Come to a show called Gay Witch Sex Cult, and you don’t expect a host like this. Kaelan Trough is an estate agent, suited up, smug and prepping a gender reveal party for his new baby. OK, the baby will be raised by Kaelan and his partner Jeremy: gay, we can account for. But witch sex cult? Well, we mustn’t talk about that, says Andrew Doherty’s camp and narcissistic alter ego, who’d rather crow about how much sex he’s having, and reveal his misogyny in dismissive remarks about the baby’s surrogate mum.
You can’t help but love him, though. Doherty (former double-act partner of This Is Going to Hurt star Ambika Mod) has created a compelling comic monster here: ditzy, self-absorbed but also puppyish and vulnerable, not least to the occult forces at play once the backstory to the party is divulged. In episodic flashback, Kaelan recounts a boat trip to a deserted island, ferryman uttering gnomic prophecies en route. There, a row of lonely trees look uncannily like women, an axe-wielding maniac runs amok and a cave is littered with the skeletons of human babies. Folk-horror red flags all, which our host is usually too dim – too busy preening or gossiping – to notice, far less piece together into a coherent whole.
It’s a ticklish confection that gets spookier as it proceeds: Doherty demonstrates that a gleefully undercutting and silly sense of humour is no bar to full-blown scares. His performance is a treat: all eye rolls, camp moues to the audience, and his tongue leaping out of his mouth whenever he gets excitable. And the show is peppered with daft jokes, some of which miraculously contrive to build tension too: not the great visual gag about the struggle for the axe, perhaps, but certainly the fate that befalls Kaelan’s crab companion Gonzalo.
There are a few loose ends still flapping when Doherty’s plot ties up; the journey here is more satisfying than the destination. But Gay Witch Sex Cult remains the finest horror pastiche I can recall on the fringe since Garth Marenghi hit his spine-chilling peak.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August
