It’s the Saturday before Halloween and legions of the undead, in their blood-spattered finery, are shuffling through Camden. Some have made it to the Oxford Arms on Camden High Street and have swapped pints of blood for pints of cider and the odd glass of house red.

Upstairs in the Etcetera Theatre, the second London Horror Festival continues with Carnival of Crows, a darkly atmospheric slice of Victorian Gothic filtered through modern ‘goth’ sensibilities. With just a hint of Tim Burton.

Tragic, beautiful, Poppy is our narrator. The picture of corrupted innocence with her white face and smudgy eyes, she stands in her blood-stained pinafore; its grubby pocket stuffed with black feathers which she nervously shreds and casts about the stage.

By turns gleeful and sad, she tells a tale of grave-robbing and mutilation, of deadly puppets and dolls with their mouths sewn up and, finally, of the murder of her best friend, Virginia.

Virginia – Ginny – is fond of her gin and Poppy, understandably, is partial to opiates – in the form of that Victorian staple, laudanum. Together they are the Laudanum Sisters, assistants to the sinister carnival sideshow boss, Edward Friday.

Edward’s carnival – despite his sideline in providing human body parts for German medical students – is not doing well. The puppet show has had to close because of the death of the puppeteer; though this may have something to do with Coppice, the living puppet girl, who wants a human heart and doesn’t care how she gets it.

Does Edward murder Ginny and does Ginny’s ghost crawl out of the Thames, demanding one of Edward’s eyes to replace the one she’s lost to the fish? You’ll have to see it to find out but hurry – Carnival of Crows finishes Sunday.

Poppy’s eerie, disjointed world is conjured up in the Etcetera using suitably gothic props: lace, bird cages, dolls and masks as well as stark lighting, creating pockets of darkness in which anything might lurk while highlighting her expressive face.

Little Friday Theatre Co. are Molly Beth White and Celyn Ebnezeer but Carnival of Crows is a one woman show. White performs alone as Poppy and she both brilliantly and economically evokes Ginny crawling out of the Thames on broken arms and Edward, with only a top hat and a stick.

Sunday’s show starts at 8.30 and tickets are £11.50 and £9.50 conc. Etcetera Theatre is at 265 Camden High Street, above the Oxford Arms pub.

Still to come at the London Horror Festival is Zombie Science: Worst Case Scenario. “A spoof tutorial on the real science behind a zombeism outbreak.” If there is a zombie apocalypse – you can be sure it’ll be in Camden. Dates are 29th to 31st October, time is 7.30pm and tickets are £12 (£10 conc.)

Or you can see in Halloween with Aleister Crowley – A Passion For Evil. Same dates, later time of 9.30pm and tickets are £13 (£11 conc.)

The wonderful Tin Shed Theatre Company are bringing Dr Frankenstein’s Travelling Freakshow all the way from Wales so the least you can do is go and see them in Camden. A ringmaster, a lobster mind reader, a bearded lady and a chimp will keep the monster company. 2nd to 4th November, 9.30pm. Tickets are £12.

Listen is a tender and affecting family drama; a slice of working class life written by Paul Ferguson and staged by Miller Theatre Productions. The play explores the bonds between children and parents, particularly that between father and son and, as such, it is a return to the world of Miller, an earlier play by Ferguson.    

Listen opens in a back garden: Alfie sits in his chair beside a flower pot full of fag-ends while Irene takes in the washing. Neither will answer the phone.  Before long they are chasing each other round the garden giggling and about to head to the bedroom when the phone rings again. Alfie answers and we hear, “What’s he done this time?”

On the other side of the stage, a young man in a Fulham shirt stands listening to the traffic. This is Jason, the subject of the telephone call, as an adult.   

Sarah, a nurse leads an older Alfie, now in a home, to his seat on the other side of the stage. He sits listening to her chatter. We go back and forth in time and place while Jason grows up, meets someone, starts a family and Alfie sits remembering his Irene.

From young Jay, later Jason – both in Fulham shirts – we learn that Alfie is his stepdad but “he is my dad,” Jason realises fiercely. He visits Alfie and tells him about his life. Alfie wishes he could stay longer and not hurry off. These scenes are poignant and tender – all the more so when we realise that they are not talking at cross-purposes at all…

“All you got to do is listen. Listen with your head and your heart.”

