CHRIS Parkinson-Brown's review of When Darkness Falls at Salisbury Playhouse

AAAH, Autumn, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” “from whose unseen presence the leaves dead are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.” 

Ghosts, eh? Yet somehow Keats and  Shelley, being busy voicing the beauty of Romantic existence, overlooked Hallowe’en, a time intended to fill us with dread, yet succeeding only in rousing the retail sector on its American-inspired journey to plunder our wallets in a corporate orgy of theistic satanism.

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Nevertheless, it’s an appropriate moment to stage “When Darkness Falls,” a ghost story set on Guernsey. It tells the tale of John Blondel, interviewing an expert in the paranormal – “The Speaker” – for a podcast. Blondel, played by Blue Peter veteran Peter Duncan, is sceptical, so The Speaker sets out to change his mind by relating a series of stories of paranormal experiences.

Slowly, the stories intertwine, past linking with present, the stage characters slipping between themselves and the unseen persona in the tales. Sound confusing?  It was, and that’s where this play struggles.

The play’s structure is so nebulous that you really do need some clues as to when characters are “in the now,” and when they’re playing the parts of people from The Speaker’s tales. Without these clues – an altered accent, a costume detail, anything! – you’re left playing  catch-up, rather than becoming immersed in what should be a spine-chilling experience.

Which brings me to problem number two. In these days of CGI and hybrid animations, flickering lights, falling crockery and a few loud bangs really don’t cut the mustard in making your audience cling to each other in terror. The effects were so lacking in the fear factor that it became comical – one half-expected  Peter Duncan to slip back in time to his Blue Peter past  and show the audience how to make a Hallowe’en poltergeist out of a used Fairy Liquid bottle and a pair of Val’s old knickers, such was the comedic nature of the audio-visual trickery.

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Nevertheless, the play is thought-provoking; what, exactly, have we seen and what’s the story saying? Was it two living characters, or two ghosts chatting? Were we really seeing Blondel’s untidy office, or was that a metaphor for a ghost-inducing psychosis?

Ultimately, you file it away under “interesting” and move on to more realistic matters. Let’s face it, Hallowe’en is hokum, but soon we’ll say goodbye to flying broomsticks and turn to the reality of flying reindeer. Romantic? Me?