The Enfield Ghost Tour
Every now and then we get the chance to see good and sometimes famous actors struggle to balance their professional dignity with their contractual obligations.
So it is with Catherine Tate and David Threlfall, who lead a cast in a new ghost story based on the ordeal of the real Hodgson family, who became embroiled in the infamous Enfield poltergeist saga of the late 1970s.
The entire party must surely realize that they are doomed to spend the night (which may seem like an eternity) in a paranormal omni-mess.
Police, an exorcist, a ventriloquist and even a Brazilian psychic were called in to solve the mystery of the Hodgson girls’ apparent possession.
But this piece from Paul Unwin (creator of TV’s Casualty), more than a decade in the making, has so many balls in the air that it never comes close to identifying a plot – let alone catching the poltergeist suspected of setting up a portal between the living. and the deaths in a north London council house.
Catherine Tate (pictured) leads the cast of Enfield Haunting
David Threlfall (photo) stars alongside Tate in the piece
Tate plays honest, single mother Peggy, who tries to muddle through in a role that is ill-suited to her mad skills. She hardly challenges the men who burst into her house to solve her domestic nightmare, but is only charged with chatting, worrying and making tea. Among the meddling men is Threlfall’s parapsychologist, Mr. Grosse, who sets up a psychic laboratory with cameras, sensors and recording equipment.
If anything, Threlfall, a slim walrus in a cheap beige suit, proves he can be sloppy chic as well as his sloppy Manc in Channel 4’s Shameless.
The entire cast conducts themselves with determination in Angus Jackson’s grimy dog’s dinner of a production – scheduled for March 2 – that works neither as investigation nor as spook.
On the plus side, it only lasts 75 minutes. And there are a few crumbs of social history, including clips from Top Of The Pops appearing on a black and white television. Seventies blackouts also elicit a strange cry from an audience hoping for a supernatural rollercoaster.
But the kindest thing would be to cut off the power to the theater completely and let the company rest in peace.
Lee Mack (pictured) plays yawning suburban dad Peter, who seems perpetually short of breath and has no personality
The unfriended
What planet is Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat on now? Certainly not the one he presents in The Unfriend – a would-be comedy starring Frances Barber, Lee Mack and Sarah Alexander. There is no one on this planet, because it does not exist.
Even on a second try (I saw the show in Chichester in 2022) I found it impossible to pretend to believe in the scheme of a boring middle-class couple who let an American serial killer (Barber) into their house because they are You too polite to say no.
That’s also the extent of a plot, which thrives on the methane of fart jokes and real toilet humor (a recently used toilet brush used ‘hilariously’ at one point after a bowel movement by a small-time police officer).
Nevertheless, we should embrace this as a quaint English comedy in the vein of Robert Lindsay and Zoe Wanamaker’s sitcom My Family.
It’s a pale imitation of that standard TV show of old, laying bare every sterile cliché of a nuclear family being double-glazed citizens of nowhere.
The only plus is Barber’s flashy turn as a kind of female Donald Trump from Denver – all bling and pincer fingers. Her Elsa is a stranger to personal boundaries, wearing a velvet tracksuit, a Gucci scarf, shiny sneakers, a blonde wig and red lipstick.
Her victims are Mack, the gawking suburban dad, Peter, who seems to be perpetually short of breath and has no more personality than Nick Sampson’s methodically dull, nosy neighbor, whom he believes he is mocking. And his wife Debbie (Alexander), a Sue Barker look-alike who is characterized merely as a Malbec mother… even though I haven’t seen her touch the one glass she pours.
It’s blandly directed by Mark Gatiss (who happens to appear just around the corner as John Gielgud in The Motive And The Cue), and is set in a family home – a Barratt Homes-style new build – that someone says is in London. But this one also seems to have undergone a personality bypass.
This is mediocrity on Mogadon and I can’t explain how I’m getting another West End run (after last year’s short stint at The Criterion).
Perhaps it can only survive on star billing. Or maybe it’s as they say in Yorkshire: ‘Where there’s mud, there’s copper.’
Joe Bishop plays the titular character of the musical Alan Turing
Alan Turing – A Musical Biography
“Guess what my computer said to me this morning?” says a young Alan Turing with a first in mathematics, as he imagines what the marriage between mathematics and machines could yield in the future.
Nearly a hundred years later, my Alexa greeted me with, “Good morning, Georgina.” Surely she should have been called Alan, after the father of computer science and AI?
His expression is a rare moment of cheerfulness in this thin, small-scale musical about the tragic Turing, who broke the ‘unbreakable’ Nazi code, shortening the Second World War by two years and saving the lives of millions.
Joan Greening’s seminal crack in his life intertwines the mathematician’s preoccupation with the Snow White fairy tale. Intellectually absorbed in intangibles such as time and space (although he is often late for school), this eccentric boy is also haunted by a poisoned apple. Is it poison that fascinates him and/or the power of love to awaken the soul? Unfortunately, Greening fails to calculate this idea satisfactorily.
Yet Turing speaks several times of himself as “an odd number in an even world,” a poignant and accurate way of expressing a misunderstood mathematician’s sense of otherness.
Joel Goodman and Jan Osborne’s undulating, unmemorable compositions imbue the piece with melancholy, with Joe Bishop emerging as a more sensitive Turing than Benedict Cumberbatch created in The Imitation Game.
In Jane Miles’ small production (desk, blackboard, bicycle), Zara Cooke plays everyone else: Turing’s devoted mother, the headteacher who wrote him off as ‘lazy, slothful and slow’ and Joan, the young woman who helped crack the code by to suggest that ‘Heil Hitler’ and the weather forecast appeared in every message.
The secrecy demanded of the codebreakers ensured that Turing’s triumph was unknown and little celebrated for decades. Instead, he became infamous for violating a barbaric moral code.
A sad story, told with regrettably little drama or insight, but with sweetness and soul.