Steve Pemberton, left, and Reece Shearsmith: Giving the inside story on Inside No. 9 at York Barbican
ARE you ready to step through the door marked No. 9, ask Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton as the Inside No. 9 duo invite you to join them at York Barbican on December 10?
To celebrate the release of The Insider’s Guide To Inside No.9, Hull-born Shearsmith and Pemberton will take to the York stage at 7.30pm for an informative, humorous guide to the creation of their dark-humoured BAFTA-winning BBC comedy anthology.
Prompted by host Mark Salisbury, author of The Insider’s Guide, they will share behind-the-scenes stories and shocking secrets from memorable episodes.
“There may be singing. And dancing,” say Pemberton and Shearsmith. “And as we respond to fan questions, every night [on the tour] will be completely unique.”
Pemberton and Shearsmith forged their comedy partnership in student days at Bretton Hall College, near Wakefield, West Yorkshire, where they first linked up with League Of Gentlemen cohort Mark Gatiss, being joined later by Leeds-born Jeremy Dyson.
First aired on BBC2 on February 5 2014 and now running to six series, Inside No. 9 comprises self-contained stories with dark themes that centre on different characters, each one set inside either a mansion, a dressing room or a flat numbered No. 9.
Tickets for the inside track on Inside No. 9: An Evening With Reece Shearsmith & Steve Pemberton go on sale on Friday at 10am at yorkbarbican.co.uk. Further Yorkshire shows: Hull City Hall, December 14; Harrogate Convention Centre, December 19; box office: ticketmaster.co.uk.
The tour poster for Inside No. 9: An Evening With Reece Shearsmith & Steve Pemberton
Double act: Niall Ransome’s Dr Watson and Jake Ferretti’s Sherlock Holmes shake up The Hound Of The Baskervilles
MYSTERY and murk have abounded in York Theatre Royal’s hit and mist Haunted Season.
That mist descends once more, over a desolate Dartmoor of spectral trees and a grand house, looming in the distance, where the lights seem to twitch nervously. Except, this time, the foggy haze is emanating from Sir Charles Baskerville’s newly lit cigar in the country air, his face matching the contentment of a bygone Hamlet advert.
A bewhiskered, elegantly dressed Serena Manteghi has entered David Woodhead’s nocturnal set in the first guise of a hatful of such roles – putting the ‘Man’ into Manteghi as it were – on a fright-night when she will be playing men only.
Just as we are appreciating her miming – with immaculate timing to the sound-effect accompaniment of the opening and closing of gates and striking of a match – suddenly a ghastly howl quickens the heart.
Taking on 20 roles? Bring it on, say Niall Ransome, Jake Ferretti and Serena Manteghi
A look of terror, a futile attempt to escape, and Sir Charles and his cigar have snuffed it.
So far, so scary, albeit in the exaggerated manner of a silent film, in a startling start where the titular hound is but a sound. Spooky, melodramatic, beyond immediate explanation: this is the perfect Conan Doyle recipe for the arrival of Holmes and Watson.
On bound Jake Ferretti’s superior Sherlock and Niall Ransome’s hearty doctor, promptly shattering theatre’s fourth wall as they demand applause for Serena’s miming, then introduce themselves and how the show will work.
Here comes the “howlarious” version of The Hound Of The Baskervilles penned in 2007 for comedy clowns Peepolykus by John Nicholson and Steven Canny and now, 150 productions down the line, picked up by Bolton Octagon Theatre artistic director Lotte Wakeham and the Original Theatre Company.
In the frame: Jake Ferretti, Niall Ransome and Serena Manteghi in The Hound Of The Baskervilles
It still carries its original health warning for “anyone suffering from a heart condition, a nervous disorder, low self-esteem or a general inability to tell fact from fiction”. In truth, the cast and indeed the characters are most at risk. The audience, by comparison, needs only sit back, laugh loudly and burst regularly into applause.
