Review: The Book of Horrors volume 2 at Hope Street Theatre **1/2

Anyone who likes a bit of horror in their lives will find that their cup runneth over next week – with Halloween preceded by an autumn budget that’s likely to send a shiver through the sturdiest of spines.

Ahead of that double whammy of dread, 4AM Productions has returned to the Hope Street Theatre with another volume of its own ‘book of horrors’, a collection of short plays written and performed by members of the company which showcase different influences and explore different aspects of the genre from fright-in-the-night ghost stories to creepy legends to shlocky horror cinematic hokum.

The evening of disparate parts is drawn together in drily deadpan fashion by the ‘Curator’, a shadowy top hat-wearing, cane-wielding figure accompanied by his faithful Minion and whose interactions with the audience are pitched somewhere between panto-esque and a stand-up working the front row, picking on those who attempt to come in late or sneak a glance at their phone.

Some might say it was a rather bold strategy too to announce last night that there was a reviewer in the house - and encourage the rest of the audience to boo them!

Among the more successful of the ‘shorts’ is Victoria Loftus’ Zombie Theory, intriguing if over extended and packed with densely knit dialogue but which offers a thought-provoking modern day Frankenstein fable where science and ethics come into conflict and where the ‘horror’ of it is less gory and more of the disquieting kind in a world where AI has become not fantasy but reality.

Another is Phil Halfpenny’s Decay, starring Leo Hewitson and Agnes Vesterback, which poses the question about how much we know about those we rely on to care for our most vulnerable. Although without trying to spoil the plot too much, it would be neater, tighter and more unsettling shorn of its vampiric, victim-blaming epilogue.

And there’s plenty of fun to be had in Rachel Louise Clark and Sam Muthari’s Michael Jackson-inspired Thriller, with Muthari taking on the role of the soft-spoken Jacko, Paul Philip Ryan chewing both cigars and the scenery as director John Landis, and the cast coming together in a finale that recreates the iconic music video dance moves.

Above: Shortbread. Top: Thriller.

Elsewhere Clark and Muthari’s Shortbread, a mash up of Neville’s Island and Hansel and Gretel, features three unappealing old schoolmates – including the psychopathic jailbird ‘Harry the Hammer’ – who embark on an ill-conceived stag weekend in the wilds of East Lothian where they happen upon a remote cottage inhabited by a beautiful but strange (and very sweary) woman.

Meanwhile if there’s a moral to Edgar Allan Poe’s short gothic story The Tell-Tale Heart, adapted here by Luke Bennet, it’s surely don’t let the police in without a warrant.

And the second trilogy of plays, coming after the interval, centres on an exasperating man-child (Adam Titchmarsh) seeking salvation in a post-apocalyptic world in a piece inspired by The Twilight Zone.

Book of Horrors is an ambitious enterprise and its evident a lot of hours have gone into bringing it to the stage.

But while not the length of Hamlet, or Ken Campbell’s crazy, brilliant behemoth Illuminatus, with six playlets – three on either side of the interval - pushing the running time to the best part of three hours it’s also a marathon, and at times a rather ponderous, watch.

Thinning out the number of stories and tightening and improving the execution of the remainder (as well as the projection of some of the dialogue) would help to give it more shape, focus and energy.

What’s beyond the creative team’s control however is a certain lack of atmosphere in the lofty Hope Street Theatre auditorium – to up the chill factor it really needs the claustrophobic confines of a small room or the disquieting gloom of a subterranean stage.