Terrifying Women II: The Return is ghoulishly good enjoyable at Camberwell’s Golden Goose Theatre
“I’d like to tell you a story…”
Whether you think about Halloween Ends to be the 4th or thirteenth entry within the collection, it’s clear that if you’re making an entry into the horror market, you gotta be enthusiastic about a franchise. So after Terrifying Women shook up the horror theatre world final 12 months, it ought to come as little shock that like Glenn Close in that tub, they’re coming again for extra in Terrifying Women II: The Return on the newly revamped Golden Goose Theatre.
Terrifying Women are producer Amanda Castro and writers Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, Sampira and Abi Zakarian and between them, there’s a extremely fairly invigorating reappraisal of what horror can do on the stage. This collection of monologues, new items from the trio plus work from three new featured writers – Rebecca Batala, Kandy Rohmann and Peyvand Sadeghian – takes us well past retreads of Dracula, Frankenstein and Jekyll & Hyde to creep out audiences as soon as once more.
That’s to not say they don’t know the worth of old style fire yarn. We open with Lloyd Malcolm’s Beware the Old Woman within the Woods which Karren Winchester delivers with torchlit glee (did everybody have a type of scary homes out of the way in which of their childhood?!). But we additionally shut with Abi Zakarian’s proper on the nostril Serial Numbers: Society’s Obsession with Mass Killers which lands its punches exactly and squarely because it indicts our misplaced prurient curiosity in killers over victims, Johnnie Fiori’s lecturer taking zero prisoners in its extremely entertaining supply.
Widening the slate of writers does naturally imply that the number of storytelling on provide will increase and that may invoke the Revels impact. Not the entire items despatched shivers up my backbone the identical approach however the eeriness of Peyvand Sadeghian’s Restless labored its approach into my mind in Maia Tamrakar’s emotional efficiency and the traumatic underpinning of Rebecca Batala’s Rubble is disturbingly persuasive. A shout-out too to technical stage supervisor Lauren Wedgeworth who deploys her completely timed interventions to most impact.