Showing @ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, Mon 28 Feb – Sat 5 Mar
A composite of elements from several of Charles Dickens’ ghostly tales, as well as some details from the author’s own life, Hugh Janes’ play matches theatrical jolts with more profoundly disturbing truths about Victorian society. One of the most vocal consciences of the industrial age, Dickens’ work displays an empathy for the poor and working classes the ghouls currently haunting Westminster sorely lack, and Janes plays not only on the tensions between superstition and the 19th Century’s devout belief in rationality and progress, but also on what that advancement meant for those on the lower rung of the social ladder.
Vintage book appraiser David Filde (Charlie Clements) is invited to the estate of Lord Gray (Paul Nicholas) to evaluate the worth of his father’s dusty library. There, Filde becomes increasingly aware of a presence; first, books spontaneously falling off their shelves, then ghostly whisperings of “help”, and finally and apparition itself. What does it want, and does the cryptic Lord Gray know anything about it?
A pleasant if predictable yarn, director Hugh Wooldridge keeps the scares shrill, shameless and effective, upping the tension with the monotonous clicking of a clock and the distant howl of eerie, incessant winds, leaving the audience perpetually on edge. If there’s a fault in Janes’ script it’s perhaps that he shies away from the kind of extreme characterisation Dickens relished, but the production offers up an effective two-hander in Clements and Nicholas, the one’s naivete and openness playfully at odds with more cynical other. If the play offers few surprises, the emotional weight behind the acute class consciousness that lies at the heart of its mystery plot more than satisfies, with a climax that’s both frightening and affectingly resonant.