Sharp acting, but short on shocks

THE HAUNTING, Lowry, to Saturday
THE Salford theatre gets its autumn season under way with the sort of story normally reserved for the dead of winter.

Writer Hugh Janes’s adaptation of a little-known 1859 Dickens ghost story comes not with former Corrie actor James Roache and previously-advertised veteran star Peter Bowles, but Roache and the equally-familiar face of David Robb, who since the Seventies has appeared in hundreds of plays on stage and TV and several movies.

And talk about experience and innocence: this is Robb’s umpteenth stage performance but Roache’s first, despite which the mix is a remarkably even one.

But you have to wonder why the show is doing the rounds at all. Producer Bill Kenwright presumably did a “me too” after realising that “The Woman in Black” has been coining it in on stage for years and Daniel Radcliffe’s starring role in the movie has put ghost tales front and centre for a while. But this story? Director Hugh Wooldridge says we go to ghost stories to be scared, but he might have said used to go to be scared. These days we go to horribly violent slasher movies instead.

I shouldn’t tell you what happens, so suffice to say Dickens wasn’t Edgar Allan Poe or M R James; his ghost story turns into a murder mystery and this play mucks about with perception so willy-nilly that at times the audience doesn’t quite know who is hearing what and when.

The pleasures of the show are the two central performances; Robb stiff, precise and lordly; Roache keen, irreverent and determined.

Sharing the billing is a wonderfully detailed set, full of books, old furniture, creepy corners and french windows leading to a creepy, usually fog-filled, garden.

Books fly, apparitions appear and no one really gets scared. Or at least admits to it.