28 January – 1 February
This is a play in which the audience does a lot of the work. This is a good thing. The writers know how plays and in particular thrillers, work on the minds and imaginations of the audience. Long, apparent gaps in the action are anything but hiatuses; rather seed beds in which the audience grows its own expectation and suspense, all aided and abetted by stagecraft and sound.
The writers (Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman) are playing with us from the start. The audience is itself the audience whilst being an audience of a different shade within the play, co-opted as it were into being the audience at an academic lecture on the paranormal (If you follow). As the play progresses the astute amongst the audience will have noticed the occasional oddity in behaviour and concluded it betokens that all is not as it may appear. But more on that I may not speak.
Is the learned professor (Dan Tetsell) an out and out hard-nosed sceptic or does his rational armour against credulity have an all too human chink? He takes us on a journey – the feeling is very much that of being on a ghost train at the funfair – in which ‘evidence’ is presented in the form of individual ghost stories related by men who have supposedly experienced the inexplicable. A night watchman (David Cardy) and a university student (Eddie Loodmer-Elliott) take us through their hair-raising stories. And then Mike Priddle (Clive Mantle) a financier of sorts relates his chilling story about his and his wife’s attempts to have a baby, a story that morphs into something quite unexpected. (But more on that…etc.)
Delightful (if one may use that word) special effects, which show the hand of a master stage illusionist, Scott Penrose, play on our previously groomed minds. Thrilling (literally, if one is to judge by the reactions in some sections of the stalls) use of props and settings are given atmospheric support by an ever present soundscape by Nick Manning.
The direction, by the writers with Sean Holmes, is taut with a palpable sense of timing, brave and almost comically knowing. Each of the playlets are given their own feel and develop at their own pace. The acting in each is matched to the mood. Mr Mantle, who takes us through something of a change of direction (More on that …etc.) has the accomplished storyteller’s ability to inhabit the story he tells whilst deftly changing direction when required.
In one sense the whole play is a master-class in misdirection and manipulation and yet one in which we eagerly participate. Thrill seekers will not be disappointed. But more on that…etc.
★★★★☆ Graham Wyles, 29 January 2025
Photo credit: Hugo Glendinning
