A Haunted House @ Assembly St Andrew Square

He’s creepy and he’s kooky, mysterious and spooky, he’s altogether ooky – he’s David Hoskins, and this is A Haunted House! Allow the kindly host Uncle Lester to welcome you into his home, a sprawling manor chock full of enough creative, campy creatures to delight any horror B-movie fan. The show takes the form of a tour of this ramshackle abode, from its graveyard filled with grooving ghouls to its library stocked to the rafters with ‘memory jars’. There’s even a laboratory in the attic populated by bird-like hybrids left over from cloning experiments gone wrong! All this is transmitted to the audience in the form that's a hybridisation of physical theatre and mime. It's a style that produces much hilarity, but also, admittedly, quite a bit of confusion. At times, it can be difficult to orient yourself within A Haunted House – there’s only so much one man and the sound effects he can make with his mouth can do, after all. One wonders if Hoskins could have done with bringing in another performer, or even involving his audience more than for the occasional gag.

Beneath Hoskins' obvious love for classic horror films such as Dracula (1931), The Wolf Man (1941), and, apparently, The Full Monty (1997) – yes, bizarrely, there is a dance number to Joe Cocker’s You Can Leave Your Hat On – there’s an emotional depth being probed by the show’s fixation on memory. From the reveal of the memory jar containing the grief of futures never to come to repeated mimed birthing sequences, A Haunted House is haunted most of all by the loss of potential. It’s unfortunate, then, that Hoskins increasingly manic miming can often leave these moments more confusing than they are evocative.

What remains clear always, however, is Uncle Lester's isolation. Hoskins, too, clearly delights at having an audience to follow him in this hour’s romp through occasionally nonsensical episodes of terror. With wild eyes and wilder hair, he charges about the stage at a breakneck pace, laughter following at his heels. A concept this huge needs a highly committed performer, and Hoskins is nothing if not that.

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A Haunted House, Assembly @ St Andrew Square (Front Room), run ended