The Horror! The Horror! The Final Curtain

Where to begin with this baffling, contextless and odd little dinosaur of a show?

The promising-sounding Theatre of the Damned’s paean to end-of-the-pier-style variety shows is told through the duplicitous, unhappily married music hall owner Alfred Brownlow, down at heel and barely balancing the books.

In between bouts of excruciating innuendo of the “I was rummaging in my drawers” variety, shared with sidekick Archie Cox (just imagine the puns you can dream up with a surname like that), Brownlow is marshalling his dwindling troupe of performers for one last hurrah. At least, you think that’s what’s happening, but the jumbled, episodic mess of a narrative falls apart faster than the “rotten heap of timbers” the group calls home.

There’s a drawn-out skit with a charlatan spiritualist, some bizarrely misplaced puppetplay, a saucy singalong from a pair of girls (inexplicably from Somerset), a ponderous conjuring trick and, well, just lots and lots of double entendre. Crashing into this procession of confusion are some half-baked occultish overtones, and the audience, over half of whom leave when the show is interrupted by a genuine fire alarm, are left literally and figuratively out in the cold.

The company, who have engaged themselves in a far more intriguing-sounding promenade performance at the exquisite Wilton’s Music Hall in London, claim their primary line of enquiry is to explore “horror and suspense on stage”. Perhaps not quite in the way they’d hoped, they certainly manage the first of these here.