Listen mixes dance, movement, music and drama as well as imaginative use of props to tell the story of an ordinary family. Only Jason inhabits the entire stage, in front of a graffiti-scrawled wall, at home as a boy, with his father in the old people’s home and even ascending the steps beside the audience to tell us his thoughts. Director Charlotte Chinn keeps the emphasis on the central characters, allowing Alex Sycamore as Jason and Charlie Carter as Alfie to build a relationship in stages throughout the play. Both are excellent but Charlie Carter deserves special mention for his sensitive and restrained portrayal of Alfie as an old man, conjured up with only a palsied hand as he sits with his memories. (I may have had a tear in my eye as I left the Etcetera.)

Charlotte Chinn also plays chatty and cheerful nurse, Sarah, while different generations of the Doyle family – Tina, Sam and Eliza Doyle play Irene, Jay and Jason’s wife respectively.

Listen runs at the Etcetera till Sunday 26th August, the last night of the fringe, at 7.30pm. Tickets are £7.50.

Akaky Akakievitch is unfeasibly proud of his meaningless title of Titular Councillor and the work he does copying “3,400 words a day average” as a government Clerk of the 9th Grade – basically the bottom of the heap – in 19^th century St Petersburg. His colleagues gather together to take snuff and mock him for trailing shit in from the street and treading it into the carpet, but most of all, for his shabby overcoat.

“Did you see his overcoat?” “No.” “That’s because it’s so thin it’s invisible!”

He puts on this overcoat to go home and struggles through the cold of a St Petersburg winter to his attic. Only his landlady appears to care for him, advising him to get the coat mended, as she ladles out imaginary soup. But the tailor won’t mend Akakay’s overcoat: “this is a wretched garment and I wouldn’t piss on it if was on fire.”

It will take a minimum of 80 roubles to buy a new one and Akaky tries extra hard to please at work, bouncing quite literally up and down on the stage and rushing around on all fours like a dog when his copying is noticed by the Tsarina. But the new overcoat is still out of reach until his landlady makes a sacrifice.

Akaky has his head turned by his new overcoat and the status it confers at work – now he too is attending parties and making jokes with the gossiping snuff-takers but disaster strikes the overcoat and Akaky learns who his true friends are.

A mixture of music, song, dance, mime, straight drama and physical theatre, this adaptation of The Overcoat develops into a rich and living theatrical experience. All these aspects come together when Akaky cannot afford mink for his new coat’s collar and he and the tailor take to the streets to hunt a cat for that special furry finishing touch. The three cast sing, dance, cavort and eventually have the tail off a very surprised Rachel Lincoln as the cat. Perhaps Akaky himself, Jon Levin, should play the cat, hunted down by the tailor (Ben Hadley) and his wife.   

Aside from Jon Levin, playing Akaky, the other two actors perform a multitude of parts seamlessly – their very inter-changeability adding to the sense of a hostile world pressing in on Akaky and his loyal landlady.       

Those familiar with Gogol’s tale will detect a few changes but the spirit of the original is here. The emphasis on physical theatre and developing a variety of performance languages point to the fact that all concerned – the company, Le Mot Juste (the right word) and the cast are either graduates or current students of the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Devised by the company and directed by Sohie Horton to make maximum use of the cast and a minimum of props, this production gives full rein to the techniques championed by the Ecole.  

Stimulating, challenging but ultimately rewarding, this hour-long version of The Overcoat is well worth a visit.  Make the trip to the friendly and laid back Camden People’s Theatre before the end of this year’s Fringe. The show runs every night until Sunday 26th August at 7.30pm. Tickets are £10, concs, £8. 

If you would like to help fund the Overcoat Summer 2012 Tour or make a donation to Le Mot Juste Theatre, visit them online at: www.lemotjustetheatre.com/support-us

Beware the Wolf is a musical celebration of fairy tales and an imaginative re-telling of the Little Red Riding Hood story.

After their grandfather’s death, cousins Christian and Lottie, are sifting through their grandfather’s possessions in the attic. They find his old trunk and the book of stories with which he charmed them as children. It must be time for a song and they oblige, singing “Don’t look with your eyes, better to see with your heart”.    

The stage is strewn with boxes and bedecked with ‘dust sheets’ behind which back-lit shadows act out the stories of Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel and The Three Bears as Christian reads from his grandfather’s book. But when he gets to Lottie’s favourite, Little Red Riding Hood, the pages have been torn out and Lottie must remember the story herself in order to come to terms with her grandfather’s death.

And so the story unfolds using a little bit of everything: shadow theatre, song and dance as well as more traditional storytelling techniques. Behind the sheet, the rest of the cast do a magnificent job bringing the stories to life as Little Red Riding Hood and the Woodcutter as well as two swaying singers providing the “sha-la-la-awooos” to accompany the gravelly-voiced wolf.   

Men in Space have come up with an extremely accomplished piece of family entertainment. The show is well staged, making maximum use of the limited space and the attic is convincingly evoked – both as an actual attic and as a portal to the world of the imagination.

