THE public’s appetite for ghost stories, macabre thrillers and supernatural drama is boundless – and few people have tapped into that zeitgeist more than Uncanny creator Danny Robins, whose hit play 2:22 – A Ghost Story returns to Theatre Royal Bath from Monday 19th to Saturday 24th January.
Premiering in 2021, 2:22 is a chilling and gripping thriller revolving around young mother Jenny (Shvorne Marks) and her husband Sam (James Bye), who have recently moved into a house that they are in the process of renovating. Every night at precisely 2:22am they hear strange, scary sounds, and Jenny is convinced the house is haunted but Sam is having none of it.
Lauren, a psychologist and old friend of the couple, comes round for dinner with her new partner Ben (Gary Lucy). Belief and scepticism clash and the four of them decide to stay up until 2:22 to try and suss out what’s really going on.
Natalie Casey, the actress who plays Lauren, thinks it’s the perfect show for right now. “We’re trying to make sense of a world that’s becoming increasingly chaotic,” she says, “and in times like this people often turn to the idea that there must be some kind of mystical, otherworldly reason why bad stuff is happening. Also, the world which we live in is being dragged in an increasingly ugly direction and a show like this offers some much-needed escapism.”
The play was wrote by Danny Robins, creator of the hit BBC podcast and TV series Uncanny, and is directed by Matthew Dunster. It won Best New Play at the Whatsonstage Awards and was nominated for three Oliviers. It started out at the Noël Coward Theatre in London and has since enjoyed seven seasons in the West End. With 12 replica productions worldwide, it has been seen by more than 1.1 million people in 17 countries across five continents. The show headed out on its first UK tour in 2023 and in 2026 it is back on the road, returning to towns and cities it has previously played as well as visiting new venues.
The edge-of-the-seat thriller was described by The Guardian reviewer as “a slick, chilling romp of a play”, but Natalie Casey believes that what is interesting about the play is “that it’s about the supernatural, of course, but it’s also about the ghosts of our past in terms of the characters’ relationships. It’s about the things that we never said, the things we wish we’d said and the people we wished we’d become.”
Photographs by Helen Murray