[title]
Gore-hounds rejoice! The Parisian theatre of horror and deviant sex has pitched up in Southwark, just in time for Halloween. The ceiling creaks and sways, the players contort themselves into gruesome tableaux and blood literally spurts from the walls. Carl Grose’s grisly tribute to the repertoire of the great Théâtre du Grand Guignol, which gave its name to a whole genre, is part backstage comedy, part genre pastiche, and delivers admirably in both belly laughs and butchery.
Alfred Binet (Matthew Pearson) is the nervous doctor making a study of the famous late Nineteenth century theatre, drawn into its world of fake severed limbs, bubbling vats of blood and shrieking melodrama by chief writer and jovial ‘Prince of Terror’ André de Lorde (Jonathan Broadbent). He finds a man secretly tortured by his own gift for torture and plagued by ghostly visitations from his roaring muse Edgar Allan Poe (Andy Williams, in one of several whiskery roles).
Couched in the everyday foibles of a low-rent-but-proud acting troupe, Grose’s play is warm and funny, peppered with horrific set-pieces that form a greatest hits collection of the Grand Guignol’s most notorious moments. Director Simon Stokes keeps the real-world action broad and the plays themselves camp, with a twinkling, gleeful energy running throughout. The original Grand Guignol theatre would alternate horrific dramas with sexy farces and comedies of manners – here they’re all jumbled up together in a perfectly pitched concoction.
Williams is particularly brilliant as bluff theatre owner Max Maurey as well as the Vincent Price-like Poe, and Robert Portal plays a lovably wooden leading man, but the whole cast slip between their many roles with skill and an infectious sense of matinee merriment, even while skin is seared and limbs fly across the stage.
There are a few too many talky scenes between De Lorde and Binet on the forestage, as Alex Doidge-Green’s magnificent set is manipulated behind the curtains, but they’re soon swept away by another bloody set-piece. The final reality-warping medley of Grand Guignol classic ‘A Crime in a Madhouse’ is even quite unnerving, capping a delightfully ghoulish evening of demented indulgence.