Writer and Director: Jamie Armitage
Do you really want to spend 85 minutes at the theatre wearing binaural headphones? Isn’t that just a podcast with visuals, one that risks distancing the audience from the actors? In A Ghost In Your Ear, writer and high-profile director Jamie Armitage leans into the challenge by giving us an unexpectedly satisfying story and a decent reason to put on the headset, and by drawing on just about every foley-driven jump scare technique in the Hollywood horror director’s tool book. The result is an engaging and often funny take on the ghost-story genre that admirably distracts us from the gimmicky.
George (a tremendous George Blagden) is an actor who specialises in audiobook recordings. He arrives late and flustered for a gig at a recording studio somewhere on “the world’s saddest retail park”. Long-time collaborator and sound director Sid (Jonathan Livingstone), whose wife is heavily pregnant, is impatient to get to work on recording a new piece by a horror start-up specialising in binaural ghost stories. Voiceover recordings from someone who sounds an awful lot like custodian-in-chief of the British ghost story, Mark Gatiss (the actor is not credited in the programme for some reason), add a tone of eerie menace.
George, money-starved and fragile from a recent relationship bust-up, has not actually seen the script before, but throws himself into the job with the energy of an Audible hack in urgent need of a paycheck. The horror genre needs characters to walk into danger to keep the plot moving, which explains why the actor lets himself get trapped behind glass inside a claustrophobic sound studio, without his phone, and with only a microphone that looks like a disembodied human head for company.
The story George has to act out concerns a redundant university lecturer whose estranged father has left him a large, spooky house somewhere outside a remote Pennine village. Inevitably, it is dead of winter, blizzards threaten to cut the house off from the outside world, and the mansion’s electrics are decidedly temperamental. As the protagonist begins to clear his dad’s household clutter, weird thuds and the creaking of steps on the staircase echo threateningly from room to room. Mirrors splinter, and somewhere in the distance a disembodied child’s voice intones the word “Papa” (one suspects a nod to TV’s Stranger Things here). A shadow of a noose emerges from behind a bookshelf.
While George recounts the tale, the events he reveals come to life in the sound studio: lights flicker, and boom microphones crash to the floor. Anticipate other scary appearances. The atmospheric soundscape positively celebrates the spookiest of foley effects, particularly during one scene set entirely in the dark.
Without giving too much away, A Ghost In Your Ear has something serious to say about facing up to family secrets, and how adults often struggle to cast off the shackles of inadequate or even malign parenting. Passing on, or rather not passing on, our bitter childhood experiences to our own children is Armitage’s theme. Blagden delivers a tremendous turn as the ever more jittery and breathless George, playing to the dummy microphone head as if he is making love to a reluctant romantic love interest. Livingstone’s jovial, down-to-earth Sid pops up just frequently enough to press the pause button on the ratcheting tension, and neatly camouflages a satisfying late-act twist in the tale.
The National Theatre’s Anna, whose sound designers Ben and Max Ringham do the honours in this piece, got away with headphones because the experience felt fresh, even if the story was thin and mostly bonkers. The Donmar’s Macbeth relied on fine direction and stonkingly good central performances to carry the conceit. A Ghost In Your Ear gets away with it, indeed thrives on it, because the execution and story are great, the horror tropes are the right side of hackneyed, and the show never takes itself too seriously.
The Hampstead Theatre cautions those of a ‘nervous disposition’ to think carefully about attending. Others might conclude that contemplating your check-out bill at Tesco’s is a great deal scarier than most of what goes on here, but be duly warned.
Runs until 31 January 2026
