“This is the true story of two trav­el­ling car­nies who devel­op an obses­sion with the occult, expos­ing and explain­ing the paranor­mal.”

Liz­zie Tolle­mache and Dav­id Lad­der­man listen to their audi­ence.  It makes sense as per­formers who’ve worked with cir­cus, cab­aret, and vari­ety around the world…  so much of those skills rely on the audi­ence invest­ing fully.  And while Tues­day night’s open­ing night audi­ence were warm and excited, get­ting them to invest in that way demands a hell of a lot of energy from the act­ors.  Tolle­mache and Lad­der­man had that energy and more, as they star­ted to spin their haunt­ing (get it?!  oh God, I’m sorry…) tales.  In fact, Lad­der­man had so much energy with his wild ges­tures and choppy, almost Shat­ner-ish deliv­ery, that it felt pretty hammy.  I wondered if I’d be leav­ing with a bottle of snake oil, or be called upon to yell “Behind you, behind you!!”  Mean­while, Tolle­mache was on AV duty, without even a light on her.  Seemed a bit rude.

The premise is that they became inter­ested in ghost stor­ies in South Otago, appar­ently the most haunted part of New Zea­l­and.  They set the scene well, with a little detail here and there provided with slides and props.  The stage is pretty bare – fur­niture set out like a little sit­ting room starts under dust cloths, revealed incre­ment­ally as the story pro­gresses from gen­er­al present­a­tion on ghost stor­ies from the min­ing era to some­thing more imme­di­ate – per­haps one of those pres­ences fol­lowed them all the way to Circa?  Per­haps it does­n’t like how its story is being told?

The inter­est­ing thing for me was the way Lad­der­man’s panto flail­ing had lulled me into expect­a­tion of more of the same.  So I was sucked into Tolle­mache’s rising intens­ity while he sub­sided and did­n’t even real­ise the clev­er swap of focus they’d effected.  They under­stand how people engage, and they played with us.  This show has been going for a couple of years, pre­sum­ably evolving as they’ve stud­ied the reac­tions, and it must be old hat now.  But the audi­ence is always the wild card.  They did­n’t assume we were stu­pid – obvi­ously we all recog­nised where they were going to take us early.  But I swear every single per­son in that theatre jumped, more than once, and exactly when we were sup­posed to.

There was nowhere near enough Actu­al Story to sat­is­fy me.  It was a little bit here, a little there, then a tempt­ing nar­rat­ive began that just stopped dead (yep, I’ll see myself out), replaced by light­ing and sound and then just…  noth­ing.  I felt that the com­mit­ment the audi­ence had made was unre­war­ded.  And I felt that the act­ors were unre­war­ded, too…  I get what they wanted to do, but they deserved applause for the work they’d put in.  Maybe they were just happy know­ing that they made a full theatre shriek and jump like wusses?