An immensely immersive evening of fear
Back in the Liverpool Playhouse 15 years after its initial staging, three West End runs and one film adaptation later, Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories is named on the Liverpool Playhouse website as “one of London’s best reviewed plays of all time”. Alongside this great acclaim, a foreboding warning reads: “We strongly advise those of a nervous disposition to think very seriously before attending.” Ha! I thought. Me, nervous? Me, a horror novel and film aficionado? Think again.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. I screamed. I jumped. And I, along with every other member of the audience, experienced an immensely immersive evening of fear.
The audience in attendance at the Playhouse on March 11th was treated to a post-show discussion with Dyson and Nyman, a dynamic duo in person as well as in output. During this, they posited that one of the reasons they have been successful in writing a truly scary play where others have fallen short is that other plays often feel like pieces of theatre threaded with scary elements, but they are pieces of theatre first and foremost. By contrast, Ghost Stories feels like a pure distillation of horror first and foremost, with non-stop homages to giants of the genre.
Of the show itself, some may argue there’s too much assault on the senses in terms of visuals and sound; I suspect that Andy Nyman’s work on Derren Brown’s TV and stage shows confirms that such choices are all intentional, to ensure the viewer never gets too comfortable or relaxed.
The audience was asked to keep the plot a secret, so in very broad strokes the show’s narrator is a professor of parapsychology, dead-set on debunking the paranormal, investigating three separate claimed hauntings. The play’s moments of levity, a welcome relief at first, soon gained that destabilising quality when the laughs were no longer dependable nor clear-cut, the latter theme of opacity being something this show plays with very well.
As you might expect, there are some very good special effects designed to induce maximum fright, and the show’s small company performs their roles admirably, but special mention must go to the set design and lighting – Jon Bausor’s clever sets play with perspective and movement to give the impression of massive space and convincing mobility, and James Farncombe’s lighting (or lack thereof) allowed the actors to melt in and out of scenes as required, adding an extra level of uncanny.
I, for one, left the theatre newly afraid of the dark, and I can’t think of a greater endorsement than that.