THE GHOST THEATRE

London Calling

RELEASED 11 MAY 320 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Mat Osman Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

London is unforgiving – it eats people up. Yet it’s also magnificent, and a place that has always drawn those who need to make themselves anew. Those such as Shay, a messenger girl, hawk whisperer and fortune teller, who belongs to a religious sect that worships birds. Or Nonesuch, a child theatre actor, a Blackfriars boy, with the rare gift to hold audiences rapt.

In a more egalitarian era, both would be feted and rich, but the setting of Mat Osman’s second novel is late-elizabethan London, which regards Shay and Nonesuch as little better than guttersnipes. Both are preyed upon, both are victims – though neither would describe themselves as such.

How to fight back? The solution that Shay and Nonesuch, accidental friends, hit upon is the Ghost Theatre of the novel’s title.

Rather than work solely for Nonesuch’s unsavoury boss Evans, a man who pimps his actors, the duo form a guerrilla performance troupe that attracts both a young audience and the unwelcome attentions of the authorities and even the Queen herself, suspicious of the subversive possibilities inherent in lowlifes making their own fun.

Those in power are right to be worried, because while Shay and Nonesuch lack status, they have imagination. The day-to-day world, in Nonesuch’s estimation, is “arbitrary”, whereas things “make sense” on stage. The tensions and contradictions inherent in this idea drive the plot of The Ghost Theatre, a slipstream historical novel, towards a brilliantly scripted set-piece finale that plays out as a kind of fever dream.

As he works his way towards this denouement – and at times that progress could be better paced – Osman gradually broadens the novel from an initial focus on his protagonists, showing us both London and (far more dangerous) provincial England. It is, of course, a place from which every dreamer trying to remake themselves has to run. Jonathan Wright

Osman will be doing signings for the book, including at Blackwells in Manchester (9 May) and Topping & Co in Bath (15 May).

The duo form a guerrilla performance troupe