Theatre / Reviews
Review: Gurt Haunted: Miracle on North Street, Tobacco Factory Theatres – ‘Deeply absurd, faux-spooky and at times hilarious’
I grab my seat in the Tobacco Factory Spielman Theatre and rip open my ice-cream tub in readiness for this year’s Christmas studio production, running alongside the big family show Rapunzel: A Hairy Tale in the main house.
Tonight there is a sizeable young cohort in the audience in gurt high spirits, so there’s a lot of prosecco swigging and anticipatory giggling and squealing going on as the lights go down in a puff of haze.
They are clearly all fans and followers of TV’s Most Haunted and the BBC ‘yoof’ mockumentary This Country, and they’re going to get all those references which are going to go straight over my head as I only listen to Radio 4, I think to myself… But as it turns out the plot is so straightforward that even I get everything.
Local Bemmie-boy Reece (Benji Foster) sashays onto a stage mock-up of North Street to post his Xmas wish-list to Santa. But Reece seems, well, a bit twitchy, weird and not quite himself, and that’s worrying his friends Tony Chestnut (Casey Lloyd) and Sir Francis Hailbop, played by Toby George (bearing an uncanny resemblance to a younger Toby Parks of Spymonkey fame and affecting a similar posh-twit stage persona).
Tony and Sir Francis play ridiculous games with the front-row audience, like Naughty or Nice and a bit of thought-transference by touching fingertips. And then something really spooky happens: Reece DISAPPEARS, and none of us knows where he is! All we know is that there is a veil, and Reece has gone beyond it. And that Santa is in fact an anagram of someone else who is less ho-ho-ho and much more evil. Gulp…
Tony and Sir Francis come up with a plan to win Reece back. What ensues is a deeply absurd, faux-spooky and at times hilarious shaggy-dog story that isn’t normal – it’s paranormal – with lashings of Bristolian humour (“the K could be silent like in Knowle West..”), some low-budget special effects, daft deadpan humour, a dusting of Gen Z in-jokes, and a big splash of egg nog.
No I’m not going to spoil it by telling you whether they get Reece back or not! Buy a ticket and go and find out for yourself! But I am left with a couple of questions for the Gurt team: If you have Benji Foster – an incredibly good physical performer, self-imagined go-go dancer and totally watchable chubbster with great comic timing – in your show, why cast him as a character who DISAPPEARS for at least half of it?
Guys, how about tweaking the plot as you go along so that by the end of the run Reece is only disappearing for say, five minutes in total? And is the deep dark underlying message of this show that Christmas is actually HELL? ‘Cos that’s gonna make your gran’s Xmas fairy fall off the top of the tree, innit me babbers.
View this post on Instagram
Gurt Haunted: Miracle on North Street is at Tobacco Factory Theatres on December 9-January 3 at 7.30pm, with selected 2.30pm matinee shows. Tickets are at www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com.
All photos:
Read next:
Our newsletters emailed directly to you
