When Darkness Falls – Richmond Theatre, London

Writers: James Milton and Paul Morrissey

Director: Paul Morrissey

This touring production of When Darkness Falls sounds promising. It’s a two-hander set on a stormy night on Guernsey and is about local ghost stories. Seasoned West End actors Tony Timberlake and Thomas Dennis play respectively John Blondel, a local historian and a younger paranormal researcher known only as The Speaker. We’re in John’s cluttered, ill-lit office while he is setting up to record his first ever podcast about the island’s reputation for supernatural sightings. He’s awaiting the arrival of his guest who promises to share some of his stories.

So far, so bland, and we’re perhaps reminded of the deliberately flat beginning of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black. Hill achieves a startling change of mood when the dry narrative of the protagonist’s story switches to its vivid, increasingly terrifying dramatization. The sense of foreboding memorably begins when the hero has to visit a deserted house by crossing from the mainland along a causeway only accessible at low tide.

Will When Darkness Falls transform itself into a play of similar eeriness? Sadly not. While writers James Milton and Paul Morrissey are clearly passionate about their research, the piece never comes to life. The dialogue between the two characters is ponderous, each tending to lecture the other using very similar language or read aloud long extracts of prose. Both actors do a good job with their respective parts, but are required to embody characters who are frankly contradictory. So although John Blondel presents himself as a cynical historian, adamant ghosts don’t exist, he has to straighten his back in a significant manner and adopt a look of terror every Thomas Dennis’s character tells him another chilly tale.

There is some attempt at dramatization, but it makes little sense. Every so often, the two men start playing characters, but we we’re not transported to another realm: we’re still in the sturdily realistic office where we remain throughout. Sometimes the lights go out for dramatic effect. Sometime a piece of furniture goes rogue. Relentless dripping rain and several ear-splitting claps of thunder signal what we’re supposed to feel. Particularly clunky is an unfortunate section about Guerney’s underground hospital. For some reason Thomas Dennis has to narrate his experience of being a German soldier in the third person. More worrying is the deeply unpleasant stereotyping of the enemy forces as inhumanly brutal.

The play wants to engage with philosophical and medical debates about the nature of haunting, but reading aloud chunks of Freud and asking endless rhetorical questions doesn’t make for engaging drama.

Runs until 11 February 2023 then tours