Bone-chilling West End Ghost Stories

Now, let me make one thing clear – I don’t ‘do’ horror. As in, it doesn’t work on me. Those twin girls in The Shining? Whatever. The wild-eyed clairvoyant in Don’t Look Now? I encounter scarier religious nutcases every morning outside Brixton Tube. Ringu? Boringu, more like. You get the picture. All brilliantly imaginative entertainment, of course, but collectively about as scary as a cheddar ploughmans. This, coupled with the well-known fact that anyone who believes in ghosts is a gaspingly incredulous dumbo of the highest order, meant that I was slightly disdainful of the warnings accompanying the posters for Ghost Stories: “…CONTAINS MOMENTS OF EXTREME SHOCK AND TENSION… WE STRONGLY ADVISE THOSE OF A NERVOUS DISPOSITION TO THINK VERY SERIOUSLY BEFORE ATTENDING”. Not even the sight of two St John Ambulance men conspicuously overlooking the audience (presumably armed with smelling salts and a copy of New Scientist) could prevent me from striding to my seat with the bravado and swagger of the terminally un-afraid.

Ghost Stories is co-written by Jeremy Dyson, one of the creators of superlative TV series The League of Gentlemen. Like this earlier work, the play blends classic horror-film elements with a twisted narrative and blacker-than-black humour. Production-wise, it’s highly inventive - much of the play is set in near darkness, with the actors often illuminated by a single spotlight. The clever set designs, surround-sound effects and a host of other technical tricks all serve to keep the audience’s senses in a state of heightened and nervous awareness. (I won’t give anything away, but suffice to say I’ll never view a bottle of TCP in the same way again). The acting by the five-man cast is excellent throughout – special mention must go to co-writer Andy Nyman as the intense parapsychologist Dr Goodman..

Discretion prevents me from revealing any details of the plot, but it’s an intelligent and engaging piece of writing that weaves several separate stories together. Although I had a feeling that the sense of apprehension could have been ratcheted up further in some of the earlier slow-moving sections, when the shocks do come they are sudden and effective. After a while, the pervading gloom and unease begin to have a genuinely unsettling effect, which slowly grows as the drama progresses. When the plot eventually starts to fold in on itself, the tension is brought to an almost unbearable peak until the final, sudden climax.

At which point, dear reader, I got a bit scared.