Writer: Gerald Durrell
Adaptor and Director: Dugald Bruce-Lockhart
Unsettling, discordant music plays, underscored by strange inhuman sounds. Smoke drifts through uncanny shafts of light before a row of arched antique mirrors with ornate frames. The lighting, sound and set design for The Mill at Sonning’s latest show The Shadow in the Mirror are all award-winningly good. Matched with a first-rate cast and energetic direction, they magically conjure a gripping couple of hours’ entertainment from an evocative, baffling, but slightly predictable 1970s horror story.
Writer and naturalist Gerald Durrell (1925-1995) is best known for his cheerful memoir My Family and Other Animals, but he also wrote dozens of other books, including a couple of short story collections. The Entrance, Durrell’s unexpected gothic tale, involving a spooky snowed-in château, is a mash-up of almost every trope in the whodunnit/haunted mansion/thriller genres’ cobwebby closets: locked rooms with giant keys? Check. Mysterious midnight visitors? Check. Grimoires full of occult lore? Check. Bloody handprints? Broken mirrors? Kafkaesque courtrooms? Check, check, check.
Director Dugald Bruce-Lockhart’s adaptation of Durrell keeps quite a lot of the richly detailed narration whilst also transforming the piece into a dynamic stage-play. Nick Waring gives a convincing central performance as Peter Letting, an amiable antiquarian bookseller, who takes a commission to catalogue some valuable books and finds himself trapped in a nightmare. When we first meet him, he’s in prison, desperately trying to finish writing an account of his recent life before daybreak. It’s not clear for quite a while what crime he’s accused of, whether he actually did it, and indeed what is actually going on, making it less of a whodunnit than a wtfhappened?
George Dillon is simultaneously blunt and enigmatic as John the Jailer. He quickly becomes a kind of mocking narrator, snatching Letting’s half-finished written account to read aloud. Gregg Lowe is fabulous as French aristocrat Gideon de Teildras Villeray, with lashings of charm and terror, later doubling as a sinister hooded figure and bewigged judge.
Costume designer Natalie Titchener pays exquisite attention to every detail of the suits and robes the 1901 setting requires. Gideon sweeps in with silver-topped cane and hat (as described in the original tale) and a swishy cape lined with crimson silk that matches the dark red roses in a vase and Ribena-purple ‘Margaux’ in crystal glasses. When they meet again in France, it’s snowing and he sports an elegant grey Astrakhan collar while Peter carries a snow-dusted suitcase.
Diego Pitarc’s super-stylish set is half crumbling baroque mansion and half steampunk prison, all in the show’s signature monochrome/mirror-silvered/dark blood palette. The responsive lighting by Mike Robertson is atmospheric and effective, and Simon Slater’s sound design, with its disquieting musical compositions, is a work of genius. From the prison’s gloomy dripping to the thumping of the monster’s twisted foot, there is a whole symphony of unnerving noises: howling storms, growling thunder, clanking chains and creaking doors.
Durrell clearly borrowed from a jumble of sources to create this off-brand Halloween-ready thriller. His isolated château is home to a slightly incongruous menagerie of animals: a loyal terrier, a patriotic parrot, who whistles La Marseillaise, and a cage of canaries. But they are not the only things living here…
The play is staged in the amphitheatre-style Mill at Sonning, an elegantly converted eighteenth-century flour mill by the river. Tickets include lunch or dinner in the beamed restaurant, making a thoroughly worthwhile day or evening out. If you’re a fan of creepy stories, from Dracula to Stranger Things, you’ll love this supernatural excursion.
Runs until 8 November 2025
