Review: Monstrous at KXT

Review by Kate Gaul

Monstrous begins by pretending to be a gentle office comedy, the kind where two co-workers orbit each other in a fluorescent haze. But very quietly, almost slyly, the play starts to twist. What looks like banter begins to curdle. What looks like flirtation starts to feel like a warning. By the time the supernatural pushes through, the shift is so well-managed you hardly notice the floor dropping out from under you.

At the centre of the story are Chris (Zev Aviv) and John (Byron Davis), colleagues whose connection sparks in ways neither of them seems fully prepared for. Their attraction is strange, charged, and difficult to name. When they finally act on it, one of them walks away unfazed, while the other is yanked sideways into a new and frightening version of himself. The play never spells out what has happened, or why—it prefers suggestion to certainty—and that refusal to explain becomes part of its power. Meaning sits between the lines, waiting for the audience to lean in and piece it together.

A notable thread running through Monstrous is its interest in the instability of the body. Identity, sensation, transformation: the production treats these not as abstractions but as lived, unpredictable realities. Without announcing itself, the work channels a distinctly trans perspective. This isn’t done through speeches or declarations; it emerges through how the story handles flesh and change, through the way bodies seem to shift shape under pressure or desire. Chris, played with watchful opacity, becomes the locus for much of this thematic charge. Their stillness, their ambiguity, their refusal to explain themselves: it all reframes the story’s relationship to embodiment. John’s performance, restless and kinetic, is in contrast —he’s the one who unravels, who cannot return to the version of himself he thought was fixed.

Lu Bradshaw’s direction embraces the play’s genre-blending instincts. They allow scenes to grow awkward, then eerie, then outright uncanny, without sacrificing emotional clarity. The humour is sharp and sometimes painful, the kind that makes you laugh while wishing you hadn’t. Horror elements slide in gradually, as if summoned from the corner of your eye.

The creative team does exceptional work shaping the show’s atmosphere. The lighting design, by Theodore Carroll and Anwyn Brook-Evans, behaves like an intelligence within the room—shifting tone, colour, and shadow to hint at movements beneath the skin of the story. It becomes a barometer for unease. Corey Lange’s set grounds the action in everyday familiarity, which only makes the later disturbances feel more intrusive. Ellie Wilson’s sound design moves in cryptic pulses: low, textural, bodily. You don’t just hear it; you feel it tug your breath into sync with the characters’ panic.

What stays with you after Monstrous isn’t simply its blood or its boldness. It’s the way tenderness keeps leaking through the cracks. Underneath the grime and the grotesquerie sits an oddly delicate meditation on longing, vulnerability, and the painful elasticity of the self. The play may traffic in horror, but its beating heart is surprisingly gentle.

Image Credit: Valerie Joy