Night Terrors is haunting theatre

Night Terrors at the Burton Taylor Studio, Oxford Playhouse

on Wednesday, September 4 and Thursday 5

Review by JON LEWIS

Storyteller Gerard Logan returned to the Burton Taylor with three tales by EF Benson, directed by Gareth Armstrong with music by Simon Slater. Night Terrors is an entrancing companion piece to Hauntings which Logan brought to the same theatre last year when the stories were by MR James and Benson.

Logan enters the stage dressed in a smoking jacket, introducing the stories in the character of Benson, hinting at Benson’s homosexuality. The first story, The Dance, written in 1934, features the unpleasant Philip Hope who is described as ‘small, slight, spindly’, like the spider he notices stalking a wasp. It’s not a wasp Hope has trapped, but his teenaged wife Sybil, who Hope has manipulated into having an affair with his secretary Julian. Hope shows no interest in his wife beyond possessing a beautiful woman. Logan carries a walking stick with a crocodile head as its handle, a prop highlighting Hope’s animalistic savagery.

Hope and Sybil live in a large cliff-top house near Cromer with its own tennis court and summer. The gardens get covered with autumnal sea fog, images that have become standard in haunted house horror movies. In the second story, In the Tube, dating from 1922, the central figure is Anthony Carling, a bemused gent who is relating his experiences to an unnamed narrator.

Carling is a habitual traveller on the underground, often taking the last train home to Kensington. He repeatedly experiences the suicide of another traveller, the tube becoming some kind of time tunnel into the future. Slater’s ticking clock sound effects permeate the story whilst Logan, sitting in a shiny leather chair, makes the most of the squeaks he makes shifting around.

The final story, The Confession of Charles Linkworth, explores how the ghost of a hanged prisoner haunts the phone of a prison doctor named Teesdale. The telephone caller who isn’t real is a popular trope in ghost stories.

The twist in this story is that Linkworth is not a malevolent entity but an unquiet spirit seeking absolution from the prison padre for the murder of his mother. Logan is a master storyteller: another excellent one-man show.