THE SHADOWS AT CORPUS PLAYROOM
Dark themes make The Shadows compelling viewing at Corpus
Corpus Playroom in St.Edward’s Passage is the perfect place to be petrified. Small enough to feel trapped; but spacious enough to realise you share the chill with dozens of other human beings. Which, when these horror writers turn on the full beam of their inventive imagination the company of others is just what you need. The three plays that make up The Shadows all do what they promise and lay on ‘an uncomfortably intimate unique horror experience’ - introduced by the zaniest narrator/presenter anyone could conjure up for a night of nervous thrills. Jacob Klimaszewski appears familiar, genial if off -hand. ;the kind of man who might prop up a bar with some random views on the meaning of life and death,. It feels as if this casual mine host has wandered across the path of a team of Thespians who haveput him to work speculating on the nature of real fear, of dread and the immanence of mortality -And all delivered as amusing banter, an off the cuff style to beguile the audience into a false sense of the ordinary.
Ordinary is just what doesn’t happen when we fall into the hands of some great actors and a sure-footed producer and director Richard McNally .
Acquisition by Sarah Jane Arbury happens in the basement of The Fitzwilliam Museum in 2003 one winter evening. This is in itself uncanny as I was once showing a visiting architect around the very same place on a dark December evening when everyone else had gone home. The lift then was new and barely working and in this play it never arrives, First though we see a strange film of an archaeological dig from 1898 where a young man dies. At the Museum, Jenny an off-beat amateur philosopher and wannabe mystic is on her way in a wheel chair to her lecture accompanied by caretaker Jeff. In the corner of the room is the latest Acquisition, a mummy strangely - as Jenny notes - not as decomposed as it should be. Jeff’s childhood horrors combine with the exhibit’s presence in a more-than-chillling way. Great acting from Mike Milne and the over-confident Sarah Walton-Smith. Brilliant in fact.
The Chamber by Matt Wilkinson is already off to a worrying start when we meet three students, who have persuaded a senior tutor to allow them into an abandoned chamber in the old part of St.John’s College, once a hospital. Truly terrifying events unfold at the hands of a superb Cara Rowland as glamorous fast-talking Rachel (clearly they’ve all been drinking at an upmarket party) and the seemingly genial George, her boyfriend, is played with natural good humour by Tom Heald. Simon the handsome hanger-on with a jealous eye on Rachel makes up the threesome - played with convincing style and nervous ambiguity by Gabriel Bowker. Trapped in the vault, time rolls back in a deeply sinister way. Where are we and what on earth - or elsewhere- is going on? Convincing discoveries, false paths all make for a very nasty set of surprises.
REVIEWED BY Anne Garvey
There is a long tradition of tales of women locked up in castles, panic rooms, prisons and attics. In this short, intense, one-person ghost play,, Drive by Leigh Chambers. it is ‘the Woman’ herself who chooses her temporary incarceration. Fleeing from the horror of a hit and run she finds herself entombed in a motel room.
Married with two children she is having an affair. It is from her lover that she returns home that fateful night .. Realising she has hit something whilst driving at night along by Stourbridge Common, she panics, and seeks the sanctuary of a motel on the A10.
As soon as the Woman flings herself into the airless, windowless motel room, there is a creeping conviction that she is not going to emerge. The door cannot be opened, the mini bar is non-existent, her phone is dying, and her laptop erased of all contacts. Regular updates blast stridently from the radio, reporting first the hit and run, then the death of the victim, and finally her identity: she was Annie Simpson - Cambridge Professor in Human-Computer Interaction. We register this information and then begin to sense the sinister impact of who she was as the play progresses.
All contact by phone or email is gone. Only the radio persists and the intercom asks if the room temperature and lighting are to her liking. Her responses are ignored. . Messages from Annie start to appear and, with dread, she reads each one; they are short, distressing and accusatory. We register the callousness and cowardice of the Woman She becomes increasingly repugnant with her middle class fears, her sense of entitlement, her adultery, and now manslaughter. This compact play is brilliantly acted by Philippa Watts, as she portrays a woman’s descent into madness .Her increasing panic is acted out as she swirls like a dervish, around the room. All control is lost, she has to face the vengeance of Annie, and her collapse to the floor is a kind of relief! The Orwellian touches of the intercom and the blasting radio are a clever device. The final chilling moment of the play is provided by the intercom declaring matter of factly; ‘Room Vacated.’
The script, the choreography, the claustrophobic set and the very fine acting combine to have produced a compelling and intense ghost play. I enjoyed every second of it.
REVIEWED BY JULIE STEVENSON
Strange world of the unknown haunts The Shadows
