Peace and Goodwill to All Men outside. Inside, on stage at least, there’s not much peace nor goodwill to be had on the horror-filled Saturday afternoon before Christmas. A high-spirited full house is set to spend a couple of hours with spirits of a very different kind. In every sense, it's a shocking contrast.
Of course, this is no original IP, many punters, having seen what they liked in the Paranormal Activity movies, sitting down, drink in hand, bag of merch tucked under the seat, for a new fix, this time in the West End. That said, ghost stories are a Christmas tradition, whether Marley and Scrooge at the Old Vic yet again or classy MR James adaptations on the BBC. A younger audience it may be at my matinée, but they’re plugging into generations of spooky shivers.
Like its twin British tradition, pantomime, ghost stories make a bargain, hands shaken across the fourth wall. On the stage side, they give us jump shocks, blackouts and things that go bump in the night; on the stalls side, we promise not to look too hard at plot holes, forgive an element of overacting and scream along as part of the show. The deal held for Levi Holloway’s new PA story, right up to the point it didn’t - which is so often the way with this genre.
The best of the production comes before the interval, when we’re introduced to an American couple in London. James (Patrick Heusinger, pictured above with Melissa James) is working late and troubled Lou (Melissa James) is WFHing - 40 years ago, they’d be Yuppies. Designer, Fly Davies, has provided them with a detailed two-floor home, but one that looks more Chicago than London with that US sitcom style front door leading directly to a living room/kitchen. It jars a little because, as is the case with all genre work, the details really matter.
Soon the familiar warp and weft of a ghost story are laid out before us - the power going on and off, the TV glitching from one channel to another, unexplained noises, stormy nights, a mysterious unseen room, something iffy in the past. There’s a more recent staple added with a nice turn from Pippa Winslow as James’s mother, Carolanne, on a transatlantic video call. Nothing is more likely to creep out a British audience than an interfering religious zealot with a Deep South accent.
The tension builds slowly but surely with a bell providing a nice little object on to which we can project Chekhov’s gun style foreshadowing, so much of the currency of a show like this vested in tingling anticipation and delayed gratification. Soon we get the first of Chris Fisher’s illusions, and it’s a good one, as are the ones that follow, even if we pay a price with far too many lengthy total blackouts. Gareth Fry has some fun with the sound design too, sometimes, and with justification, going to 11
Curiously, director Felix Barrett was happy with an interval (or maybe it was the bar manager) but it dissipated so much that had gone before. It’s not as if the production couldn’t do 100 minutes all-through, as there’s a scene with Jackie Morrison as a medium that adds nothing but a few more clichés to the by now creaking plot. Once we’re on the carefully constructed slippery slope, we can’t be allowed a fag break!
But we get one. Lights up, we check our phones, become aware again of just how tight the seats are packed, and our minds drift to last minute Christmas shopping. Crucially, heart rates settle back down to normal, and you feel some sympathy for Heusinger and James, who have to start ratcheting up the tension all over again from a standing start. Just as fatal, we’ve time to consider how this sophisticated couple seem unaware of Airbnbs, Uber Eats or even emergency electricians. Horror should not be about thinking, it should be about feeling!
The true enemy of dramatic tension turns up towards the end with a great slab of exposition which uses none of the bells and whistles that have held our attention so far. I guess it’s needed to make the previous 90 minutes add up (well, sort of add up), but, in a play of already somewhat esoteric pacing, it slowed things down at exactly the point they needed to speed up.
Even though I was happy to accept the genre's deal I outlined above with its inherent compromises, you can see a more theatrically satisfying show inside the one we get - and that is a little frustrating.
Maybe it needed a script doctor, but who you gonna call?
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