Alphabets detailing infantile homicide, erotic adventures involving saucepans and sofas, indescribable creatures and obsolete objects, fur coats and sailor suits, blank stares and limp wrists, Edwardian interiors and Surrealist landscapes, the absurdity of being and the non sequiturs that shape it: welcome to the world of Edward Gorey.

His may be a macabre world (he collected postcards of dead babies), but it is also hilarious. Dead children are not inherently funny; but in the melodrama of Gorey's imagination, they're side-splitting. Poor little ‘Fanny', for example, is ‘sucked dry by a leach'.

However intriguing his narratives, what captivates one first is Gorey's drawings. In these rectangles of eerily composed scenes, dozens of inky textures are created though painstaking straight and cross hatching, no detail - from the individual hair of a sculpted moustache, to the floral designs of a William Morris carpet - is brushed over. Although there is a theatrical quality to Gorey's work, it is lifelessly staged. There is no depth or surface and perspective is misleading. The plane never reaches beyond the few centimeters his effeminate characters stand on. These limp limbed figures belong on the carefully designed pages they float through.

So it was with some trepidation that I greeted news of a stage production of Edward Gorey's best loved work, The Doubtful Guest. But if anyone is suited to the task, then it is the theatre company Hoipolloi. Like Gorey they are fascinated by the tension between the dark and the comic. The Doubtful Guest consists of 14 couplets narrating the arrival of a large nosed, hairy creature in a stripy scarf and white basketball pumps at the country house of an Edwardian family. It is unknown and unwelcome, and causes domestic havoc by hiding towels, ripping books apart and dropping objects of which it grows fond into an ominous pond.

I asked the artistic director of the Hoipolloi company, Shon Dale-Jones, why they decided to bring this guest to the stage. ‘I'm fascinated by the situation', he explained. ‘The very simple idea that everything is organised, everything is fine, everything is under control, and then the arrival of this strange creature upsets everything. I love the tension between us trying to pretend things are under control when actually they're not'. (Hence the mannered poses, pristine suits, stiff upper lip, even in the face of this thing wrenching the horn from the new gramophone.) ‘In terms of theatre I really like that too. It's a completely rehearsed thing, but Hoipolloi love working to improvisation even when we come on stage. I love the tension between doing things which are completely rehearsed and which are absolutely spontaneous'.

But what is this thing? What is the doubtful guest? ‘For me it's the thing which we don't understand, the thing which isn't controllable. It's as simple as the thing which knocks over the cup of tea or the thing which takes someone's life when they're not ready to die. Its as small or as big as that. One thing that just gets in the way. Everything would be fine if it wasn't for this thing'. But one only has to set eyes once on this ‘thing' and we adore it. ‘That's what's so wonderfully complex! The family talk of this presence, this force that creates such a disturbance, and the audience get quite frightened, quite disturbed, but it's a loveable thing!'

Gorey attended almost every performance of the New York City Ballet between 1953 and 1983. He said choreogaroher George Balanchine was the ‘great, important figure in my life... sort of like a God'. It is not hard to find visual proof of this influence in the erect posture and precise gestures of his effeminate men and women. Hoipolloi are a particularly movement-based company, and worked with a ballet coach to perfect the carriage of Gorey's characters, as well as working tirelessly on the costumes and set design to fit his Edwardian world.

Gorey once said, ‘forget it kids, I don't collaborate'. But sadly he's been dead for eight years. I don't think he's have much to worry about though, this doubtful guest looks like it's found the perfect home with the Hoipolloi family.

Anna Trench