Even More… Ghost Stories by Candlelight is a touring co-production with HighTide that takes four spine-chilling new stories and tours them across the East and West of England, culminating in a run at the BAC in November. We sat down with two of the writers on the show, Florence and Simon. Full tour dates are here.
1. Your play Destiny brought working-class voices from Wiltshire onto stages nationwide. How do your roots continue to shape the way you approach something as universal yet uncanny as a ghost story?
FEN (Florence Espeut-Nickless): I think my roots and place always influence and inspire my writing, no matter the genre. And writing a ghost story was no different really, in that sense. I read and watched a lot of ghost stories when researching, to try and get my head around the genre, and found they are often set in specific locations and rurality is a common theme.
The brief from Hightide and Pentabus was to write a contemporary ghost story set in our home region. I’m passionate about flying the Wiltshire flag on stage, so this was a gift for me as a writer. The county is steeped in folklore and mythology, which crosses over into ghost stories, so there was lots of rich history and material to draw upon and to be inspired by. The marriage (if you like) of the urban and rural that I experienced growing up in Chippenham, felt quite fizzy and exciting in the ghost story context, so I leant into that definitely.
In terms of class, I think my writing will always spotlight and champion working class characters and communities, whatever genre I’m writing in. That’s the goal anyway. People from all backgrounds and walks of life experience the supernatural and believe in ghosts, so I took a character I know and love and placed him in a chilling environment…I don’t wanna give any spoilers, so I’ll stop there 🙂
2. Ghost stories often carry whispers of history and trauma—did writing for this project feel like a natural extension of your interest in telling under-heard stories?
FEN: Yes absolutely, from the beginning of the process I was really interested in a telling a ghost story from a kind of unexpected character.
I wanted to try and surprise the audience and give voice to a character and place that we don’t often hear from on stage. In a sort of defiance I guess, to be like ghost stories are for working class young people too (oops that’s a mini spoiler, my characters a teenage lad from Swindon…that’s all I’m saying though).
I think, as you say, ghost stories are rooted in trauma really, and quite often that trauma is grief, loss, displacement and the feeling of not being believed or even listened to. Those happen to be prevalent themes that I come back to again and again in my writing, so there was a surprising synergy that happened during the writing process, that I wasn’t really expecting at the start.
3. This is the third year of Ghost Stories by Candlelight, but each set is fresh. What was the most exciting challenge about reinventing such a traditional genre for today’s audiences?
FEN: Writing a super contemporary story and bringing my voice to it, was really exciting. From the start it felt like Hightide and Pentabus wanted our authentic voices, in their kind of purest form. There was no diluting or sanitising involved, it was just how can we tell the story you wanna tell in the most impactful, dynamic, haunting (hopefully scary) way. That kind of experience is a joy for a writer and very empowering I think.
A challenge I gave myself was how can I write a ghost story that is also a celebration of young people and of current youth culture. Or the youth culture that I know and am surrounded by, at least. It’s a bit of a love note to all the teenagers I’ve been blessed to know and work with over the years. I’m constantly blown away by their resilience and wit, so I wanted that to be in there.
Weirdly writing a very contemporary ghost story felt sort of radical and I dunno “fresh”. I think that’s probably because I read a lot of Victorian ghost stories at the start of the process, but of course when they were written they were contemporary too. So, I guess I’m not reinventing the wheel as much as I’d like to think 🙂
I’m definitely writing with a current audience in mind though, in a way I hope will entertain and challenge them.
4. Your plays often explore isolation and human connection in stark, poetic ways. How did those themes evolve when filtered through the eerie lens of a ghost story?
SL (Simon Longman): Good question! I think a ghost story naturally gives you an opportunity to ask questions about isolation, and, when we’re alone, how that manifests in some form of anxiety/worry. The weird thing is that with a contemporary ghost story, a character is rarely totally alone. The world is so connected. But, of course, those connections feel distant and hazy. It’s that feeling of being alone within a crowd, but turbo charged. So with Cold Oak, it was more about writing about someone who was running from trauma. And in that running, they find some isolation, which is what they think they need to solve what’s happening inside their head. The haunting becomes a manifestation of that feeling. Ghosts become a representation of something bigger, something deep inside us we are afraid of. We isolate those feelings until they emerge. The nice thing with a ghost story is that you can turn those feelings into a literal ghost, giving you the opportunity to scare the shit out of a character. Which is fun.
5. Ghost tales are as much about silence and atmosphere as about words. Did writing for candlelight and small audiences change your process as a playwright?
SL: It’s been tricky. One because writing a ghost story means that it has to be scary. Which is an obviously thing to say. But one that’s important to keep in mind. So silence is good, of course. But you can’t just rely on that to make something feel eerie and haunting. So writing this was all about thinking how to play with the audience in a more, for want of a better word, brutal way. I wanted the story to be horrible. And that horror to stand for something bigger. And using the intimacy of the spaces the monologue is performed in helped with that. A sense that the audience is leaning in, being held close, so there wasn’t any space for them to escape to when the real brutal things happen.
6. You’ve worked extensively with Kestrel Theatre in prisons. Did that experience of working in spaces where people live with ghosts of their own—whether memories or regrets—influence your story for this production?
SL: We all have ghosts and regrets and memories. So my experience working in prisons didn’t directly influence me, no. It’s more about what we share as human beings, irrespective of where we are and what we do. We are all, basically, the same. All haunted by regrets and memories and mistakes. So that sense of a shared experience was more influential on this than a specific experience. Prison work can accentuate the past more, but the key with that work is staying firmly in the present, and looking towards the future, and a potential change. The past can haunt us so totally that we can’t escape it fully. It lingers and causes more pain. That’s something to deal with collectively, so we can grow as humans. This ghost story is kind of about that. It’s about a shared experience that might be painful, but could be felt by anyone.