The brainchild of Writer/Directors Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman the format is standard fare. It starts as Professor Goodman (Joshua Higgott) a parapsychologist takes his position at a lectern and begins his lecture which challenges humanities over reliance on the supernatural. The theatre lights are switched on and the audience are asked to participate. “Put your hands up if…”. He then embarks on a journey where he shares three testimonies recapping paranormal activity that have occurred.

The first tells the tale of Tony Matthews (Paul Hawkyard) a Night Watchmen; the second Simon Rifkind (Gus Gordon) a student; the third Mike Priddle (Richard Sutton) a businessman. Each is introduced via a tape recording of a previous interview, and that’s when things really get interesting. As each character begins to recount their story we’re whisked away to a re-enactment of the ‘scene of the of the crime’ so to speak.

Light and sound play a major part of this production. Both are ‘amped up’ to 11 in the capable hands of James Farncombe (Lighting Designer) and Nick Manning (Sound). This coupled with the Scott Penrose’s special effects mean that we’re catapulted from bleak, darkened, silence to ‘edge of your seat mania’ with wild abandonment. You suspect something’s going to happen – you just don’t know when. And when it does happen, I guarantee you’ll jump. And I really do mean jump! The shock levels displayed here are akin to those excepted at the cinema not a common or garden theatre performance. Yet it translates perfectly.

In between each vignette Professor Goodman is commanding as the ‘safe pair of hands’ that holds this piece together. He quotes facts, scenarios and statistics at the audience akin to the opening scenes of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series. “Pareidolia…” he cries, (the tendency for incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds; seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns). We’re ‘reminded’ that 51% of the earth’s population is now ‘on-line’, whilst 20 years ago this was 0.4%. Why does this matter? It matters because once a rumour starts, nowadays it has the capability of spreading like wildfire and that this act of digital transference reinforces its validity. So much so that what was just a rumour or misinterpretation now becomes a version of the truth. It’s his mission to dispel such notions.

If you make it to the end of this performance in one piece the twist is very rewarding. Ghost Stories is truly the output of minds that are in touch with the macabre. There is a child-like reverence for horror that is manifest by employing techniques previously only at the disposal of cinema and TV producers. Based on the success of this performance and indeed the show’s run, I have to ask myself, why doesn’t this type of show happen more often?

Ghost Stories is at The Lowry, Salford Quays from 18-22 February 2020.

Read our interview with Ghost Stories writers Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson.

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Supernatural stage scarefest Ghost Stories is something of a modern The Mousetrap. Stick with me. I’m not suggesting Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery has moments of ghoulish terror that would make you leap, petrified from your seat, but if it did you probably wouldn’t know about them because, despite having run for the best part of seven decades, no-one spills the beans on its record-breaking secrets.

Ghost Stories is exactly the same. Despite having premiered a decade ago and been adapted as a film, the secrets that make it such an unusual and successful show have remained elusive, well-guarded as they are by both its creative team and audiences.

“Secrets are precious,” explains the show’s co-creator Andy Nyman. “If you give people a secret that they really enjoy and you ask them nicely to keep it, they do.” If anyone should know about secrets, it’s Nyman. Before writing Ghost Stories, he was the man behind many of Derren Brown’s mystery-filled stage shows and early TV performances.

The secretiveness with Ghost Stories, he says, was born out of frustration that these days “Everything is spoiled for you. Every single film and television trailer ruins plot points. Jeremy and I love the experience of telling people a really good story without them knowing anything about it in advance. You feel the buzz in the audience; it’s an exciting thing to sit and watch.”

So what can we say about Ghost Stories? Well, Andy explains: “Ghost Stories is a 90-minute scary, thrill-ride experience about a professor of parapsychology who investigates three cases. That’s as much as you get and that’s more than we ever used to give.”

If you push him a little harder, he’ll tell you it’s: “A rattling hour and a half that will make you roar with laughter, leap out of your seats and talk about it for a very long time.” And that’s really all you need to know about the specifics of the show; it will make you scream like a banshee and giggle like a schoolchild, probably at the same time.

Nyman and co-writer Jeremy Dyson, best known for his work with The League of Gentlemen, have a long history that reaches back far beyond the start of their Ghost Stories journey, but begins with horror and a shared love of the genre that saw them forge a teenage friendship.

“It probably started, for me, with Scooby Doo,” says Dyson of his infatuation with creepy tales. “There were a lot of scary things for kids around in the 70s, and lots I was enchanted by. Doctor Who would have been a part of that, which in the 70s had a real horror edge to it. So the groundwork was done by the time I was seven or eight years old. People used to buy me collections of ghost stories for my birthdays. They were supposed to be for kids, but they were the most terrifying tales.”

Throw in horror double bills on BBC2, screened at a time when there were only a trio of channels available so “whoever was doing the programming just picked the best stuff,” and public safety films that were as terrifying as any big screen offering, and you have a culture that bred a shared sensibility, certainly between Nyman and Dyson, if not a much wider generation of horror fans.

“It’s a very English genre,” says Dyson. “Certainly when it comes to the supernatural side of things. The English sensibility defined a lot of that. It’s a very English tradition, and there’s no question that’s part of what we’re celebrating in Ghost Stories.”

