Tag Archives: London Horror Festival 2018

Phantasmagorical – 3 Stars

Phantasmagorical

Phantasmagorical

Old Red Lion Theatre

Reviewed – 23rd October 2018

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“Fenton’s expressive storytelling and comedic, quick-witted improvisation, will ensure that you have an enjoyable evening”

 

Phantasmagorical: a confused group of real or imagined images that change quickly, one following the other as in a dream.

As Halloween is looming ever closer, The Old Red Lion Theatre has been hosting the fright-filled London Horror Festival to celebrate this ghoulish time of year. Careena Fenton brings her spooky mind reading experience, Phantasmagorical, to be a part of the festival. It is an entertaining, good old-fashioned scare that mixes theatrics with seances and magic. As sceptical as you may be with the β€˜powers’ of second sight, Fenton’s expressive storytelling and comedic, quick-witted improvisation, will ensure that you have an enjoyable evening.

Sylvia Sceptre, Fenton’s Victorian alter ego, is a woman who delights in all things macabre and metaphysical. At a young age she discovers that she has a gift, being able to bridge between Earth and the β€˜other side’. She is able to express the inner souls and feelings of inanimate objects, as well as reading the minds of the living. Sylvia regales her story, of how she came to learn of her powers and what the rest of society thought about it. Was it a gift? Or was it just a case of female hysteria? Testing her skills on the audience, proving herself as a master of the mind, she departs from our world as quickly as she enters it.

With the likes of illusionist Derren Brown peddling mind reading for the 21st-century masses, Fenton’s Sylvia Sceptre takes us back to its origins, where it could be found as a speciality act, up and down the music halls of Britain. There’s a sense of innocent, harmless fun from a bygone era that proves it can be just as entertaining now, as it would have been all those years ago. Fenton has a whimsical and warm presence that is simply irresistible. A mix of naughtiness and nicety.

The stage is mostly bare, albeit the props that help to assist in Fenton’s tricks. With bells ringing and chimes chiming all by themselves, you can’t help but get lost in the magic with childish awe, even when the adult inside you tries to rationally work out how it was done.Β A charming little show, with an eccentric playfulness that you can’t help but enjoy.

Reviewed by Phoebe Cole

 


Phantasmagorical

Old Red Lion TheatreΒ 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
Nightmares in Progress | β˜…β˜…β˜…Β½ | January 2018
Tiny Dynamite | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | January 2018
Really Want to Hurt me | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | February 2018
The Moor | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | February 2018
Shanter | β˜…β˜…β˜… | March 2018
Plastic | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | April 2018
In the Shadow of the Mountain | β˜…β˜… | May 2018
Tales from the Phantasmagoria | β˜…β˜…β˜… | May 2018
I am of Ireland | β˜…β˜…β˜… | June 2018
Lamplighters | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | July 2018
Welcome Home | β˜…β˜…β˜… | August 2018
Hear me Howl | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | September 2018
That Girl | β˜…β˜…β˜… | September 2018
Hedgehogs & Porcupines | β˜…β˜…β˜… | October 2018
The Agency | β˜…β˜… | October 2018

 

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The Agency – 2 Stars

Agency

The Agency

Old Red Lion Theatre

Reviewed – 9th October 2018

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“The only just punishment here is hard labour in the rehearsal rooms of London and amputation of at least some of the ideas and themes”

 

Some plays you want to hate and come to love. Others, like The Agency at the Old Red Lion Theatre, you really want to love but can’t help being let down. Part of London Horror Festival, Davey Seagle’s (writer, director and β€˜lighting guy’) creation is improv, audience participation, voting technology, political satire, who-done-it, romantic comedy and more. The audience are jurors in a near-future Britain where a private company (The Agency) doles out budget-conscious justice as this jury sees fit; it’s all on the table from a cheap and cheerful execution to an expensive bout of rehabilitation. Hopes were high of a timely play about the ethics of late austerity, but with the ideas delivered in an if-you-didn’t-like-that-one-then-how-about-this-one manner and actors quickly losing control (over the audience and their own mouths), it failed to deliver.

As we passed the sixty minutes mark of a play starting at 9:30pm things had bubbled out of hand. Our actors were shouting for silence as an unruly audience called out over one another as we searched for a traitor in our midst. Members of the public where made to stand up and defend themselves before their fate was voted on, as yet more accusations were spat out from the second row and left unheard. I began to wonder if this was, in fact, the point. Maybe, I thought, the play was about anarchy mob rule? But no, order was restored, the traitor was missed, and we were brought back in into line.

Only making matters more convoluted was a mostly 1950s look to the set and costume but accompanying this was at least one poster aping contemporary anti-terrorist adverts, accents often from the 1920s and oddly futuristic props. For the when and where, we simply had to take the script at its unsubtle word.

How had these characters-come-supply-teachers lost control? Well, there wasn’t much else to do but cause mischief: idle hands make light work for the devil. Performances were loose and stumbling as actors simply spoke over one another or switched accents for reasons unknown. Georgie Oulton (Bunny) stood out for sheer commitment and Chris Elms (Chuck) was solid as those around him swallowed their lines, but it wasn’t enough to have the audience actually care. Where the script did get to speak, it didn’t have much to say leaving a late breaking β€˜I fight for freedom’ speech written more like a teenage whine than Braveheart’s cry.

For a play about crime and punishment, The Agency lets itself off lightly. The only just punishment here is hard labour in the rehearsal rooms of London and amputation of at least some of the ideas and themes. We all believe in rehabilitation after all and there is a lot that could go right about an ambitious and inventive play like this.

 

Reviewed by William Nash

 


The Agency

Old Red Lion Theatre until 11th October as part of London Horror Festival 2018

 

 

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