Back Room of the Star Inn, Guildford – until 8th February 2019
Reviewed by Antonia Hebbert
3***
Strange how sinister a pram on the stage can be. Somehow you just know the evening is going to be more Rosemary’s Baby than Mary Poppins. Steve Griffin and Nathan Jones start mildly enough, inviting the audience to talk about beliefs and share any experience they might have of the supernatural. They then move smoothly on to tell us a creepy true-life murder story. In 1973 a woman died in childbirth in the German town of Wurzburg, which was once the scene of horrific witch trials. Miraculously, the baby survived, but the father became convinced that the mother continued to visit the child and that both were possessed by a demonic power. Eventually he murdered his closest friend and confidant, and told the police he had also killed the baby – but the baby’s body was never found.
It’s a short show of less than an hour (written and first performed by Sasha Roberts and Tom Worsley). With the help of a good old-fashioned slide projector, Griffin and Jones kept us intrigued and entertained, but they didn’t succeed in totally spooking us. Somehow they never created a really eerie atmosphere, despite the story’s many uncanny aspects – Wurzburg’s witch history, the cult of the murderous Erlking, odd footprints in the snow and the mother’s mysterious past, not to mention all the darkness of 20th-century German history, which might have made for a more serious play. Perhaps more work on the lighting and sound effects would have helped, or perhaps the show is just too short – it would have been more satisfying if we could have finished as we started, with the audience invited to mull over what they had just heard and seen. Still, you can do that anyway if you go with the right person – the Star Inn has just the right atmosphere for it.
Note to Griffin and Jones: try not to block the audience’s view of the screen