She (Unfortunately) Knows What She’s Talking About: Kirsty Mann’s Corpse

★★★★★

Kirsty Mann knows corpses better than most.

She’s seen her fair share. Legitimately, in hospital. Less legitimately, elsewhere.

The opening premise is clear. Mann and her husband, Mark, both doctors, live in a tiny flat in London. It’s so tiny that any hopes of starting a family are somewhat complicated by the fact that a potential baby would be worryingly close to the oven. 

But hope manifests on the property market, assuming the form of a three-bed Victorian semi in East London at a spectacularly low price. Here, finally, a future baby would be at least six feet away from the oven. Therefore, it’s perfect.

Except it’s not.

There are a fair few architectural and atmospheric warning signs ignored in favour of optimism: a crumbling ceiling, a spot of mould, a temperamental toilet. There might have been a reason for the slashed price. 

It soon becomes apparent that Mann and Mark may not be the house’s only inhabitants.

Before long, Mann finds herself occupying the quintessential role of the female Gothic heroine: isolated in a haunted house and increasingly uncertain of what she can trust.

As increasingly strange occurrences disturb Mann’s new domestic life,Corpse encapsulates a whirlwind of scary stories without ever losing its hilarity.

What feels at first like an artful blend of escapist Gothic horror, genuine fright and comedic relief gradually reveals something more carefully constructed underneath. Little motifs circle back from beginning to end, while death hangs over the entire production. Mann explores the absurdities of encountering it as a doctor—someone accustomed to its realities—and as the victim of a haunted house, where she is decidedly less so.

This precision carries through to the production’s staging. For such a small stage, Mann transforms the space. Using only a bed, a lamp, an armchair and a scattering of props (including some dreadful paintings), the uncomplicated set is continually reinvented. Nothing feels out of bounds. Lighting and sound are similarly effective. A dimmer light or an eerily still piece of audio can tip the production almost imperceptibly from comedy into horror, making the show remarkably immersive.

Mann’s performance is equally transformative. The one-woman show introduces an impressive cast of characters, and Mann slips between them so effortlessly that sometimes you barely register the transition until an entirely different person appears in front of you.

Watching Corpse feels somehow like reading a Gothic novel, watching a Mike Flanagan miniseries and sitting in a theatre all at once: an isolated woman, a conspicuous house and the creeping uncertainty of whether what she sees can really be trusted. It taps into the tradition of the female Gothic without ever becoming weighed down by it. Because Corpse is really, really funny. 

Mann lets an audience laugh comfortably before plunging them back into darkness and, on more than one occasion, making them jump. Crucially, the comedy never punctures the horror; the two make each other more effective. This show takes a deceptively simple ghost story and produces something tightly constructed, technically accomplished and immensely entertaining.

Corpse is showing at Summerhall (apparently a venue already home to seven ghosts) at 3:15pm until 30 August.

Eilidh Paterson

Cover image via Jenny Forward-Hayter