A gripping ghost story stained by a calamitous ending
You expect a lot from a play when the program boasts of record breaking tours, seven West End seasons. For a play to reach this kind of success it’s usually inevitable that it did so on the back of beating your expectations in nearly every way, from every line down to the lighting cues and furnishings on stage. In one sense the show does meet these expectations, in all technicalities it impresses with great performances from all the cast, tight pacing and a gorgeous set that brings the house to life throughout the two hour run time. However I have never in my life seen a play that fumbles it’s finale to this degree.
Despite my apprehension there is a lot to praise here. The play delivers some incredible naturalistic dialogue that really immerses you in the domestic life of Sam (James Bye) and Jenny (Shvorne Marks) as they invite an old friend Lauren (Natalie Casey) and her new boyfriend Ben (Grant Kilburn) into their house, unbeknownst to all that a ghost appears to haunt Jenny at 2:22 every night and she wants everyone else to finally see it too. ‘Haunted house’ stories really need a certain idyllic setting to spin on it’s head and the relative bliss of a recently converted house in London fulfils this charm nicely. The set design really stands out before the show even starts, it’s easy to see how Anna Fleischle (set designer) has won Olivier awards for their work prior. The bottom of the set is a nice enough, standard modern cozy apartment furniture but as your eyes crawl up you see the peeling, old walls like wounds threatening to tear open, punctuated by a red LED clock ominously ticking towards 2:22.
As the clock ticks on so does all the tensions between the characters as they wait to see if Jenny’s phantom appears, new ghosts appear from their past, aching to be resolved. Jenny’s loss of faith, Lauren’s longing for Sam who once humiliated her, Sam’s constant need for control, and Ben’s repulsion at being constantly stepped on by others. All their rough surfaces catch sparks throughout, tearing them apart as the wait for the phantom seems to lay everyone’s true thoughts and fears bare in front of each other. The overlapped dialogue in these heated arguments are very well written, Shvorne and Grant in particular stood out with their superb delivery of every biting remark in-between volleys of vitriol and questions.
Grant delivers one of my favourite dialogues as he bites into Sam and Jenny’s attitude towards the very building and the people around them, as middle class vampires tearing out the very walls that build the community around them. The play is at it’s best when the ghost is merely a catalyst for people to unearth their seemingly unrelated inner monologue at each other, sometimes in a nervous breakdown and sometimes in shouts that rock the room. However when all the tension reaches the climax, this is all done away with in a single scene.
The twist of the story is, without spoiling it, easily the single worst thing in the play by a wide margin. It singlehandedly undid any goodwill the show had earned. Committing one of the cardinal sins of writing a twist by making it ‘un-predictable’ by being totally impossible to predict with ‘clues’ that don’t make logical sense. There are a million ways you can end a ghost story whether or not the ghost is real or whether you get to even find that out, but this type of rug pull was utterly insulting to the whole audience. If I could recommend watching only the first hour and 55 minutes I would, because the last 5 minutes easily undo all the good work of every actor, set designer, producer and worker involved in this production.
This show runs at the Edinburgh Playhouse until 30th May. Tickets here.