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Paul Unwin’s new play is based on the ‘real life’ Enfield poltergeist: a claim of supernatural activity at a council house in north London during the late-‘70s that became national news, and has spawned numerous screen and radio adaptations.
‘The Enfield Haunting’ dives straight in: as it begins the activity has been ongoing for a while now, and single mum Peggy Hodgson (Catherine Tate) is losing hope that any end is in sight for the bizarre events that seem to revolve around her daughter Janet (Ella Schrey-Yeats). The case is being investigated by two paranormal experts, one of whom – David Threlfall’s Maurice Grosse – has called around unexpectedly on the night the play is set.
Unwin’s script is a bewildering muddle, which gestures at the fact that Janet and her sister Margaret (Grace Molony) admitted to having been on the wind-up, but then piles a load of wildly unsubtle, jump-scary supernatural stuff on top.
It’s unclear what any of the characters believe is going on, but they all seem incredibly nonchalant about, say, a gas fire being ripped out of the wall by unknown forces while they’re all upstairs. The tone teeters on the verge of comedy, but only really because the dialogue is all overripe approximations of ‘70s working-class London dialect (‘makin’ the nippers their tuck’ and such).
There are attempts by Unwin to flesh out both Peggy and Maurice, but the play is so short that his brief attempts at adding depth just end up confusing matters. It is bewilderingly brief and feels like it could have done with at least another hour to introduce and examine the characters in an orderly fashion.
Tate and Threlfall both try their best, but they should be asking some very hard questions of their agents here. Director Angus Jackson hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory, but I can’t help but feel that the RSC veteran has been left fighting a desperate rear-guard action with a terrible script. He salvages a couple of scares from this mess, but the most terrifying thing about ‘The Enfield Haunting’ is that nobody stepped in to stop it before it reached the West End.