Give an artist unlimited time, space and money, and the result is rarely art. Creativity loves constraint — and for proof, look no further than Eldritch Theatre’s The Call Centre of Cthulhu, a wildly inventive participatory horror-comedy conjured from a desk, a canopy of dangling tin cans, a bag of hand puppets, and a deck of cards on the pocket-sized stage of Leslieville’s Red Sandcastle Theatre.
Constraint, as it happens, is also the great theme of its source. H.P. Lovecraft wrote “The Call of Cthulhu” in the summer of 1926, a century ago this year, and it first appeared in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928. Its opening line is one of horror’s most famous: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” For Lovecraft, our limits are a mercy. To see beyond them is to go mad. This story launched the Cthulhu Mythos, the sprawling shared universe that Lovecraft and generations of later writers have built on, and it made him the presiding deity of cosmic horror. But in 2026, engaging with Lovecraft is complicated: his primal, visceral terror is truly singular … yet frequently fuelled by a racist fear of the “other.”
Lovecraft tells his tale in documentary style: a narrator assembles three separate accounts from notes left behind by a dead great-uncle. Eric Woolfe, Eldritch’s founder and self-styled “Director of the Uncanny,” keeps that piecing-together structure, but moves it from a gentleman scholar’s study to a customer-service cubicle. In a town whose libraries and public services have been gutted, the call centre is the only lifeline left. Irving Irving, a meek, middle-aged phone jockey, is the one picking up. Call by weird call, the scattered threads of his workday knot into an ancient apocalyptic prophecy. Woolfe’s satire of creeping corporatization, right down to Irving’s petty tyrant of a boss, is gleefully on-the-nose. And as Irving finds sinister connections literally everywhere, you don’t need to squint too hard at the waking Cthulhu to see the faces of A.I.— and the Silicon Valley tech bros who keep promising it will save us.
Woolfe usually plays it big, as one of the garish, greasepainted showmen who front many Eldritch shows. So it’s a treat to watch him shrink inside the sweater-vested, white-moustached Irving. As is his wont, Woolfe deploys a gallery of grotesque hand puppets to play everyone else, including callers, colleagues, and Moxie, the object of Irving’s secret crush. The script comes “with additional dialogue by HP Lovecraft,” a wry way of crediting the fevered prose that runs all through it. That lurid poetry is gorgeously atmospheric, but it can’t quite shed its author’s baggage: in a few passages about the cult’s far-flung followers, it teeters on the edge of the racism that haunts the original.
Melanie McNeill’s set transforms the Sandcastle’s tiny stage into a green-lit switchboard of the damned, with Irving’s desk marooned beneath a seemingly endless canopy of tin cans on strings. When a call comes in, he must find the right can, then listen. At other moments, he has to fight his way through the forest of cords just to reach us. A digital screen behind his desk is a masterstroke: on it, a camera delivers close-ups of the puppets Irving is talking to, lending them an eerie, cinematic reality.
I won’t spoil the ins and outs of the plot. But what delighted me most is how The Call Centre of Cthulhu turns out to be a magic show. Or rather, an anti-magic show. Woolfe is an accomplished magician who often folds sleight of hand into his Eldritch work. Here, however, his character doesn’t want the tricks to work. The thoroughly spooked Irving sees every impossible coincidence as proof that the dread Elder God is stirring. So he gnashes his teeth when a deck of cards, which he has scrupulously shuffled, falls out perfectly divided into its four suits. He blanches when an object an audience member has written on inexplicably matches another one waiting on stage.
He enlists the audience in a dazzling range of simple parlour tricks tucked inside plot points like combination locks and entry codes. “Aw, jeez…” he frets, as audience members select words, numbers or cards, any one of which might doom the world. At an ordinary magic show, the impossible is a pleasure, because we know it’s a trick. But for Irving, it’s the same kind of unwelcome evidence that Lovecraft’s narrator found in each new scrap of his great-uncle’s notes: proof that the world’s scattered horrors are connected … and coming for us.
Woolfe’s creativity so loves the constraint of his tiny theatre that he puts nearly every square inch of it to work, including the Red Sandcastle’s famously on-stage bathroom and its cramped backstage. With a roving camera and a striking sequence of artwork, he stretches the story out to the vastness of the ocean itself.
Lovecraft thought our limits were all that kept us sane. Woolfe’s ninety-minute The Call Centre of Cthulhu makes the opposite case for art: that a fitty-seat room, a few props, a master performer and a willing audience can summon something infinite. Which leaves only one force in this story with truly unlimited time, space and money … one that wakes up hungry.
Aw, jeez. Is this really about the rise of Cthulhu-GPT?
The Call Centre of Cthulhu runs until November 8, 2026, at Eldritch Theatre’s Red Sandcastle Theatre, 922 Queen Street East, Toronto. Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission. Tickets are available at eldritchtheatre.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
