Berninna

Smock Alley Theatre ****

THE HOUSE is definitely haunted. Two blood-spattered Russians have just emerged from the front door and the gathered audience is not quite sure it wants to go in. Sure, we have been invited, but Vlad and Dimitri do not look like the most welcoming hosts.

Inside our suspicions are confirmed: figures in pictures wink at us, the carpets seem to have a life of their own and a woman’s voice can be heard singing spookily upstairs. Is it the voice of Russian opera singer Berninna or that of her long-dead sister Octavia? It is only after a series of alternately chilling and amusing adventures that the house will reveal its secrets.

Berninna is a sophisticated site-specific work for children aged 8 years and older, a work that constantly surprises its young audience while providing reassuringly familiar set-pieces (“blood, lots of blood”).

The site-specific form of the performance is a fantastic asset, allowing the young audience to reassess the nature of the theatrical experience from one in which they are merely spectators to one in which they are participants: milk- and spit-spattered participants.

Unsure of the rules, the first reaction from the audience is giddiness and mild chaos, but eventually they settle into rapt appreciation, and there is much to wonder at: the wardrobe turned elevator, the strange knocking beneath the floorboards, and why the birthday girl Berninna doesn’t want to go home to Moscow.

This outing for Belgian company Studio Orka marks the English-language premiere of Berninna and very little is lost in translation. Indeed the actors’ accents add an extra layer of strangeness to the material.

How did these Muscovites end up in Dublin? At the beginning we might suspect their motives but at the end we want them to stay.

Ends tomorrow