Elysium, © Agnes Wang
Brilliant writing can define or defy a genre. Ghouls Aloud’s Fringe debut is probably the later, a gorgeously sui generis concoction of gig theatre and environmental horror, stitched together with melodies that veer from Sondheim-like ballads to Amy Winehouse’s smoky laments. Like all the best horror, the gore is incidental. The real unease lies in the social commentary bubbling beneath it.
Elysium Court is an upmarket housing estate in south London. Its newest arrivals, a pair of cheerfully smug yuppies, sip matcha in the morning and orange wine by night. Its community is governed less by neighbourly goodwill than by the iron fist of the WhatsApp group. For the unnamed woman at the story’s epicentre, tearing up the communal astroturf so that she can grow a garden of her own becomes a small act of rebellion. But there is vengeful darkness buried deep in the soil that her green fingers will soon unearth.
Writers and performers Milly Blue and Jessie Maryon Davies conjure an addictively strangetone: a Twin Peaks-like disquiet narrated in the lulling cadences of a CBeebies bedtime story, one that lets its questions creep under your skin and burrow into your brain: where do the boundary lines of urban communities lie? To the couple’s friend protesting for Palestine outside the Supreme Court, the answer is demarcated by apathy. To the obsequious but kind concierge she befriends, it’s wealth. Indifference to the communities we are tangled in can be as corrosive as malice.
Elysium is a fist-clenched warning against neo-liberal nihilism and the Balkanisation of civic life. But it never descends into polemical finger wagging. Instead, its ideas materialise like a haunting poltergeist until they are impossible to ignore. Few writers can muster this kind of quiet but menacing power, one that echoes even louder in the age of global permacrisis, protest, and political upheaval.