Ghost stories are a tough ask in the theatre. While all forms of storytelling require a suspension of disbelief, there is something about the medium of theatre that makes this task both more difficult and less rewarding. Perhaps it’s the communal nature of the art form. A cinema audience is able to submerge into private hells, whereas theatre audiences face their fears together. And fears faced are fears halved.
English playwright Danny Robins’ 2:22 – A Ghost Story follows slavishly the template of the horror film, especially its recent tendency to turn its monsters into metaphors for psychological states. Where The Babadook stands in for maternal anxiety, and the evil in It Follows represents sexual awakening, the ghost of 2.22 acts as a metaphor for marital strife. The rift here is less between the living and the dead as between husband and wife.
Jenny (Gemma Ward) is a typical new mum, highly stressed and burnt out, looking for support from husband Sam (Remy Hii). What is atypical is the source of her anxiety: the uncanny sounds coming from the baby monitor in her daughter’s room, for the previous three nights at precisely 2.22am. When Sam’s old friend Lauren (Ruby Rose) comes to visit, trailing her builder-boyfriend Ben (Daniel MacPherson), Jenny co-opts them into a vigil. They’ll all stay until the allotted time, to see if the ghost returns.
Sam is not just a sceptic, he’s actively hostile to the idea of a ghost haunting their baby daughter, and spends most of the night highlighting his own rationality at the expense of his wife’s patience. Lauren is a psychologist and tends to think all horrors are based in the mind, although she isn’t unsympathetic to Jenny’s fears. Ben is a believer, having had a formative experience with the paranormal as a child. The theme of rationality and belief, and the seesawing Socratic dialogue between the two worldviews, distracts us as the clock ticks down.
The conceit is a nifty one, and Robins has a wealth of solid material with which to work. Jenny’s Catholic background, a belief system Sam’s hyper-rationality has basically quashed, is depicted as both a salve and a torment. Lauren’s focus on psychological states nevertheless leaves her blind to her own. And Ben, in the play’s most fascinating discursion, rails against gentrification and its tendency to paper over the lives of the poor. The ghosts of the underclass are buried in the walls of the wealthy.
All of which makes the play sound smarter and more ambitious than it really is. Because Robins’ interest in these larger themes is at every turn subsumed into the demands of genre, and even the purely mechanical pleasures of the plot are marred by clunky character development and jump scares so inauthentic they verge on the parodic. The play is literally interrupted every 20 minutes or so by the sudden and excruciatingly loud sounds of foxes fucking. No joke.
Most of the acting is as wooden and unconvincing as the dialogue. Ward has an underpowered voice and awkward physical presence that compromises her heightened register – what should be a barely contained terror comes across as merely breathless and wispy – and Rose, initially poised and angular, fumbles Lauren’s descent into drunken morbidity. Hii is particularly grating in an admittedly poorly written part; his scientific resolve is just an excuse for him to mansplain the entire play to us. MacPherson is the only actor having any fun, with an avuncular performance as the tradie who can turn on a seance when required. He is decent, but next to the others he looks virtuosic.
Matthew Dunster’s direction is oddly leaden, as if he didn’t get enough time with his actors. Given that this English play has been rather meticulously translated into an Australian context – the house is located in the Melbourne’s inner west, “between the markets and the Maribyrnong”, and the Warrumbungle national park plays a key role in the plot – it seems strange that the production isn’t more settled. Anna Fleischle’s set, with its pre-renovated walls visible beneath the soulless modernisation, is terrific until a character explains it to us. Lucy Carter’s lighting design is effective until it’s overused.
Most problematic of all, and in many ways definitive of the flaws in this entire concept, is the sound design by Ian Dickinson. Silence is horror cinema’s chief asset, aided by the sudden escalation of music that indicates present danger. Think of György Ligeti’s deeply unsettling soundscapes in The Shining or Bernard Herrmann’s stabbing strings in Psycho. Robins leaves no room at all for silence: the characters talk endlessly in circular arguments about ghosts and the afterlife, intellectualising what should remain subliminal. Those sudden screeching foxes start to seem like a desperate attempt to keep the audience awake rather than a natural explosion of the irrational.
2:22 – A Ghost Story implores us at the end to “Shhh … Please don’t tell”, in the tradition of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap or Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. But this twist ending – one of those resolutions that negates what has come before and reduces the entire evening to a single, meaningless shock – is so trite, you’ll refrain from sharing it out of sheer embarrassment. Now that’s scary.
At Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne, until 20 August.
