Shock Horror UK Tour Review (City Varieties Music Hall, Leeds)

13 October 2025 I 19:30 I City Varieties Music Hall, Leeds

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I PR - Invite

Fresh from their UK Tour of The Void, a dazzling achievement in sci-fi thriller and illusion, Thunder Road Theatre are back this autumn with Shock Horror. Calling upon more conventional modes of ghost stories, a masterful understanding of suspense creates a multimedia performance that breeds on our fear. The audience hold their breath, and chuckle with the inevitable embarrassment of jump scares. We lose ourself in their world, and we cannot escape.

With trepidation, Herbert returns to the decrepit and ruined attic of the Metropol, a Victorian music hall (apt for tonight's venue!) once his playground and home. Exposed to his father's business in cinema, Herbert would sneak downstairs to watch the likes of Kubrick and Hitchcock, where troubled families imitate life.

Photography Credit: Marc Brenner

Shock Horror primarily excels through Ryan Simons' script, so richly written in a love letter to the horror genre, opening with a semi-educational study on the conspiracies surrounding The Shining. The text is decorated with a handsome array of metaphors, disguising a child's loneliness through commercial film. This show-long monologue is interjected with Dave Hackney's cinematic video designs, linearly traversing Herbert's own horrors growing up in clever, domestic tensions.

Those that admire The Woman In Black's theatricality will discover a production that equally plays on its own simplicity to unsettle. Leeds' City Varieties has been entirely transformed from a space once filled with warmth, as Ethan Cheek's set design is chillingly impeccable amidst fractured wooden panels and debris. The cinema screen doubles as a gauze as Herbert travels through the walls of the Metropol, acknowledging the minimal space as disorienting and claustrophobic.

The crucial aspect to horror is controlling what your audiences are allowed to see, with Andrew Crofts and Matt Carnazza's masterful lighting designs obscuring the stage to manipulate our sight, questioning what you see moving in the shadows. The sensorial experience is intensified with Ben Parsons' compositions, an anxiety-inducing underscore with piercing replays of white noise to share Herbert's distress.

Photography Credit: Marc Brenner

Where Herbert is a product to the films he consumes, Alex Moran's solo stage performance solidifies himself as one of the UK's finest performers, like a chameleon as he adopts famous cultural references in frightening renditions of The Omen and Psycho. His presence as a disturbed mind is uncomfortable, and yet as he reverts to a childhood state, Moran induces a tenderness and vulnerability that we are able to connect with.

Thunder Road Theatre maintain the crown as the experts of stage illusions, with John Bulleid designing such visual trickery to leave the audience exclaiming "How?!". Whether it be figures transporting across the stage, possessed puppets or Ouija boards, all theatrical logic is suspended to believe in the dark arts that we share the space with. It's in front of us, and it is terrifying!

Raising the stakes, this revival of Shock Horror revels in its ability to make audiences shrink into their seats. Simons directs his own masterpiece for the stage and, as an immense lover of gothic theatre, this production is to die for! Packed with disembodied limbs and bundles of haze, I feel privileged to have been a part of Thunder Road Theatre's history, and I cannot wait to see what comes next!!

Tickets & Touring Info: https://www.thunderroadtheatre.org/shockhorror