Horror and the West End have a mixed recent history: The Woman in Black had a very good innings, and Inside Number 9’s Stage/Fright worked a treat. 2.22 – A Ghost Story was a nice idea that ended up being done to death. The Enfield Haunting was unspeakably awful.
It’s with some trepadition, then, that we approach Paranormal Activity, a theatrical adaptation of the 2007 sleeper screen hit. Found footage horror isn’t the obvious genre to put on stage by a long shot. But this adaptation has a real USP: it’s directed by Felix Barrett, aka the brains behind immersive theatre legends Punchdrunk, his first non-Punchdrunk theatre show in over a decade. If anyone can inject some menace and atmophere into a show that is nominally about two people buying a house, it’s him.
And he’s got a pretty good writer too: playwright Levi Holloway isn’t much known over here, but he sounds eminently qulified having scored a Broadway hit recently with the spooky drama Grey House. His adaptation of the film sounds pretty ‘free’: rather than a stage retelling of the misadventures of the original film’s demon-haunted San Diego couple Micah and Katie, this once concerns James and Lou, a couple who quit Chicago for London in the hope they can escape their past (spoiler alert: they can’t).
