It’s ghastly and ghostly but A Midnight Visit is also a blast

A Midnight Visit was a haunting hour of theatre where the actors looked half dead, but that was exactly why Phil Brown loved it!

Cast members from A Midnight Visit, the crazy immersive theatre experience opens this week and on until late August. Picture: NIGEL HALLETT

I went to a show last night. The actors looked half dead. In fact some of them were. It’s called A Midnight Visit and it’s an immersive theatre experience based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, the master of the macabre. The American writer died in 1849 at the age of 40 but somehow he’s still with us at this show.

The whole thing had as much atmosphere as a funeral parlour. Wait a minute … it was a funeral parlour! The House of Usher. On Robertson Street in Fortitude Valley.

And as you enter you are in that funeral parlour with a couple of coffins and some rows of seats for the mourners. A host, who looks like one of Dracula’s undead, briefs you before you enter a maze of rooms that could drive you mad if you were already a tad unhinged.

Cast members Meg Hickey, Kristian Santic, Gina Tay Limpus and Lucinda Shaw. from A Midnight Visit, the crazy immersive theatre experience opens this week and on until late August. Picture: Nigel Hallett.

There is room upon room of weirdness. Co-creators Danielle Harvey and Kirsten Siddle are the brains behind this bizarro world. They have populated this world with actors who look like death warmed up … some declaiming verse by Poe, others who seem to be ranting incoherently. Sitting on a grassy knoll in a little graveyard in the middle of all this we were confronted by local performer Lucinda Shaw who has been transformed into a crazed medieval king for the show. She tells us a story about hidden treasure and seems as mad as a hatter. She’s either a very good actor or quite unwell.

Don’t worry, if you feel unwell at A Midnight Visit help is at hand

Wandering from room to room things get curiouser and curiouser. There’s a jester performing a nonsensical show with a hand puppet, mysterious figures in widow’s weeds standing guard at various points (talk to them if you want to get out before your allotted hour is up) and there’s a nurse tending to the sick in a ward where there has been an outbreak of some sort of plague – how appropriate!

There’s a confessional booth, a room where a ghostly girl drowns in front of you in a shallow pond, a room where two weirdos are having a mock dinner party and each room is a different world designed to, well, freak you out. Talk about fun!

Kirsten Siddle creative producer with Kristian Santic performer from A Midnight Visit by Broad Encounters. Pics Adam Head

And there is also Poe, the tortured dreamer, played by Sho Eba, wandering around waiting to become a cadaver. Spoiler alert – he dies at the end, a finale where the performers gather for a final performance before you are ejected back out into reality.

It’s all based on the works of Poe, the most famous of which may be his epic gothic poem The Raven and yes, there is a raven wandering around, or an actor in a raven mask at least and there are references to other Poe works. He was an amazing writer and worth revisiting and he probably invented the modern detective novel with The Murders in The Rue Morgue.

Cast members from A Midnight Visit, the crazy immersive theatre experience opens this week and on until late August. Picture: Nigel Hallett.

It’s worth reading up about Poe before you visit. The literary cachet adds to the intellectual depth of what could have been a silly indulgence but is actually an incredibly enriching experience. You will never have seen anything like this before, I promise.

But for people like me who are a bit claustrophobic and abhor audience participation it may be challenging.

Still, I got into the spirit of things after a while although it did cause some flashbacks. When I was a young boy I went to an amusement park on a pier in Manly in Sydney and they had a ghost house. I went on a ride through it and was terrified, came out screaming and my father made me go through again, possibly to toughen me up.

A midnight visit is bound to leave you wanting more.

For some reason I had flashbacks to that at A Midnight Visit. But as Kirsten Siddle points out A Midnight Visit is not a hunted house. Which is not to say it’s not haunted.

All I can say is that you may need a drink at The Raven’s Rest at the end of it.

A Midnight Visit is on at The House of Usher, 95 Robertson Street, Fortitude Valley until August 22. Tickets from $49 available at amidnightvisit.com