The Psychic at Theatre Royal York – review

When Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman first collaborated in 2010, they struck gold with the horror Ghost Stories. Multiple West End runs, UK and international tours, and a film adaptation later, the duo return with a new show that makes the same request of its audience (and critics): “please, keep the secrets.”

It is not a spoiler to tell you that we begin in the presence of popular TV psychic Sheila Gold (Eileen Walsh). She has been branded a charlatan following a high-profile court case that has left her disgraced and with a monumental legal bill to pay. An approach by a recently bereaved wealthy couple (Jaz Singh Deol and Nikhita Lesler) offers Sheila the opportunity to recoup the cash: they want her to undertake a séance to find out if their late young daughter is at peace.

Dyson and Nyman ground the play in the travelling Showmen community and have engaged Showmen consultants William Hussey and Richard Cadell on the play’s contents. Showmen terminology is embedded in the characters’ language, as is the way of life. Having no children of her own, Sheila, somewhat reluctantly, takes on the role of Ooja (mentor) to her 18-year-old cousin, Tara (Megan Placito) – as her mother, Rosa (Frances Barber), did for her – to pass the ways of the Showmen community’s Dookeroos (fortune-tellers) on to the next generation.

Amongst the play’s twists, the biggest revelation of the night takes the steam out of proceedings and leaves the second half struggling to regain the show’s momentum, even with Barber in full, entertaining flow (despite an “Oirish” accent that holidays in the West Country). She almost upstages Walsh’s perfectly constructed Sheila, who oozes charm when in performance mode and is cutthroat when not mic’d up, surviving on a stream of medication and whiskey. We ask ourselves how much of what Sheila is doing is real – she asks herself the same question.

Meanwhile, Placito, who grew up in the travelling Showmen community, is impressive in her professional stage debut as the perpetually underestimated Tara, who proves herself to be more than a match for anyone. Rae Smith’s angular stage gives us the glitz of Sheila’s show business, the hardship of Rosa’s caravan, and captures the mood of a candlelit séance before it has begun. It holds a few surprises too.

Audiences should not arrive expecting the horror of Ghost Stories. We are in psychological thriller territory, though there are a few genuinely hair-raising shocks sprinkled into the evening. These moments are when the play is at its best and are, in a way, its undoing. Having built up the tension and terrified us in the process, the methodical path towards a conclusion that follows is entertaining but never grips us in the same way. It can’t provide us with the same closure that Sheila gives the grieving fans who flock to her shows, partly because its ending is tied up with a convenient neatness, but mostly because when the thrill is in the unknown, the reality can often underwhelm.