Suitable for all the family, Beware the Wolf is a lot of fun and well worth getting out to see at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. The show runs until the 22nd August at the Etcetera Theatre and tickets cost £8, concs £6.

Janice Day’s one-woman show is adapted from her book of the same name and brings the same lively wit and mordant humour to play on the stage of the Etcetera Theatre.

Slim, elegant and with a twinkle in her eye, Janice introduces herself as she walks onstage. “I know the question trembling on everbody’s lips is…did I survive? Well, you’ll have to wait until the end of the show to find out.”   

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer sixteen years ago – at only 39 – she little thought it would be the making of her, forcing her to change her life and realise long-held ambitions. The night before her mastectomy, an old woman in the next bed told her she would reinvent herself and like what she became…

Janice guides us through her initial ‘shame’ at having the unmentionable disease (she felt like John Hurt in Alien – with this thing inside her – about to ruin everybody’s lunch party) to the decision of what type of re-construction to have and the consequences of this. With the resulting missing nipple, a hernia, a ‘dog ear’ and an asymmetric abdomen, she states, “I was a vision.”

With a 50/50 chance of surviving the next ten years, she rejected chemotherapy on learning that the best it could offer was a 5% increase in survival rates – and the worst? “It would be like calling the SAS in to get rid of a rat behind the sofa.” She decided to follow an alternative route, taking control of her own body to keep the cancer at bay and uses a neat device to explain her reasoning: the ersatz parable of the princess and the wise woman.

Getting it Off My Chest allows us a peek at Janice’s childhood as well guiding us through the sixteen years since her cancer diagnosis. And so we get to see the origins of her sugar addiction as well experiencing the reality, for Janice, of cravings and self-loathing as she scoffs a family-sized pack of doughnuts and goes on the rampage for the chocolate Christmas tree ornaments. She finally sheds her seven stones overweight by cutting out sugar completely. But her final task in turning her life around is to reduce her levels of stress and so her husband has to go.

Having spent years ‘not writing’, she now resolved to finish her book as well as resuming her singing career, doing stand-up and acting for the first time in last year’s Camden Fringe.

The monologue is nicely broken up with musical interludes. A trip back to 1963 is announced by the Beatles’ Help! And coming to terms with her childhood is celebrated by Janice leading us in sing-a-long rendition of Mary Hopkin’s Those Were The Days.

Long on humour and mercifully short on gory detail, Getting it Off My Chest is an inspiring account of what one person can achieve when they’re up against it.

Getting it Off My Chest is produced by Mark Lindow and directed with sensitivity by Matthew Gould.

The show’s short two-night run at the Etcetera has finished now but you can still read Janice’s book or follow her blog.

“Now I understand the DC multiverse!” Not words you will hear every day but on this occasion spoken by an audience member after the first night of Full Stage Splash, Sigil Club’s new show at the Etcetera Theatre.  

Attempting to distil the history of the comic book into a one-hour stage show is a pretty ambitious project but Sigil Club have succeeded with great verve and admirable energy especially considering the build-up of heat in the Etcetera. They promised sketches, puppets, fights and seven-foot long diagrams and they have delivered.

The show starts with a textbook definition of the comic art form so we all know where we are before we are cast back to 1938 – “a dark time of depression”, recession and fat cats exploiting the masses – “yes, hard to imagine”. With hundreds of cartoonists out of work there was the opportunity to give birth (literally, on stage) to a new kind of hero. Possessing the DNA of lesser heroes such as Hercules, Zorro and even Popeye, the superhero’s new popularity is summed up thus by Daniel Farley playing a generic superhero throughout the show: “I am every little guy you have ever pushed around – here to push back.”

The show provides a lightning tour of the major developments, fashions, reinventions/re-imaginings and, not least, the historical context of the comic book. There are moments of brilliance including turning the 1954 Senate State Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency and the publication of psychologist, Fredric Wertham’s, Seduction of the innocent into a puppet show whereby a glove puppet Fredric Wertham as a kind of Mr Punch wallops a succession of comic book characters over the head as too gay, too sexy, too violent or whatever.

The well-researched stream of information never seems relentless as it is broken up through various devices – apart from the puppet show there is Fantastic Four Family Fortunes with Stage Manager and Co-Producer Jackie O’Sullivan lurking offstage to make the famous “uh-uh” noises.

Totally engaging, Full Stage Splash strikes the right balance between information overload and downright silliness. The cast – Daniel Farley, Kate Quinn, Kris Wood and writer, director, performer Michael Eckett clearly enjoy themselves whether over-the-top fighting in the style of 90s comics or clomping up and down the stage as the bandiest-legged cowboy ever; their love of their subject matter is infectious.

