A Haunted House
No beloved doll’s house played with by a fortunate favoured child was ever so sinister, a grey slate mansion over three floors and the tower to the attic wrought in ghastly miniature, a joyous carousel of nursery rhyme choruses playing in the background interrupted by mechanical sounds of shunting engines filling the space before, with a thunderclap and flash of lightning, the host of this strange evening appears.
Guiding the audience through the dark, dark house, with dark, dark dreams and low, low council tax, not to mention ghosts, ghouls, goblins and hungry vampire bats and other denizens of the night and nightmares, performer David Hoskin has found himself stranded at A Haunted House, his miniature camper van running out of miniature petroleum, invited in by “Uncle Lester,” keeper of the memories of “the family mansion of a thousand ghosts.”
With blackened tongue firmly in cheek, under a cascade of curls which looks like his beauty regime involves licking a Van de Graff generator, through mime, interpretive dance and moonwalk, in black frock coat and leggings Hoskin embodies the spooky spirits of the house, accompanied by Beethoven on piano, Bach on pipe organ and Danny and the Juniors on karaoke, eclectic choices for an eccentric show which juxtaposes absurdity and horror.
With a handsome face which contorts to any requirement, hilarious or grotesque, A Haunted House is a patchwork of clever moments created by an obviously talented performer which would benefit from tighter stitching to pull them together into an actual story, the macabre hour entertaining but adrift from a sense of structure which might anchor it, the creator more accomplished than his strange and ghastly creation.
A Haunted House continues at the Snug at Assembly Roxy until Sunday 24th August
