Thrillpeddlers show that the Grand Guignol can still disturb

There are certain things a theatergoer can pretty much depend upon when visiting the Hypnodrome, the home of Thrillpeddlers — one of the few companies in the world (if not the only one) dedicated to presenting plays from the Grand Guignol repertoire. These include the use, at some point during the show, of a replica guillotine; a finale involving actors dancing about in the dark in fluorescent skeleton costumes; and lashings of fake blood. Furthermore, most Grand Guignol dramas follow a similar trajectory toward a gory climax. Watch the first five minutes of a play by André de Lorde (Grand Guignol's "Prince of Terror") and you pretty much know what's going to happen in the end. In general, the art world shuns predictability. "Success is dangerous," Pablo Picasso once said. "One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility." Yet for some strange reason, the formulaic seems to be one of the Grand Guignol theater's greatest strengths.

With its roots in fin de siècle Paris, the Grand Guignol theater flourished in France (and briefly in England) during the early years of the 20th century. According to scholar Mel Gordon, guidebooks from the 1920s listed the Théâtre du Grand Guignol in the Rue Chaptal as being among the top few attractions in Paris alongside the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and legalized brothels. One of the main reasons patrons flocked to the Rue Chaptal was the theater's winning formula: Interspersing breezy, one-act comedies with tautly spun melodramas dealing with such depravities as rape, murder, insanity, torture, and other sordid subjects ripped from the tabloid headlines, a typical night at the Grand Guignol took the audience on an emotional rollercoaster. The blend of over-the-top bloodletting and comedic relief within a predictable format provided a much-needed cathartic outlet for theatergoers dealing with the real-life horrors of World War I and its aftermath.

It's hard to imagine that Grand Guignol would have much to offer to today's audiences. Beyond the fact that theater is no longer the form of mass entertainment that it once was, people looking for thrills and spills are much more likely to turn to movies and videogames these days, with their superior ability to make grisly scenes of carnage seem disturbingly lifelike. Even the most gruesome modern stage works, such as Sarah Kane's Cleansed and Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan, don't come close, shock-value-wise, to films like No Country for Old Men and The Last King of Scotland. And that's to say nothing of the Saw movies.

Yet as formulaic and tame as Grand Guignol programs seem by today's standards, a trip to the Hypnodrome to experience Thrillpeddlers' latest — and perhaps greatest — foray into the genre, FLAMING SIN: London's Grand Guignol, will fricassee your emotions and play tricks with your mind. This is particularly significant considering the fact that London's Grand Guignol enterprise, which existed for only two years from 1920 to 1922, was, owing to genteel English sensibilities and draconian censorship laws, much less bloodthirsty and risqué than its French counterpart. Blending compact writing, fast-paced direction, and nuanced performances, Thrillpeddlers' salacious evening of out-there entertainment does nothing if not dispel the common belief that Grand Guignol theater is an outmoded form, of marginal interest to anyone but horror history enthusiasts and academics. To borrow Dr. Frankenstein's famous assertion: "It's alive."

The first of the evening's offerings, a recently rediscovered one-act by Noel Coward titled The Better Half that is making its American premiere, barely gets a mention in biographies about the playwright. By all accounts, Coward, who was in his early 20s when he wrote it in 1922, was embarrassed by the work. Yet it's piquantly funny and socially astute. Set in the dressing room of Alice, an unhappily married high society woman, the narrative deals with the lady's extreme attempts to force her superficially dashing and upright husband, David, to get in touch with his dark side. Thanks to the playwright's seamless blend of the urbane and the dangerous; Eddie Muller's tight, perfectly paced direction; and nuanced performances by Alice Louise and Jonathan Ingbretson in the psychologically challenging roles of Alice and David, The Better Half is anything but a lightweight domestic farce. Though delightfully old-fashioned (characters refer to each other using terms like "old dear," "good sort," and "damned cad"), the work also feels quite contemporary for its unconventional views on marital relationships. No blood gets spilled onstage, but intermittent allusions to a sensational news story about a man who beats up his wife for being unfaithful hints at the violent impulses at work at the heart of the play.