While Charles Dickens is more famously known for his other, more cheerful and festive story about a ghost, his first person narrated short The Signalman is one of the more interesting pieces from his stable, particularly with its preoccupation with death, trauma and horror. But also because it was directly inspired by Dickens’s own experiences after narrowly surviving the Staplehurst Railway disaster in 1865.
In Paragon Theatre Collective’s adaptation, Tim Larkfield plays the titular rail worker. Exuberant and wild-eyed, he greets the audience and begins to unspool his story and his sanity, a tale of horror and tragic death on the railway line, his growing horror at having witnessed not only the carnage of a bloody disaster but at the strange spectral figure who appeared phantom-like upon the line moments before, waving to him.
The play drags the audience through Larkfield’s ever-spiralling terror and burgeoning alcoholism as the spectre and the tragedies continue to plague him, tightening the screw and building to a horrifying climax. It’s a dark and brooding affair, with a tight script by Martin Malcolm, whose redirection of the Dickensian perturbations read painfully recognisably as after-effects of PTSD and unresolved mental illness.
If there’s a flaw in the piece, it’s that it's both a little bit too short and yet at the same time drags out just a little. Even the inclusion of a very welcome drunken dance and song in the middle stands out a little as padding in a piece that ran a good five minutes under the allotted time. But that’s a trifling concern in a piece that will leave the audience shivering, despite the August heat, and glad to be back outside in the sunshine, far from the gloom of a dark railway tunnel.