REVIEW: Siblings & Séayoncé: House of Horror @ Spiegeltent

Eric Page

6 months ago

Siblings & Séayoncé: House of Horror

Bosco Tent

Brighton Spiegeltent

This one off, and rather delightful show smashes the strange ethereal camp of Séayoncé into the pert effervescent and deeply disturbed cherubic due of Siblings and opens the Weekend of Weird. Set up as a spiritualist show taken over by two demons summoned by an evil bell, this wasn’t so much House of Horror as Tent of Trauma.

Weird is certainly was, it is difficult to upstage such a grand guidal of the stage as Séayoncé and the usually totally in control ‘Leslie Ann’ but this mischievous pair of lady gremlins, fiddled, poked, gnawed, pulled, teased and ripped apart the tightly staged element of the Séayoncé show with eye sparkling daftness, getting Séayoncé & Leslie Ann smirking with the cheek of it!

It’s a fun combination show, Séayoncé accompanied by Leslie Ann and their perfect comedic musical timing, is a tightly scripted, apparently random exercise in audience bonding and machine gunned gauche wit. Siblings is a throw-it-all-in and see chaotic blend of silliness with an abyssal dark underbelly where you can’t stop them going.

These mini macabre monsterettes merged with manic melancholy ‘Drags’ was like watching the Gremlins masterminding the Fall of the House of Usher. To be honest Siblings are more like possessed furbies that Gremlins, they look so sweet until they start walking towards you, pointing, eyes rolled back to the whites……terrifying.

Plenty of highlights in these hijinks, seeing Leslie Ann (Robyn Herfellow) get a song number all to themselves a heartfelt filthy lament about always being the accompanist and playing the music but never being the tune. What a delight, I adore them, deconstructing traditional music in the most savage way while still serving up funny entertaining comedy, Leslie Ann is a comedic star.

The Siblings scurrying around, like puppies on poppers, taking ages to leave the stage, calling Séayoncé ‘Daddy’ relentlessly, all delicious, Séayoncé wafting through the carnage of their carefully wrought act like a Drag Dido, more than holding their own, literally head and shoulders above this demonic dangerous due of delight. My favorite part of the show is where Siblings arrive dressed as Séayoncé each skewering Séayoncé routines with the rapier wit that Seyonce themselves is known for, seriously funny, meta monstering at its best. This trio in costumes present us with a triple Goddess of Séayoncé , each more bonkers than the last. Eventually order is recorded with a flash of crystal testicle, of course – it’s the Fringe after all,

House of Horror is fun, silly, night out of car crash comedy, bravely committed to fully by all four performers and giving each other space to shine while undercutting, undermining and verbally dynamiting each other at every opportunity. With a less accomplished confident crew, or a kinder one, this might have been messy, but with this undead crew of supernatural whip sharp wit sadists we got to see them murder, kidnap, and slaughter each other time and and time again on stage, in front of us, then rise again to dish out and take some more..