Welcome in 2020 with a scream

ANDY NYMAN AND JEREMY DYSON TELL MATTHEW AMER ABOUT THEIR SHARED LOVE OF HORROR, GIVING AUDIENCES A TRICK AND A TREAT, AND KEEPING THE SECRETS OF SPOOKY STAGE HIT GHOST STORIES

SUPERNATURAL stage show Ghost Stories is something of a modern The Mousetrap. Stick with me. I’m not suggesting Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery has moments of ghoulish terror that would make you leap, petrified from your seat, but if it did you probably wouldn’t know about them because, despite having run for the best part of seven decades, no-one spills the beans on its record-breaking secrets.

Ghost Stories is exactly the same. Despite having premiered a decade ago and been adapted as a film, the secrets that make it such an unusual and successful show have remained elusive, well-guarded as they are by both its creative team and audiences.

“Secrets are precious,” explains the show’s co-creator Andy Nyman. “If you give people a secret that they really enjoy and you ask them nicely to keep it, they do.”

If anyone should know about secrets, it’s Andy. Before writing Ghost Stories, he was the man behind many of Derren Brown’s mystery-filled stage shows and early TV performances.

The secretiveness with Ghost Stories, he says, was born out of frustration that these days “everything is spoiled for you. Every single film and television trailer ruins plot points. Jeremy and I love the experience of telling people a really good story without them knowing anything about it in advance. You feel the buzz in the audience; it’s an exciting thing to sit and watch.”

So what can we say about Ghost Stories? Well, Andy explains: “Ghost Stories is a 90-minute, scary, thrill-ride experience about a

Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s worldwide cult phenomenon Ghost Stories is set to terrify Birmingham audiences in early January

professor of parapsychology who investigates three cases. That’s as much as you get and that’s more than we ever used to give.”

If you push him a little harder, he’ll tell you it’s “a rattling hour and a half that will make you roar with laughter, leap out of your seats and talk about it for a very long time”.

And that’s really all you need to know about the specifics of the show; it will make you scream like a banshee and giggle like a schoolchild, probably at the same time.

Andy and co-writer Jeremy Dyson, best known for his work with The League of Gentlemen, have a shared love of the horror

genre that saw them forge a teenage friendship.

“It probably started, for me, with Scooby Doo,” says Jeremy of his infatuation with creepy tales. “There were a lot of scary things for kids around in the Seventies, and lots I was enchanted by. Doctor Who would have been a part of that, which in the Seventies had a real horror edge to it. So the groundwork was done by the time I was seven or eight years old. People used to buy me collections of ghost stories for my birthdays. They were supposed to be for kids, but they were the most terrifying tales.”

Throw in horror double bills on

BBC2, screened at a time when there were only a trio of channels and public safety films that were as terrifying as any big screen offering, and you have a culture that bred a shared sensibility, certainly between Andy and Jeremy, if not a much wider generation of horror fans.

“It’s a very English genre,” says Jeremy, “certainly when it comes to the supernatural side of things, and there’s no question that’s part of what we’re celebrating in Ghost Stories.”

Yet despite the best British traditions of both horror and theatre, stage horror is not a genre you see very often. The Woman in Black may be a permanent fixture in the West End, but try and name another such show.

“I think it’s hard to do well,” opines Jeremy. “You have to have a love both for theatre and for horror.”

After numerous successful runs across London, Ghost Stories is taking its jump-inducing, goosebumps-raising show around the UK for the first time. And audiences are getting the fully polished, expertly tweaked, 20 per cent scarier version that Andy and Jeremy have been refining for a decade.

The majority of the spooky psychological blood-curdler was actually put together in the space of one-week. It was one of those projects where everything clicked. Since then, Andy and Jeremy’s work has been about small changes to give audiences the biggest thrills, laughs, scares and hold-your-breath moments of tension possible.

Ghost Stories is at the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, from January 8-11.