Recently, British theater has suffered from stage fright due to an increase in the number of shows with supernatural themes. The successes of A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic and the spooky thriller 2:22 A Ghost Story (now on tour), not to mention the eerie congruence of Macbeths, testify to a palpable increase in our passion for tingles. 2024 begins with The Enfield Haunting at the Ambassadors: a new play by Paul Unwin (starring Catherine Tate and David Threlfall) about the infamous case of the late 1970s involving a poltergeist-infested ordinary house in North London.
These shows use the tricks of the trade to create the necessary chilling atmosphere. But they are unconsciously helped by the strange, otherworldly aspect that many theaters possess, with many telling their own ghost stories.
Danny Robins, the author of 2:22 and an open-minded researcher into the supernatural, now has a popular touring show called Uncanny, based on his podcast. His recent 42-day tour of Britain became an unofficial 'census' of theater ghosts, he suggests; only three or four locations had no related ghost story to convey. And surprisingly often he was lucky enough to find confirmation from eyewitness accounts in the audience.
"There was a great example in Worthing. We were in the Pavilion, but the theater is linked to the Connaught, where there are reports of a 'grey lady'. This guy [in the audience] said, "I saw her," and told us a story about working in the fly gallery late at night. He said, "I saw this woman and she looked as real as you do now." It scared him so much that he took two weeks off and had to move to another role.
"Looked at together you start to see trends," Robins continues. "About 60 percent of theaters had a 'gray lady', ranging from medieval nuns to manageress characters. If I had to break it down, I'd say the stories fell into three broad categories: stories of tragic love, stories of failure and frustration, and then cases involving accidental injury and death.
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The story of failure that stuck with him most involved a groaning ghost at the Glasgow Theater Royal - "a woman called Nora, a cleaning lady who always dreamed of going on stage. She was given the opportunity to audition and apparently was so terrible that she was laughed off stage - and threw herself to her death out of shame. So many people who work in theater would identify with that feeling of pain and rejection.
The doyen of knowledge in this field is Nick Bromley, an experienced West End company stage manager who has written a valuable compendium of the best stories (Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres). It includes its own shocking encounters, including one apparently involving the mischievous ghost of Joe Orton during a West End performance of the play Prick Up Your Ears in 2009.
The A-list actors in his book include Judi Dench and Patrick Stewart. Dench believes she may have seen the 'Haymarket' ghost (19th century manager John Baldwin Buckstone) at a memorial service for actor Michael Denison in 1998. Stewart was shocked when he briefly saw a figure with him and Ian McKellen on stage. during their 2009 Waiting for Godot, in the same theater. 'He was wearing a belted Norfolk coat. I think he had a shirt - a rather old-fashioned checked shirt with a tie under the jacket, and he was wearing twill cavalry trousers and suede boots." Bromley isn't sure who that might be ("this appearance remains anonymous").
He has entries for more than 50 venues, the most substantial of which is London's oldest theatre, the Theater Royal Drury Lane: the supposed stage for the clown Joseph Grimaldi (who likes to give actors an encouraging kick in the butt), the comedian and panto dame Dan Leno, usually announced by the scent of lavender, and the mysterious 'man in grey', an 18th century figure wearing a gray riding cloak, who was reportedly sighted en masse from the stage in the auditorium in 1939 by the cast of Ivor Novello's The Dancing Years during a photo call.
I was sure the current owner of the 'Lane - Andrew Lloyd Webber - would have stories about the place and its other theaters up his sleeve. But unfortunately he tells me he's never seen one ("Although I did have a house in Eaton Square where there was a poltergeist," he adds casually. "It would take, for example, theater scripts and put them in a neat pile in a or other obscure Finally we had to ask a priest to bless it, and it left!")
However, his former collaborator, the impresario Cameron Mackintosh, has something to say about 'the Lane'. "On the opening night of Miss Saigon in 1989, I walked onto the huge stage and stood there [designer] Johannes Napier. As we looked into the beautiful empty hall, we felt a chill and heard some light sounds above our heads in the grid. Even the light we were in seemed to take on a mysterious hue. Within a minute it was gone, but we both felt some presence. Later the theatre's old manager, George Hoare, told me: 'That was the Man in Grey. He always comes along when you're about to score a big hit!'"
Neat and reassuringly good-natured. The same cannot be said of the story of Christian Edwards, the actor who satirically masked himself for years as a 'West End Producer'. In about 2011 he was a tour guide at Drury Lane, and while talking to a group of American tourists about the space under the stage, he alluded to a girl called June who had died in a [1909] program called The Whip. "While I was talking - and this sounds crazy - a bunch of screws ended up in front of my face. I heard a noise and saw the shadow of something behind me. One of the attendees said: 'Oh my god, the effects you make are amazing!'. I said, 'This isn't part of the tour. Maybe I said something wrong.' I cut the tour short and it took me a long time to get back under that stage."
One can clearly discount some ghost stories as the product of confusion and overactive imagination, or of attention-seeking, or the theater's love of a good yarn, but the amount of material begins to weigh on the skeptical mind. None other than Richard Eyre - former artistic director of the National Theater - would ask you to think twice before dismissing these things out of hand.
He identifies the séance-like nature of the theater itself, where so much imagination and emotion is invested en masse, and reflects: "I've never had a problem with the appearance of ghosts. I'm one of the few people who didn't think about it [Diana] scenes in The Crown were ridiculous. Theaters are places of intense experience, for audiences and practitioners. There is an unnatural level of energy - they are absolutely charged."
He himself saw a ghost in the late 1960s while working at the Lyceum in Edinburgh. "It must have been about 1am. I was working all night, lighting a show, and I saw a woman in white, in period clothing, walking across the back of the upper circle. She walked slowly and then was gone. Then I told the two technicians I was working with, and they said, 'Yes, we know about that ghost, but we've never seen her!'".
And it is at the Lyceum where we will linger for the final and most romantic vignette of stage-stricken or trapped ghosts. David Greig, the current artistic director, tells me the story, as matter-of-factly as he can be: "It was during the pandemic - October 2021," he says. "I got locked up after a technical run for Life Is a Dream. I was writing in the gods and no one knew I was there. So I had to call and wait for the reception staff to return with the keys. While I waited, I saw a young woman and a young man on stage. She was dressed in a very chic 1940s cocktail dress and he was wearing an army uniform. In the half-darkness they started dancing together to music I couldn't hear.
"I assumed it was two actors, but no one was allowed to be there, so I shouted. They looked at me and left the stage. When the reception person arrived, we looked everywhere but no one was there. Later I was told by our union representative - one of our longest-serving employees - that another technician had once told him that there had been a flight operator who had had a love affair with a stage manager. He had died in the war and she had committed suicide out of love. The man told him that the couple was sometimes seen dancing on stage. I have no idea how I saw what I saw, but it struck me that my vision was closely aligned with that story."
The Enfield Haunting is open from January 10 to March 2 at the Ambassadors, London WC2, (0333 009 6690; enfieldhauntingplay.com); further dates for Danny Robins' Uncanny tour will be announced soon at dannyrobins.com; Nick Bromley's 'Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres' is published by LNP Books (lnpbooks.co.uk); book a tour of Theater Royal Drury Lane here: lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/theatre-royal-drury-lane-tours/
