Carnival of Souls Press Reviews
Three Weeks - four ****
Steve Lyons - Carnival Of Souls - Sample Theatre
Walking into the Romanesque Cameo Cinema, you know you are in for a treat. A calliope plays ominously as a carousel, going round and round, is projected onto the big screen. The carousel morphs into a car plunging off a bridge. Suddenly, Mary, the driver of the car, appears live on stage, with her suitcase. Applying DJ sampling/looping techniques to the 1960s movie ‘Carnival of Souls,’ Sample Theatre creates a haunting piece of film noir theatre. The surround-sound system enhances the macabre landscape in the cavernous, lonely theatre. The film montage on the screen meshes nicely with the progressively surreal events unfolding on stage. Carnival of Souls is a deliciously evocative piece of late-night weirdness.
tw rating 4/5
The List
"A spirited, chilling adaptation of the cult classic horror movie." The List, Miles Fielder
Scotsman
http://www.edinburgh-
Walking home from the atmospheric Cameo Cinema in the dead of night, it's easy to get caught up in the idea that you're being followed after spending just over an hour in the presence of this unsettling ghost story.
Based on the 1962 cult horror film of the same name, Sample Theatre company's show fuses live action with disorientating original film footage and an eerie musical score that could well leave you wishing it was possible to hide under one of the cinema's blood-red seats.
Through a narrative clearly inspired by Hitchcock and his contemporaries, we follow a young woman, haunted by sinister demons, trapped somewhere between the worlds of the living and the dead after a mysterious car accident. Faced with a choice between spending her nights with a lecherous neighbour or the nightmarish figures slowly closing in on her, she finds herself drawn to the all-consuming hell of a hypnotic carnival.
The world of noir cinema is lovingly recreated through a theatre experience that gives it new-found immediacy, but anyone familiar with the horror genre's conventions will guess the tale's final twist. While there is a sense of events building towards a climax that doesn't live up to its promise, this is an unnerving piece that couldn't be better suited to its evocative performance space.
Reel Scotland
http://www.reelscotland.com/?
Of all the shows vying for attention at the Fringe this year, many have their pedigree in film and Carnival of Souls which runs at The Cameo cinema is a prime example. Based on the cult 1962 film by Herk Harvey (now in the public domain, so legally watchable online), Leeds-based Sample Theatre, under the direction of Madeleine Hughes, have taken an innovative approach to the source material using video, audio and interpretive dance.
From the moment you enter Screen One late at night; dry ice billowing, carousel incessantly spinning on screen, carnival music invading your ears, balloons and bunting draped around the Art Deco pillars; there’s an immediate and pervading sense of unease. Like funfairs, cinemas shouldn’t have any perturbing connotations but in this context, it certainly does.
Carnival of Souls is the tale of young woman (Hayley Mallinson) who survives a car crash and is haunted by strange visions leading her inexorably towards a mysterious pavilion. The only other recurring character in the play is a lecherous neighbour (Gordon Campbell) who plagues her almost as much as the visions.
Sample Theatre advise they seek to use cinematic conventions to “[alter] the audience’s experience of watching a live performance through the use of new technologies… to create an experience which enmeshes the audience members into the visual and audio fabric of the performance.”
Where the play’s strength lies is in its creation of an unsettling ambience. Through use of sound design by Rob Julian, which we’re assured is “malleable” and subject to improvisation based on the ebbs and flows of a particular night’s performance, he creates an unsettling sonic soundscape which cranks tension.
When married with visuals projected across the sparse set, which uses a series of screen doors and ladders to create an ingenious space for the actors to work around, the sound and images lift this above many other productions aiming for similar cult appeal. Using interaction with footage and occasional dialogue from the film, as well as self-generated imagery, visual artist James Chantry makes bold use of the storytelling potential of mixing mediums.
The play feels slightly on the short side and at times the structure of varying mediums gives it the feel of a remix, rather than the full story. As such, while you leave feeling you’ve experienced something audacious, you won’t necessarily leave feeling satisfied. Although it certainly works visually and in terms of ambience, it might be that late at night in the cosiest chairs in town isn’t the ideal place for an event which requires quite intense concentration. Keeping up with the rapid-fire scene changes and 360-degree performance does become hard work. The acting is solid and Mallinson definitely holds the attention as the strung-out lead. However, the incongruity of the leads’ accents is occasionally jarring with Campbell’s Scottish accent seeming out of place among the early-60s Americana.
As an exercise in atmosphere building it’s a success, making use of the cinematic surroundings to their full potential. As a feat of storytelling, it may leave you feeling slightly cold. That said, this is a unique opportunity to see something different this Fringe in a space which rarely, if ever, sees cinema break from the screen in quite this way.
TV Bomb
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine
http://www.edfestmag.co.uk/
http://hairline.org.uk/2010/
Edinburgh spotlight.com
http://www.edinburghspotlight.
