Gather round, my pretties, gather round, and let me tell you a terrifying tale of witches, death, blood, scarecrows and Sir Ian McKellen.
This shocking story concerns 80 minutes of horrifying entertainment in the rumbling bowels of Soho theatre, where darkness surrounds an unsuspecting audience and no-one can hear them scream. Apart from the ushers.
Five frightening playwrights have provided a quintet of queasiness-inducing vignettes, none more disturbing than Jack Thorne’s finale The Gong, in which a chain-smoking, acceptance-craving Ciaran Kellgren, gazing nowhere and everywhere, recounts a tale of Cambridge University games that turns the stomach faster than a three week old chicken burger.
A burlesque witch with serious health problems – yes, you did just read those words – has a similar effect, though somehow manages to combine comedy – she’s creating a love potion for Gandalf – stripping and gore to magic-up an unsettling atmosphere where no-one knows precisely what to feel.
Kneehigh writer Carl Grose chips in with the rhyming tale of a farmer and his wife, delivered with gossiping relish by Amanda Lawrence, while there is arguably more sadness than horror in Dave Florez’s tale The Waiting Mortuary and Tom Holloway’s Whitney Houston-based story of a suicide gone wrong.
The same could be said for one of the songs, performed by Desmond O’Connor and Merrill Grant, which punctuate the performance. This particular ditty, a tale of abortion and child loss, begins with humour before whipping away the rug.
O’Connor is the perfect MC for the evening; he looks perfectly presentable yet there is something about him, whether he is singing as a schoolboy or recounting a love story between serial killers, that means you wouldn’t be surprised if he snapped at any minute. Well, I guess you would, but you’d probably assume it was just part of the show… before the brick connected with your fragile skull.
The West End has been treated, recently, to the masterful horror storytelling of Ghost Stories. Terror 2011 never tries to achieve the jumps or the prolonged moments of tension of the former, but on a dark autumn evening, the cold wind biting at your neck like a peckish vampire, street lamps flickering on your way to the theatre making shadows leap like lurking threats, it is 80 minutes of ghoulish fun.
MA