![Catherine Tate stars in The Enfield Haunting](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/01/02/TELEMMGLPICT000361403598_17042182568300_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
‘The man in grey turns up when you have a big hit’: the secrets of Britain’s haunted theatres
Many theatres have their own resident spectres. Cameron Mackintosh, Andrew Lloyd Webber and others talk about their eerie experiences
![Catherine Tate stars in The Enfield Haunting](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/01/02/TELEMMGLPICT000361403598_17042182568300_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Recently, British theatre has caught stage fright with a rise in shows involving supernatural subjects. The successes of A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic and the ghoulish thriller 2:22 A Ghost Story (now on tour), not to mention an eerie congruence of Macbeths, attest to a palpable surge in our passion for spine-tinglers. 2024 kicks off with The Enfield Haunting at the Ambassadors: a new play by Paul Unwin (starring Catherine Tate and David Threlfall) about the notorious late 1970s case involving a poltergeist-beset ordinary house in north London.
These shows employ the tricks of the trade to help conjure the required hair-raising atmosphere. But they’re subliminally abetted by the curious otherworldly aspect that many theatres possess, with many boasting their very own ghost stories.
Danny Robins, the author of 2:22 and an open-minded enquirer into the supernatural, now has a hit touring show called Uncanny based on his podcast. His recent 42-date tour of the UK became an unofficial “census” of theatre ghosts, he suggests; only three or four venues didn’t have a related ghost story to impart. And surprisingly often, he struck lucky in finding corroboration from eyewitness accounts in the audience.
“There was a nice example in Worthing. We were in the Pavilion, but the theatre is linked to the Connaught, where there are reports of a ‘grey lady’. This bloke [in the audience] said ‘I’ve seen her’ and told us a story about working in the fly gallery late at night. He said ‘I saw this woman and she looked as real as you do now.’ It freaked him out so much that he took two weeks off, and had to relocate to another role.”
“Viewed collectively, you start to see trends,” Robins continues. “About 60 per cent of the theatres had a ‘grey lady”, who ranged from medieval nuns to manageress figures. If I had to break it down, I’d say the stories fell into three broad categories: tales of tragic love, tales of failure and frustration and then instances related to injury and accidental death.”
![Christopher Eccleston as Ebenezer Scrooge and Rose Shalloo as Little Fan in A Christmas Carol at The Old Vic](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2023/12/29/TELEMMGLPICT000356949545_17038640255960_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqme4O-rs0Qz_d49US6yOGPO9w7m6QJNDwG3DTNYKwfJA.jpeg?imwidth=350)
The one related to failure that most stayed with him concerned a moaning spirit at the Glasgow Theatre Royal – “a woman called Nora, who was a cleaner who always dreamed of going on stage. She was given a chance to audition and was apparently so terrible she got laughed off stage – and threw herself to her death out of shame. So many people working in theatre would identify with that sense of hurt and rejection.”
The doyen of knowledge in the field is Nick Bromley, a long-standing West End company stage manager who has penned an invaluable compendium to the best stories (Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres). It includes his own head-scratching encounters, including one apparently with the impish spirit of Joe Orton, larking around during a 2009 West End run of the play Prick Up Your Ears.
Among the A-list actors in his book are Judi Dench and Patrick Stewart. Dench believes that she may have seen the ‘Haymarket’ ghost (the 19th-century manager John Baldwin Buckstone), during a memorial service for the actor Michael Denison in 1998. Stewart was spooked by briefly seeing a figure on stage with him and Ian McKellen during their 2009 Waiting for Godot, at the same theatre. “He was wearing a belted Norfolk jacket. I think he had a shirt – a rather old-fashioned check shirt with a tie underneath the jacket and he was wearing cavalry twill trousers and suede boots.” Bromley isn’t sure who that might be (“this apparition remains anonymous”).
![The clown Joseph Grimaldi who haunts Theatre Royal Drury Lane](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2023/12/29/TELEMMGLPICT000361096194_17038637520380_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqHqOpY7qqPpKt1o-ufeW-sSqxjOYp6jQVimjLmvgWxxw.jpeg?imwidth=350)
He has entries for more than 50 venues, the most substantial being London’s oldest theatre, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane: supposed stomping ground for the clown Joseph Grimaldi (who likes to give actors an encouraging boot up the backside), the comedian and panto dame Dan Leno, usually announced by the smell of lavender, and the mysterious ‘man in grey’, an 18th-century figure wearing a grey riding cloak, who is said to have been mass-sighted in the auditorium from the stage in 1939 by the cast of Ivor Novello’s The Dancing Years during a photo-call.
I felt sure the ‘Lane’s current owner – Andrew Lloyd Webber – would have tales about the place, and his other theatres, up his sleeve. But alas he tells me he has never seen one (“Though I did have a house in Eaton Square which had a poltergeist,” he adds casually. “It would do things like take theatre scripts and put them in a neat pile in some obscure room. In the end, we had to get a priest to come and bless it, and it left!”)
