This is a welcome night of festive horror for those looking for Halloween celebrations with a series of sketches complied by the actors and directors, under the MC of a ghoul, Mr. Sam. With the help of a hidden skull hidden in the audience, he spirits up Mephistopheles, a delightfully impish Rudra Bharadwaj to help him call in the acts. As a showcase for writers and performers who are at the beginning of their careers, the sketches are, understandably, patchy but, along with the under-rehearsed and not-thought-through, there are some gems.
The first was the best, set in SpaceX departure lounge with a couple of posh men en route to Mars. Everyone is on board with satirising Elon Musk’s idea of sending rich stupid people into space and these two are really funny. Their characters attended the same posh school, ‘That time you set fire to my bed…good times, weren’t they?’ The humour surrounding James Shitforbrains is not subtle, but Tom Johnson and Rob Glenister make every second count, with smart lines and slapstick humour. They deserve their recent success at the Edinburgh Fringe, they are the ones to watch.
Some were classical: a bit of Shakespeare and a dramatic performance of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem ‘The Bells’ by the Volya Theatre featuring three young women from Romania, Ukraine and Latvia dressed in white, illuminated only by hand torches. Besides this, Eastern Europe made a strong showing with a piece on Romanian things to be scared of: ‘vampires, witches, your grandmother’.
Ziggles the Undead Comedian who offered ‘zombie giggles’ started well, ‘If you don’t laugh you don’t respect the dead’, but when his slot became a commentary on international affairs with – horrors – no jokes, we had to wonder what we were watching. And the sketch with the four soldiers calling up a dead uncle on a Ouija Board didn’t really go anywhere.
It was interesting to see how much of this eclectic mix relied on a knowledge of successful productions in other cultures: The Film Club were two blokes cleverly improvising films which the audience shouted out, with references the film Gosford Park, for example; and a surreal piece where fans of Wallace and Grommit (‘What’s this? There’s mould in this cheese, lad’) let the characters take over their lives.
Even the National Youth Theatre got a look in ‘To Death Us Do Part’, with a married wife loving her husband a tad too much to let him leave.
It was hard to keep track of who was who with ten acts including the ghoulish compere, Temporal Productions’ Harry Fitzpatrick. At the very least a list of the acts (if not the actors) would have helped to be able to identify them, three sheets with 22 QR codes to scan at the theatre entrance is a lot to ask in terms of audience engagement.
All in all though, a fun night of horror to keep us entertained and oodles of enthusiasm from the cast.
Venue: Golden Goose Theatre
Cast: Various, assembled by Temporal Horizon Productions
Director and Producer: Harry Fitzpatrick
Until: 31 October 2026