Chit chat - Fright night

Published Tuesday 22 July 2008 at 11:05 by Tabard

Meanwhile, just as the Royal Opera tries to broaden its appeal to include Sun readers, the Royal Shakespeare Company appears to be targeting horror fans.

At last weekend’s Latitude festival - a multi-art form event held in a field in Suffolk - the RSC premiered a new work from Anthony Neilson.

The playwright himself got up on stage in the theatre tent to introduce the show.

He started by telling the audience that while the RSC was most famous for its work with Shakespeare, the following piece was the kind of theatre that we could look forward to seeing more of in the future.

What followed afterwards was strange to say the least.

Two actors performed what seemed to be a rehearsed reading of a rejected extract from EastEnders, before the show was interrupted - and there’s no way of putting this without it sounding strange - by a zombie invasion.

The audience was evacuated from the tent to find a horde of baying zombies outside.

Well, if this is the kind of work we can expect in Stratford in the future, Tabard is up for it. Although, at the same time, we have a slightly disappointing feeling that Neilson might have been joking.