We are in a grotesque, unsettling but strangely familiar world. The Misty Moon club in Rotherham is an old-fashioned working men’s club threatened with closure. Its compere Frankie Monroe is a desperate old school entertainer with a suitcase full of terrible tricks and a sense of impending doom.

 

In some obscure moment in the past Monroe has entered into a satanic pact with a 1980s pocket pop princess and now – as the doomsday clock is ticking, the bargain is about to be fulfilled.

 

It’s astonishing, given such a disturbing and unpleasant back story, that Joe Kent-Walters manages to create such a warm and comfortable feeling in the room. We want to be here, with sick strange Frankie and his bag of gruesome props. We instantly become a part of this unsavoury doom-ridden world.

 

Monroe brings the members of the audience into his story. Some are given sinister nicknames, others take part in conjuring tricks. He even fools a member of the crowd into lending his voice, and his secret thoughts, to a moth-eaten ventriloquist’s puppet.

 

He brings on his nervous nephew to have a shot at observational comedy and there’s a special appearance from Rotherham’s number one Johnny Cash impersonator.

 

Monroe, or Kent-Walters, is a man of many voices, alive with physical tics, possessed by a whole cast of characters, who are all different, but also oddly the same. He’s a one-man old-time variety show with a cast of thousands.

 

In among all this bizarro stuff are some excellently written jokes – which can go different ways depending on how the audience reacts. There’s a brilliant balance of material and playful interaction – not to mention a genuine sense of jeopardy as we all hurtle together towards the abyss of hell.

 

There’s no sense of cynicism or judgement towards the working class entertainers of the past – although there is the odd well-aimed crack about historic sex abuse at the BBC.

 

Somehow this show celebrates a lost era – while also re-inventing it as something completely new.

 

The finale, a full throated and bloated bout of old-style club singing, is triumphant and strangely moving.

 

It’s one of those shows where you feel a huge surge of heat and goodwill coming from the audience at the end.  We’ve bonded over this strange story, we’ve been taken on a wild ride into a novel imaginary world.  And we’ve laughed our heads off along the way.

 

It’s rock and roll, it’s horror – but it’s also made of ordinary stuff, like socks, trowels and scampi fries.  Somehow, in the fiendishly talented hands of Frankie Monroe, these things are all transformed into emblems of another dimension.