On Saturday 4th March 2023 a long-awaited trip out to Manchester, well to Salford Quays was taken. I was coming up from being in London for a show at Sadlers Wells on the Friday night and I was meeting family in Manchester to take them to the Theatre as part of a Birthday Present. This one has been booked since October 2022 so quite a while to wait. The Play in question was called “When Darkness Falls – A Ghost Story” and was billed as being…

“a brand-new spine-chilling ghost story that delivers a twisted, terrifying, and thrilling tale that will ‘leave you cowering in your seat.’ (The Guardian)”

Was it? Not really. There were some jump-scares caused by loud thunder noises and flashes of lightening from pitch black darkness, and some of the stories told as part of the play, which was setup in a singular room on stage, the messy office of a History teacher at some unknown institution, were scary in their nature, heavily reliant upon the power of suggestion and leaving it up to the mind and imagination of the audience to fill in some of the blanks. The characters within the play; Tony Timberlake as History Teacher John Blondel and his guest, The Speaker played by Thomas Dennis were the only two characters that actually appeared in the play. A voice recording of a Parapsychologist (Rhys Gennings) and the Voice of Young Ben (Calixte Rold) were used throughout mostly for exposition and story beats but these two additional characters are never seen on the stage.

The set design features the History Teacher’s office, which seems to be a long-forgotten about room now also the home of ‘Now & Then’ the Guernsey Historical Society. An old room with two desks back to back in the middle of the room and a small kitchen off to one side, a filing cabinet and some chairs off to the other. There are boxes of paperwork littered around the room and several stacks of books all over the place. The office could do with a good clean and has been that way for quite some time. The play starts with the house lights on as the History Teacher enters the office and makes himself a cup of coffee. He sits down at his desk, seemingly preparing the room for an interview for a Podcast he has been asked to setup. He has no experience of this. During this setup (when the audience is seemingly unaware of the fact that the play has started), and as no curtain went up and the house lights remained on, as the audience started to settle. After a moment of quiet the teacher’s phone rings and as it does he drops his coffee off the end of the desk spilling it into an open drawer and on to the floor. As he is trying to get off of the phone (seemingly a conversation with his wife at home), there is a knock at his office door. He gets off the phone and answers the door. There is nobody there. He returns to his desk and starts to clean up the coffee spill. Moments later when his back is turned we see The Speaker entering the room quietly before slamming the door in an effort to scare the Teacher. – It works. A moment of lightheartedness juxtapositioned alongside a growing sense of tension. A device used throughout the play to relieve tension.

Dialogue is shared between the Teacher and The Speaker before they start to get down to the business of the telling of the stories that The Speaker has. It should be noted that when the play starts, The Teacher is a skeptic who doesn’t believe in Ghosts. The Speaker begins to deliver his count of four stories for the Podcast. The first focuses around an apparently haunted house and the goings on inside, the second a story about witches and a witch hunt which involved the apparent savior of a baby.. or did it. The third about Guernsey’s chilling history of occupation by German forces during the wars when they built an underground hospital, an institution created to provide healthcare, which was more known for creating pain and death. Finally the forth was about a journey of a young man and his young family and the great storm of 1987 which nobody, well nearly nobody saw coming.

What was odd to me was that after the second story had been told, in the second half following the interval, the skeptical history teacher starts to play and act out the roll of people in the ghostly stories, firstly a cruel & nasty German soldier who forces another younger soldier to against his will, perform an act of terror against a captured British soldier and in the final story the teacher plays another part too. The stories are seemingly independent of each other, at least from the first and second, as you hear them separately. But as the third then the final story is told, the plot comes together and the stories tie in with each other in some way.. How is really up to you as the audience, how you perceived the information presented and how your brain and imagination wishes to piece things together.

Enough about the plot of the play at this point, I don’t want to give away spoilers as the performance is indeed still touring during 2023. But what I will say is that the production employed an actual Illusionist to assist in the design of some of the scarier moments of the play. Without giving too much away, things fall, move, are pushed / pulled.. the lights go off etc. Ok so the lights going off isn’t an illusion but some of the other things are, and build into the set seamlessly are some illusions designed by John Bulleid who is an Illusionist who currently assists with the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child UK performance at the Palace Theatre in London. A programme was available so we bought one to browse before and after the show. Really hopefully as a guide to the story.. which it really.. doesn’t give. But it does use an additional paper insert to further set the scene. I didn’t realise it till reading it again at home after the fact, but the paper insert is actually a ‘Newsletter’ from the Historical Society portrayed in the play. It is written by ‘John’ The History Teacher and alludes to the recording & release of the aforementioned Podcast. It’s a clever device, hidden in plain sight.

The script was good. Everything flowed like one would have thought it should and the acting from Tony & Thomas was spot on. Sure there were some lines that were fluffed here and there, but in a play carried by two principle actors, it was well covered. The parts that the actors play were well written. There were jump-scares and sure enough they did make me jump. But after a few of them, I felt you could feel the tension building towards more of them coming, and then all of a sudden, they stopped coming. That kept the audience more on edge I think than the actual scares did. The play actually relies upon the audiences interpretation of what they are listening too and what images from these ghost stories they are creating in their heads. There are no ghostly effects in the play whatsoever, even when the cast are staring out into the audience, in places where it would have been so easy to use a plant or even a projection.. Nothing was given. I felt that some of the stories told were indeed chilling, and made the mind work to create the tension and fear needed to make things work. But I cannot say I actually felt terrified as hype would have lead one to believe.

I felt the experience was good.. But perhaps not quite as creative as other original works I have seen previously. If you can go see it. It will provide a decent night of entertainment for the theater goer.