The Loft Theatre misses a trick at Halloween

Halloween is a time for ghosts, ghoulies and long-legged beasties. Occasionally disturbing, these are usually harmless fantasies of fear.

The Loft Theatre, Leamington Spa has given us a Halloween show full of the above, with lots of screams to match. It is hard to come up with something original and genuinely disturbing in a field that is so saturated in fake gore. It is not an obstacle that The Cage Protects Me, written and directed by Giles Allen-Bowen, and playing till November 8, overcomes.

The setting is straight out of cliché horror. A deserted church somewhere in the Southern States of America. It has long been abandoned as such, but has been occupied for nine years by Red (Peter Daly-Dickson) and his wife Grace (Katie-Anne Ray), who we first see as a ghost, and their baby daughter Cat, who mercifully does not appear but has been allowed to die at some point.

Outside there are wolves, whether real or metaphorical we can never quite figure out. They howl and apparently have been eating people for miles around and for some time.

As this is the essential premise of the play, you’d think it would stand up to scrutiny on at least some level of reality. Why, for example, has nothing been done to deal with them? We don’t know. They’re just there, a convenient excuse for action. What are they? If so much effort, as the elaborate set suggests, has gone into keeping them out, how does one, called Howl (by name and nature) noisily played by Owen Watts, manage to wander in freely? If it’s all in the mind, as it and various other aspects of the play suggest, how does it also seem to achieve corporeal reality?

Another trick of the play is the have two ‘voices’ apparently always present in Red’s disordered mind played by characters, Sense, (he’s the sensible one), played by Julien Ross, and Omen, the emotional one, played by Luca Catena. It’s a crude distinction. If they are disembodied aspects of Red’s mind, why do they talk of getting out of this dismal scene and starting a new life once Red is dead?

The play is full of complex ambiguities and psychological blind alleys like this, and I don't have space to list them. There should be a lesson writ large to all aspiring playwrights: complexity does not equal profundity.

The Loft is one of the best theatres in the region, capable of staging truly magnificent theatre, as good as many professional theatres you could name. It is good that it gives space to aspiring talent. But this one should have been played in the studio on a very limited run.

Tickets https://lofttheatrecompany.com