A ghost story with plenty of laughs, thermodynamic theory, booze and shagging foxes, Danny Robins’s feted tale of a middle-class dinner party is quite divisive.
With famous faces in role (Lily Allan and Cheryl Cole to name but two past cast members) to draw in the crowds, thrill-seekers find the scares cheap and Easter eggs aplenty, but all seem to appreciate the largely unexpected sworn-to-secrecy twist.
Wordy, shouty dialogue persists with precisely-timed interruptions and talking over one another as diminutive new mum Jenny (EastEnders’ Ruby Allen Louisa Lytton) challenges her guests to witness the 02:22 visitation she has suffered for several days. Arrogant know-it-all husband Sam (Nathaniel Curtis—best known as Ash Mukherjee in It’s A Sin) doesn’t believe in ghosts and has a theory or scientific fact to undermine his wife’s terror as the clock ticks towards showtime.
Charlene Boyd (The Strange Undoing Of Prudencia Hart) is the lush Lauren filling the yawning, yearning gap with ever more booze, memories of the student union and parakeets and a few pills to deaden reality. She and the dogmatic Ben go back a long, long way. Luckily, her latest unworthy beau is Ben (Doc Martin stalwart Joe Absolom) whose attributes spookily include the ability to fix boilers, building expertise, intimate knowledge of the area and seances.
Plenty of pontificating and posturing raises interesting fleeting thoughts about family, faith, upwardly mobile neighbourhoods and the uniformity of vision for doer-uppers… as well as the likelihood of the ghost Jenny is convinced haunts the nursery making an appearance at 02:22.
Olivier Award-winner and Tony nominee Anna Fleischle’s set is a typical Yuppie open-plan, knocked-through and extended kitchen / diner with plenty of just out-of-sight areas for the unknown to lurk and French windows, outside which mist swirls and Ben smokes. A large digital clock counts down the hours in LED red, mirrored by neon strips surrounding the stage, which randomly flash when the lights go out for no apparent reason other than to prime the audience to the edge of their seats... only to interrupt any building tension with an interval, despite being a short two hours in total.
A tad overlong, but entertaining.