Spirited Allen shows no fear
CHART-TOPPING SINGER LILY IMPRESSES IN HER WEST END DEBUT AS A MOTHER TRYING TO COPE IN A HAUNTED HOUSE
LILY Allen famously sang about The Fear, now she’s here to inflict it on us in her spooky West End debut. Danny Robins’s chiller sees the chart-topper starring as Jenny, an exhausted new mum trapped in a dilapidated house she believes is haunted. Some vocal straining aside, she’s impressive, her elegant, brittle self-possession giving way to rising terror and near-hysteria.
Robins’s horror show is a rickety edifice, creaking with well-worn genre conventions. It has obvious ambitions to be something much cooler but it’s not unlike veteran dramatist Alan Ayckbourn’s occasional paranormal plays, with its artful structure, middle-class milieu and underlying domestic tensions.
Matthew Dunster’s shrewd production ratchets up the tension mercilessly and though the final twist feels like a bit of a letdown, the pulse-quickening race to get there is buckets of blood-curdling fun.
Over an uneasy dinner party at their semi-renovated east London fixer-upper, Allen’s Jenny tries to convince her smug husband Sam (Hadley Fraser), his flirty old uni friend Lauren (Julia Chan) and Lauren’s boyfriend, lairy builder Ben (Jake Wood), that the bumps in the night she keeps hearing – at 2.22am – are supernatural.
Swirling fog, screeching foxes in the garden and jump-scare tactics involving red light and sudden screams keep us clinging to the edge of our seats as a digital clock counts down to the witching hour. Like a ride on a fairground ghost train, it’s hokey, yet still a shivery treat.