Things that go bump in the theatre: Are you brave enough to see Ghost Stories in Leicester?

Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson tell Matthew Amer about their shared love of horror, giving audiences a trick and a treat in supernatural stage scarefest Ghost Stories.

Here are their thoughts on the show…

It’s something of a modern The Mousetrap.

Despite having premiered 14 years ago and having enjoyed a subsequent film adaptation starring Martin Freeman and Paul Whitehouse, the secrets that make it such an unusual and successful show have remained elusive, well-guarded as they are by both its creative team and audiences.

“Secrets are precious,” explains the show’s co-creator Andy Nyman.

“If you give people a secret that they really enjoy and you ask them nicely to keep it, they do.”

If anyone should know about secrets, it’s Nyman. Before writing Ghost Stories, he was the man behind many of Derren Brown’s mystery-filled stage shows and early TV performances.

The secretiveness with Ghost Stories, he says, was born out of frustration that these days

“Everything is spoiled for you. Every single film and television trailer ruins plot points. Jeremy and I love the experience of telling people a really good story without them knowing anything about it in advance. You feel the buzz in the audience; it’s an exciting thing to sit and watch.”

So, what can we say about Ghost Stories? Well, Andy explains: “Ghost Stories is a 90-minute scary, thrill-ride experience about a professor of parapsychology who investigates three inexplicable

hauntings. That’s as much as you get and that’s more than we ever used to give.”

If you push him a little harder, he’ll tell you it’s: “A rattling hour and a half that will make you roar with laughter, leap out of your seats and talk about it for a very long time.”

And that’s really all you need to know about the specifics of the show; it will make you scream like a banshee and giggle like a schoolchild, probably at the same time.

It runs at the Leicester theatre from June 3 – 7.

Nyman and co-writer Jeremy Dyson, best known for his work with The League of Gentlemen, have a long history that reaches back far beyond the start of their Ghost Stories journey, but begins with horror and a shared love of the genre that saw them forge a teenage friendship.

“It probably started, for me, with Scooby Doo,” says Dyson of his infatuation with creepy tales.

“There were a lot of scary things for kids around in the 70s, and lots I was enchanted by. Doctor Who would have been a part of that, which in the 70s had a real horror edge to it. So, the groundwork was done by the time I was seven or eight years old. People used to buy me collections of ghost stories formy birthdays. They were supposed to be for kids, but they were the most terrifying tales.”

Throw in horror double bills on BBC2, screened at a time when there were only a trio of channels available so “whoever was doing the programming just picked the best stuff,” and public safety films that were as terrifying as any big screen offering, and you have a culture that bred a shared sensibility, certainly between Nyman and Dyson, if not a much wider generation of horror fans.

“It’s a very English genre,” says Dyson.

“Certainly when it comes to the supernatural side of things. The English sensibility defined a lot of that. It’s a very English tradition, and there’s no question that’s part of what we’re celebrating in Ghost Stories.”

Yet despite the best British traditions of both horror and theatre, stage horror is not a genre you seevery often, even with the fact that a theatre gives you the ability to control the entire 360 degrees ofan audience’s experience. With Ghost Stories’ emergence at the Lyric Hammersmith 14 years ago, and its immediate success, this has slowly begun to change.

“I think it’s hard to do well,” opines Dyson. “You have to have a love both for theatre and for horror. It’s a bit like comedy. People talk about comedy writers having funny bones. I think you need scary bones to write horror.

“I think snobbery plays a real part in it too,” Nyman adds. “When I was growing up, we’d come to the West End and there was always a good old thriller on, be it Corpse!, Deathtrap or Sleuth. Those stage thrillers have completely gone out of fashion. There is a section of the audience that is completely ignored by plays; a thriller audience that would never dream of going to a play because it’s seen as ‘clever stuff for clever people’. That’s not to say we think we’ve created this brilliant play for that audience, we’ve just written the play that we wanted to see.”

After numerous successful runs across London, Ghost Stories is taking its jump-inducing, goosebumps-raising show back on the road to complete its first full UK tour, after it was cut short by the pandemic in early 2020.

Nyman and Dyson could not be happier.

“We cannot wait to take it around the country and let people see it and experience it in their hometowns,” says Nyman.

While audiences outside London have had to wait for Ghost Stories to take to the road, they are getting the fully polished, expertly tweaked, 20% scarier version that Nyman and Dyson have been

refining for nearly fifteen years.

The majority of the spooky psychological blood-curdler was actually put together in the space of one-week. It was one of those projects where everything clicked. Since then, Nyman and Dyson’s work has been about small changes to give audiences the biggest thrills, laughs, scares and hold-your-breath moments of delicious tension possible.

Nyman and Dyson really do care whether audiences leap out of their seats with a heady mix of fear, excitement and joy, and not just because they want them to keep those all-important secrets. “If people are paying their hard-earned money to see a show you’re putting on, you have a massive responsibility to give them more than they pay for,” says Nyman. “It’s not fair to think ‘that’s good enough, it will be fine’, you have to over-deliver. You’ve got to lose sleep over it. When the show is up and working and you keep tweaking it to get it right, and you see people going away happy, you know the main reason you’ve got to that place is you’ve felt a responsibility and you’ve worked hard at it.”

With that attitude, if anyone deserves to replicate The Mousetrap’s success, it’s them.

Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson’s Top 10 horror films:

10. Mama

9. Deep Red

8. Dead of Night

7. The Haunting (The 1963 Robert Wise version, not the ‘let’s never talk about it remake)

6. American Werewolf in London

5. Switchblade Romance

4. Halloween (The original)

3. Dark Water (The original)

2. A Warning to the Curious (This was part of the BBC’s Christmas ghost stories series that are

probably the best ghost stories ever filmed.)

1. REC

For more information and to book tickets, visit https://www.curveonline.co.uk/whats-on/shows/ghost-stories/