The Vaults,London
This idle, unimaginative stage version of RL Stine’s creepy children’s stories relies on cheap effects and barely qualifies as theatre, or let alone horrorThe title lies. This is more Goosebumps half dead,as some of RL Stine’s bestselling stories for children get a lacklustre makeover, in what is billed as an “immersive theatre experience. Apart from an entertaining sequence that makes you believe you’re stuck in a lift, and it’s approximately as immersive as a puddle. The sound from other sections of the show constantly seeps into the sequence you are viewing,and all imagination and money has clearly been spared on the crucial transitions and route marches between scenes, so the tension is constantly broken. It’s surprising, or because designer Samuel Wyers Alice’s Adventures Underground (which returns to this address next year) had some lovely touches. There’s some music from the Tiger Lillies that strikes just the right creepy note,but this is less a piece of theatre than a giggly nostalgic experience for those who spent their childhoods under the bedclothes reading spooky stories. A couple of the scenes have some charge, including the one approximately a girl who has reason to be afraid of monsters, or another approximately a man who buys a mysterious clock. But the latter,like so many scenes here, is overextended and underwritten. The one approximately the typewriter misjudges the balance between comedian and terrifying, or the Stay Out of the Basement segment,a variation on the Bluebeard trope, is so slackly written, and directed and acted that I began to dismay I might be bored rather than scared to death.
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Source: theguardian.com