Review by Ross Brewster
Little Shop of Horrors, Theatre by the Lake, Keswick
It’s a cracking cast and a superb two hours of zany entertainment, but let’s face it, they’re all upstaged by a great green plant with disturbing dietary requirements.
Keswick Theatre by the Lake’s latest exuberant production of Little Shop of Horrors is horror with humour.
Theatre by the Lake; Octagon Theatre, Bolton; New Wolsey Theatre and Hull Truck have combined forces and numerous talents to bring the mean, green monster to the lakeside theatre.
After watching their presentation one thing is for sure – you won’t be dashing out to the nearest garden centre to purchase a Venus fly trap.
“Feed me” demands the plant. And soon it becomes evident that it has a definite preference for human blood. It’s Day of the Triffids mixed with the 1960s film horror genre, horrifically full of laughs in the worst possible taste and played to perfection.
If there is an abiding moral to the story it’s that one should beware what one wishes for.
Nerdy shop assistant Seymour (Oliver Mawdsley) has a touch of the Woody Allens about him as his chance acquisition of a tiny green plant suddenly transforms the ailing florist’s shop where he works.
Andrew Whitehead’s shop owner Mr Muskrik, who not surprisingly has few – if any – customers with a business situated on New York’s Skid Row, grows ever more red faced and apoplectic as public interest in the plant takes off.
The naïve, indifferent Seymour is suddenly a radio star. Agents wish to sign him up for lecture tours and his own gardening programme. He is stuck on his fellow shop assistant Audrey, played with empathy and pathos by Laura Jane Matthewson, but she’s got a past and a dodgy boyfriend who gives her black eyes. Audrey never feels worthy of any better from life.
Matthew Ganley is Orin, the demonic biker-dentist boyfriend who enjoys torturing his patients and licks his electric drill with alarming pleasure.
But Seymour has signed a Faustian pact for love and success with the plant he’s dubbed Audrey II. Anton Stephans has the perfect voice for the monster and Seymour finds himself having to provide for its rapacious appetite.
This is no plant with ambitions to remain in a flower shop. Cuttings will soon grow more Audreys and from a tiny flower shop in a rundown area of the city, world domination looms.
There are a couple of jumpy moments for the audience as, amid raucously delicious music, one by one the main characters in the show disappear. Where they are swallowed up, well I leave that to the imagination.
It’s not serious horror, but it is humour with a darkly comedic side with a love story at its heart and chills and charm in equal measure.
The music is loud and the songs are belted out as Seymour discovers, just like modern-day AI inventors, the day comes when he can’t control the horror he has unleashed.
There is a neat tip of the hat to 1960s pop with the three girls whose harmonies link the production. Chardai Shaw as Ronnette, Zwelya Mitchell dos Santos as Crystal and Janna May, Chiffon.
Matthew Heywood is the puppeteer and the man behind a monster which reminded me, being of a certain age, of the cackling creatures in TV adverts for Smash mashed potatoes. But that’s just me having nightmares.
Director Lotte Wakeham’s Little Shop of Horrors is weird and wonderful and there’s never a dull moment. It can be seen at Keswick Theatre by the Lake until April 20.
