It is perhaps embarrassing how long into Colin Hoult’s The Real Horror Show it took me, until I realised what I was watching. The first section went by in a confused blur of clunky dialogue and terrible acting with very few laughs and more importantly, no scares. It made me look back and forth at the fringe brochure, which show a ghoulish red-lit face, and warns me to ‘Prepare to scream with terror’. I even questioned whether I’d accidentally walked into the wrong show.
This is, of course, the point. You expect horror, and are given ‘real’ horror, which turns out to be Hoult’s dark and disturbing examination of contemporary society. And once you realise what he’s trying to do, Hoult creates moments of unsettling visionary clarity, which shock far deeper and longer than things that usually go bump in the night.
There’s one scene, in total darkness, that’s more conventionally scary: the emergency exit signs are blacked-out, bright lights intermittently shone into the audience’s face and the room filled with haze. The characters on stage are trapped inside a room, and they think someone else is in there with them. In reality, they’re all hopeful temps waiting for a new job assignment, but one by one, they’re slowly slaughtered. It’s truly frightening and effective satire.
Other sketches include a boy who thinks he’s a werewolf pestering people on the tube, an excellent sequence involving a comic obsessive’s trip to the ‘Empower Zone’ (A CV clinic) and a final macabre tale in which a pensioner is brutally disembowelled by a gang of youths.Each of these tales has excellent moments and leaves a lasting impression, but the work still feels incomplete and occasionally clumsy. The scenes themselves go on for a little too long for the impact to be as crisply felt as it might be.
At its best, Hoult’s production has the insight and darkness of Martin Crimp, though with less of the taut clarity. This is definitely an unusual and fascinating production to watch, in spite of its flaws.
