Ghost Stories takes care to manipulate you from the moment you step into the theatre. Ghostly sounds are piped into the bar so the pressure is being applied even here. Once in the auditorium it appears as though there is some sort of building work going on. None of the house lights are working, the space instead being illuminated by strings of caged bulbs, flickering ominously.
The evening begins with the rather sudden arrival of Professor Goodman (Simon Lipkin) who starts a lecture about his study of people who claim to have had super natural experiences. It’s all getting rather dull (“Stay with me,” he urges at one point). Then we are taken into the next level of the story as the first of the people he has interviewed about their experiences is brought to life on stage. So we have an episodic approach, with the Professor as our anchor. As he says, people like to look for patterns. And it seems there is one emerging here, with the professor telling us about a case, then the curtain lifting to reveal that story in front of us. And he tells us there will be three such stories. But we also know enough about writers Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman to suspect that there will be more to this pattern than there appears.
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