Performance - Judith Palmer boards a magical ghost train with no rubber skeletons in sight
While filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man at a disused fairground in 1976, the TV production crew made a rather grisly discovery. Accidentally knocking an arm off one of the ghost-train props, they found out that the "hanged man" was no plaster-and-wax dummy, but a real mummified human corpse. (Investigations showed the stiff to be Elmer McCurdy, an incompetent train robber gunned down by a sheriff's posse in 1911, then purloined by carnival promoters for a showbiz afterlife.)
This may be the only recorded instance of a ghost train being genuinely scary: because, let's face it, the ghost train is usually the biggest flop of the fair - thirty seconds juddering past glow-in-the-dark ghouls, the occasional limp drift of a polythene cobweb against your face, a few lugubrious wails from a worn-out tape recorder, before the final clunking apparition of a pop-up skeleton, then out through the rubber doors and back into the light with nothing but disappointment to show for your 50p fare.
A grand new performance spectacle that tours Britain this summer hopes to redefine the ghost-train experience, however, without recourse to either plastic spiders or embalmed cadavers. Carnesky's Ghost Train is part art installation, part visual theatre and part fairground ride - a purpose-built train whisking audiences 20 at a time through a magical environment of optical illusions and performance vignettes.
Devised by the performance artist Marisa Carnesky, Ghost Train draws on her fascination with Victorian melodrama, sideshow freakery and female erotica, creating a dark, fairy-tale atmosphere reminiscent of Angela Carter.
The first time I saw Carnesky perform, she was giving birth to herself, slithering naked from a tattooed latex skin for a sweaty, heaving mash of leatherboys at the Torture Garden, an arty London fetish club. It was the mid-1990s. She was still working part-time as a stripper, and sometimes appearing with the ritualistic body artist Ron Athey or in the Dragon Ladies line-up at the Raymond Revue Bar, Soho - developing transgressive, sexually charged characters who mutated from one to the other. Back then, she was not Carnesky, but Marisa Carr. Developing her one-woman theatre show Jewess Tattooess in 1999, Carr became increasingly fascinated by her east European Jewish heritage, and opted to reclaim the Latvian surname her grandmother had anglicised during the 1940s - Carnesky, fortuitously redolent of both carnival and the carnal.
It is this preoccupation with eastern European migration, fractured lives, displacement and dislocation that Carnesky aims to play out on her ghost-train ride. But Ghost Train itself has been bedevilled with problems. The creators had hoped to buy and convert a second-hand fairground attraction; but it soon became clear they would have to build the 400-square-metre ride from scratch. And apparently, even without leaves on the line or the wrong kind of snow, it's just not that easy to build a train and keep it on track. All the tour dates have been shuffled and rearranged a dozen times, but finally, after five years of planning and costs of £300,000, Carnesky's Ghost Train is up and running.
The first public trip took place to Dagenham, to the disused Ford car factory where the Ghost Train was built. It is real Scooby-Doo territory: acres of abandoned buildings and weed-choked concrete, with the distant sound of spooky music filtering out from a large corrugated-iron assembly shed. Towering outside is a majestic 30-foot wooden facade, the entrance to the Ghost Train, deliciously shabby in faded crimson and gilt, an arcade of pilastered arches beneath, a swirl of art nouveau curlicues on top, all hand-painted with portraits of showgirls. Roses in their hair and a faraway look in the eyes, each rouged lady is painted with a ghost from her past - faint snapshots of homely girls in respectable headscarves, of sad-eyed toddlers and stiff-collared youths, mementoes of a different life.
Collaborating with Carnesky (along-side theatre designers, multimedia artists, technicians and performers) is the magician Paul Kieve. The pair have already worked together taking a Victorian horse-drawn funeral cortege around strip joints in London and making the theatrical vanishing act The Girl From Nowhere. For Kieve (who has just been teaching Harry Potter tricks for The Prisoner of Azkaban, and was responsible for making the Invisible Man invisible in the West End), Ghost Train is an opportunity to try out illusions that work only in confined spaces.
Stepping behind a ruched velvet curtain, we sit two by two on the plush-seated train, which rattles off down a winding track on its 12-minute, phantasmagorical journey. In silk kimonos and jaunty tutus, a succession of powdered lovelies wafts silently in and out of our vision - reaching out through broken windows, floating above station platforms, sinking into the floor, or spinning in midair. Peeking over a fan of playing cards, one soubrette endlessly paces a revolving hotel corridor; another crouches inside a birthday cake, knife in hand. A spin of a crystal ball, then a flutter of wings, and a gipsy dancer catches a pair of digital doves. A twisted rose-decked railway line springs into view and the ghostly showgirls line up, then vanish. The ride through Bluebeard's chambers is over.
Ghost Train has taken magic as its metaphor, using the conjurer's assistant to demonstrate the "human disappearing trick" - women contorted into small spaces, cut in half, suspended between realities, lost between border crossings. The voyage around Carnesky's Ghost Train is tantalisingly brief, but that's 11 and a half minutes more of thrills than you will usually get at the fairground - and no rubber skeletons.
www.carneskysghosttrain.net
Carnesky's Ghost Train goes to Coventry and the Glastonbury Festival, and then arrives at Trafalgar Square in October
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