Yahoo Finance 2:22 A Ghost Story review: Lily Allen’s stage debut is spellbinding
Lily Allen makes a spellbinding stage debut in this clever, remorselessly effective supernatural thriller. The singer is a skittish, magnetic presence as Jenny, a teacher and new mum convinced the London house she and husband Sam are doing up is haunted.
Though her performance is both assured and affecting, glamour and curiosity value are of course part of the equation. Will her emotional range encompass something far bigger than a pop song? Will she be as bad as Madonna?
Fair enough. Right now, anything that brings audiences back to theatre – left-field star-casting, an unseasonal ghost story – is welcome. And Allen, whose family is full of actors, shows enough innate ability and stagecraft to suggest this could be another arrow in her quiver.
Not that Matthew Dunster’s production is a star vehicle. It’s an ensemble piece, and the ideas in Danny Robins’ script are as important as the performances. During a dinner party, Jenny, a lapsed Catholic, reveals she’s been hearing weeping and footsteps in her baby daughter’s room at 2.22am, four nights running. Sam (Hadley Fraser) a know-all astronomer, is sure there’s a rational explanation.
Also present are his university friend Lauren (Julia Chan), a svelte and flirty psychoanalyst, and Ben (Jake Wood), the rough builder she’s settled for. Sexual and class tensions simmer alongside the debate between rationalism and belief, and the current distrust of experts and facts. Unlike most plays, it’s set properly in the here and now – Covid excepted – with people consulting mobile phones and shouting at the Amazon Echo. Oh, and there are screaming, fornicating foxes outside setting off the security lights.
Robins and Dunster play by the spooky rules, cynically manipulating the buildup of tension then puncturing it with humour: the script is very funny. But Robins also weaves in intriguing themes, imagining ghosts as refugees, homeless people, dementia sufferers or revenants dredged up by gentrification. Ben grew up near Jenny and Sam’s house, when it was Kray territory. He also, conveniently, turns out to be a spiritualist.
Wood, the EastEnders and Strictly alumnus, turns this potentially absurd character into something larger than life and twice as full of testosterone: he’s great to watch. Chan, a US TV star also making her West End debut, glides through the role – even a speech that sounds very much like a male playwright’s fantasy. Fraser plays convincingly against type as the smug and arrogant Sam.
I kicked myself that I didn’t see the final twist coming, but it’s brilliantly done. This is a superior, knowing piece of genre drama, well-executed, and buoyed up by Allen’s star power and skill. A great, spine-tingling night out.
Noel Coward Theatre, booking to Oct 16: 222aghoststory.com
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