THERE'S precious little that's new about this haunted house tale, but a selection of convincing performances amidst a clearly tightly-directed show raise The Margins above most of its fellow low-budget competition.
Like many other shows on the Fri
nge it seems almost like an early draft of a hopeful cinema script, but there is actually a quite convincing element of the filmic to this late-night schlock horror story.
The setup is simple: five psychics, one of their helpers and a cynical journalist spend the night in The Wailing Mansion, brought together by one Jonathan Torino.
His goal is to recreate a Toronto experiment of many years before, in which a group of ordinary people used their latent mental powers to create their own ghost.
In true "meddling with incomprehensible forces" fashion, these psychics succeed beyond their wildest dreams, before things turn really nasty.
What follows is actually quite a scary piece of commercial theatre. No great truths about the human condition are uncovered, but the writing and acting create a solid background from which a succession of ever-greater chills emerge.
Although the ending is a little weak after at least a couple of jump-off-your-chair moments earlier in the show, this is one worth watching – if you can bear to, from between white-knuckled fingers.
• Until 9 August. Today 10:15pm
The full article contains 238 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