The facts are that Ferretti, Ransome and Manteghi must play 20 characters between them, multifarious accents et al. Isn’t the heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, supposed to be Canadian, Serena is asked. “Yes, but I can’t do that accent,” she replies.
In the original, the cast of three were all men and Holmes suddenly turned Spanish in the handsome form of Javier Marzan. Such is the strength yet flexibility of Canny and Nicholson’s format that we now have the added pleasure of watching Serena Manteghi as she deepens her voice, mirrors male movements and tropes, breaks out of character under emotional duress at the first act’s finale, and once more confirms what an outstanding talent this former University of York student is.
This time it is Ferretti’s Costa Rican Miss Stapleton who brings an Hispanic flourish to the production, directed crisply and crunchily for the tour by Tim Jackson.
Funny business: Niall Ransome’s Dr Watson, Serena Manteghi’s Sir Henry Baskerville and Jake Ferretti’s Sherlock Holmes make light of tackling the mystery
Comedy, yes, but send-up or spoof, no. Canny and Nicholson are true to Conan Doyle’s story, re-imagining scenes rather than inventing new ones, but always with the fourth wall in danger of needing new bricks again.
“We wanted to be as faithful as possible to the drama and intrigue of Conan Doyle’s masterpiece, while setting about discovering how to use a company of three actors to tell the story as inventively as we could,” said the writers.
“It became clear very quickly that simple props, rapid costume and scene changes, precision comic timing and a determined commitment to stupidity were going to play a significant part in our version.”
Think of the works of Lip Service’s Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding, Nobby Dimon’s North Country Theatre and Mikron Theatre, or Patrick Barlow’s “touching up” of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, or Mischief’s The Play That Goes Wrong, as Ferretti, Ransome and Manteghi keep veering off the straight and narrow but somehow still reach their intended destination.
Niall Ransome’s Dr Watson has a blast in The Hound Of The Baskervilles
In this case, this is the art of making a drama out of staff-shortage crisis – how very 2021 – but not needing to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear because the source material is from the top drawer.
Canny and Nicholson have it right in saying the “determined commitment to stupidity” is crucial too: a characteristic that benefits from Ferretti’s Holmes, in particular, taking everything so seriously, or the pathos in Ransome’s even straighter-faced Watson having a propensity to draw his pistol on anyone and anything, especially woodland animals.
This peaks at the outset of the second act after a Tweet “complaint” from an audience member – it was a letter in the original! – about Holmes’s lack of commitment to solving the crime prompts Ferretti to demand the right to re-enact the entire first half. A breathless snapshot replay ensues.
Someone so bright acting so dumb and supercilious is but one of the delights of seeing the Holmes and Watson partnership being poked out of its comfort zone, a shift as rewarding in its comedic interplay as Morecambe and Wise’s jousting.
The Hound Of The Baskervilles goes barking mad in this amiably daft comedy, at the cost of Woman In Black or Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories scares, but that sacrifice of bite is a price well worth paying. Howlarious indeed.
Performances: 7.30pm, plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
The lecturer in Ghost Stories: “The supernatural is purely a trick of the mind,” he says…but is it?
THE Grand Opera House, York, already
has its own ghost, one said to call out the first name of a new member of staff
in the quiet of the auditorium on first acquaintance.
No doubt that will intrigue Professor
Goodman, ahead of the lecturer’s visit to the Cumberland Street theatre from
March 10 to 14 as the investigative fulcrum of writer-directors Andy Nyman and
Jeremy Dyson’s “supernatural sensation”, Ghost Stories, on its first national
tour.
On the road since January 7 after
completing its latest West End run at The Ambassadors Theatre, London, the
Lyric Hammersmith Theatre production should feel at home in York, the
self-proclaimed most haunted city in Europe.
What’s more, with the Grand Opera
House’s proximity to the York Dungeon, “York’s scariest tourist attraction”,
where better for Nyman and Dyson’s global hit to be spooking?
