Rating: 3.5 Stars
There aren’t too many live shows that I get excited enough to make sure that I attend them, but with a title that went A Haunted House, it seems this one certainly qualified. Part of the Mumbai Fringe Festival, mime and physical comedy performer David Hoskin presented to us a hysterical, terrifying, and surreal tale about one hair-raising night in a haunted house. Hair raising Is an important phrase here as David makes sure his voluminous hair add to his aura, long with his completely black outfit and dark eye shadow, he resembles one of those Victorian ghosts in mansions we would love to spend some time with.
The one-man show starts with David beside a miniature of a mansion and thunder and lightning with red strobe lights reflected on his face, which immediately reminded me of Michael Keaton character Beetlejuice (1988), the gothic horror comedy directed by Tim Burton. Through a period of 1 hour, David takes us on the tour of a spooky old mansion, playing a myriad of characters- dancing, zombies, vampires, babies, bats, a wayward wiener and many more. The ofcourse, there’s the host, Uncle Lester, obviously reminding any of us millennials of The Addams Family.
Ghosts in the audience
What makes this show unique is that the audience needs to be as alert as the performer, as David uses the mass of the audience to add elements to the overall ambience- the right side of the audience are made to mimic howling winds while the left side are chirping birds. And then in the middle is a woman who starts off with an oink-oink, but clearly forgot the memo and went on to make other sounds throughout the show. Sitting bang in front of him right in the front of the stage, I was caught in an interaction where being asked my name he couldn’t pronounce it and referred to me throughout the duration of the show simply as ‘Mr Egg’.
But the highlight oof the one-hour special are his transformations into various characters and the physicality of it. He induces the audience into laughter with his expressions and sounds. But what shines through are two aspects- the love with which he has written and conceptualized this entire act, and also a one-liner which hints at how most of us end up spending more time thinking about a future which might never take place.
Jim Carrey?
We laughed at different times because of different reasons- sometimes it was the comedic timing, at other times the physicality and some members out of the bizarreness and weirdness of the show. At the end, you feel like wanting to spend time getting to know David the individual, so mesmerized you are with the entire production, much like the lonely apparition of the haunted house purposely punctures the cars passing its path so that he can spend time with them and take them on a tour of his mansion. I was also left wondering that this man could very well carry a Hollywood film on his shoulders with his comedy and physicality- much like Jim Carrey did with Ace Ventura or The Mask, and a little known vampire movie called Once Bitten (1985). In other words, don't keep looking at the most enthralling actors on screen, you just might discover them on the fringes.
