Fresh from the West End, and currently on its first UK tour, “2:22 A Ghost Story” has all the set up of a standard horror. An empty house, creaky floorboards, an Alexa that won’t play ball, and a baby monitor that picks up some strange voices…
The play is probably best known for its West-End celebrity casting (Cheryl Cole, Lily Allen, Tom Felton and James Buckley have all starred previously), although little is known about the plot, making the play even more intriguing. The tour version also has a cast made up of household TV actors. Fiona Wade (of Emmerdale fame) plays new mum Jenny, who, whilst her husband is away, hears voices and footsteps every night at 2:22am.
When her husband Sam (George Rainsford, of Casualty fame) returns, Jenny tells him what she’s heard, although Sam is quick to dismiss her fears as an overactive imagination. Still, with the support of their two friends Lauren (Vera Chok) and Ben (Jay McGuiness), they agree to stay up until 2:22 to uncover the mystery.
What follows is a play that is mostly about waiting. Facing a long evening ahead, the four characters each get their moment in the spotlight, as they discuss their beliefs and suspicions about Jenny’s “ghost”. The argument of “ghosts are real/not real” makes the show fairly repetitive, with scientist Sam’s insistence that there must be a logical explanation to the nighttime noises continually hitting brick walls with the other characters. The characters go round and round in these circles for the majority of the show, and all the while the audience wait for something (anything) to happen.
The set for the show is impressive, although not utilised enough. I was expecting the set to be full of different scares and illusions, as the play progressed and the characters begin to get teased by the ghosts. It was not to be. Apart from a table that moves on it’s own, the set is static and the jump-scares are few and far between, the play instead choosing to focus on the philosophical discussion of whether or not ghosts exist.
The acting feels a little over-the-top, and the characters are not particularly likeable, with the exception of McGuinness, who feels the most down-to-earth (which is ironic, as his character is the one who vehemently believes in the supernatural). The production itself is stylish though, with mood-lighting helping to create a sense of foreboding, and each scene interspersed with loud, sudden screams, which help to keep the audience awake if nothing else.
Throughout the play, digital clocks tick away the minutes to 2:22, which inevitably comes at the end of the play. This, however, just creates the sense of waiting for the play to be over. I was more interested in what would happen when 2:22 struck, rather than what was happening in the meantime. Everything else began to feel like filler, but that was the entire play.
The play ends with a twist, which I didn’t see coming, and which I won’t spoil here. But the journey to arrive at this twist was, in my opinion, uninteresting and, dare I say, boring. Clearly other audience members disagreed with my view, as the actors earned standing ovations from some at the end of the show. They clearly saw something in the production that I missed.
Overall, this is a very slick production, put together with a West End budget, but ultimately let down by a boring story. A good example of a show that has been marketed well, but doesn’t live up to the hype.
Tom Morley, May 2024
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