Vegetables review

Muddled Marauders has experience on the rave scene with immersive work in unusual spaces, but for its first fully fledged play it has constructed Dr Hass’ underground laboratory complex in a murky, labyrinthine basement in hipster Clerkenwell. Here, eager, white-coated research scientist Veronica (Michelle Robertson), her hair bun skewered with biros, leads us potential “trialists” on a tour of labs aglow with radiation and half-open storerooms, in which we spy jars of unhealthy looking perishables – there’s devilment in the details of Ellie Koslowsky’s deliciously unsettling design – in between video testimonials from blissed-out ex-patients of the doctor. When we meet the prim, increasingly megalomaniacal Dr Hass (a scarily convincing, Teutonic Adie Mueller), she proceeds to lecture us on her brilliance with the aid of some thoroughly ridiculous, yet finely crafted props. Before being ushered into the machine room, a volunteer for treatment must be selected from among us. And is that a pentagram on a book cover among the magazines in the waiting room?

Surprises come thick and fast as we are confronted with Koslowsky’s supreme design achievement: an outlandish, outsized VitaMind Infuser that is somewhere between Frankenstein’s operating table and a galumphing NHS MRI scanner (lighting by Ben Garcia and sound by Paul Freeman add enormously to the menace).

Beneath the absurdist hokum and camp, Dr Hass’ claims of suffering domestic abuse appears a glib device to anchor the character in reality while pushing the comedy envelope. But as the performance spills out on to the street after the show has supposedly ended, your lasting impression is one of unbridled hilarity, as these skilled improvisers remain in deranged character to the very last.