STAGE FRIGHT AT VERTIGO
Dickens had a talent for horror
No face masks. No chainsaws. Just good old-fashioned ghosts.
That’s the recipe director Craig Hall uses in The Haunting, a scary Victorian ghost story inspired by a quintet of stories by Charles Dickens, that opened Thursday night at Vertigo.
When David Filde (Stafford Perry), an employee of an antiquarian book dealer, shows up a little late one evening at the remote estate of Lord Gray (Grant Linneberg), to assess the library of his late father, things rather quickly descend into the business trip from hell.
For one thing, those old, remote Scottish mansions that sit overlooking moors are colder than hell.
For another thing, Filde’s carriage got detoured en route when some sort of deranged woman wandered in front of it, warning him not visit the estate — kind of curious, given that he’d told no one where he was headed.
She also issued a warning to David, a good-natured, eager-to-please kind of guy, that he repeats to Lord Gray, who dismisses the entire incident as the ravings of a drunk woman wandering into the street from the pub.
It all unfolds in the kind of stately library ( beautifully designed by Narda McCarroll) that you imagine John House- man used to dispense legal wisdom from in that old TV classic The Paper Chase — and the wall of volumes, some of them quite valuable, hide more than fabulous fictions inside their covers.
Back and forth go Filde and the good Lord, Filde trying to make all of the creepy coincidences add up while Gray is eager to get rid of his late father’s library of volumes, get paid, and board a ship back to India, where he lives.
Telling good theatrical ghost stories is kind of like preparing good chili — you assemble a variety of ingredients — cast, script, lights ( by John Webber), set, costumes (also by McCarroll) and sound (Andrew Blizzard), blend, and let sit for a while, to allow it all to jell into a coherent whole.
It doesn’t hurt The Haunting one little bit that its source material was Charles Dickens (adapted for the stage by Hugh Janes), who deftly manages to weave in a superbly creepy backstory that explains all the supernatural events that keep interrupting Filde’s inventory-taking.
Perry often plays guys like Filde, who seem completely naive but actually have a little more on the ball than initially suspected, and that’s because he’s great at it. A few years ago, he sported a French accent in Panic.
This year, he’s traded that in for a British accent in The Haunting, and he wears this year’s accent well — and McCarroll’s tweedy outfit.
He’s beautifully counterpointed by Linneberg’s Lord Gray, who starts out the detached, imperial skeptic, but as the visit evolves, finds himself inextricably drawn into Filde’s version of events.
Thanks in no small part to Blizzard’s brilliant sound design, Webber’s wicked lighting, and McCarroll’s splendid set, Hall conjures up a creep show that proves that when Charles Dickens summons the ghost of Christmas Past every year onstage at Theatre Calgary, he was only beginning to plum the depths of his supernatural soul.
It doesn’t hurt The Haunting one little bit that its source material was Charles Dickens (adapted for the stage by Hugh Janes).