11 – 16 March

A show that has not only been touring in the U.K. and abroad for decades, but also simultaneously running in the West End as a kind of fixed tourist attraction, in which it serves rather like its non-musical predecessors such as No Sex Please, We’re British and The Mousetrap, offers little grist to the reviewer’s mill. New acting blood can offer new insights of course, with a two-hander offering scope for talent to flower, but I decided to concentrate my attention on how such a long-in-the-tooth show managed to achieve its effects, which judging by last night’s performance retain their power to elicit squeals of shock from parts of the audience.

There is inevitably, for a story that started as a novel, a good deal of narration in the show, much of which is used in setting up the gloomy mood, which hangs over the show. Setting up a sense of expectation and unease whilst lulling us, paradoxically, into a relaxed state is the delicate stock-in-trade of many a supernatural yarn or thriller. The director, Robin Herford, who has had his hand on the tiller of this production since its original outing in Scarborough, has had ample opportunity for fine-tuning the effects and times the shocks to perfection. Indeed all the eeriness is in the setting up since the ghost scenes themselves rely on shock rather more than spine-tingling atmosphere.

I’ve always been of the opinion that the notion of an audience engaging in ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’ is a pack of nonsense. The idea that we need to do two apparently contradictory mental feats in a theatre seems to me to fall at the first slash of Occam’s razor. Much more plausible is something Mr Herford acknowledges in his programme notes, namely the active engagement of the audience’s imagination which is the sine qua non of any artistic venture. Michael Holt’s simple setting involving little more than a large costume and props basket and a couple of chairs invites us to engage positively from the start. In short the show succeeds in large part because of what we bring to the theatre, which is in no way a bad thing.

In one sense the play is about acting and in Malcolm James as the storyteller with a burden to unload and Mark Hawkins as a kind of midwife to the story we have two accomplished actors who ably spin out the gothic tropes. Fans of supernatural thrillers will not be disappointed by this simple story cleverly told.

★★★☆☆      Graham Wyles    12 March 2024

Photo credit: Mark Douet