A shipping container sits in Centenary Square. Inside there are two rows of worn red velvet seats, like those you might imagine in an old cinema, allowing for an audience of 15 or thereabouts. They surround a table covered in cloth. The audience sits down, and puts on headsets. The lights dim, and then switch off. Séance begins.

Total darkness, 3D stereo sound, and actual tactile experience combines in this production to unsettle, frighten and potentially upset the audience, and the show is calibrated as such that it is difficult to maintain your composure. What might not seem so scary at the start of the 15 minutes gets into your gut by the close.

It is no embarrassment to say that, by the close of the show, I had one hand left on the table, the other on my earphone ready to remove it, and my facial features were wrinkled into an uncomfortable brace position.

It is hard to control, and seems an obvious thing to say, but this sort of immersive show, designed with illusive trickery in mind, works best when all the seats are full. With a smaller audience, the suspension of disbelief (or actual belief) is interrupted by sounds coming from where you know they cannot come from.

The best material—rather, the scariest material, the stuff that we are there for—comes when we are being spoken directly to, as if one on one, near the close of the show.

Séance is another collaboration between director David Rosenberg and theatre maker/novelist Glen Neath, their third, and response to it will likely follow the line of the first two, Ring and Fiction. The pair are three for three on success stories now.

I love to be spooked, and this is spooky done right. Halloween approaches, and this is an ideal show to get you in the holiday spirit.  ★★★★☆   Will Amott     19th October 2016