Indi­an Ink has done it again.

Wel­come to the Murder House is dark, deadly, a little bit sexy, and some­thing you def­in­itely should read the press release for before you see because it does not pull any punches.

Our five main char­ac­ters; death-row con­victs who have a par­tic­u­lar pen­chant for theatre, take us on a wild jour­ney to tell us the tale of Alfred South­wick, the man who inven­ted the elec­tric chair. (As it was made to make deaths quick and pain­less, they all have a par­tic­u­lar interest in that area.)

This show is quite vaudeville – a thrill­ing per­form­ance style pop­u­lar in 1890s Amer­ica where this play is set – and con­tains a mad mold­ing of pup­petry, live music, dance and com­edy – all of which Indi­an Ink is well-known for. Most of the per­formers play sev­er­al char­ac­ters, and each are thor­oughly dis­tinct from the one before – major kudos to all the per­formers for nail­ing mul­tiple dif­fer­ent accents and man­ner­isms and switch­ing between them incred­ibly fast.

It is joy­ous to watch, des­pite the grim nature of most of the piece, because the per­formers are just so damn good at it. Though there are times when the miser­able con­tent becomes a little hard to bear (the last ten or so minutes were that, for me), the com­edy, music­al­ity and energy in the show bal­ances things out per­fectly so the show isn’t an abso­lute down­er.

Speak­ing of the music­al­ity, every single song in this show is phe­nom­en­al. It’s been nearly a full day since I saw the show and I’ve still got the head­line song stuck in my head.

(Con­sid­er­ing said song is about murder, that’s a little bit of a worry.)

Wel­come to the Murder House is an amaz­ingly well-con­struc­ted piece of theatre. Though the his­tory in this show is some­what fudged – a lot of the char­ac­ters nev­er actu­ally met each oth­er, and Alfred Southwick’s real story was far less music­al than por­trayed – how much is actu­ally real is left up to you to decide. It’s phe­nom­en­al, and you should def­in­itely go and see it.

It’s an abso­lute killer.

 

Wel­come to the Murder House is being per­formed at Te Aua­ha in Wel­ling­ton from now until June 10th, no shows on Mondays. Tick­ets are avail­able from Event­finda.

This play con­tains the use of smoke, expli­cit lan­guage, some sexu­al con­tent, and the dis­cus­sion (and show­ing) of death.

Get amongst!