Tales from the Woods

Theatre Upstairs, Dublin

**

“I like to be afraid,” says a girl with a passing resemblance to Red Riding Hood as she leads a modern wolf through the woods. Don’t we all? The shivery appeal of Halloween isn’t easy to trigger, though. The Girl, wide-eyed but eerily self-possessed in India Mullen’s performance, actually makes for a difficult audience herself.

It’s dark, she agrees with an unseen and predatory stranger (silkily voiced by Peter Gaynor), but she has seen darker. Fables about beasts are not as scary, she thinks, as the horrors of real people. And even stories, she suspects, are more coercive trap than innocent diversion.

In Gary Duggan's piece, The Beast in the Woods (the second of three short sketches for Theatre Upstairs and Gumption Theatre Company) it's hard to tell whether this preternaturally aware character is a fairy-tale naïf or, perhaps, an unshockable literary critic. But Duggan, with hardly a flicker of comedy, seems most aware of the challenge: splicing fairy tales into horror stories for know-it-all viewers.

Where other productions might settle for knowing laughs and ghost-ride schlock, director Karl Shiels goes for something far more stylised, in pursuit of more sincere scares. The most impressive of these, despite modest means, is Laura Honan's fetching set, where a gnarled tree bears flickering filament bulbs, like strange fruit, and a rocking chair moves of its own accord beneath a ghostly narration.

Otherwise, various attempts to hit a nerve are too abrupt to find it. Kate Gilmore's The Ballad of Ginny Fogarty, a schoolgirl chiller played by Mullen, Eilís Carey and Marnie Mccleane-Fay, involves games of truth or dare, parental deception, infanticidal lore and, of course, trespass. It escalates into a hysterical fantasy, but it would be more discreetly and meaningfully sexual without the blunt emphasis of their costumes.

Shiels's own abstract fable, The Children Played at Slaughtering, imagines the barbarity of innocents, with two brothers (Shane O'Regan and Dave Rowe) on writhing, shrieking trial for the murder of another, under a ghoulish, torturing creature. The material alone, the show knows, is pretty slight, so it leans hard on the effects of Derek Conaghy's overly detailed sound design, on billowing smoke clouds and lashings of blood. That makes it hard for a final guest reader – on my viewing, John Kavanagh reading Poe's The Raven – to connect with his material through all the superficial fog. It wasn't hard to empathise.

Until November 7th