Jamie McKeller’s sarky, sceptical Sam in Neon Crypt’s 2:22 A Ghost Story. Picture: Emma Varley
YORK spook specialists Neon Crypt tend to put comedy first, but Danny Robins’ smart metropolitan thriller 2:22 A Ghost Story is a chance to “scare the absolute beans out of you”, forewarns director Jamie McKeller.
You should know that McKeller and his wife, Laura, have another life as Dr Dorian and Dede Deathly, purveyors of the Deathly Dark Tours ghost walks in York, Europe’s self-anointed “most haunted city”.
This week, our city has a new addition to its hauntings in the form of Robins’ psychological drama, now being staged in traverse for the first time in York after two tour productions under the proscenium arch at the Grand Opera House in May 2024 and April this year.
Traverse places the audience in seats either side of the stage, in this case matched by the seating on the mezzanine level too. “The audience are a part of the story. There is nowhere to escape,” says McKeller, explaining the reasoning behind the design.
Laura McKeller’s Jenny, left, Laura Castle’s Lauren, Jamie McKeller’s Sam and Michael Cornell’s Ben in Neon Crypt’s 2:22 A Ghost Story. Picture: Emma Varley
The set runs the full length of Theatre@41’s black box studio, filling the space with the open-plan kitchen and sitting room that is undergoing renovation by Albanian builders after scientist Sam (McKeller) and teacher-on-maternity-leave Jenny (Laura McKeller) moved in with their baby, Phoebe.
Sam has been away all week observing the dark skies on the island of Sark. For four days, he has not been answering his phone, and in that time, in between busying herself with painting and looking after Phoebe, Jenny has been disturbed by the sound of footsteps and adult crying in the child’s room at 2:22am each night, picked up on the baby monitor. She is becoming convinced the house is haunted.
Tonight Jenny and Sam are hosting their first supper party. American Lauren (Laura Castle), Sam’s best friend since university days, has arrived already with new boyfriend Ben (Michael Cornell), a builder who never left. She is stirring the asparagus risotto, but where is Sam? Ah, here he is, at last, to stir things up with his scepticism and know-all sarcasm.
All the while, Robins’ thriller is suffused with unnerving soundscapes, whether the propulsive incidental music before each half and in between scenes, or the cries of Phoebe needing attention, or more piercingly – and definitely louder than in the Grand Opera House tour shows – the yelps and screeches of foxes in flagrante in the garden. Huge glass patio doors and lighting that responds to movement further shred the nerves every time someone suddenly appears on the terrace.
To go with these noises, unnatural, maybe supernatural things keep happening: Why is the window in Phoebe’s window open and why is white spirit suddenly in the basin of the downstairs loo? Jenny decides they must all stay up until 2:22am to resolve who or what is disturbing the house. An electronic clock to either side of the stage will count down to that fateful/fatal time.
From the gleefully wicked imagination of The Battersea Poltergeist and Uncanny podcaster, broadcaster and journalist Robins, this paranormal thriller is more than a ghost story with Hitchcockian jump scares. He combines the social and cultural wit of a James Graham comedy with a sleight of hand worthy of Derren Brown’s mind games as these bright sparks debate whether they believe in ghosts or not.
Later, Cornell’s Ben, one of those cocksure types who wears no socks, will give both barrels to yuppie intellectual Sam on how the houses where he once lived have been newly gentrified by “posh tw*ts”, who strip out all the interior and make them all look the soulless same. Yet Ben and co are still under the floorboards, he says, like a ghost of the street’s past.
Class warfare plays out between Sam, a non-believer in ghosts, and Ben, who believes in the supernatural. As the trendy wine flows and arguments rise, so too does the sexual heat in an echo of the tensions of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf or a Tennessee Williams play.
2:22 A Ghost Story rivals The Woman In Black for spooks, but now applied with modern technology, not least an unpredictable Alexa, topped off with illusions at the climactic séance conducted by Ben.
McKeller’s cast plays it straight, nothing hammy or Hammer Horror here, to the betterment of Robins’ state-of-the-nation character study: from the choices of wine to Sam’s dinner party playlist (Portishead); from the reference to Sam and Lauren working together for a charity in Africa to the discussion about the lizard, mouse and monkey sections of our brain, and how fear, rather than love, is our most powerful emotion.
2: 22 A Ghost Story is Neon Crypt’s best production yet, satisfying with both its delivery of well orchestrated shocks and alarms and its exposure of uncomfortable truths within the verbal jousting that is as witty as it is revealing. The warring McKellers times two, Cornell’s obdurate Ben and Castle’s whip-smart Lauren make Robins’ dialogue spark and sizzle, all the more intensely within the claustrophobic traverse.
Neon Crypt in 2:22 A Ghost Story, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, until Saturday, 7.3pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: https://tickets.41monkgate.co.uk/.