A creative anthology of very human horror
Antique sellers have a timeless, otherworldly feel. Every object connects us to another life, to someone else’s story. The titular Uncle Monty’s Antique Shop is no exception, feeling more like a museum to the Instagram influencer who stumbles in off the street and is baffled by the lack of WiFi. She meets four such objects with a story to tell, as well as some worryingly recent Missing Person posters. It’s a delightfully varied collection of tales, woven together by a creeping sense of dread. At times, though, the narrative overplays itself, losing momentum in the search for more horror.
An old SLR camera transports the audience to a machiavellian politician’s private chambers, sitting for a portrait with his personal photographer. A gun (unloaded) connects two prisoners of war, on opposite sides of the conflict and slowly going mad. A Bakelite radio once sat beside a woman who woke up one morning to find she no longer recognised her life, or her husband. A laptop forms the interface between an insecure scientist and the humanoid robot he was expelled from the scientific community for attempting to build.
Each story is performed by a core ensemble, who do an admirable job of embodying characters with wildly different accents, beliefs and mannerisms. Shanice Petilaire delivers standout performances, as her eyes fill with tears when the politician-cum-cult-leader barely contains his explosive rage, and she breaks into a thousand pieces tormented by a voice begging for help through the radio. Akshay Sharan and Ryan Williams deliver a grippingly intense fight scene, in one of the most believable scraps I’ve seen on the stage, as the prisoners of war inevitably come into conflict. The same-yet-different cast adds a chilling discordance to each narrative.
By contrast, the story tying everything together – performed instead by Nina Atesh and Nicholas Benjamin – feels like a caricature of the horror it aims to structure. The fish-out-of-water Instagrammer’s interactions with the arcane shopkeeper offer laughs, but the main stories ultimately offer the funniest moments: a great fourth-wall break as the prisoners go slowly mad, and the woman-like robot repeating “bedroom talk” she can only have heard from her creator. The framing narrative misses the chance to draw out common threads from these seemingly disparate stories. Instead of enriching them, it is in conflict with them.
The juxtaposition of humour with horror, and anthology format, invite comparisons with BBC hit Inside No. 9. Both drop the audience into a world they have no knowledge of, trusting them to work things out; both are unafraid of the darker aspects of humanity; and both are highly creative. The greatest difference is pacing – each story from the antique shop offers a more confident, impactful ending complete with fade to black, before pulling back to offer an epilogue. These extra beats add more horror, but at the expense of sharpness and momentum.
Perhaps there’s a reason I don’t binge-watch Inside No. 9: as the creeping dread becomes familiar, the narrative loses its serration. For all its creativity, and the strength of its performances, Uncle Monty’s Antique Shop falls victim here, losing some of its punch. Its great promise is dulled by a narrative that refuses to end at the peak of a scream, milking the horror until it’s scarcely more than a whimper.
Uncle Monty’s Antique Shop plays at the Lion & Unicorn until October 17th, at 7:30 each day. Tickets can be purchased here. It is part of Profura Theatre’s Here|For 2026 season of breakthrough work – all shows in this lineup can be seen here.