Arts Theatre
Wednesday 15th to Saturday 18th October (Matinees 16th/18th October, 2.30pm)
Dir. Shôn Dale-Jones; Hoipolloi Theatre Company

Five Stars

Hoipolloi’s Artistic Director writes ‘we hope that age won’t matter when watching The Doubtful Guest’, and the first thing you notice in the auditorium (which you are encouraged by the cast to consider) is that all sorts of people are there. This production has something to offer each one of them, and in that single, glorious idea lies Hoipolloi’s greatest strengths – the excitement to leave no stone unturned and the ability to lever them up from every angle.

The show is dubbed as ‘inspired by’ Gorey’s illustrated story of the same name, and it stays intimately close to the original work. We witness the interruption of a nervous, quirksome family by a mysterious caller who proceeds to rattle their cage in a rib-tickling series of ‘episodes’. While consistently and genuinely hilarious, Gorey’s macabre and unsettling dimension is included in equal measure, but the amusing and the chilling obscure each other so that the audience howl, laughing and fidget uneasily all at once.

Bearing in mind Hoipolloi’s relentless duality, the aesthetic of the show is in some way about accepting the confines of the physical theatre but forcing all our responses to it back into the imagination. The ensemble explains how they will tell their story – with what concepts, with which props – and yet transitions between meta and pretence are seamless. Alexander Rudd’s music underscores and jars by turns, floating between echoes of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and clunky, end-of-the-pier clarinets and strings. Songs are beautiful and haunting, but disturbing lyrics are comically delivered. Actors alert spectators to modern lighting effects and yet inhabit a distressed set, dressed in stiff, Edwardian costume.

There is something sinister about the idea of Gorey’s dark illustrations coming to life, and something difficult about negotiating the risible, rhyming couplets which accompany them. Adapting both for the stage in one effort is therefore not an easy task, and perhaps why Hoipolloi chose to project the original words as a visual escort to the actors. While at times this can feel like a cop-out, it does serve as a reminder that this piece of work does stem from a graphic novel of sorts, and that part of this production is about translating – from image to action, experience to recollection and metaphor to reality. But it is also about confronting – or not – those unwelcome guests, those elephants in the room, that restrict us as if we were drawings ourselves.

Finn Beames