The title lies. This is more Goosebumps half dead, as some of RL Stine’s bestselling stories for children get a lacklustre makeover, in what is billed as an “immersive” theatre experience. Apart from an entertaining sequence that makes you think you’re stuck in a lift, it’s about as immersive as a puddle. The sound from other sections of the show constantly seeps into the sequence you are viewing, and all imagination and money has clearly been spared on the crucial transitions and route marches between scenes, so the tension is constantly broken. It’s surprising, because designer Samuel Wyer’s Alice’s Adventures Underground (which returns to this address next year) had some lovely touches.
There’s some music from the Tiger Lillies that strikes just the right creepy note, but this is less a piece of theatre than a giggly nostalgic experience for those who spent their childhoods under the bedclothes reading spooky stories. A couple of the scenes have some charge, including the one about a girl who has reason to be afraid of monsters, and another about a man who buys a mysterious clock. But the latter, like so many scenes here, is overextended and underwritten. The one about the typewriter misjudges the balance between comic and terrifying, and the Stay Out of the Basement segment, a variation on the Bluebeard trope, is so slackly written, directed and acted that I began to fear I might be bored rather than scared to death.
After a few drinks with a group of friends this might be a bit of a laugh, but probably not, with tickets close to £50. As a piece of theatre, it’s woeful: technically and imaginatively lazy and entirely failing to understand that fear is not found in cheap effects but in the dark recesses of the mind. I’ve had encounters with myself in the mirror in broad daylight that have been much, much scarier.
- At the Vaults, London, until 5 June. Buy tickets at Guardian box office or call 0330 333 6906.
.png?w=600)
