Warnings – St Pancras Church Crypt, London

Text: Montague Rhodes James

Director: Nick Blackburn

Reviewer: Honour Bayes

The Public Reviews Rating:

St Pancras Church Crypt is an inherently spooky location. Cold stone archways and small dark nooks and crannies are filled with crumbling tombs and dusty head stones. It is definitely a place that should be seen at least once in your life. But not for Warnings, which quite remarkably takes an extraordinary venue and turns it into something quite mundane. Hollow, distant and unfocused, the audience should take the title of this piece as a literal piece of advice as to what to expect.

Starting off in the midst of a ramshackle birthday party you are greeted with disconcerting familiarity by two strangers whose cry of ‘Oh I’m so glad you made it!’ succeeds in putting you off kilter. So far, so creepy, but here is where this performance takes a turn for the more expected and in doing so loses any of the un-nerving subversion of normality which is key to so many great ghost stories.

Warnings, for all its postulation of being an interactive experience designed to ignite ones curiosity and lead us down dark paths, is essentially a reading of two stories; A Warning to the Curious and Count Magnus written by Montague Rhodes James. These are performed by director Nick Blackburn in a suitably fruity Victorian tone, in a small carpeted room down one of the black corridors under St Pancras.

Performed is perhaps too generous a word for Blackburn’s frigid posture, he literally doesn’t move or look up at any point, making it hard for you to break through to communicate with him; the detailed florid prose of Rhodes James doing nothing to assist in one’s quest for a connection. This inevitably means the audience ends up zoning out, our eyes clouded with boredom, not frozen in fear.

When the braver of us do venture out into the other rooms in this maze (we are given no encouragement to do so, so frustratingly it takes a while before one realises one can) things do pick up a bit with previously thought members of the audience morphing into eerie performers. And it is true that the whole thing looks absolutely gorgeous, swinging light bulbs, detailed puppets and intricate desktops providing a temporary semblance of interest. But as the cold takes a grip even these settings and our ghostly performers begin to seem repetitive.

The beginning of this piece is strange and somehow otherworldly, giving us something that in the most pleasant of all ways, makes us question our security. But Warnings soon descends into the predictable, with all sense of suspense sunk into a mire of the expected thrills and chills – faceless men, wide eyed girls, reading by candle light – leaving one to think that this is sadly one Victorian nightmare that is as lightweight as its language is ornate.