Review: Extravaganza Macabre (Battersea Arts Centre)

Battersea Arts Centre has a new theatre; its first outdoors space. Its Playground Projects stress the process of architecture: buildings becoming. The driving idea is that every inch of the old town hall – this nook, that cranny, cupboard and corridors all – could be used for performance. Every room a theatre. Every space a stage.

Thanks to architects Graham Haworth and Steve Tompkins – who else? – what was an unloved smoking space is now an old courtyard theatre. White tiles extend the original brick walls upwards to a square patch of sky. Wooden benches move in and a high russet walkway forms a standing balcony. The playing space is small, but the sound is enormous. Voices bounce up the walls and out into the open air.

Asking Little Bulb to open it seems inspired. A talented musical troupe, they make a big noise as it is. Their best shows run away like impromptu hoedowns – only light and ludicrous, never lost in themselves. Unassuming and playful, and above all else, live, Little Bulb make sense in the open air.

Only, they’re not really themselves in Extravaganza Macabre; not entirely. Taking their lead from the building’s beginnings – it opened in 1893 – they’ve gone back to an old staple: cod Victoriana and quips. Over two hours, three actors dish up a spoof penny dreadful – the sort that sends up all the trappings of melodrama and morbidity, all the sentimentality and schlock you expect on the genre with lashings of OTT am-dram naivety.

Backed by a piano score – too quiet to reach the balcony – Alexander Scott plays the actor-manager who narrates the great storm of 1886; so bad it washed orphans up in the Thames and cut weddings short at the altar, leaving brides behind and dragging grooms out to sea. These stories combine, seven years on, as an earnest amnesiac called Earnest and a chipper street urchin called, yep, Chipper try to track down the bride before she remarries a devilish new husband, Lord London.

There’s nothing – not a scrap – beneath the surface here, just all the old gags spun together and, mostly, sung through. Think over-extended vowels and ham acting; bouts of verbosity just as urgency strikes and so on, and so forth. It’s cute enough – the knitted facial hair is a lovely touch – but nowhere near sharp or smart enough, and while the company’s unguarded personalities keep us onside, the truth is you’ve seen all this before. Frankly, you’ve seen it much better. The shame is that there’s so little music; the odd flash of operetta, but none of the Little Bulb hootenanny that would have set this space alight.

Still, nice theatre…

Extravaganza Macabre – A Tale of Villainy & Valour in Victorian London runs at Battersea Arts Centre until 26 August.