If you think it’s a lot to squeeze into an hour, wait until the entire history of comic books is rattled through in a minute at the end of the show. And the amazing thing is – it still makes sense.   

I spoke to Michael and Jackie after the show in the steamy back garden of the Oxford Arms. They were pleased with the reception of the show – there was a full house on the first night and only a few seats going spare on the second – and the fact that people with no interest in comics were still able to follow and enjoy the show while geeks could enjoy the extra layers of detail.

They enjoyed being part of last year’s Fringe so much, despite having a show cancelled because of the riots, that they had to come back and they’re hoping to take the show to the Manchester Fringe next year. Part of their “2-D aesthetic” is that – with a minimum of props – the show can be packed up and carried around in a couple of bags.

I asked how the show was developed – whether devised onstage or based on improvisation but Michael said that the need to research and balance information with humour meant that he pretty much had to write it all in advance and tweak it later – with input from the group, of course.

Finally, I asked about research and both recommend The Comic Book History of Comics by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey and Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones for the early years in particular. Needless to say there is also a ton of stuff online.

There is so much packed into this hour that you owe it to yourself to go and see it if you have any interest – current, nostalgic, whatever – in comics so get on down to the Etcetera for the last night of Full Stage Splash tonight at 7.30pm. Tickets are £7.50.

The stage at the Camden People’s Theatre is bedecked with colourful paper lamps and fairy lights creating a suitably magical atmosphere for the performance of Arabian Nights. A guitarist strums by the door as we enter and file into our seats before the cast bounce energetically onto the stage in tee-shirts and harem pants.

For those not familiar with the story of Arabian Nights (or One Thousand and One Nights) and Queen Sheherazade’s attempts to stave off her execution by telling stories to the king, there is a brief enactment. The king is betrayed by his wife and has her executed. He then resolves to marry a different woman every day and have her executed at the end. It is his nervous, teacup-rattling, vizier’s task to find these wives from the ever-dwindling stock of women in the land. Eventually his daughter, Sheherazade, comes up with a plan and volunteers as she is confident she can survive by telling stories.

There follows an irreverent and good-humored take on some of the tales from 1,001 Nights: a donkey learns to keep its advice to itself; an enchanted wooden horse flies about introducing princes and princesses to each other, genies escape from, and are trapped again in, bottles. Eventually the king falls for Sheherazade before she runs out of ideas; and the executioner dies of old age.      

The five cast are all fabulous, entering into proceedings with gusto and bringing a host of unlikely characters to immediate and recognisable life. Three twine together to make up a particularly stroppy three-headed genie and another three combine to make a giant flying bird. It’s hard to pick one out for especial praise but Tamara Astor brings great physicality to the part of Mrs Axe, the executioner-in-waiting as well as the donkey and numerous other parts.

The whole is directed with great vigour by Jennifer Rose Lee who also scripted it after improvisation sessions with the cast.   

Get down to the Camden People’s Theatre for a fantastic night out! The show runs till Saturday 18th August at 7.30pm. Tickets are £8.50 and concs are £7.50.

Annie is an ordinary eighteen year old who sets out for college a little earlier than usual one Wednesday morning after a breakfast of coco pops. She is looking forward to reading her novel on the train. It’s a glorious day: the whole world is happy.

“It’s impossible to describe what happens next,” she says, “it’s as if I’ve been dumped in the ocean by an angry wall of light….then darkness.” A suicide bomber has blown himself up right behind her. Scenes of utter horror are described as Annie lies on the floor of the tube carriage, the skin on her back and her polyester hoody fused together in one bubbling mass.

She begins to fight: “I will not die. Not now.” She recites the numbers of the dead and injured. Gradually, the walking wounded are rescued and those who can be helped, are. But Annie is passed by – the profoundly injured can wait and she is one of the last off the train.

Listening is told from the point of view of the seemingly unconscious Annie, locked into her broken and bleeding body in her hospital room – “a half-way house for the dead”. She recounts her story from a chair and only makes her way across the stage to the bed when it is clear that her life-support is to be switched off.

Listening is a one-woman show written, produced and performed by Nellie McQuinn in conjunction with Grass Roots Media. It was developed from a 10-minute piece in remembrance of a school friend who died of brain cancer at age 15 about the time of the Bali bombings. In Listening therefore, it is the universal nature of grief and loss that is explored. Although sometimes emotional, the piece is not mawkish and McQuinn holds the show together admirably. It is an assured and strong performance.

