Reviews for The Ghost Sonata

'...Even the process of finding this site-specific play, hidden away in the tangled alleys of Trinity Buoy Wharf, feels like a dramatic adventure. Once there, the company invites the audience deep inside the drama, and the warehouse opens out like a pop-up book of malevolent fairytales. Walls disappear without warning to reveal candlelit caverns, where dead men search for pennies by the docks and love turns poisonously sour...'

'...the extent to which Goat and Monkey have transformed the echoing space into a crumbling Victorian mansion is simply breathtaking, and director Joel Scott creates some unforgettable, hugely imaginative dramatic scenes with Strindberg’s melodramatic tale of thwarted love and crimes unburied...'

'... the emotional impact of these beautifully sculpted, barely lit and flickering scenes is as potent and disorientating as a shot of absinthe...'
  Lucy Powell, Time Out Review Four stars June 26,2006


'... Peepholes in the walls give glimpses into worlds within worlds, and if you put your ear to doors you can hear whispers and creaks as if the building is crying out in despair. The sound, lighting and design are brilliant...'
'.... plenty of startling dramatic moments follow as ghosts walk, the innocent suffer and are walled up, and the past catches up with Hummel in an astonishing watery gush, which is worth the price of admission alone...'
'.... I shall always remember the Narnia moment when you walk through a wardrobe, and I'd be prepared to walk even further to catch this company's next show....'
 Lyn Gardner The Guardian Wednesday July 5, 2006


'...If you emerge baffled by the convoluted unravelling of a grudge by an embittered old man called Hummel against a love-rival - the Colonel - director Joel Scott communicates much at a visceral level.
At times he ranges his actors far off, creating febrile, pallid apparitions, but he also brings them right up to our faces - and, in the case of Ian Summers's bullying, caped Hummel, stalking the scene on crutches like a villain from a 19th-century melodrama, that's an unforgettably unnerving proposition...'
 Dominic Cavendish The Telegraph July 10th, 2006.

'...That feeling engulfs you as you walk into a bar made out of wallpaper, punched with peepholes that hint at what lies in wait. Goat and Monkey Theatre are an electric young company from the same stable as Punchdrunk, but with their own distinctive take on the adventure of the theatrical event, gently playing with the presence of the audience....'

'...It's disorientatingly dream-like through brilliant tricks of light and space, and occasionally astonishing imagery. this is the kind of work that grows into itself and your imagination...'
Tassos Stevens - Kulture Flash - June 28, '06

‘Powerful and disturbing...’
Audience member on Fury