Review: Horror (Peacock Theatre)

This hybrid of contemporary dance, mime, special effects and good old-fashioned gore will prove especially delightful to connossieurs of horror movies: Jakop Ahlbom's enjoyable, occasionally ponderous, 80 minute romp (first seen here as part of last year's London Mime Festival) references everything from The Shining and The Exorcist through to The Ring and Poltergeist with much in between.

Blood spurts, hands take on a sinister life of their own even after being removed from arms, inanimate objects move by themselves, a character's entire digestive tract is removed from his mouth before our very eyes, a zombie walks down a flight of stairs while horribly contorted… it's all happening here. What’s more it is happening to the accompaniment of an ear-splitting, periodically vomit-inducing soundtrack. If none of it feels particularly original, what does rivet the attention is the sheer technical ingenuity required to make this performance work.

The entire point is that you will – at least if you're familiar with horror as a cinematic genre – have seen all of this before, but only onscreen, seldom live (or at least undead) onstage. Genuine fear is a hard thing to convey in theatre, where the power of suggestion usually proves way more potent than prosaic demonstrations of threat – as evidenced by the apparently never ending run of The Woman In Black – and Horror isn't actually all that scary, despite some genuinely shriek-inducing aural effects: it's creepy, atmospheric and even nastily funny, but it's never truly terrifying.

The story – a girl revisits her gothic monstrosity of a family home where she and her sister suffered horrible abuse – is simply a peg to hang all the (admittedly superb) effects on and generates little tension of its own. The overall result is of watching a compendium of "Best Of" horror effects with a bit of modern choreography thrown in to keep it classy; exhilarating but uneven.

Ahlbom's eight strong company are a supple, game bunch though, whether knocking seven bells out of each other in the splatterfest fight that concludes the evening, or emerging unexpectedly from various elements of the suitably grandiose set (superbly lit by Yuri Schreuders). Especially impressive is Gwen Langenberg, defying physical belief as the spider-walking, screechingly undead zombie sister.

Horror runs at the Peacock Theatre until 10 June.