Short & Spooky – Bold Theatre, Elephant & Castle

Writers: Somebody Jones, Jake Daproza, Scott Younger, Jaymie Bellous, Victoria Howell
Directors: Dylan Zwickel, Hana Fukui, Suz Pontillo, Gabriela Torress Gil, Marta Mazur

Reviewer: Christine Stanton

“Long & Laborious”

2 / 5

~This review was originally written for The Reviews Hub~

Untold Collectiv have curated five Halloween inspired plays to close out October’s spooky season. With themes from zombies, ghosts and demons, there’s some good variety on offer from this scratch night style collection.

The closing show, horror-comedy Spa-Maggedon is the most entertaining of the evening. Spa owner Tabitha (Shilpa Varma) is doing her best to create a harmonious, meditative environment for guest Sally (Sian Kayleigh) who has come for a relaxing break. The zombie apocalypse outside threatens scupper their session but Tabitha refuses to stop when zombie Colin (Sammy Simmons) breaks in, adding him into the session and hypnotising him out of his craving for eating brains. Suz Pontillo weaves the humour into the storyline well, with the cast nailing the comedic timing. Another entertaining offering Forever Isn’t Always opens the collection. Jones’ narrative focuses on a woman visiting her deceased ex-boyfriend for some closure. The intensity from Jordan Skelly (Mason) desperately trying to convince Catalina Lutz (Amina) to stay with him is great, and his special effects makeup works well in showcasing the horrific accident that took his life.

The Protector has a great set design (Isabella Stone), with the cornfield and scarecrow (Siyi Huang) immediately setting the tone after the interval for a creepy storyline. It has potential, and the final scenes are great, but the build up featuring Jules (Wolf Newton) and Frankie (Alexa Wong) setting up camp and arguing becomes too repetitive – some trimming would work well to allow the impact of both the arrival of the farmer (Drew Paterson) and the scarecrow to land better and really shock the audience. Moonlight Becomes You about a grieving ghost (Mili Carnevale) in a B&B falls flat, the B&B guests Luna (Sophia Roldan) and Terra (Pamela Estrada) spending too long quietly wittering about nothing before anything is revealed, and the final scenes just being a dull, elongated dance performance. Eat has an intriguing premise, but there isn’t enough variety until the very end, so Eddie’s (Andrew Atha) monologue about his disorder starts to become boring, which is unfortunate because Atha shows the fear and struggle of his character well.

Depending on where you are sitting in the theatre, visibility and acoustics are a bit of a problem. There are a variety of scenes played out on the floor, so those between the middle and back can’t see what is actually happening, and those at the side are able to see hidden figures, which somewhat ruin surprise reveals that audience members in the front benefit from. The sound design is mostly fine during the plays, but during the Sylvr acoustic set that kicks off the evening, the lyrics are incoherent due to the feedback from the speaker, and the guitar microphone being much louder than the singer. Some small issues, that logistically moving forward, could be an easy fix, with the directors ensuring all seats in the house have an equal experience.

Billed as being five 15 minute plays, the ‘Short & Spooky’ evening unfortunately isn’t all that short, nor spooky! The evening on the night reviewed, ran for a total of 2 hours and 35mins – some of this was due to an unexplained delayed start, then a smoke alarm that evacuated the building. But even excluding these avoidable events, many of the plays go over the 15 minute runtime, then the (mostly very minimal) set changes between each show are very lengthy. Many of the performances would benefit in capitalising on tension and atmosphere built up from the previous performance, but the elongated breaks and waiting time means that the suspense dissipates fast, turning a ‘Short & Spooky’ night into a ‘Long & Laborious’ one instead. It’s a shame because the premise is fantastic, and a scary scratch night is always welcome, especially in October, but this one sadly just struggles to deliver on the premise.

Runs until 30th October 2026