Pip Dwyer, Jeanie Calleja & Natalia Bushnik in Night at the Grand Guignol | Photo Jack Woolfe
Eldritch Theatre’s stock-in-trade is small scale, bizarro spectacle. It’s devised specifically for the quirky coziness of a venue like their home, the Red Sandcastle Theatre. I wouldn’t want it any other way, of course, yet it’s sort of a shame that the immense talents of all involved can only be experienced by a certain limited number of people at any given time. I’ve sung Eric Woolfe’s praises many times over and this latest venture, Night at the Grand Guignol, which he wrote and directed, fits snugly into his cartoonishly macabre wheelhouse. It’s glorious, truly, and features some genuinely virtuoso comedic performances.
Jeanie Calleja, Pip Dwyer, and Natalia Bushnik are captivating as all hell and wholly committed to these unhinged antics. From the moment the first contemptuous “lunatic bitch!” is spat out, straight through to the eerie and drawn out final tableau, I was utterly transfixed.
This is an affectionate tribute to the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, which operated in Paris from the late 1890s through to the early 1960s and offered audiences the theatrical equivalent of exploitation cinema—sensationalistic plays featuring horror and sex. I’ve often referenced Grand Guignol in discussing Eldritch’s oeuvre because they are a contemporary local equivalent. Here, Woolfe has adapted a quartet of scenarios from historic Guignol offerings and added some of his trademark flourishes.
We open on a story about a young woman in a madhouse, begging to be released before two old crones do her in. There’s a decidedly kink appeal to how she is tied up and ball gagged. Designer Melanie McNeill, an Eldritch mainstay, has been responsible for a number of outlandishly gruesome props; the steam-powered anti-hysteria device featured here—a ghastly sex-toy—is one of the funniest.
A super important meeting between old-timey business bros is interrupted by a phone call from a family being horribly murdered! There is a whole sequence here with a tin can telephone which just about killed me. The pause, that audaciously protracted pause as they wait with baited breath for what feels like an eternity, well, it made me quite deliriously giddy. And the murder itself, rendered in squishy-splattery-sputtery audio, is peak ghoulish hilarity.
A third entry takes us to a remote lighthouse with a repressed young boy and his grandfather. A sex worker is there for some sultry extra stimulation when all hell breaks loose. There is a deliciously grisly monologue about imagining oneself being melted by the intense heat of the massive lighthouse bulb and a lovely, low-tech immolation effect achieved through scrim and projection.
The last instalment conjures a scenario where a pink-sweatered mad scientist mother invents a torture device that submits its victims to a prolonged experience of the painful moment of their death. It culminates in that eerie tableau I mentioned earlier, with a disembodied head hooked up to a ludicrous contraption. Like the long silence in the telephone scene, the final moment also plays with pushing a moment to its absolute limit. Genuinely amusing, this finale is also legitimately baleful and reminded me, quite uncomfortably (same energy), of the final, haunting image from Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
There are plenty of call backs from scene to scene. Super rabies. Demented circus hobos. Oh, yes, of course, we have that Uber Eldritch™ callback—the awful, cosmically horrific text that will simply never leave us alone… the “Dread Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.” (If you know, you know.)
Night at the Grand Guignol
February 18 to March 1, 2026
Red Sandcastle Theatre
(922 Queen Street East)
90 minutes (no intermission)
Natalia Bushnik & Pip Dwyer in Night at the Grand Guignol | Photo Jack Woolfe