DramaLondonReview

A Gig For Ghosts – Soho Theatre, London

Reviewer: Richard Maguire

Book and Lyrics: Fran Bushe

Music: Becky CJ

Director: Ria Parry

Halloween may be around the corner, but 45North’s new show, despite its title, is not a scary ghost story. Instead, A Gig For Ghosts is mostly a sweet rom com that may be too saccharine for everybody’s taste.

The ghost is Lily. We’re told she’s dead, even though she’s smiling and breathing in front of us, in the first five minutes. The rest of the 80-minute show is a flashback scrolling through the months before she died, focussing mainly on the meet cute.

Lily has come to London to find true love and she thinks she’s found it when she meets Amy at some kind of police forensics office where they both work. Lily is just a temp while Amy is in charge of collecting the bodies of lonely people who have died. With no one to miss them, these people often lie for weeks in their homes before they are found. To be honest, this storyline is more interesting than the enfolding love affair, but, because we are never given Amy’s job title or the name of the organisation she works for, this part also seems under-researched and therefore pretty unconvincing.

Fortunately, as the show’s title promises, there are songs, and these are performed very well by the three-strong cast, especially the Irish folky number that begins the show. With Rori Hawthorne on the fiddle, Hanora Kamen on the guitar and Liz Kitchen on the drums and keyboard, the handful of songs they perform certainly gives energy to the story.

Hawthorn is excellent as the optimistic Lily, although Lily’s desperation to find a girlfriend would have most people running for the hills. Kamen is good, too, giving Amy a solid sense of self that is happy to fall in love but who is also afraid to depend on a single person too much. Kitchen plays a variety of roles, and although she is funny with them all, her characters have been thinly drawn by writer Fran Bushe.

The play tackles some darker themes towards the end, but Bushe’s determination to keep things light, means that the subject of loneliness isn’t really given the treatment it deserves and completely ruins scenes that would be more effective if they were played straight. So, it’s three stars for the acting and the music, but the story needs more work if it really wants to interrogate the isolation that modern life engenders.

Runs until 12 November 2022

The Reviews Hub Score

Nice songs

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The Reviews Hub - London

The Reviews Hub London is under the editorship of Richard Maguire. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.

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