Eleanor Morton: Haunted House

Edinburgh Fringe – Monkey Barrel

The tenement walls of Edinburgh are full of ghost stories, multiples of haunted houses in the one city. In Haunted House, Eleanor Morton talks about just the one – the city at large- and the spirits that flock to its streets every August.

Haunted House is essentially a loaded Chekhov’s Gun that uses ghosts as a starting point to explore and poke fun at different aspects of Edinburgh. It’s not an intensely technical set, in that the focus is definitely more on what Morton says rather than how she says it. The material itself – whilst funny in its familiarity and unusualness – is delivered in such an off-handed manner that we almost don’t notice the comedic-accumulation that occurs. The way that she builds up the set in this manner, sliding ideas almost under the radar, behind rather unexpected and comparatively trivial material on ghosts and the paranormal, makes her focal idea and purpose behind this hour incredibly powerful.

“essentially a loaded Chekhov’s Gun“

Like breadcrumbs in the woods, everything leads to something, everything means something; everything previously established haunts and contributes to the overall understanding of Morton’s words.  Morton speaks in double-think and it’s one of those hours where every word, every joke counts for bringing it together at the end.

The more theatrical elements – the lighting design, voice overs of stories about encounters with ghosts, the revealing of the haunted house – break up the set into significant chunks. The purpose of this isn’t entirely clear in the moment and instead of adding something, it detracts. Sure, it creates a spooky atmosphere in the middle of what is otherwise quite an intelligently sparkling but measured set, but it doesn’t have any technical value, in that there isn’t a noticeable shift from one part of the show to another for it to be considered a particularly effective segue. 

This hour is truly a masterful construction by Morton that brings important stories and realities to our attention in the most subversive way possible. Whether intentional or not, Haunted House reminds us of our own ghosts that come around every so often.

By Katerina Partolina Schwartz

Photo Credit: Trudy Stade