Crybabies' The Scaring Brings Chills and Laughs to Fringe
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- Crybabies' "The Scaring" plays at the fringe festival, with the reviewer placing it in the company of past horror-comedy hits like Garth Marenghi and Andrew Doherty's "Gay Witch Sex Cult"
- The Radio 4 trio of Michael Clarke, James Gault, and Ed Jones wrote and perform the show, which the reviewer credits with both chills and laughs and production values "rarely seen on the fringe"
- The plot follows Father Arthur, a disillusioned priest who loses his exorcist partner to a beast from another dimension and ends up working in the immersive stag-do industry before being summoned to the Lyle Away hotel
- The densely-packed story stacks escaped serial killers, a bloodlusted haunted boy, a possessed bouncy ball, an anti-woke spook, and an Exorcist-referencing scene with a haunted dolly onto a single arc
- Standout gags named in the review include a guest-ghost forever "fading away" into another realm and a Three Ronnies-style conversation between Arthur, his hotelier, and a spectre only one of them can perceive
- An emotional wrinkle surprises — parental bereavement enters the comedy, and the reviewer admits to "a twinge of unease" before concluding that Gault's tender goodbye from a possessed son pulls it off
Why it matters: The review cements "The Scaring" as a standout in the fringe's horror-comedy lineage, with the critic explicitly placing it beside prior festival breakouts like Garth Marenghi. For festival programmers and horror-comedy audiences, the show's combination of jump scares, illusions, and unexpected bereavement beats on a small stage is what the reviewer flags as unusually high-end for the fringe.
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