Premiered a decade ago and turned into
a film too, Ghost Stories invites its captive audience to “enter a nightmarish
world, full of thrilling twists and turns, where all your deepest fears and
most disturbing thoughts are imagined live on stage”.
Expect a “fully sensory and
electrifying encounter in the ultimate twisted love-letter to horror, a
supernatural edge-of-your-seat theatrical experience like no other”, as
Professor Goodman strives to prove the supernatural is “purely a trick of the
mind” in the face of three stories that beg to differ.
“Ghost Stories has never really gone
away, running in various incarnations since the original production a decade
ago, going into the West End, then Canada, Moscow,” says co-writer Jeremy
Dyson, best known for his work with those twisted humourists The League Of
Gentlemen.
“It was done in Russian in Russia but we
had to maintain that it was set in Britain because apparently no Russian is
afraid of a ghost.”
Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson: co-writers and directors of Ghost Stories
The latest British incarnation opened
at the Lyric Hammersmith last March, whereupon it was picked up by commercial
producers keen to take it on the road. “We’d always wanted to do that but never
been able to do so, even though we knew just how much people wanted to see it,
but we were told it ‘wasn’t tourable’.”
Until now, until Jon Bausor came up
with a design that could play both The Ambassadors Theatre and theatres around
the country.
“He’s made it possible to squash the
set into a van!” says Jeremy, who lives in Ilkley, by the way. “Each time we’ve
staged the play, we’ve been able to solve another problem, get rid of another
niggle, and finally we have the production that is totally to our satisfaction.
“The show’s been going down really well
on tour, and it will fit perfectly into York with all its ghost stories and the
York Dungeon opposite the Grand Opera House.”
Why are we so drawn to ghost stories,
Jeremy? “I think there are lots of reasons,” he says. “One of them is obvious: death
and the afterlife, which is a personal concern to all of us, and ghost stories
are a way to approach such an overwhelming concern.
“That’s particularly so in our
increasingly secular society, where there’s a hunger for the mysterious, the
uncanny, the inexplicable, which once upon a time would have come under the
auspices of the church and religion.
“That’s part of it, and also when it
comes to a show like Ghost Stories, there’s the entertainment and the thrill,
the fairground element.”
Nyman, London actor, director and
writer, and Dyson, screen and stage writer and author, have been friends for a
“very long time”. “Since we were teenagers, in fact,” says Jeremy. “We met when
we were 15 and one of the things we bonded over was horror movies at the dawn
of the video age, renting those films to watch them together.
The Caretaker: one of the three Ghost Stories to be told at the Grand Opera House, York
“We’ve had our individual careers and
we’d never thought of working together, but out of the blue Andy called me with
this idea of having three men sitting telling ghost stories after he saw The
Vagina Monologues [Eve Ensler’s show with three women telling stories].
“It was a very intriguing idea that was
enough to hook me straightaway, though we then veered away from that initial
construction over a long gestation period.
“Creating Ghost Stories was very much a
case of sitting in a room together, talking about it for a year, and then
getting together, bashing out the outline, working every day for a week, when
we pretty much hammered it out, because we’d been thinking about it for so
long.”
Ghost Stories has drawn comparisons
with Stephen Mallatratt’s stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black,
premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, in 1987 and still running
in the West End, but Jeremy was keen that Ghost Stories should stand in its own
right.
“We wanted very much to create a theatre
experience that we hadn’t had before, in terms of being a very immersive piece
of theatre, and we also like the challenge of taking things that you’re
familiar thematically from horror films and seeing if we could transfer them to
the stage.”
A further element is at play in Ghost
Stories. “Andy and I both have a love of conjuring and magic; Andy has worked
with Derren Brown for 20, so we wanted to build that into the show’s
structure,” says Jeremy. “We wanted to look at how you can create a magical effect
with a combination of storytelling and technology, and that’s what we’ve
achieved.”
Ghost Stories promises “moments of extreme shock and tension” at the Grand Opera House, York, from March 10 to 14. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or at atgtickets.com/york. Unsuitable for anyone under 15 years old.
