Ghost Stories (Lyric Hammersmith)

When I heard about Ghost Stories I was intrigued. They had done a great job with the marketing campaign, and the secrecy around not divulging information about what happens in the show definitely works to its benefit. It is capitalising on the way that horror can work when the audience goes in knowing little or nothing of what will happen. This of course builds tension, because as we all know what you imagine is always worse than the reality, so by the time everyone is finally sat in the auditorium they are wound as tightly as a spring, making the tension in the air palpable. I’d seen The Woman in Black before and knew it was possible to pull off effective horror on stage, so I went in genuinely a bit creeped out and excited to perhaps see something different, and who knows, maybe even be a little scared.

So, did Ghost Stories scare me? The answer is no.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the appeal of mainstream horror and how these films play up to genre conventions in a predictable way because they aren’t aimed at horror fans, but instead at an audience unaware of the common tricks, who can still be easily tricked into the jump scares. I remember watching a reaction clip to an audience being shown the trailer for Insidious 2 (a film that I found to be dull and entirely groan worthy) and the audience freaked out… and it was only the trailer! I was genuinely shocked by the reaction and it seemed unbelievable that people could react so viscerally to something on the screen.

So why am I telling you all of this? Well mostly it’s filler, all because we were asked not to talk about what happens during the play. I have seen some fairly positive reviews in the press and again I can’t help but wonder if it’s because theatre critics probably don’t spend most of their time watching horror films, so again fall into that category of being able to buy into the tried and tested conventions laid out on stage for us here. Admittedly there were some clever tricks and some smoke and mirrors type effects that worked well, and Scott Penrose did a mostly great job with the effects – in particular a scene with a night watchman whose office moved around on stage to give the perception of the space being much larger. Nick Manning’s sound design is also very effective and quite eerie in places.

The play is a sort of portmanteau series of ghost stories populated with wholly unlikeable characters that rely on cheap jokes, and each segment plays out in a near identical fashion. I had high hopes from Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, who are both clearly fans of the genre and whose previous work I’ve admired, but Ghost Stories feels like a narrative cop-out that uses predictability and unoriginality to play successfully to the masses. Perhaps I’m just too cynical and desensitised these days, but overall I was very disappointed and more than a little annoyed by the time I emerged.

This was however the most clever twist in a theatre production I had ever seen, and I've seen a few. Without giving anything away in this review, if you have a moment and like a good twist, give it a watch :)