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!