Theatre review: The Enfield Haunting

One of the most famous poltergeist cases ever documented, The Enfield Haunting has been the subject of multiple books, movies and TV series, so a stage version - courtesy of writer Paul Unwin and director Angus Jackson - was probably inevitable. Every so often someone attempts to do big jump scares in the theatre, and with the latest spooky juggernaut 2:22 A Ghost Story mainly known for its rotating cast of random leading ladies with big Instagram followings, there's still room for something to provide the actual chills and thrills recently vacated by The Woman In Black. But while there's some interesting elements to this starrily-cast premiere, the screams of audience terror they might have been hoping for don't come. Lee Newby's set certainly looks creepy enough - the innards of the small, cluttered two-storey house where a young family has lived for 5 years.

Peggy Hodgson (Catherine Tate) looks after her three children on her own: Her marriage recently ended, but her ex-husband still turns up to see the kids about once a week - although that's usually a drunken banging on the door in the middle of the night.

Since then, teenage daughters Margaret (Grace Molony) and Janet (Ella Schrey-Yeats) have become national and international celebrities due to the seemingly supernatural events that have started to revolve around them. The youngest, Janet, in particular, seems to be possessed at times, speaking in tongues and doing frantic automatic writing. (The women subsequently confessed to faking some, but not all of the phenomena, and one of the supernatural theories the play considers is that their fakery invited in something real.) As well as journalists the case has attracted a pair of psychic investigators who spend most nights in the house.

On the night when the story takes place, the main expert is off meeting some spontaneously combusting Brazilians but his tech assistant, retired soldier Maurice Grosse (David Threlfall,) has turned up unexpectedly on his own to go over the recordings, and to spend some time alone with Janet. (It's a relief when the forthright Margaret hangs a lantern on the dodginess of all these older men who want to spend time looking after the teenage girls, especially with this being the 1970s. Never mind a g-g-g-g-ghost, you don't need that elephant in the room.)

The fact that Carolyn Downing's sound design offers up a couple of little jump scares suggests the creatives did actually have a horror element in mind, but it never comes close to materialising, and after some early shocked noises, probably more from them winding themselves up in anticipation than anything happening on stage, the audience soon sounded quiet and comfortable, which is all very well in... almost anything but this. I think the great-looking set is actually part of what's sabotaging the scares, as there's too much of it on the two levels. You don't want the audience to be looking straight at the point where something ghoulish is going to appear, but you do want it to be in their field of vision. Here it goes in the opposite direction: You're invariably focused on the ground floor when something scary happens in the bedroom, or vice versa, so by the time you register an apparition the element of surprise is gone.

Tate is a highlight though: She pulls off one of the most difficult things to portray, someone whose behaviour is constantly contradicting itself but makes its own kind of sense, as Peggy's fear for her children makes her do things she doesn't want to: This includes giving neighbour Rey (Mo Sesay) a key to her house which he uses indiscriminately, even though she doesn't much like him or his obvious crush on her. Her nerves also mean we get regular mood swings, taking her from fiercely protective to blaming her daughters for bringing this all on them.

But like the audience, Unwin doesn't seem to be looking at where any of the scares are, instead throwing in a number of disparate elements. With poltergeist stories famous for focusing on the emotional teenagers the phenomena are drawn to, you'd expect the girls to be the focus, but the writer is distracted by wanting to follow Grosse's tragic backstory, as well as putting an actual g-g-g-g-ghost on stage. I kept expecting rug-pull moments that never came: In a news story famous for the levitation photos that definitely don't look suspiciously like a teenage girl trampolining on her bed, when Grosse carefully covers Janet with a blanket, that's the magic trick I was expecting, but it never comes. And I thought a final twist in which youngest child Jimmy (Jude Coward Nicoll or Noah Leggott) turned out to be at the centre of the haunting might be on the cards, but it turns out there's no misdirection going on, Unwin just isn't actually interested in him. There's a few interesting things going on here, but if they don't include the one thing the show's selling itself on, does it even matter?

The Enfield Haunting by Paul Unwin is booking until the 2nd of March at the Ambassadors Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.