I have avoided the London Horror Festival this year, largely on account of the fact that I’m not entirely convinced that the festival really takes theatrical horror seriously, given that the majority of the plays being presented this year explicitly frame themselves as horror-comedy. The festival has been going more and more in this direction in the last couple of years and, whilst I don’t have anything against horror-comedy, it is something which is difficult to do well; indeed, all of the productions I saw in 2017 and 2016 which fell into this category were not only lazily-written, but lacked a solid understanding of the genre, going instead for the comedy angle based on the assumption that horror tropes are relatively easy to make fun of. Even so, it is still the case that if you try to make fun of something lazily and badly, you are going to produce a bad, lazy play.
Providence: The Shadow Over Lovecraft does, indeed, address its subject matter from the standpoint of (almost) physical comedy - I went to see it because I felt that I should make the effort to attend at least one performance of something from the festival this year - but also because, despite its comedic tenor, the play had received some excellent reviews during its run at the Edinburgh Fringe.
And I have to admit, this is one of those rare occasions where the comedy is effectively integrated into a sense of horror - in this instance, in the context of a whistlestop tour of Lovecaft’s life and philosophy, with Edgar Allen Poe as the tour guide, and poignantly incorporating the deep flaws of both Lovecraft and Poe as a commentary on the failings of the modern world. Whilst unintentional, the play’s focus on Lovecraft’s antisemitism - anchored as it is in the play to some of his more virulently genocidal outbursts - functions as a powerful pronouncement on the recent tragic events in Pittsburgh, and on how we have come to find ourselves in this particularly terrifying contemporary moment.
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