THEATRE REVIEW: GHOST STORIES
13 APR/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2 out of 5



We all recognize that without the willing suspension of disbelief, there can be no theatre. That said, most productions are still willing to earn that suspension, instead of merely asking an audience to surrender disbelief at the door or simply leave it at home altogether. Which is precisely what GHOST STORIES does.

To clarify: For those of you who have somehow been able to avoid the hype — droll little first-person accounts of nights spent in coffins and the like — GHOST STORIES is a little bundle from Britain that has taken up residence at the Panasonic Theatre under the Mirvish imprimatur (in partnership with Lyric Hammersmith and Phil McIntyre Entertainments), having first spent at least 15 minutes in the Maxwell Smart School of Espionage, learning to disguise its English roots, if not its British rave reviews.

And while we’re on the subject of those raves, let’s just say that after attending (enduring?) Tuesday night’s opening performance, we would have thought that memories of a blitz, Margaret Thatcher and the spectre of Camilla as queen would have rendered Brits a little less skittish than this. For, Toronto traffic being what it is, chances are unless you travel in a padded coffin, the trip to the Panasonic is going to offer more thrills and chills than you’ll experience in this entire 80-minute production.

Written by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman (who both team up with Sean Holmes to share a directing credit), GHOST STORIES would seem to be inspired by those spooky stories kids have always spun out to scare themselves silly. But here, they’ve put the cart before the horse and, as a result, ‘silly’ seems to be the voyage here and not the destination.

It starts when you enter the dimly lit theatre, echoing with enough phony creaks and drips and groans that you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve suddenly been swallowed whole by a particularly bilious whale. But no such luck, for you’re soon being lectured by Professor Philip Goodman (Jason Blicker), a self-styled specialist in paranormal sightings, a man who has, it seems, devoted his entire life to debunking things that go bump in the night.

Still, the only fear involved here for far too long is an increasingly creepy feeling that we’re going to be expected to listen to his ramblings for the entire evening — but just as the fight or flight impulse is threatening to kick in, the good professor gets specific, launching into a tableau (semi) vivant that involves a night watchman (played by Jack Langedijk), a spirit, and a room full of dummies. Happily, those dummies are played by out-of-work department store mannequins to avoid giving offence to the audience.

As spooky goes, however, it barely registers on a Richter scale of fright — and as the good professor progresses through the tale of a hapless teenage driver (David Reale) whose car breaks down on a deserted stretch of highway and an oddly distasteful tale of a self-obsessed stock broker (Darrin Baker) and a haunted nursery, it doesn’t get much better.

Or much worse, depending on your point of view. And when things finally start to get creepy, it’s the wrong kind of creepy, more concerned with anti-Semitism, birth defects and bullying disguised as an old-fashioned shaggy-dog story than with anything that might even scare the bejesus out of a flea.

Which means finally that, at least for those who forgot to surrender disbelief at the door, the big mystery is not how they did this, but rather just how this show managed to do so well in London. Was it better over ’ome? Or are we Canadians just so inured to visions of a Harper majority or an Ignatieff-led coalition that nothing frightens us anymore?

GHOST STORIES? Oh, BOOOOOOOO!