 |
| David Cardy (Tony Matthews) |
|
Date: 2 March 2010
It’s a very good idea to get horror back into the theatre, and the experiments lately undertaken at the Southwark Theatre in Adam Meggido’s Horror Festivals are picked up in this weird evening of ghosts and ghoulies.
A professor of parapsychology asks the audience if they believe in ghosts or have ever had a supernatural experience. He then draws us into the detail of a wedding photograph where a strange phenomenon lurks. Or does it?
Three case histories are laid out. A market-trader-cum-night-watchman loses his daughter, Marnie (the Hitchcockian reference is deliberate), and finds her in a pile of mannequins.
Is she the same comatose victim of a terrible car accident, or the apparition that shocks the audience awake some minutes later… a third narrative strand develops with a ghastly businessman in Queens Park, with a smell of ammonia, a dead wife and a deformed child.
There are links between what happens, but they are not more satisfying than the occasional, rather arbitrary, horror moments of light and dark. But these ensure a macabre theatricality that the producers intend.
People scream (I didn’t). It’s a good set up, attracting a horror movie crowd who may not even get the clever references perpetrated by League of Gentleman writer Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, who also plays the professor, and their co-director, Lyric boss, Sean Holmes.
I was asked not to give away the ending, so I won’t; but, you know what? I couldn’t if I tried. There’s a dead child and a secret. There are some funny sound effects. There’s a body and a coffin. And a curtain falls.
In terms of the play, the strands are irritatingly unresolved. There are sterling performances by David Cardy as the mildewed mensch and Ryan Gage as the new hope, and Nicholas Burns makes up the foursome of frighteners.
Design by Jon Bausor and lighting by James Farncombe ensure some atmospheric surprises, but the show’s most interesting in its aim to hook a new audience. If it does that, good luck to it. But it’s too silly in its effects, and sub-Jacobean in the writing, to amount to a genuine breakthrough.
- by Michael Coveney
