What better way to spend Halloween than to be transported to an unearthly seaside town where a series of darkly comic murders are happening thick and fast.
Welcome to the weird world of Odd Doll, a Leeds based puppet theatre with a strong belief in all things bizarre “inspired by fairy tales, the beauty of circus and dance, the absurdity of clown and the power of original music”.
Their latest creation Seaside Terror is a show for adults (or at least a 12+ audience), performed and animated by Kathleen Yore and Rebekah Caputo, and it’s on at venues in Leeds this month (I saw it performed on Halloween over the sinister side of the Pennines at the Lowry in Salford).
Kathleen’s out front in a grotesque mask and a gross flat cap as the ice cream van man our parents always suspected had dirty fingernails.
You wouldn’t want his juice on your 99, which might explain the difficulty giving away Cornettos to the audience. But there’s more gore and many more disquieting images to come.
Rebekah’s behind the scenes manipulating a menagerie of the cute but also creepy puppets for which Odd Doll are renowned. The two work together animating the characters as the stories become more involved.
There’s some real ingenuity gone into building the set, a pink ice cream van of disconcertingly distorted proportion which folds and opens in unexpected ways to transport us from a spooky B&B to a garish amusement arcade .. and then again .. and again to reveal ghoulish deeds and buried secrets from our foamy, furry and otherwise fantastical cast.
The real joy of this show comes in the set-piece moments, a chamber of horrors revealed to us one grisly scene at a time.
The creators took inspiration from the vintage horror movies of the 1960s and 70s. They were particularly drawn to the “portmanteau” movies made by Amicus Films. Titles such as Tales From the Crypt were camp, lurid and wilder than their better-known contemporaries like Dracula and Frankenstein.
Following the anthology format Seaside Terror features five different tales, all themed around elements of the bygone British seaside holiday. As Kathleen puts it,
“We take people into a world of Evil Seagulls, Zombie Donkeys and Bingo Hairballs. It’s got a lot of scares, a lot of laughs and a lot of memories for anyone who’s ever spent a rainy day on a British beach”.
Yep, it’s been a long time since you could buy a Mivvi for 9p.
Although the violence is more Punch and Judy than Texas Chainsaw Massacre this isn’t by any means a kids’ show. There are adult themes to some of the stories, and there’s no comforting happy ending. Far from it.
The sinister atmosphere is enhanced with an original, haunting score from composer Paul Mosley, who has specialised in collaborating with puppet companies including Old Saw and Barely Human.
The individual scenes are entrancing, captivating and original theatre that use the unique properties of puppetry to create delightfully dark stories told in an imaginative, engrossing and memorable way.
Some of the linking material in comparison fell a bit flat; maybe we were a tough crowd, but having suspended disbelief to enter the spooky world of Southpaw-on-Sea it doesn’t help to remind us we’re actually in a studio in Salford.
The real stars of the show are the puppets, large and small, in styles from cartoon to caracature, who acquire personalities as the stories unfold; it was an added delight to have a couple of the puppets (with their minders) bid us goodnight in the foyer as we left the Lowry.
Seaside Terror is on at The Carriageworks in Leeds Millennium Square tomorrow and Friday this week, and again on November 18th at the marvellous Sunnybank Mills in Farsley.
Production Photography: Odd Doll Theatre