2.22 A Ghost Story, Playhouse, Edinburgh review: 'a shrieking success'

2.22 A Ghost Story, Playhouse, Edinburgh ★★★★

As if current realities were not scary enough, a raft of podcasts, broadcasts and shows insist on making it even scarier, by conjuring up ghoulies and ghosties, and then taunting our supposedly scientific civilisation for failing to believe in them.

In Danny Robins’ 2.22 A Ghost Story, this tension is raging through the middle-class marriage of Sam and Jenny, who have just moved into, and radically reshaped, an old house in Essex. Sam – an academic – is just back from a work trip; and on each night he was away, at precisely 2.22 am, Jenny has heard strange, uncanny sounds of footsteps pacing around their baby daughter’s cot.

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Sam insists that there must be a rational explanation; but as they try to entertain Sam’s old university friend Lauren, and her new boyfriend Ben, a local builder – the play gradually shapes up as a pretty strong account of the social and class tensions that have led to the current rejection of “experts” and “science” by so many.

Robins’s story is presented with terrific pace and pizazz in a touring production at the Edinburgh Playhouse this week by its cast of James Bye, Shvorne Marks, Grant Kilburn and Natalie Casey, and features some impressively terrifying sound, lighting and design, as well as a famously breathtaking final twist. And if believing in ghosts will not cure the disrespect and arrogance Ben identifies in Sam, those still remain potentially deadly sins; a truth which perhaps accounts for 2.22’s enduring popularity, and shrieking success with audiences, in Britain, Ireland, and beyond.

2.22 A Ghost Story is at the Playhouse, Edinburgh, until 30 May.

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