Thunder and lightning, flickering lights, obscuring mist, ghostly silhouettes, a barking dog that isn’t there, a poltergeist seemingly active and something buried in the basement. Ivories parades a host of horror story elements with Adam Lenson’s sound design and Skylar Turnbull-Hurd’s lighting and spot-on cueing making a huge contribution to director Georgie Rankcom’s production, setting the style for this occult adventure from its opening moments.
We are in a crumbling late Victorian house where an old lady is dying upstairs, Her non-binary grandchild, Sloane (Riley Elton McCarthy), is there ostensibly to look after her, but more practically there with husband Gwyn to checkout any assets and have the house ready to put on the market the moment that grandma is gone.
Sloane, who is a playwright, is referred to as “he” but is seemingly trans, though from which to which I’m not certain. There seem to be past traumas linked to the building. Is the play he is writing based on them? Is that why he is eager to work on it in situ? What seemed to be conversation sometimes turns out to have been his play text, as when he asks what Gwyn thought of his monologue.
Gwyn and Sloane’s relationship seems to have reached some kind of crisis, and the arrival of Gwyn’s lifelong friend Neckham, ostensibly to help prepare the house sale, doesn’t help things. Is he really an estate agent specialising in decayed haunted houses? Maybe his haunted house sales vlog is just meant to be funny, but it didn’t make me laugh.
It is difficult to be sure what is going on, not helped by Sloane’s often rushed delivery and elision of words into each other. Riley Elton McCarthy knows what they are saying (they wrote it), but though this is a performance full of sensitive if somewhat stylised reactions, it needs to be more clearly spoken.
Matthias Hardarson makes botanist Gwyn decidedly unstable—he is on medication and seems traumatised by the dead plants that he finds—and Daniel Neil Ash’s Beckham is pretty odd too, but they do speak with more clarity. It doesn’t come as a great surprise to hear Beckham has been in love with Gwyn since he was aged ten.
A plethora of oddities may be red herrings and don’t make the plot easy to unearth until they bring out an Ouija board and past events come to haunt them and things take on a new twist.
If you are a fan of the My House is Haunted shows that seem to be on TV every night (introduced with the caveat they are for your entertainment), this could be one for you. I like my horror more grand guignol. Near the end of its 90 minutes, it did indeed become more ghoul and gore, but I am bemused as to whether that was the “real” story or the last act of the play Sloane is writing: perhaps both of them.