Eleanor Morton’s ode to her hometown of Edinburgh offers one of the Fringe festival’s most thoughtful and breezily hilarious shows. But it also has an important message.
Haunted House begins with a joyously macabre voice introducing the show, setting the scene for the hour in which Morton takes the audience on a cobbled journey through Edinburgh’s ghostly past and present, describing what happens to local people when the Fringe festival takes over every August.
Every time the show veers into a supernatural sinkhole, Morton brings things back to earth with a deadpan aside – ‘That’s weird’ – undercutting the mystical with an injection of self-awareness the audience really needs in a show about ghosts, to stop it feeling well-worn.
She talks about the Edinburgh Fringe with refreshing candour, describing what it’s like to have all these balloon-headed artists invade her home.
Throughout the show it becomes clear Morton’s ghost stories don’t begin or end with her mere fascination with the paranormal. She uses them as a multi-faceted metaphor to explore sexual assault and the arts-washing of social issues in Edinburgh every August.
She spotlights how homelessness lingers underneath all those shiny posters and predators smile at punters with toothy grins.
‘Ghosts are a lot like sexual predators. If you encounter one no one believes you,’ Morton quips, before lulling the cackling audience into silence with her memory of an ‘award-winning comedian’ at the Fringe who ‘tried to stick his hands down [her] pants’ in a space she grew up in and has childhood memories of.
Morton is set on haunting these men, who come here year after year and repeat the same predatory behaviour against her and her friends – one of whom didn’t return to the Fringe this year because a promoter ‘attacked her in her sleep’.
These people are in Morton’s house, touching everything and leaving their grubby mark on her beautiful city. Like a possessed teenage girl, she’s throwing things around and ripping up the curtains so people can see. Through her ghost stories, Eleanor busts the Fringe’s real underbelly wide open.
She describes the Versailles time slip – when the French city was said to have mysteriously turned into a ‘clogging, heavy suffocating’ place with a ‘malicious atmosphere’ from years ago, and the audience are left wondering if this is how she feels about Edinburgh.
Morton can ‘think of up to 25 male comedians [she’d] like to call a w**ker,’ she says, joking that female comedians are much like ghosts because you will probably not see two in one night.
As for those invisible men, Morton has a candle-lit message: ‘I’ll be whispering telling people what they’ve done.’
At the start of the show Morton explains how she’s given up trying to impress reviewers – but her relaxed, personable delivery shines bright in the dimly lit Monkey Barrel venue. She’s the audience’s new best friend.
There are no jittery comedian tics here, but just a woman talking about something real while also being captivating and belly-laugh funny while she’s at it.
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