These hammy ghosts are truly frightful
Whisper House (The Other Palace) Verdict: Fetch the exorcist! ★★✩✩✩
ANDREW Lloyd Webber’s experimental space, The Other Palace (formerly the St James), has come up with an American musical about a haunted lighthouse. It is less illuminating than you might expect.
The music, rockish in a vaguely U2 way, is agreeable enough and is funkily performed by a sevenpiece, onstage band.
The basics of the story are not entirely bad. In wartime Forties Maine a boy called Christopher stays with his eccentric Aunt Lily in a spooky lighthouse.
The government wants to intern her Japanese handyman, Yasuhiro, in case he is a spy. Lily hides Yasuhiro, but Christopher sneaks to the aggressive local sheriff. Where the show goes awry is in the presence of two whispery ghosts (Simon Bailey and Niamh Perry) with an old grudge.
They try to exact revenge on Aunt Lily. The ghosts are narrators and keep singing that the other characters would be better off if they were dead.
Given that the ghosts spend much of the show floating about, striking melodramatic poses, flashing their eyes and pawing at Lily, Christopher and Yasuhiro, you could certainly sympathise if thoughts turned to self-immolation.
Director Adam Lenson has a leaden hand. The ghosts are not the only ones overacting. Simon Lipkin’s Sheriff is way over the top.
Nicholas Goh does better as Yasuhiro and Dianne Pilkington has her moments as Lily, but this short work is over burdened with preachy stuff about immigration.
A gloomy set has at its centre a large, circular shape which is supposed to be the inside of the lighthouse but just looks like a giant plughole.