This spooky and brilliantly economical play written and directed by Jamie Armitage does exactly what it says on the tin, insinuating the looming terror and sudden shocks of a horror tale directly into the audience’s aural cavities. While we watch personable George Blagden (Versailles/Vikings) on stage as a young actor recording a ghost story for an audiobook, interacting in a studio with a dummy head studded with microphones, his voice is relayed to us through headphones.
So if he whispers in the head’s left ear, we hear it in our left ear. If he circles behind it, we hear him behind us, even though we can see him in front of us. Creaks, clanks and a whispering voice – scream-king Mark Gatiss, uncredited - leak directly into our skulls, while an ominous heartbeat seems periodically to throb through the very fabric of the theatre. Jonathan Livingstone’s blokey engineer, in the windowed control room behind Blagden, is mostly shrouded in darkness, but sudden blasts of light and bursts of sound reveal… well, that would be telling. Suffice to say it’s very, very creepy.
The show was conceived by Armitage in collaboration with leading sound designers and brothers Ben and Max Ringham and puts to devastatingly effective use binaural techniques that they’ve deployed in previous productions, and which others have used with greater or lesser success in Complicite’s The Encounter in 2016 and the 2023 David Tennant/Cush Jumbo Macbeth at the Donmar. A Ghost in Your Ear also arrives at the tail end of a resurgence in theatrical spine-tinglers, which all rely on the same repertoire of jump scares and jolts. Those who have seen 2:22 a Ghost Story or Paranormal Activity may see some of the thrills coming.
Nevertheless, this is a meticulous and artfully conceived blend of storytelling, technology and actorly skill, running a tight 90 minutes. The studio Blagden’s character inhabits is on a remote industrial estate, as isolated as the empty country house in the story he’s narrating. He is locked inside once the recording light goes on, much as we have voluntarily shut ourselves into the auditorium in order to be frightened. Supposedly reading from a screen, he experiences the story of slowly-revealed familial cruelty in real time, just like us. His emotional arc is brilliantly modulated: at first cocksure and relaxed, then gradually possessed of tremors and finally panting, desperate with fear.
The banter that Armitage writes for Blagden and Livingstone to give us breathing space between the moments of high tension is unfortunately stilted at times. But it enables him to smuggle in a neat narrative framing device that I won’t give away, except to say that it references the enduring appeal of supernatural stories and the idea of a haunting passed on from generation to generation. The dummy head is a clever touch too, giving Blagden a focal point to react to and move around. Removing it from its stand at one point he addresses it like Yorick’s skull, and cradles it to his chest, where it conveys his own, racing pulse into our ears.
And the scares? Again, it would be a shame to spoil them, but they are extremely potent and even those that can be anticipated induce horripilation (a lovely word one rarely gets to use, it describes hair stirring on a scalp tightening with dread).
Armitage originally made his name as co-director of SIX: the Musical, and mounted his own debut play An Interrogation at the Edinburgh Festival in 2023 and then in Hampstead’s studio space. That work used video technology to rejuvenate the familiar tropes of the cat-and-mouse police interview. Similarly, the Ringhams’ aural tricks enable him to put a new spin on the beloved conventions of the ghost story in the same, intimate venue.
Working in genre fiction has its hazards: in both cases, Armitage’s dialogue lapses occasionally into hackneyed phrases. But he’s a writer to watch. And, it turns out, to listen to.
Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, to Jan 31; hampsteadtheatre.com
