It's Halloween – the perfect excuse to ponder the role puppets, particularly ventriloquists' dummies, play in the horror genre.

A ventriloquist's workshop strewn with puppet parts provides the macabre setting for this dark comic horror.

If talking to yourself is the first sign of madness, then Nina Conti provides a first class ticket to her own personal bedlam with her new show, where she brings more madcap characters to the stage than ever before.