Solo show genuinely spooks you
Séance
(out of 4) Co-created by Nicholas Wallace and Luke Brown. Directed by Luke Brown. Until Oct. 11 at Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave. ArtsBoxOffice.ca or 416-504-7529
Illusionist Nicholas Wallace and director Luke Brown have discovered what it’s like to combine a theatrical play with a haunted house, and you may be surprised about how easy it is to get sucked in.
After a sold-out run of the show in 2013 in Hamilton, where the two showmen are based, Séance brings Wallace’s spooky solo (or is it?) performance to Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille just in time to get the city’s Halloween scares off to a pretty great start.
Anyone who’s been alone in a theatre after hours knows that spine-tingling feeling of not being alone; they’re notorious for housing spectres and spirits of patrons and actors past, even those in Toronto.
Wallace and Brown’s idea to combine theatre with an attempt to communicate with the dead is almost a perfect match. If you really want to hypothesize about it, you could say it’s in constant tension between telling contemporary stories and paying homage to the past. In another way, it’s just another form of storytelling — except the storytellers are dead.
Because that’s what Wallace is trying to recreate: a séance among 50 or so strangers, with one acting as the medium, to communicate with a spirit connected with one of the antiques from Wallace’s own collection. But first, he takes the audience through the history of spiritualism, its hoaxes but also its unexplainable evidence, masterfully wrapping the audience around his little finger.
He asks us from the stage if anyone will put on a plain white sweater, and no one responds; it is, he confirms, just a sweater, but somehow we’ve convinced ourselves there’s something to be afraid of. Whether it’s the audience gearing up for the big scare they know is coming, or they actually get a bad feeling from an innocuous sweater, or it’s Wallace playing into our desire to be scared, it’s entertaining to watch.
If the first half of Séance gets you with a few jump scares or heebiejeebies, the actual seance, which plummets the audience into complete darkness while holding hands in a circle, will get your heart pumping more than you would like to admit. There were very genuine screams at Tuesday night’s opening — not from yours truly, though I should have checked with my neighbour afterward to see if her hand was all right.
You may not have any answers to explain the bumps in the night in Séance, nor does it matter. Wallace has more than done his job. Even at its cheesiest, even if you know better, you have to admit that really sounds like footsteps right behind you.