James Bye’s Sam takes a vote on a point of debate with Shvorne Marks’s Jenny, Natalie Casey’s Lauren and Grant Kilburn’s Ben in 2:22 A Ghost Story.
THE Battersea Poltergeist and Uncanny podcaster, broadcaster and journalist Danny Robins’s smart, modern-day London supernatural thriller is haunting York once more, only 23 months since last doing so.
Is that return too soon? Tuesday’s audience could have been fuller, and a cursory inspection of the Grand Opera House box-office website reveals a similar picture for the rest of the week, but your reviewer urges those yet to encounter this Best New Play winner in the WhatsOnStage Awards to do so. In a nutshell, if you enjoy regular returnee The Woman In Black, then clock on for 2:22.
Robins’s nerve-shredder looks very much at home in Europe’s self-proclaimed “most haunted city”, but with a notable metropolitan flair to Anna Fleischle’s set design of a state-of-the-art, open-plan, glass-encased kitchen, complemented by a sleight of hand worthy of Derren Brown’s mind games, topped off by Magic Circle member Chris Fisher’s illusions.
Directors Matthew Dunster and Gabriel Vega Weissman crank up the tension pre-show with the too-quick-for-the-naked-eye turnover of numbers on the electronic kitchen clock – never stopping at 2:22 – while Ian Dickinson’s sound design grows ever louder and more discordant to heighten your senses for what lies ahead.
Throughout, Dickinson and lighting designer Lucy Carter will work those senses to the maximum with mischievous glee and a conductor’s sense of perfect timing, regularly interrupting with shocking sounds, screams, blinding lights and a framing of the proscenium arch in red light at the start of each scene. You will judder, you will shudder, you may well shriek, jolted further by the yelps of foxes doing what foxes do in the garden.
Robins combines the cultural and social commentary of James Graham’s dramas with his own canny podcast insights in his paranormal tale of teacher-on-maternity-leave Jenny (Shvorne Marks) and irritatingly always-right scientist Sam (James Bye) hosting their first dinner party since becoming the latest “posh tw*ts” to move into a newly gentrified Greater London neighbourhood.
Sam will be heading back from a work trip on the Isle of Sark. For several nights, however, Jenny has been disturbed at 2:22am precisely by the footstep thud of someone moving around the house and the sound of a man’s crying voice, picked up via the baby monitor in newborn daughter Phoebe’s bedroom. Already convinced the house is haunted, Jenny whiles away the hours each night by painting until that time arrives.
Robins, in partnership with his meticulous directors, is stirring the ingredients of a classic thriller with Hitchcockian chutzpah, just as guest Lauren (Natalie Casey), Jenny’s American psychiatrist best friend since university days, is stirring the risotto on arrival.
Lauren has brought along her latest boyfriend, house renovator Ben (Grant Kilburn) a streetwise, working-class counter to the yuppie London intellectuals, who did up her kitchen, never left and likes to wear his shoes without socks.
Last to arrive is Bye’s Sam, a self-righteous, hyper-opinionated sceptic, apologising for losing his phone on Sark but not for his sarky attitude. Whereupon these two stags lock horns in splenetic class warfare on what turns out to be Ben’s old “manor” before Sam and Jenny stripped out everything, like in every house around them that all end up with the same soulless look, says Ben, who has designed plenty of them.
Sam is a belligerent non-believer in ghosts, adamant that more logical reasons can explain the noises. Ben believes in the supernatural; tipsy Lauren could be persuaded either way. Let’s stay up to 2:22am, suggests Jenny, as the trendy wine flows, the guards drop and the arguments rise – as ultimately does the sexual heat – in an echo of the sparks flying in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf or a Tennessee Williams play, played out in performances that all catch fire.
2:22 A Ghost Story has the spooks to rival The Woman In Black, but now filtered through modern technology (the baby monitor and an erratic Alexa). Then add the razzle-dazzle to and fro of the dialogue in Robins’s state-of-the-nation character study: the choices of wine and risotto for supper; Sam’s dinner party playlist (Massive Attack) and Jenny’s too (The XX); the reference to Sam and Lauren working together for a charity in Africa.
Robins is happy for his quarrelling quartet to discuss how the lizard, mouse and monkey sections of our brain work and to reflect how fear, rather than love, is our most powerful emotion. You may well want to join that debate afterwards, once your heart rate has returned to normal.
2: 22 A Ghost Story has shocks and alarms aplenty, but above all it is uncomfortably, truthfully humorous, becoming all the spicier for the intellectual jousting that sometimes leaves the dialogue almost too hot to touch under Dunster and Weissman’s combustible direction.
Robins fills the hours until 2:22am so thrillingly, building the chills while thickening the plot with relationship revelations; setting up a debate over the existence or non-existence of ghosts; telling the Charles Lindbergh story behind the invention of the baby monitor, and orchestrating the climactic séance conducted by Ben.
You will have to see the show- and you really should – to discover the truth behind the spooks, but all the while Ben serves as a ghost of the street’s past that cannot be erased, no matter the aspirational revamp.
“Shhh, please don’t tell” requests a neon-lit message in shepherd’s-warning red after the final “reveal”. Lips sealed, note taken, review concluded.
2:22 A Ghost Story, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday, 7.30pm nightly plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.
