The Enfield Haunting review – a shocker in all the wrong ways

This is a shocker in all the wrong ways. A play about the famous 1970s case of the Enfield poltergeist, one of the most mysterious of all recent hauntings, turns into a snoozefest which doesn’t seem to have a clue why it’s interesting.

Despite some flashing lights and ominous darkness, the only thing that goes bump in the night is the clank of Paul Unwin’s script – and the sound of Catherine Tate and David Threlfall ringing their agents asking how they ever got mixed up in this farrago.

In Lee Newby’s cut-away set, we are faced with a grimy two floors of the ordinary house in Enfield which became – briefly – in 1977-8 the centre of massive press attention as two teenage daughters of a single mother reported paranormal activity which caused knocking in the walls and objects to fly across the room. The younger, 11-year-old Janet, appeared to be possessed, speaking in ghostly voices.

Experts were called, among them a man called Maurice Grosse who spent huge amounts of time with the family, recording everything that was going on. The case has already inspired a TV series, a film, a podcast and both a documentary and a mockumentary, but none could possibly be as baffling as this telling which flings us straight into the centre of the action with Tate (as the children’s mother Peggy) already exasperated by the amount of fuss her daughter Janet (Ella Schrey-Yeats, in her stage debut) has attracted.

“Leave my family alone,” she exclaims. Which over the next 75-minutes, is more or less the only thing she ever gets to say, aside from “I just want you all to get out of here!” and “I’m not leaving my house.” Tate is reliably watchable and warm, but it must have been difficult for her not to deliver gems such as this without heading into full comic mode.

Threlfall is similarly lumbered as Grosse, who potters vaguely around the action trying to calm things down and explaining that a poltergeist is drawn to unhappiness – and usually to teenage girls but seems remarkably unconcerned when a gas fire is ripped from the wall. A sub-thread of plot about his own dead daughter makes very little sense. Then there’s neighbour “Uncle” Rey, played with an admirably straight face by Mo Sesay, who keeps appearing to wring his hands and say things like “I’m not having it”.

The real mystery here is why The Enfield Haunting, directed by Angus Jackson, is so crushingly bad. Unwin has a track record as a writer of TV detective series such as Poirot and the hospital drama Casualty. He knows how to create scripts that have texture, that combine the thrill of discovery with the psychology of a family under pressure.

Yet here his writing seems to have no line. The interest of the tale lies in the tension between whether Janet and her sister Margaret are making things up, or whether 284 Grace Street truly is in the grip of the supernatural. Yet here, though there’s one moment in which we see Janet thrown across a bedroom, there’s no psychological insight into their behaviour. Instead, Margaret (Grace Monony) floats through the action claiming she needs to use “the pardonnez-moi” which is a bad joke about class on its first utterance and a terrible one on its repeat.

As for the paranormal, the show declares its hand relatively early in terms of a haunting and the illusions (credited to Paul Kieve) are brief and noisy rather than frightening. The audience was ready to be scared and thrilled – but the entire show is as disappointing as a wet Halloween.