In An Interrogation, his debut as a writer-director, Jamie Armitage tackled the police procedural, which is not something you see in the theatre very often. Now he’s back with an even more ambitious oddity in the form of A Ghost in Your Ear, an MR James-ish horror story with a mischievous metatheatrical gleam in its eye.
The show was created with sound designer siblings Ben and Max Ringham, and makes use of sophisticated binaural design - that is to basically say that you wear headphones, with some of what you hear being pre-recorded.
George (George Blagden) is an actor in need of a few bob, quick, so he’s accepted a last minute job narrating a ghost story that he’s not actually read in advance. The gig was secured by his recording engineer pal Sid (Jonathan Livingstone), acting on behalf of a suspect sounding third party who wants the recording done ASAP.
Anisha Fields’ set, then, is simply a bland, boxy recording studio. At first, everything is played dead straight: after some initial banter with Sid, George gets down to business, adopting a slightly mannered, slightly old fashioned RP to narrate the yarn of a man who decides to houseclear the country pile of his late father after the contracted company abruptly backs out.
The only obviously creepy thing going on is the presence of a weird human-head shaped recording mic, although apparently this is simply what you use to record binaural sound (‘Billy big binaural!’ is how George describes Sid).
In part, it feels like a genuine tribute to hardworking audiobook actors: I have no insight into how these things actually go down, but Blagden does a fine job of holding our attention as an on edge but consumate pro who takes a couple of minutes to nail his voice then throws himself into his recording with bodily enthusiasm. It’s a fine performance but inevitably there’s more to the play than that and it’s perhaps not a shocker to say that Strange Things Start Happening.
The meat of the horror here is a series of immaculately crafted jump scares, as the story and the recording session start to ominously blur into each other. I won’t spoil the precise details, but it’s very technically impressive: the sound, obviously, but also Ban Jacobs’ lighting which accounts for a lot of the drama and cleverly makes it difficult at key moments to see Sid in the booth, leaving George seemingly alone with… whatever.
Part of the treat here is seeing something so technically accomplished in Hampstead’s tiny Downstairs studio theatre, where the budget is usually pretty minimal (this is clearly higher than usual, as are ticket prices). It’s a pretty damn dazzling use of the space. I think if it were to go into the main house then you might ask harder questions of Armitage’s script, which is a fun meta tribute to the classic haunted house ghost story and to the world of audio actors, but maybe feels a little too much like an extended episode of Inside No 9 for its own good.
But horror theatre is a small, weird and often terrible genre and this is a proper scary little gem – what with the West End’s Paranormal Activity, we’re living through a mini golden age for scares on stage.