Veronica Quilligan’s direction allows the focus to remain firmly on Annie’s unfolding story with as little fuss as possible. At the back of the stage a wall of posters of the victims serves as a projector showing station scenes early in the play and videos of childhood, as Annie begins to flatline. Otherwise the stage is simply but effectively set with just the chair and a hospital bed.  

All proceeds from ticket sales are going to the British Red Cross.

 Listening continues every evening at 7.30pm until Saturday 18th August at the Tristan Bates Theatre. Tickets are £10, concs £8.

Square Peg describe their first production, Forwards and Backwards as “a dramatic jigsaw played at intense speed and with relentless energy”. It is the story of a couple and their relationship which is told forwards and backwards in time, each scene a clue, a part of the narrative jigsaw to be pieced together by the audience as more and more of the overall picture emerges. Many scenes take place on a train travelling forwards and backwards between London and Manchester. The train is a metaphor; the play is a journey – but not all the stops are in the right order.

Fragments of a couple’s first meeting on the train are measured out over the length of the play. Likewise, we visit them several times during what might be their last trip together. In between is how they got there: the journey of their relationship. There are happy moments and tragic ones; lullabies for a newborn baby intersperse the arguments, jealousy and depression.

Each scene is prefigured or reflected elsewhere. Near the beginning of the play, but towards the end of their story, Gary confesses to having told two lies – one appears trivial, one does not. When these moments appear in the play, they have all the more impact for having been signposted.

Using only a box as a prop and elements of physical theatre, Square Peg have managed to “escape the rigidity of a two-dimensional page” and create a truly three-dimensional, living, piece of theatre. Michael White and Katie Robinson both give strong performances, portraying Gary and Katherine with subtlety and sympathy despite each character’s very human selfishness.   

Forwards and Backwards is complex and rich but not at all complicated or difficult to follow. Each successive scene draws you in further as the story unravels in time and space. This really is an assured and ambitious work and one of the highlights of 2012’s Camden Fringe Festival.

I spoke to Michael White and Katie Robinson – Square Peg – after the performance at the Camden People’s Theatre. Forwards and Backwards is their first production. It is a devised piece: one that has been developed over time – in this case hundreds of hours of workshops – on stage, in rehearsal, through trial and error and only then scripted. It was not ‘written’ in advance of any staging. “The script is a document of the final product”, says Michael. It is not a starting point. He added that he couldn’t imagine having created this just “sat at a computer”.

The initial inspiration for the piece was a limerick but the play itself evolved from a short piece based on conversations, phone calls and arguments overheard on the train between Manchester and London and one of its strengths is the realistic dialogue which still follows the dynamics of real arguments and conversations.  

What started out as many journeys and many voices was whittled down over time to just the story of one couple. Additional characters and props were finally rejected and the pared down piece now showing at the CPT is pretty much the final version. The play has been performed most recently at the Buxton Fringe where they were nominated for Best Production and Katie won Best Actress.

I asked ‘what next’ for both Square Peg and Forwards and Backwards after their Camden Fringe run: they will be returning to Manchester where the play will perform at the Three Minute Theatre on the 27th August and elsewhere in September.

Catch Forwards and Backwards at the Camden People’s Theatre every evening until Saturday 18th August at 9.00pm. Tickets are £8.   

There once was a man who said

“Damn!

It is borne in upon me that I am,

A creature that moves

In predestinate grooves;

Not even a bus, but a tram.”

It’s a Puppet Life is sketch comedy with puppets, people, puppets interacting with people. Or is it the other way around?

There are blue, red, brown, purple, white, orange and multi-coloured puppets, big and small puppets, shadow puppets, puppets who sell the big issue and The Predator. Yes, the one who gave Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny Glover and even the Alien such a hard time. This time he’s ripping people’s spines out in a not-so-genteel Pride and Prejudice land.

The puppets are pretty badly behaved but not as badly as some members of the human cast. One guy gets such a quantity of talc thrown in his face that he is blinded for the rest of the sketch and beyond.     

Shadow puppetry also features: In Godzilla vs 2012, our hero pops out for some milk and Femfresh for the missus but, on finding out the price of a bus fare without an Oyster card, goes on the rampage, destroying London during the Olympics.

Like most sketch shows, there’s hit and miss. Some of the sketches in It’s a Puppet Life left me mystified but others are very funny indeed. But the puppets are the stars of the show singing us in and out with their jolly rendition of It’s a Puppet Life (with apologies to Frank Sinatra no doubt).

It’s a Puppet Life  runs till Wednesday the 15th August at the Etcetera Theatre, 7.30pm. Tickets are £7, concs £6.