“Things look and behave differently in the dark”
The Haunting of Hill House welcomes you to Richmond Theatre with an immediate fright. The opening jump-scare provokes everything from cackling to screaming. Somewhere in the auditorium, popcorn has surely been sacrificed. It sets the tone for an evening that delights in making its audience jump without becoming unbearably frightening. Even those who usually avoid horror might enjoy the ingenuity of its scares, writes Leo Dunlop.
Adapted from Shirley Jackson’s novel by Stef Smith and directed by Martin Constantine, the production follows a group investigating Hill House’s supernatural disturbances. For Clancy Ryan’s Eleanor, however, the house becomes more than an object of curiosity. Intoxicated by its secrets, she finds something dangerously inviting in the secrets it holds. Is she being beckoned towards a future, or drawn further into the past?
The technical achievements are the evening’s real distinction. Johnny Edwards’s sound design gives unseen presences a true physicality, while Chris Davey’s lighting and Duncan McLean’s video design make the architecture itself seem fluid and dynamic. Footsteps patter without a visible source. We feel a presence precisely where our eyes insist there is none. The effect is strikingly cinematic, yet exploits the particular vulnerability of watching something happen live.
“Things look and behave differently in the dark,” we are told, and the production makes good on that warning. A curtain becomes a narrow corridor; a doorway is concealed or transformed. Scene changes unfold like the turning of a page, carrying us between rooms without breaking the spell.
Familiar horror devices are deployed with relish: a rocking horse moves of its own accord; a ballerina music box, stubbornly silent when wound, finds its voice at precisely the wrong moment. These objects are knowingly cheesy, but their familiarity sharpens our anticipation. The pleasure lies in waiting for the expected scare, or discovering how that expectation will be subverted.
A possession sequence produces an effect that seems to belong to the editing suite until it happens before our eyes. Illusion designer Will Houstoun deserves credit, alongside the stage management team and crew, whose timing makes the supernatural tangible.
The cast give the characters distinct outlines, reinforced by Ti Green’s carefully considered silhouettes through the costume. Some relationships feel thinly developed, although the production’s momentum usually carries it past these weaknesses.
Beneath the spectacle, grief gives the haunting its emotional force. Eleanor’s attachment to the house asks what we might surrender to feel that the dead are still within reach. Sometimes we desperately wish they would return; sometimes we desperately wish they would stay dead. Smith captures enough of that contradiction to give the scares emotional consequence.
At around two hours including the interval, the evening is impressively compact. Yet just as the story reaches its most compelling pitch, it seems to run out of time, leaving its emotional developments insufficient room to breathe.
Still, this is a technical marvel. You find yourself caught between surrendering to the illusion and wondering how on earth they pulled it off. Then something moves in the dark, and the question can wait.
Booking and tour details: https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/the-haunting-of-hill-house/