Yet despite the best British traditions of both horror and theatre, stage horror is not a genre you see very often, even with the fact that a theatre gives you the ability to control the entire 360 degrees of an audience’s experience. The Woman in Black may be a permanent fixture in the West End, but try and name another such show. After Ghost Stories’ emergence at the Lyric Hammersmith 10 years ago, and its immediate success, this has slowly begun to change.

“I think it’s hard to do well,” says Dyson. “You have to have a love both for theatre and for horror. It’s a bit like comedy. People talk about comedy writers having funny bones. I think you need scary bones to write horror.”

“I think snobbery plays a real part in it too,” Nyman adds. “When I was growing up, we’d come to the West End and there was always a good old thriller on, be it Corpse!, Deathtrap or Sleuth. Those stage thrillers have completely gone out of fashion. There is a section of the audience that is completely ignored by plays; a thriller audience that would never dream of going to a play because it’s seen as ‘clever stuff for clever people’. That’s not to say we think we’ve created this brilliant play for that audience, we’ve just written the play that we wanted to see.

After numerous successful runs across London, Ghost Stories is taking its jump-inducing, goosebumps-raising show around the UK for the first time, and Nyman and Dyson could not be happier. “We cannot wait to take it around the country and let people see it and experience it in their home towns,” says Nyman. While audiences outside London have had to wait since 2010 for Ghost Stories to take to the road, they are getting the fully polished, expertly tweaked, 20% scarier version that Nyman and Dyson have been refining for a decade. The majority of the spooky psychological blood-curdler was actually put together in the space of one-week. It was one of those projects where everything clicked. Since then, Nyman and Dyson’s work has been about small changes to give audiences the biggest thrills, laughs, scares and hold-your-breath moments of delicious tension possible.

Nyman and Dyson really do care whether audiences leap out of their seats with a heady mix of fear, excitement and joy, and not just because they want them to keep those all-important secrets. “If people are paying their hard-earned money to see a show you’re putting on, you have a massive responsibility to give them more than they pay for,” says Nyman. “It’s not fair to think ‘that’s good enough, it will be fine’, you have to over-deliver. You’ve got to lose sleep over it. When the show is up and working and you keep tweaking it to get it right, and you see people going away happy, you know the main reason you’ve got to that place is you’ve felt a responsibility and you’ve worked hard at it.”

With that attitude, if anyone deserves to replicate The Mousetrap’s success, it’s them.

Ghost Stories is at The Lowry, Salford Quays from 18-22 February 2020. Read our review.

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The Nunkie Theatre Company’s ‘M R James Project’ brings us ‘Dead Men’s Eyes’, the latest in a series of one man shows, performed by R M Lloyd Parry. This performance sees two short 40-minute plays played out with charming yet devastating effect. At its core the project aims to reinstate the importance and significance of the oral tradition of otherworldly storytelling. Pioneered by Montague Rhodes James; a man who in the preface to ‘Ghost Stories of an Antiquary’ (1904) stated:

‘If any of my stories succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained…’

This evening’s production is comprised of ‘A View from a Hill’ and ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’. ‘A View from a Hill’, performed first, tells of a chance meeting between two men that results in an invitation to a country house. The journey to the country house is described in meticulous detail and acts to inform us of protagonist’s intellect and passion for nature. R M Lloyd Parry’s use of descriptive language, accents and anecdotes paints a vivid picture of a time before smartphones, sat navs and tablets; a time where intellectual pursuits were a pleasure in and of themselves and involved books and time – lots of time.

Upon arrival at the squire’s residence our protagonist wishes to explore the surrounding countryside and is introduced to the binoculars (or field glasses as they’re referred to on stage); they’re heavy and were made by the sinister Baxter. R M Lloyd Parry eerily recounts the story of Baxter a misanthropic, ghoulish, Frankenstein-esque character whose nocturnal activities result in macabre consequences.

After the interval where the sound of Ravel’s ‘Allegro Moderato’ pervades unearthly across the stage the second tale (‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’) has a more traditional quest / explorer plot device. Somerton, an Antiquary, believes that the location of 10,000 gold pieces is hidden in clues found on stained-glass windows (depicting Job, John and Zachariah) and Latin transcripts. Upon finding the treasure Somerton’s life takes a turn for the worst. It’s then he calls upon his friend and cleric, Gregory for assistance. The set-up for this tale is excellent and R M Lloyd Parry’s interplay between humour and extended Latin discourse stretches the audience whilst ensuring they remain engaged.

Sipping what looked like a brandy throughout both performances and sat in an ornate leather backed armchair, lit only by candlelight, we are transfixed. The dark black curtains that envelope the stage transport us from present day Salford to the rural idles of South-West England; and then to Steinfeld, Bavaria in a time-frame that spans back to the 16th century (if we include the biblical references, then the time-frame goes even further back) – all with believable and consummate ease.

This is an intellectual melting pot of Arthur Conan Doyle, Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and Dan Brown rolled into one. I didn’t believe that fear could be injected into an audience during a live performance – but I was wrong; when R M Lloyd Parry wants us to jump, we jump!

Nunkie Theatre Company presents Dead Men’s Eyes Two Ghost Stories by M R James Performed by R M Lloyd Parry was at The Lowry, Salford Quays on 26 October 2019.

See our pick of films at Home and FilmFours festival of horror FilmFear 2019.

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