WEST END HORROR
A talented cast, doomed to perform this nonsense night after night. Beware a true...
The Enfield Haunting (Ambassadors Theatre, London) Verdict: Leftover turkey The Unfriend (Wyndham’s, London) Verdict: Un-follow
EVERY so often we get the toe- curling opportunity to see good and sometimes famous actors struggling to marry their professional dignity to their contractual obligations.
So it is with Catherine Tate and David Threlfall, leading a cast in a new ghost story based on the ordeal of the real-life Hodgson family, who were caught up in the notorious Enfield poltergeist saga of the late Seventies.
The whole company must surely realise that they have been doomed to walk the night (for what may feel like an eternity) in a paranormal omni-shambles.
The police, an exorcist, a ventriloquist and even a Brazilian psychic were drafted in to solve the mystery of the Hodgson girls’ apparent possession.
But this play from Paul Unwin (creator of TV’s Casualty), over a decade in the making, has so many balls in the air it never gets close to identifying a plot — never mind nailing the poltergeist suspected of setting up a portal between the living and the dead in a North London council house.
Tate plays the honest- togoodness single mum Peggy, trying to muddle through in a role that’s poorly suited to her kooky skill set. Hardly challenging the men who barge in to her home to sort out her domestic nightmare, she is charged only with chatting, fretting and making tea. Among the meddling men is Threlfall’s parapsychologist Mr Grosse, who sets up a psychical laboratory with cameras, sensors and recording equipment.
A whiskery, slimline walrus in a cheap beige suit, Threlfall at least proves he can do dishevelled posh as well as his dishevelled Manc in Channel 4’s Shameless.
The whole cast conduct themselves with fortitude in Angus Jackson’s dingy, dog’s dinner of a production — booked to run until March 2 — that works neither as an investigation nor a spooker.
On the plus side, it’s only 75 minutes long. And there are a few crumbs of social history, including excerpts from Top Of The Pops flickering up on a black and white telly. Seventies blackouts also provoke the odd shriek from an audience hoping for a supernatural roller coaster.
But the kindest thing would be to cut the power to the theatre altogether, and allow the company to rest in peace.
WHAT planet, meanwhile, is Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat on? Certainly not the one he presents in The Unfriend — a supposed comedy starring Frances Barber, Lee Mack and Sarah Alexander. No one is on this planet, because it doesn’t exist.
Even at a second attempt (I caught the show in Chichester back in 2022) I found it impossible to pretend to believe in the set-up of a dull, middle- class couple allowing an American serial killer (Barber) into their home because they’re too polite to say no.
That, too, is the extent of a plot, which lives by the methane of fart gags and actual toilet humour (a recently used loo brush being ‘ hilariously’ brandished at one point following a bowel movement by a bit-part policeman).
NONETHELESS, we’re supposed to embrace this as quaint English comedy in the vein of the Robert Lindsay and Zoe Wanamaker sitcom My Family.
A pale imitation of that middleof-the-road TV show of yore, it breaks out every sterile cliché of a nuclear family who are doubleglazed citizens of nowhere.
The only thing going for it is Barber’s garish turn as a sort of female Donald Trump from
Denver — all bling and pincer fingers. Her Elsa is a stranger to personal boundaries, who wears a velvet tracksuit, Gucci shawl, spangly trainers, blonde wig and pillar-box red lipstick.
Her victims are Mack, as gawping suburban dad, Peter, who seems to be perpetually short of breath and has no more personality than Nick Sampson’s methodically dull, busybody next- door neighbour who he presumes to sneer at. And his wife Debbie (Alexander), who is a Sue Barker look- alike characterised merely as a Malbec Mum … even though I didn’t see her touch the one glass she pours.
Blandly directed by Mark Gatiss (who happens to be appearing as John Gielgud in The Motive And The Cue just around the corner), it’s set in a family house — a Barratt Homes-style, new-town new-build — that someone says is in London. But it too appears to have undergone a personality bypass.
This is mediocrity on Mogadon and I am at a loss to explain how it comes to be getting another West End run (after last year’s brief stint at The Criterion).
Maybe it can survive on star billing alone. Or maybe it’s as they say in Yorkshire: ‘Where there’s muck there’s brass.’