The trigger warning at the start of this “headphone horror” reminds us that its ghost is not real. All we have to do, if we become overwhelmed, is take off our headphones and the ghost will go away. You don’t really want to, though, because writer Jamie Armitage’s chiller really does delight in giving you the creeps through sound, words, and insinuation.
The audience enters a dark auditorium, stumbling up the stairs in my case. Headphones hang on the back of each seat, enabling you to access this haunting, which has flecks of MR James: a man’s estranged father has just died. When he goes to his remote home to clear it out, it begins to stir with past menace.
As a ghost story, it is full of tried and tested tropes – a house that goes bump in the night, a restless soul, creaking floorboards, moving shadows, thumps, knocks and blinking lights. But they exert their fairground-ride power. Also directed by Armitage and made in collaboration with sound design supremos, Ben and Max Ringham, the drama is set in a recording studio, designed by Anisha Fields, in which an actor (George Blagden) and sound technician (Jonathan Livingstone) are recording an audiobook. There is joshing between them before the story starts, after which the actor becomes increasingly unsettled by what he is narrating, while the break-outs into sudden, outright terror are effective.
The blend of the everyday and uncanny is reminiscent of Inside No 9 and the twist at the end is worthy of that series too. Although its scare tactics are not especially new, from the black-outs to the knife-like music and jump scares, it is sleekly executed and excellently acted by the ever more jittery narrator. What makes it innovative is the focus on listening: there is a creepily intimate sense of sound pouring into our ears, from the swishing windscreen wipers of the man’s drive up to his father’s house, to his accelerated breathing and gasps.
If you’ve come to be scared, you’re in the right place. This is a good, old-fashioned ghost-train of a story.
• At Hampstead Theatre, London, until 31 January