His sometime collaborator the impresario Cameron Mackintosh does have something to impart about “the Lane”, though. “On the opening night of Miss Saigon in 1989, I walked onto the vast stage and stood with [designer] John Napier. As we gazed into the beautiful empty auditorium, we felt a chill and heard some slight sounds above our heads in the grid. Even the light we were in seemed to take on a mysterious tinge. In less than a minute, it was gone, but we both felt some presence. Later the theatre’s old manager George Hoare told me: ‘That was the Man in Grey. He always turns up if you’re going to have a big hit!’”
![Andrew Lloyd Webber: ' I had a house in Eaton Square which had a poltergeist.'](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2023/12/29/TELEMMGLPICT000260439344_17038637153570_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Neat, and reassuringly benign. The same can’t be said for the tale imparted by Christian Edwards, the actor who for years satirically styled himself in a mask as ‘West End Producer’. Circa 2011, he was a tour guide at Drury Lane, and while talking to a party of American tourists about the under-stage area, alluded to a girl called June who had fallen to her death in a [1909] show called The Whip. “As I was talking – and this sounds crazy – a bunch of screws came and hovered in front of my face. I heard a sound, and saw the shadow of something behind me. One of the party said: ‘Oh my god, the effects you guys are doing are amazing!’. I said: ‘This isn’t part of the tour. I may have said something wrong.’ I cut the tour short and it took me a long time to go back under that stage.”
Nica Burns, who co-runs Nimax theatres, tells me about an odd, inexplicable cold patch of air in the Garrick one hot summer’s morning, Stephen Daldry talks of eerie whistling high in the Duke of York’s, the actor Joseph Millson confides about seeing a ghostly apparition that looked weirdly like a “comedy Halloween costume” while he was on stage at the Haymarket in 2016 and Andrew Stocker, a duty manager at the Bristol Old Vic - who has worked there for 40 years – talks of experiencing bizarre temperature changes, accompanied by deep unease (“I thought: bloody hell!”).
You can clearly discount some ghost stories as the product of confusion and overactive imaginations, or attention-seeking, or theatre’s love of a good yarn, but the quantity of material starts to weigh on the sceptical mind. Richard Eyre, no less – former artistic director of the National Theatre – would ask you to think twice before dismissing these things out of hand.
Identifying the séance-like nature of theatre itself, where so much imagination and emotion gets invested en masse, he reflects: “I’ve never had a problem with the appearance of ghosts. I’m one of the few people who didn’t think the [Diana] scenes in The Crown were ridiculous. Theatres are sites of intense experience, for audiences and practitioners. There’s an unnatural degree of energy – they’re absolutely charged.”
!['We felt a chill and heard some sounds': Cameron Mackintosh](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/01/02/TELEMMGLPICT000267245474_17042184318180_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqJ6RiS5Rjb_N6p5OO4zvskmtsyqqMdlVKSFyG_Mr0HEE.jpeg?imwidth=350)
He himself saw a ghost while working at the Lyceum in Edinburgh in the late 1960s. “It must have been about 1 am. I was working through the night, lighting a show, and I saw a woman in white, in period dress, walking across the back of the upper circle. She walked slowly, and then was gone. I then told the two technicians I was working alongside, and they said, ‘Yes, we know about that ghost, but we’ve never seen her!’”.
And it’s at the Lyceum we will linger for the final and most romantic vignette of stage-struck, or stuck, spirits. David Greig, its current artistic director, as level-headed as they get, tells me the tale: “It was during the pandemic – October 2021,” he says. “I got locked in after a technical run for Life Is a Dream. I was writing up in the gods and no one knew I was there. So I had to make a call and wait for front of house staff to come back with the keys. While I waited, I saw a young woman and a young man on stage. She was dressed in a very chic 1940s cocktail dress and he was in army uniform. In the half-dark, they began to dance together to music I couldn’t hear.
“I assumed they were two actors, but no one was supposed to be in, so I called out. They looked at me, and left the stage. When the front of house person arrived, we searched all over but no one was there. Later I was told by our union rep – one of our longest-serving employees – that another technician once told him there had been a fly operator who had had a love affair with a stage manager. He had died in the war and she had killed herself out of love. The man had told him the couple could sometimes be seen on stage dancing. I have no idea how I saw what I saw, but I’m struck that my vision closely matched that story.”
The Enfield Haunting opens at the Ambassadors, London WC2, on Jan 10 until March 2, (0333 009 6690; enfieldhauntingplay.com); further dates for Danny Robins’ Uncanny tour will be announced shortly at dannyrobins.com; Nick Bromley’s ‘Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres’ is published by LNP Books (lnpbooks.co.uk); book a Theatre Royal Drury Lane guided tour here: lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/theatre-royal-drury-lane-tours/