It’s all frights on the night

THE MIST IN THE MIRROR

(Oldham Coliseum, to February 21 then on tour)

BRAVE? I’ll say it’s brave.

Not so much the spooky, sinister story of Susan Hill’s ghost tale (her other ghostly tale is the stupendously successful Woman in Black), but rather the Coliseum’s bid to do a ghost story when we’re all so blase about scariness and things that go bump in the night, let alone those that crash and wallop too.

But Coliseum director Kevin Shaw has an ace up his sleeve, in the form of Leeds-based video and projections company Imitating The Dog — the people who did such amazing work on The Hound of the Baskervilles and last year’s Life and Times of Mitchell and Kenyon.

And the group comes through once again, with a spooky, graphic, black and white video-based set that creates docks, libraries, mansions, inns and much more besides — not forgetting bucketfuls of rain and snow — on the atmospheric, often mist-filled stage given all sorts of gaps, traps and hidden doors by designer Barney George.

Ian Kershaw’s adaptation of the book — which to be honest, doesn’t leave as much to the fevered imagination as The Woman in Black and — is perhaps a little heavy on narration, which gives the evening a slightly too-even pace at times; while Kevin Shaw’s direction is overall a little lighter than I would have expected; not quite full of the foreboding that seems to make up a large chunk of most modern horror tales.

But overall, the evening is a spooky treat.

Only the very nervous will be startled by the various ghostly appearances and the hard-working cast — Paul Warriner as the main protagonist, with Martin Reeve, Jack Lord, Sarah Eve and Caroline Harding sharing the other roles — work hard to inject a sense of fear.

For its sense of the cinematic scale modern theatre can reach, this show takes a lot of beating.