Reviews

Before the show properly starts, storyteller and songsmith Phil Grainger is handing out post-it notes, asking the audience sitting in the round to come up with the names of things you’d pack in your car to go on holiday. Suggestions of sunscreen and snacks are noted, a bucket and spade for the beach – and Grainger introduces us to some other important items. The story is set in the 1990s, so it’s an old Walkman with orange foam headphones and a VHS video tape that contains our entertainment once we get to the holiday house.

There are few Fringe venues that inspire before the act commences: the world-famous Spiegeltent is one of them: a magnificent wooden skeleton bound with canvas and filled with stained glass and mirrors (its name means ‘mirror tent’ in Dutch). They were originally built in the late 19th and early 20th century, and this installation, the Victoria from Belgium, is filled with an anticipating crowd, seated around the small circular stage (La Ronde = the round), struggling to talk over the loud, thumping music.

Mahler’s longest, wildest symphony begins with what feels like the birth of creation.  Nature is roused to life, from the boom of primordial brass to the murmuring heartbeats from the strings and woodwinds.  This is a thunderous nature, not only a pretty pastoral awakening, but a volcanic eruption of fire and rocks and, somewhere there, humankind.  This first movement is famously fractured, with a strange stop-start punctuation, not to all tastes.

This imaginative, risk-taking production takes the tropes of the horror genre to new and original places.  Each aspect is integrated into the whole: text, performance, design and sound.  It is, of course, frequently shocking, frightening or gruelling, but that’s the intention and the genre.  Here, playwright Amy May Nunn traps a gay couple, with an ostensibly ‘normal’ issues, into a haunted house.  But is the house haunted - or are they?