Ghost Stories at the Lyric Hammersmith, review

By Charles Spencer Published: 1:45PM GMT 01 March 2010

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A good spook story needs multiform qualities. It should grab your courtesy from the opening and hold it until the sour end, and there should be at slightest a integrate of moments - preferably some-more - that have you burst out of your skin.

On these criteria, this new show created by Jeremy Dyson of League of Gentleman celebrity and Andy Nyman, co-creator of the illusionist Derren Browns radio and entertainment productions, contingency be counted a success.

Top 10 majority appropriate humerous entertainment gigs of 2008 Burnt by the Sun, National Theatre - examination Inferno and Paradiso, examination Harold Pinter: the majority original, in vogue and puzzling bard in post-war British entertainment Great Yarmouth Hippodrome: on with the show

The lady in front of me outlayed most of the show stealing at the back of her cloak and via there are gratifying gasps of fear and apprehension from the primarily immature assembly whom you competence think would be toughened to this sort of things by Hollywood schlock horror.

The feeling of confusion starts in the foyers, with a soundtrack of utterance winds and nasty drizzling noises, whilst the residence lights in the meeting house have been transposed by low flickering bulbs.

Nyman himself takes to the entertainment as Professor Philip Goodman, a be-corduroyed parapsychology consultant who appears deeply distrustful about the life of ghosts and, primarily at least, seems wholly in authority of his brief, though there is a wavering begin when he upsets his potion of water.

He regales us with 3 spook stories formed on interviews he says he conducted himself, each of that is enacted prior to us. They engage a night-watchman in a murky depository, a immature tyro who runs someone over in his car, and a commercial operation businessman anxiously available the bieing born of his initial child.

The authors approach their own show together with Sean Holmes, the Lyrics inventive director, and for 80 interval-free mins the tragedy is ratcheted up with good ability and a little overwhelming coups de entertainment that leave the assembly with mouths agape. Its all good house-of-horrors stuff, with good receptive to advice goods and remarkable "reveals". But in the last fifteen minutes, the show becomes both darker and subtler as the Prof himself becomes a member rather than a small narrator. Very properly, the assembly is educated not to give as well most away. I can usually contend that the shining and deeply unsettling finish draws together all the manifold strands of this assumingly episodic show with a sinful panache that leaves the spectator feeling severely spooked.

Nyman is superb as the highbrow who is zero similar to as assured as he primarily seems, and there is clever await from David Cardy as the night watchman, Ryan Gage as the teenage hit-and-run motorist and, especially, Nicholas Burns as a sinister commercial operation senior manager with a horrible make buzzing sound of a shaken giggle who unequivocally piles on the vigour at the end.

This ingenious, creepy and horribly beguiling show deserves a life, or rather a vital death, over the run in Hammersmith.

Tickets: 0871 221 1722