Ghost Stories: Lowry Theatre, Manchester (22nd February 2020)
Reviewed By Richard Bell
Percipient – A person who believes themselves to have had a genuine paranormal experience.
I am one of a small handful in a large auditorium.
It is a wet and windy Saturday afternoon in February and my good friend Tim and I are sitting in the Lowry Theatre in Manchester listening to an assortment of spooky sound effects whilst the place fills to capacity.
“I hope that this is as good as they say it is.” I mumble curmudgeonly and Tim, my long time friend and horror buddy, nods with a wry grin.
Cue a loud scream, blackness and a montage of confusing images projected onto a screen.
I’m already unnerved as an agitated figure hurries onto the stage to address the audience.
“Who believes in ghosts?”
The next eighty minutes was reserved for fast-paced shocks and suspense courtesy of the genius writing partnership of Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson.
The cast, featuring the narrator and central character, Joshua Higgott with Gus Gordon, Richard Sutton and Paul Hawkyard all delivering performances that utterly drew the audience in and shot them out of their seats with dangerous ease.
The ingenuity of the sets and lighting design allowed for the imagination to fill in the rest, delivering an almost cinematic presentation on a small stage.
By no means an easy task.
To tell you any more would be to let the cat out of the bag – something the producers humbly asked us all not to do so others could experience our chills, screams and near permanently raised hackles.
And I utterly loathe spoilers.
If you’ve trudged your way round enough feeble Halloween haunts and pop up ghost tours, you will know when something slick clutches your heart, widens the pupils and dries out the mouth.
This was it, folks – the real deal!
I think it was the guitarist Steve Vai who once said,
“It’s easy to knock people back in their seats but it’s a hell of a lot harder to make them sit forward again.”
I sat forward the whole time.
Ghost Stories
See the international stage phenomenon, direct from the West End, in its first-ever UK Tour. After exhilarating audiences across the world with record-breaking, sell-out productions and a smash hit film, Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson’s worldwide cult phenomenon Ghost Stories will thrill Edinburgh for the first time ever, after a sell-out West End run.
There’s something dark lurking in the theatre. Enter a nightmarish world, full of thrilling twists and turns, where all your deepest fears and disturbing thoughts are imagined live on stage. A fully sensory and electrifying encounter, Ghost Stories is the ultimate twisted love-letter to horror and an edge-of-your-seat theatrical experience like no other. Be it phantoms, poltergeists or simply a “bump in the night”, let’s play a game with fear.
Are you brave enough to book?
Visit the Ghost Stories Live website HERE
Richard Bell
Richard Bell is a poet and writer with a passion for the horror genre. He has work published by Weasel Press, Carmen Online Theatre, Night Gallery, The Horrorzine and the Fragments of Fear series on YouTube, under the name Rick Nightmare.
He lives in a sleepy hamlet in Northern England with his family and galloping insomnia.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rick_nightmare
YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCReROBHUlnIY_66Qur4DqRQ
Website: https://richardbellhorror.wordpress.com
HorrrorZine: http://www.thehorrorzine.com/Poetry/Jan2016/RichardBell/RichardBell
Brilliant review!
Went to see it last night and was blown away and like you and the show say,let’s not share the secrets 😮