The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 100

FEATURES 5 THE INDEPENDENT FRIDAY 12 OCTOBER 2007 THOMAS SUTCLIFFE Benedict Johnson My nightmare at a horror show 7 sure that was what they were after). And it's Onlyfair to saythat other visitors were having no such problems, gamely chatting away in cod-Victorian to the soubrettes and boulevardiers who occasionally buttonhole you. There is even -and tins is surehathe-atrical innovation that could be adapted more widely a bar that you can go to in the middle of the performance without actually leaving the theatre. So I entirely buy the notion that Tm the one who's missing something rather than everyone else. But I can't help feeling, as the only sober man in the room, that it might be worth pointing one thing out And that is just how dull suggestive ambiguity can get if that's all that's on the menu.

Quite a few people have made the point that going to see The Masque of the Red Death is like stepping into someone else's dream. To which one can only respond that an encounter with someone else's dream is usually a byword for tedium, particularly if their dream is dressed with hand-me-down Gothic (a mode that is in any case unusu-alh prone to pretentious enigma). What's more, adopting the props and mood of Foe's stories, while necessarily abandoning their narrative progression (since you cant guarantee that the audience will be in a position to appreciate it) only increases the feeling that we're being tantalis-ingly allowed to smell the meat but doing a rapturous conga; I was surreptitiously checking my watch and wondering when I could get away. Which is fine by me, and, I suspect, fine by the production too, as it comes well armed against customer disappointment with the familiar rhetoric of participatory experiment. You only get out what you're prepared to put in, is the implication, with the useful corollary that audience members who don get much out have somehow failed in their duty to the producers, An encounter with somebody else's dream is usually a bywordfor tedium, especially if it is dressed up in Gothic' rather than the other way round.

I'm even prepared to believe that this is so, having an engrained phobia of audience involvement that makes me a very poor candidate for this kind of theatrical adventure. Ittakes a hell of alot more than a white mask to unlock my inhibitions, which were still effectively in place when one performer seized me by the shoulders and pleaded hysterically for my help (I suppose mortification is an Edgar Allan Poe kind of emotion, but I'm not IVe been feeling like the designated driver at a really wild party this week and not just a good night out at the pub, but one of those once-in-a-decade shindigs that you know people will be talking about for years. Everyone else was intoxicated, reeling and exhilarated. I was stone cold sober and flickering between inchilgentbemusemen envy and outright impatience at the delirium all around me. The occasion was one of the opening nights of The Masque of the Red Death, Punchdrunk theatre company latest production, which has taken over the Battersea Arts Centre from attic to basement for a celebration of the Gothic sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe.

Audience members are issued with a white Venetian carnival mask and ushered into the BAC's labyrmthine interior, where they can wander wherever their whim (and their courage) takes them. You push open one door and find yourselfmaroom of sinister reticence, the walls papered with copperplate notes and the bed rumpled; or you follow the sound of a shriek down a corridor and catch up with a choreographed rape or a strange tableau of chloroform abduction. And, judging from the glowing reviews and the feverish ticket sales, I was pretty much alone in being left underwhelmed by the experience. Everyone else was Vinicius Salles and Jane Leaney in "The Masque ofthe Red Death' never actually to bite into it. I don't want to spoil anyone's memories, you understand, or put anyone off a visit and I can even imagine myself going to another Punchdrunk production (their depth of detail is genuinely impressive).

But next time I'd love to see them take a risk with the categorical, and then maybe I could get legless too. Last week's column about the appearance of brands in works of high art prompted some intriguing examples from readers. Michael Grosvenor Myer points out that the pianoforte Frank Churchill sends to Jane Pair-fax in Emma is identified as a Broad-wood, and that Austen also writes of Gowiandfc Lotion mPersuasion. Cahal Dallat sent in a blizzard of unexpected product placements, including Samuel Beckett's use of Blue Band margarine in Embers, Louis MacNe-ices mention ofRyvita in a 1936 poem, and Eliofs namecheck of Baedeker guidebooks and ABC I'd had access to their erudition when I wrote the piece, and it seemed a pity not to pass it on this week. RRST IMPRESSION 'The Exorcist', William Friedkin, 1973 CULT CLASSICS 'Silly Sisters', Maddy Prior and June Tabor, 1976 IB! VP jj the film's technical advisers also appear in the film as actors.

Among the sights to which we are treated are Regan, her face contorted by the devil inside, vomiting what looks to be condensed split-pea soup on to an exorcising priest, and her paroxysms of fury as she jabs a crucifix into herself and shoves her mothers head down under her bloodied nightgown. The Exorcist is not an unin-telligently put-together film. The cast has some excellent actors and the care taken with the production, and with the narrative, wh achieves a certain momentum through a lot William Rfedkin's film version of The Exorcist is a chunk of elegant occultist claptrap. The story ofthe attempts to save the demonically possessed Regan (Linda Blair), the 12-year-old daughter of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), a Hollywood actress, is practically impossible to sit through, but not necessarily because it treats dia-bolism with the kind of dumb piety moviemakers once lavished on the stories of saints. It establishes a new low for grotesque special effects, all of which, I assume, have some sort of religious approval since two Jesuit priests listed as among harmonic way of singing.

Next was "Burning of another traditional number. "The repertoire gathered pace, just for our own Tabor says. Gradually, they made their repertoire public, in between Prior's commitments with the electro-folk outfit Steeleye Span and Prior's day job in a library. "Steeleye began having hits," Tabor says. "Their label, Chrysalis, offered them the chance to do solo Silly Sisters is one of the great cult folk albums.

Tabor and Prior became friends at Oxford, when Tabor was president ofthe Heritage Society. Four years later, in 1972, the two were in a festival audience, harmonising to the act on stage. Prior suggested they do it properly. First, they tackled Ewan MacColl's "Four Loom Inspired by the records of Ethel Raim and the Pennywhistlers, the pair developed a distinctive projects. Maddy said she wanted to do hers with me." SUfy Sisters was recorded in the summer of 1975.

The stand-out track is Cyril Tawney's "Grey Funnel Helping out are guitarists Martin Carthy and Nic Jones and bassist Danny Thompson. A follow-up appeared in 1988, and Tabor has a box set, Always. Robert Webb of fancy crosscutting, is obviously intended to persuade us to suspend belief. But to what end? To marvel at the extent to which audiences will go to escape boredom by shock and insult. The Exorcist reportedly cost about $10m.

The money could have been better spent subsidising a couple of beds at the Paine-Whitney Clinic. Vincent Canby The New York times'.