The leap scares are completely positioned in Mark Ravenhill’s delightfully tense new manufacturing which is targeted on the historical past and hauntings of the King’s Head theatre, the place he's co-artistic director. Although patchy in locations, it’s a fright-full pleasure to look at.
The Haunting of Susan A is a lecture, a ghost story, and a love letter to this crumbly outdated stage. Ravenhill opens the present with snippets of historical past, imagining which well-known individuals might need stopped by for a pint, whose blood is likely to be caked into these partitions. When he's interrupted by an actor itching to inform her story of a previous efficiency on this stage, the story splits in two. With Ravenhill banished to his seat, Suzanne Ahmet takes cost.
Vibrating with worry and fury, the manufacturing begins to hum. Jo Underwood’s lighting design creates a phenomenal, eerie glow as Ahmet tells us a ghost story. An actual one, she insists. Nerves construct because the manufacturing toys with the theatre’s outdated and defective lighting desk, dangling the fixed risk of the room plunging into complete darkness. Within the nook, a leak causes an irregular drip drip drip right into a steel bucket; low finances, excessive drama.
Ravenhill’s historical past is fascinating and Ahmet’s story is tense, however the two strands combat for stage time awkwardly. The excellence between their efficiency kinds jars; it’s clear she’s an actor and he’s not. This would possibly change over the present’s run, however as they argue, you possibly can hear one ready for the opposite to interrupt.
By placing the theatre’s previous because the centre of the story, appearing turns into a type of haunting, and that is the place the present actually finds its ft. Greater than a ghoulish horror or a historic lecture, that is an ode to the area, to the tales informed right here through the years, and to the straightforward energy of constructing an viewers cower with nothing greater than the horrible, tangible worry of a hand hovering over your shoulder. The stomach-deep tug prepared you to show round. The all-consuming worry of what is going to occur while you do.
On the King’s Head, London, till 26 June
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