“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?