Pleasance Courtyard
Four stars
There’s a ghost in Dylan Howell’s house in this excavation of psychic history and the tricks memory can play on us to avoid the damage the past might have done. With the audience’s help, Howells is going to exorcise the bad spirits forever. On a mini building site of a set, the performer and designer proceeds to do just that in a charming and extremely clever mix of memoir, magic and a bag of shock-horror tricks more used to being applied to large scale hammy horror yarns than something so intimate.
It begins when Dylan was ten, and he was about to move into a run down cottage in an isolated village with his dad. His Dad renovates the cottage as they go, with the bathroom being in a particularly dilapidated state. Befriended by a weird kid from next door called Connor, Dylan first notices the bumps in the night when preparing for bed as all hell breaks loose beyond the paintwork, behind the shower curtain and in the mirror. When it happens again, Howells tries to pretend nothing is happening, but Connor knows differently.
What follows is a chatty excavation of Howells’ own demons that invites the audience in on the act by making up a shopping list or else looking after a vintage cassette. With our complicity, both of these eventually reveal all.
In a meticulously built show, Howells has clearly inherited his dad’s love of DIY as well as becoming an accomplished magician in a quietly revelatory affair that sees Howells bury his past while remaining a comic craftsman who knows where the bodies are buried.
Until Aug 31, 1.40pm.
The Herald, August 16, 2026
ends
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