By Grace Hatchell
I have been informed that we are going back to 2007.
Now, ordinarily I’d object. I’m not entirely convinced my eyebrows survived 2007 the first time around. But when the invitation comes courtesy of an award-winning, darkly comic show involving an emo teenager, an imaginary friend and a deeply questionable reality TV star, I’m prepared to dig out the eyeliner.
Goblin is heading to Park Theatre’s Park90 this November, running from Tuesday 17 November to Saturday 5 December 2026, with press night on Wednesday 18 November at 8.45pm.
And this particular Goblin arrives with a bit of a reputation.
The show has already won a Binge Fringe Queer Performers Award and collected a dozen four and five-star reviews. Written and performed by Derek Mitchell, who you might know online as @derekscottmitchell and @letsdoubledutch, it has been several years in the making, developing through Camden People’s Theatre, Pleasance and Summerhall.
There was also, apparently, a collapsed yurt involved at one point.
Theatre. Such a stable profession.
Meet Eliot. And Goblin.
It’s 2007 and 15-year-old Eliot has an imaginary friend called Goblin, who acts as his confidant and constant companion.
As Eliot grows from an emo teenager into adulthood, he becomes increasingly isolated from his family and is drawn into a secretive and destructive relationship with Max, a much older alternative British reality TV star.
That sentence started with “emo teenager” and took a considerably darker turn than I was expecting.
Through a shifting collection of characters, Goblin looks at growing up, obsession, identity and what happens when somebody you once knew becomes almost impossible to recognise. It also asks what it means to love someone who is slipping away – and how you find yourself again when you no longer recognise the person you’ve become.
But there’s another character in all of this.
Us.
Yes, the audience.
We’re not simply sitting nicely in the dark pretending nobody can see us checking the programme. The audience becomes a character within the story and forms part of its emotional spine, as Goblin takes us deeper into a twisted nostalgia trip through the early noughties.
Eliot’s choices are designed to keep us guessing as the world of the show gradually shifts around us.
Goblin is co-directed by Ellie BW and Sammy Glover and was developed in collaboration with writer-performer Ben Target. For Mitchell, comedy isn’t there to soften the darker material; laughter is part of how the story works.
As Mitchell explains, the show deliberately sits somewhere between theatre and comedy. He describes it as being about “a person whom it’s hard to love, and what made them that way,” and says bringing Goblin to Park Theatre feels like the moment the show has been working towards: a proper London run and the space for the work to breathe.
There’s lived experience beneath the story too.
Goblin draws upon Mitchell’s experience of being transatlantic and living between different places, cultures and versions of yourself. That sense of displacement feeds into the isolation experienced by the characters and a wider story about the people we become, the people we confide in and, occasionally, the imaginary companions who help us through.
Ultimately, beneath the humour, noise and hurt, the show asks whether we can find our way back to pieces of ourselves we thought we’d lost.
Which is rather beautiful.
Although if my lost piece of self turns out to be my 2007 fringe, it may remain lost.
Goblin at Park Theatre
Goblin runs at Park Theatre (Park90), 11–13 Clifton Terrace, Finsbury Park, London, from Tuesday 17 November until Saturday 5 December 2026.
Tickets are priced between £15 and £18, with performances listed at 8.45pm and 2pm.
The production is recommended for ages 16+ and contains strong language, themes of sexual grooming and exploitation, references to suicide, loud noises, moments of complete darkness and audience participation.
So there we have it.
Derek Mitchell has spent several years developing Goblin, picked up awards and glowing reviews along the way, survived a collapsed yurt and is now taking the whole strange, funny and unsettling creation to Park Theatre.
And somehow he’s persuaded us all to go back to 2007 with him.
Fine.
I’ll bring the eyeliner.
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