The Argus: Brighton Festival Thumb Of the two productions Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes has brought to Brighton Festival, Monsters And Prodigies was billed as the accessible number.

The show was chaos. Anyone with tickets for El Gallo should expect bedlam.

Monsters And Prodigies, written by Jorge Kuri and directed by Claudio Valdés Kuri, aimed to tell the tale of falsetto-voiced boys castrated in the name of art in Baroque-era Italy.

First came a distressed centaur, an overweight beast, Chiron (Miguel Ángel López), who grunted and snorted an introduction (welcome to a disturbing world, basically, neither opera nor play) from behind a stable door, beneath a screen showing English subtitles (from Spanish, Italian and French).

There was a distinct stable smell. Was the whiff his?

Scene two and he arrived, all part of the pomposity and scholarly stroytelling, a white dressage horse, dribbling with nerves, perfectly trained and turned out.

From the university classroom we travelled, with a pair of unforgettable Siamese twins (Raúl Román and Gastón Yanes) jostling from a lifetime at each other’s throats, to the Conservatorio, where the spoilt castrato (Javier Medina), all rouged cheeks and resplendent plumage, turned primo donna to primo uomo.

For the final scene it was to the opera house, as the curtain fell on both the castrati and the age of Italian decadence.

One disgruntled viewer screamed obsenities at the cast. She raised hell, a food fight and murders, only a few of the many non-sequiturs this vaudevillian slapstick – where grotesque is beautiful – delighted in.