The man who wrote 2:22 A Ghost Story, inspired by the spooky stories submitted to his Uncanny podcast, watched the dress rehearsal on Friday before shooting off to see a professional production of the play open in New York.
He said he loved it and posed for pictures with cast and crew.
Was Danny Robins just being kind to the amateur company of which he was once an enthusiastic member – and in particular to his one-time People’s co-star, Anna Dobson, the director?
Not on this evidence.
The People’s have shown themselves well able to emulate West End production values (I’m thinking The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and, from way back, The Pitmen Painters) and they’ve pulled it out of the bag again.
Experts at rustling up a domestic interior, they serve up the busily furnished ground floor of the large house being ‘done up’ by the young couple, Jenny (Holly Stamp) and Sam (Sam Hinton), who recently moved in.
They have a baby… and poor Jenny has reason to believe they also have a ghost. It comes every night at, you’ve guessed, 2.22am.
Could it be that, in stripping the house of its previous fittings, they have upset the spirit of Frank who’d lived there for years until his death gave his widow reason to sell?
The play is basically a debate about the paranormal stirred up at a very awkward dinner party hosted by the couple.
Their guests are Lauren (Kay Edmundson), who is American, works in mental health, is partial to a drink or two and, we learn, is Sam’s old flame, and her new boyfriend Ben (Sam Burrell), a builder.
We share their long night of the soul as Jenny, anxious about the sleeping baby upstairs, becomes ever more scared, Lauren gets tipsier and the lads’ dislike for each other threatens to get nasty.
Sam, you see, is a smart aleck and a sceptic, and middle class to boot; Ben, a working class lad and a bit of a dark horse, has reasons to believe.
The play’s first half is quite slow but it heats up in the second when the qualities of an experienced People’s cast come to the fore, fleshing out the characters so your allegiance switches this way and that.
And to crank up the tension are the occasional bloodcurdling cries of the urban foxes outside and the constant background crackle of the baby monitor, which weirdly reminded be of the submarine sonar common to all wartime naval films.
There are to be no torpedoes here but what actually does happen, of course, I’m not at liberty to say. A message flashed up at the end urging us to keep schtum.
Having seen this play professionally done quite recently, I was in the know. But it was interesting to now see the significance of things that had whizzed over my head the first time.
And I can vouch for the foxes. Once, walking the dog down Jesmond Dene late at night, a vixen (for I’m told they’re usually the culprits) unleashed a bloodcurdling shriek as I was in the middle of a dark tunnel.
I saw people making a zombie film down there once and this, I can tell you, was far scarier.
2:22 A Ghost Story runs until Saturday, October 24. Tickets from the People’s Theatre box office.