Battersea Arts Centre

This short immersive horror show from Immersive Octopus and BAC provides briskly efficient scares four times a weeknight and up to eight a day at weekends. And to be clear it is scary. Or it is by the time you get to the main event, a sort of seance-like sequence where the audience - divided into small tables - are plunged into darkness, and bad things happen for 10 minutes or so. Tom Maller’s production is boosted by effective sound design from Matt Farthing and Max Sharp’s fine lighting – indeed, frequently non-lighting – does a tremendous job of turning what is basically a room with some tables in it into a nexus of otherworldly horror. It’s all a bit thin though. Bells Pendergast’s script features some fun lore about entities who enter our world through destructive fires, and how Room 13 mysteriously appeared at Battersea Arts Centre following the blaze that ripped through it in 2015. To be clear it is scary But with just half an hour of performance there’s not a lot of time to get much world building in. The conceit of the doorway being examined by the oddly Victorian-garbed paranormal investigators the Circle of the Veil is fair enough. But the fact one of them is an incredibly creepy lady who makes funny clicking noises is never really delved into – we can infer she’s possessed and not subtly so, but there’s no real corroboration of this or explanation of exactly what’s going on. Even 15 minutes extra would have given time to build it all out a bit. Still, being...

Now this is a little different to the average kids’ picture book to stage adaptation: kids’ dance-theatre company Peut-Être Theatre offer up a take on Lemony Snicket’s book The Dark, which concerns Laszlo, a boy terrified of the dark that lives in the basement. Then one night, it comes visiting. Performed by a cast of two, it’s an empowering physical theatre piece about facing up to one’s fears, for ages four-plus.

Droll performance duo Action Hero return to Battersea Arts Centre with a week-long run of new show A Song and Dance. As with much of their creative but po-faced ouvre, you probably have to see it to really appreciate what it’s about, but it concerns an actor – played by the company’s James Stenhouse – who is attempting to get over an eight-year-period of intense stage fright by replaying his entire life. He starts to lose the plot: but apparently he’s not coing to make a song and dance about it. The show is co-written by Stenhouse and Gemma Paintin, who directs, and it’s dramaturged by Deborah Pearson, who directed BAC’s recent hit Nina.

After years of taking a rather mercurial approach to Christmas, BAC seems to have zeroed in on younger audiences in 2026, with its play for little ones Dear Santa, a Christmas soft play for ages up to five, and the return of last year’s inaugural grotto. As far as we’re aware it’s a fairly basic encounter with Father Christmas (it’s certainly on the more affordable side), but you get a gift and – perhaps more crucially – your name written on the nice list.