Who doesn’t love a good ghost story in the run-up to Halloween? Theatre critic Graham Watts went in search of what goes bump in the night at London’s Peacock Theatre.
The ghost-to-building ratio goes off the scale in theatres. Every self-respecting theatre of a certain age has its ghost and, in some cases, (Bath’s and Drury Lane’s Theatre Royals, and the Royal Albert Hall, for example) they have quite a few. Haunting a Royal theatre seems to be particularly popular in the supernatural world!
Ghost Stories, a play by The League of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson and his childhood friend, Andy Nyman, has been doing the rounds since 2012 (I found myself wondering if the theatre ghosts enjoy a good play about themselves) and this Halloween season at The Peacock Theatre (ending on 8 th November) is yet another London opening of a show, directed in this iteration by Sean Holmes, which has toured as far afield as China, Russia and Peru.
The idea for theatre based on ghost stories came to Dyson when walking past the Fortune Theatre where The Woman in Black had been successfully playing for years and asking himself why there was only one scary play in London and thinking that it’s like having just one musical or one comedy. As the audience leaves the theatre, they are exhorted not to reveal the play’s secrets and so I’ll avoid spoilers in this review (although just about everyone knows whodunnit in The Mousetrap and that universal knowledge has hardly dented its box office resilience). The initial premise of Ghost Stories sets the stage as a platform for a lecture (complete with lecturn and the ubiquitous PowerPoint) whereupon Professor Phillip Goodman, an expert in the paranormal sets about debunking photographs that purport to evidence the supernatural, always finding a plausible explanation for what – at first sight – seems to identify the spirit world.
Goodman – a strong and believable performance by Jonathan Guy Lewis – says that in all his thousands of experiences, only three descriptions of ghostly sightings seemed so genuine as to be unexplainable: one from a nightwatchman in a deserted warehouse occupied only by mannequins; the second with a broken down car on a lonely rural road at 3am; and the third in a nursery of a well-to-do household.
Each ghost story began with a tape recording of the person experiencing the apparition: David Cardy – best known for being Chris Theodopolopodous in the TV comedy Birds of a Feather – played the seen-it-all nightwatchman, Tony Matthews, recounting his 3am ghostly encounter in the warehouse; Preston Nyman was Simon Rifkind, a young man returning home from a late night party when his car broke down on a country lane; and Clive Mantle – an actor with a significant career but who will forever be remembered as the Vicar of Dibley’s love interest – was outstanding as Mike Priddle, a commodities broker (or similar) who was nicknamed The Prophet for his uncanny ability to make profitable trades, and who encountered the ghostly happenings in the nursery of his new family home.
The play is made all the more believable by Jon Bausor’s impressive set designs (the different perspectives in the warehouse built the tension superbly), James Farncombe’s outstanding lighting and the especially evocative sound designs (Nick Manning) and special effects (Scott Penrose) – all essential ingredients of a good ghost story!
The scenarios were all fairly predictable and I bet that most people will have heard variations of these particularly ubiquitous Ghost Stories and although there were plenty of screams from the audience at the scary moments, I found that the tempo of the piece almost foreshadowed when the terrifying moments were due and, thus prepared, they were not shocking (although I concede that many in the audience were
clearly shocked)!
Even forgetting the ghosts, it is, nonetheless, a good play, well written with an exceptional denouement, which I didn’t see coming, a clear sign of an excellent mystery, ghosts or no ghosts!
