Blood Show review – splattering violence becomes gross-out comedy
This much we know from the title: there will be blood. We’re given plastic ponchos to wear, if we want, in case of splatter (washable). The small performance area, lined with seats, houses a white armchair, a metal coffee urn and a forlornly potted tree. On the chair sprawls the bloody corpse of Ocean Chillingworth, hair, face, body, arms, hands, legs, feet all glistening deep red. On the carpet hovers a ghost – that is, someone draped in a white sheet with cut-out holes for eyes. Should we be really unnerved, or really not?
It’s the kind of question that runs through Blood Show, the second of Chillingworth’s planned Extinction Trilogy (after Monster Show and before Nature Show), which relishes its own ambivalence. The first half establishes an action loop. The ghost (Tim Bromage, though we never see him) guides the ghoul-white figure of Craig Hambling towards Chillingworth. They fight, viciously, with kicks, bites and gouges, grunting and yelping horribly as Bromage sings a gentle folk song. Hambling throttles Chillingworth until their body goes limp. He tweaks the body back into position, straightens the tree pot and lets the ghost guide him off again. And the cycle repeats. It’s shocking at first, but each iteration makes it less so, not only because we become increasingly aware of the compositional choreography and theatrical artifice, but because the two performers grow more playful, by the last loop gamely throwing punches at each other, metres apart.
The second half belongs to Chillingworth, compressing the gross-out into the laugh-out-loud until they all but fuse: gleefully they spout bloody fountains from their lips; delicately they tip their head forward, as if to staunch a nosebleed, while the tap on the urn they’re carrying gushes red rivulets all over the floor.
Blood Show is sometimes a little disjointed: the loop of its first half is left dangling and the pacing can be ponderous. Why are the ghost and the fighter sidelined in the second act? Still, its haunting ending, when the room suddenly feels like the inside of someone’s psyche, leaves you with plenty to think about; and if its effects are messy, its means are very clear. Might be best not to go wearing white, though.
• At Battersea Arts Centre, London, until 23 November
