21 – 26 October

Gurt Haunted is packing them in at the Weston Studio, where those with a taste for supernatural buffoonery are offered seventy-five minutes of silliness. The scenario is a low-budget reality TV show about ghost-hunting that aspires one day to reach the giddy heights of being streamed on Dave, and features three actors of contrasting physique. Toby Robertshaw is Francis Hailbop, a pretentious, self-deluding paranormal investigator with a haughty manner. Fans of Most Haunted will surely be reminded of Derek Acorah, the psychic medium who was exposed as a fraud. Robertshaw is tall, dark and angular, and brings a lofty grandeur to the role. Shorter, stockier, and a redhead, Casey Loyd plays Tony Chestnut, the programme’s more practically minded presenter willing to use shameless fakery to boost the viewing figures. The trio is completed by bearded and bulky Benj Foster who plays both Arthur Goodun, an expert on spooky local history, and Reece, a cheerfully hopeless programme assistant.

In this relatively intimate space, all three actors connect directly with the audience. Indeed, on occasion members of the audience are roped in to add to the merriment. Last night one chap entered into the spirit of the moment by giving a very funny performance of someone, as it were, being entered by a spirit, and his enthusiastic shaking and trembling was a comic highlight. In a show that mocks pretention it is perhaps appropriate that the humour throughout is of a very broad and down-to-earth kind. Trousers drop, ginger hair is mocked, and a line about being ‘sucked off into the spirit world’ is delivered with glee, and more than once. Perhaps anyone unfamiliar with the tropes of so-called reality TV, and particularly those of Most Haunted, will find that some of the humour passes them by; however last night’s audience, in true Hallowe’en mood, was certainly highly entertained.

Gurt Haunted is proudly Bristolian, rightly so, and aimed squarely at a Bristol audience that it understands well, though if it is to travel further afield it will doubtless need to shed some of the local references. It does not offer an evening of sophisticated theatre, and it does not pretend to. An earlier version was a hit at the Alma Tavern Theatre and it retains the feel of a pub show, best seen with a pint in the hand. 

★★★☆☆  Mike Whitton, 24 October 2024

Photo credit: Sarah Mawen