Horror pastiche has a proud lineage at this festival – for example Garth Marenghi, and Andrew Doherty’s hit Gay Witch Sex Cult two summers ago. In that company, Crybabies’ The Scaring can stand as tall as the demon Haeldrrun towering over its finale: it’s another fantastic comic play from the Radio 4 trio of Michael Clarke, James Gault and Ed Jones with chills as well as laughs, and production values rarely seen on the fringe. A tale of demonic possession and a disillusioned priest, set in a guesthouse that makes the Overlook in The Shining seem five-star by comparison, it’s as tightly packed with smart gags as a hotelier’s cellar with the corpses of slaughtered guests.
The plotting, too, is twistier than Regan’s neck in The Exorcist, a moment referenced in one creepy/comical scene here featuring a haunted dolly. It begins with two priests exorcising a beast from another dimension. But the beast wins, leaving our hero Father Arthur bereft of his partner, and his calling. And so (cue non sequitur second scene) he must take up work in the immersive stag-do industry – at least until summoned to the Lyle Away hotel, where a reckoning with his traumatic past awaits ….
You get plenty of bangs (and shrieks) for your buck with what follows, as Crybabies squeeze escaped serial killers, a haunted boy with a bloodlust, a possessed bouncy ball, and an anti-woke spook into their platinum-dense plot. When parental bereavement is added to that mix, in a show not designed to bear that weight, one feels a twinge of unease. But they pull it off, as Gault issues that son’s oddly tender goodbye – and as the trio’s battery of big-yield visual and verbal gags (including some particularly precious puns) keep emotional significance at arm’s length.
Among those, the hotel guest/ghost forever “fading away” into another realm is a keeper, as is the brilliant Two Ronnies-alike conversation between Arthur, his hotelier and a spectre that only one of them can perceive. Add to this accomplished illusions and corny-but-effective jump scares, and you’ll feel spoiled by a spooky show riffing ridiculously on revenants, and the difficulty of letting them go.
