A Haunting performance from Thom Bailey Theatre

Posted on 26th October 2024

With Halloween only a week away Thom Bailey Theatre arrives just in time to scare the pants off the Corn Hall’s audience with four strange tales, based on East Anglian history and folk law. Reminiscent of Amicus’s portmanteau films of the seventies, Thas’ a Rummun offered a variety of perspectives on the supernatural, with four contrasting stories that ranged from the spooky to the silly, all linked by a tape recorder that stubbornly refuses to stop playing.

The Poltergeist of Elizabethan House, written by Mylo McDonald, featured Charlie Randall as a tour guide of a house in Great Yarmouth haunted by the memory, and perhaps more than a memory, of his abusive father. Randall’s performance, as a man descending into madness, was viscerally unnerving, his fragile mental state bringing to mind the writing of Edgar Alan Poe. In sharp contrast,  the sensitive portrayal of Elizabeth Butcher’s trial for Witchcraft, both written and performed by Roseanna Frascona, was chillingly understated, all the more disturbing for being based on historical records. Based more on legend than fact, but nevertheless rooted in the region, was the Herring Girl’s Lament, Abby McCain’s nod to the wives of fishermen lost to sea, with Christy Randall’s haunting portrait of a women estranged from her community given a gut punch of a twist. Perhaps best of all, if only because it featured the whole cast, was Mark Finbow’s Southtown Exorcist. Surely based on that Fortean charmer Lionel Fanthorpe, this closing episode was peppered with Finbow’s signature wit and the occasional forth wall break, providing a welcome sorbet of chuckles, after all the solemnity that preceded it. I eagerly await the return of this leather clad, neon lit, motorcycling cleric in a play of his own.

Uniformly excellent performances, sharp writing and handsomely dressed staging all combined to offer an involving night of the weird and the wonderful.