This short immersive horror show from Immersive Octopus and BAC provides briskly efficient scares four times a weeknight and up to eight a day at weekends. And to be clear it is scary. Or it is by the time you get to the main event, a sort of seance-like sequence where the audience - divided into small tables - are plunged into darkness, and bad things happen for 10 minutes or so.
Tom Maller’s production is boosted by effective sound design from Matt Farthing and Max Sharp’s fine lighting – indeed, frequently non-lighting – does a tremendous job of turning what is basically a room with some tables in it into a nexus of otherworldly horror.
It’s all a bit thin though. Bells Pendergast’s script features some fun lore about entities who enter our world through destructive fires, and how Room 13 mysteriously appeared at Battersea Arts Centre following the blaze that ripped through it in 2015.
To be clear it is scary
But with just half an hour of performance there’s not a lot of time to get much world building in. The conceit of the doorway being examined by the oddly Victorian-garbed paranormal investigators the Circle of the Veil is fair enough. But the fact one of them is an incredibly creepy lady who makes funny clicking noises is never really delved into – we can infer she’s possessed and not subtly so, but there’s no real corroboration of this or explanation of exactly what’s going on. Even 15 minutes extra would have given time to build it all out a bit.
Still, being short cuts both ways: it's a bit undernourished, but it’s still an effective scare, and a half-hour long show clearly has its merits socially - it’s very easy to combine with a few beers with pals, and the £20 ticket price is not particularly onerous. I mean I’m not sure ‘briskly efficient’ is the number one recommendation for a piece of horror theatre, but it is a recommendation nonetheless.