The Boy Who Kicked Pigs

Based on a novella by former Doctor Who star Tom Baker, this twisted tale of murder and mayhem in deepest, darkest Kent is ghoulishly funny and stylishly staged. The brilliantly named Kill the Beast theatre company have channelled the grinding suburbia of a Lowry painting through The League of Gentleman’s Royston Vasey.

Against an off-kilter monochrome backdrop, the cast contort themselves into a vivid parade of grotesques as David Cumming’s superbly nasty teenager Robert Caligari plots his first murder – with the aid of his sister’s talking piggy bank, Trevor.

The script is bitingly funny and the show’s warped view of a drab and faded England skilfully references countless comedy horror films and TV series while finding a fresh vein of surrealism to open up and fling across the stage.

As Caligari festers in his bedroom, bossed around by Trevor and boiling with frustration, director Clem Garrity keeps things moving with manic energy. Housewives advance from their doorsteps in grim formation and jokes cut through the air like a volley of knives.

Beautifully detailed animations and a feverishly exaggerated set create a nightmarish world of unremitting tedium in which locals greedily devour news of a motorway pile-up.

Beneath the small-town Grand Guignol and lashings of black-hearted humour is a dark vision of a society lacking meaning or purpose, where children are neither seen nor heard.

But don’t panic: the show’s rictus grin never droops and the blood and guts keep coming.