Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk in Victor & Victoria’s Terrfying Tale of Terrible Things. Photo supplied.
Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale Of Terrible Things (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
“What if we aren’t awake?” wonders Victor, half a set of Victorian twins, terrified and a bit thrilled by the nightmare he’s been having.
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In this clever, escalating thriller by Nathan Cuckow and Beth Graham, which plays after dark in the eerie Freudian landscape, Victor and his twin Victoria are inventing exhilarating ways to scare themselves. “Would it frighten you if I were undead?” The mysterious absence of their parents provides further fuel for their macabre childhood gambits. What if Mother and Father get lost in the woods? What if they’ve gone mad? “What if they don’t want to return?”
With Victoria in the lead, the games they devise to amuse themselves, even charades or their own creepy invention, In Mother’s Womb, have an unsettling Victorian morbidity about them. They discover, by accident?, a strange volume, containing a gruesome and ghostly story of love and abandonment, a terrible storm at sea, a vestal virgin waiting in vain in a lighthouse. And they begin to read. Gradually, their fears take on something more sinister, in fantasies that seem somehow familiar. And that little frisson of doubt in your own ribcage just won’t subside. Facing your fears might have a downside too.
The script, 15 years old now and a gem of gothic engineering, is executed with huge zest, style, skill and care in the production directed, designed, and lighted by Jim Guedo. The sound effects are stunning, too. And the perfectly interlocking performances of a pair of fine young actors, Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin, with matching bobs and sleeping smocks, are high-precision. Their quick-silver child-like energy, and their inventive physicality onstage, are fine-tuned. You can’t, you dare not, take your eyes off them.
