Freak Winds at Herald Theatre

If Marshall Napier asked me to dinner, I don't think I would want to go. The New Zealand-born actor has made a very successful career on Australian television by playing hard men and now he has written his first play - and it's a horror.

That's not to say Freak Winds is badly written or unenjoyable. It is merely a description of its genre, and its a most unusual genre for theatre.

We get tragedy all the time but not horror, and not this kind of psychological thriller, certainly not with such a fine balance of humour and terror.

Freak Winds takes us to an isolated house on a stormy night. We follow brash salesman Henry Crumb to the home of Ernest and Myra and, like him, we are trapped in an increasingly strange and disturbing situation.

It's hard to think of another play like Freak Winds but there are film references aplenty, and while watching it I couldn't help thinking of Hitchcock movies, David Lynch's Blue Velvet and even Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.

In addition to the offbeat humour there is that sinking feeling when you realise the implied threat is real and there is no getting away from it.

It is hard to make horror real and to recreate fear, but the uniformly impressive cast of Gary Stalker, Sophia Hawthorne and Michael Morris pull it off successfully.

Stalker's Ernest attracts repulsion and pity in equal measure. His is a very creepy performance that is like some alien lifeform trying to impersonate humans but not quite getting it right.

Sophia Hawthorne, as the wheelchair-bound Myra, makes a fine job of giving mixed messages.

Throughout her funny and teasing performance you keep changing your mind about her as she swings from fragile victim to perverted mastermind.

Our sick and twisted couple have the perfect foil in Michael Morris' Crumb.

As the brash salesman who becomes a lamb to the slaughter, Morris is the perfect straight-man.

The play's most humorous moments come as he doggedly tries to keep selling life insurance, and he creates much of the tension as we see his increasing fear and desperation.

Of course, every horror story needs a creepy haunted house, and John Verryt's atmospheric set is just right.

It combines claustrophobic, windowless, black and white striped walls with the faded glamour of red leather couches and a red and gold chandelier. The perfect parlour for two poisonous spiders.

Director Paul Gittins maintains the strange balance of humour and fear for 99 per cent of Freak Winds, and only in the final few moments does it seem to lose its way a little.

The play works best when we are uncertain about what is going on, when the threat of violence is implied rather than demonstrated.

It is a case where ambiguity is preferable to clarity.

Freak Winds will open in New York later in the year. We are lucky to get such fresh theatre before the other side of the world for a change.

No doubt it will do well in America. That home of serial killers seems to have an insatiable appetite for the sickest of cases in both fact and fiction.