2:22 A Ghost Story Review — Whose Fear Gets Believed?
★★★★ A tightly wound paranormal thriller that pairs jump scares with a sharper interest in class unease, strained intimacy and belief.
It is hard to write about a paranormal play without either spoiling it or sounding as though you are circling your own sentences. 2:22 A Ghost Story invites that problem because it trades so heavily on what you think you are seeing. If you have watched The Sixth Sense, your mind may start doing some quiet arithmetic. That is the only hint I can give the reader without spoiling the reveal.
At its simplest, it’s a dinner party play with a timer built in: new parents Jenny and Sam invite Lauren (Sam’s old university flame) and her partner Ben for drinks and dinner in a half-renovated house, then agree to stay awake until 2:22am to see whether the noises Jenny has been hearing are real, imagined — or something else.
Danny Robins’ script, directed by Matthew Dunster and Gabriel Vega Weissman, sets its supernatural machinery inside a recognisably ordinary domestic evening. Everything takes place in one room: the kitchen-diner-living space of a house still mid-renovation, half-painted and unsettled, its new owners living among mismatched furniture and the traces of those who came before. The set (Anna Fleischle) remains unchanged across two acts, but it never feels static. Three doors — to the bathroom, the stairs and the patio — are enough to suggest an offstage geography that keeps pressing in. You feel the upstairs where the baby sleeps. You feel the garden beyond the glass. You feel the house listening.
The production announces itself with an opening that is almost aggressively loud: techno blasting through the darkened stage, framed by bleeding red LED lines. It is an arresting start, though one that arguably overstates its case; the play is quite capable of generating suspense without forcing the audience into it. When the noise drops, the mood shifts. Jenny (Shvorne Marks) appears on a ladder, painting carefully around a door frame while keeping half an ear on the baby monitor, as if motherhood has trained her attention into a permanent flinch. From the start she feels stretched thin.
Jenny tells Sam (James Bye), newly back from a business trip, that at precisely 2:22 every night she hears footsteps and strange sounds through the monitor. Once, convinced it was an intruder, she even called the police. Sam brings the other half of the play’s engine: scepticism with a professional sheen. He’s an astronomer and the author of Astronomy for Dummies, a man trained to find explanations and to distrust the emotional charge of a story. Foxes shrieking outside, pipes, drafts, electrical faults — he offers plausible answers in the way a certain type of person does, not quite noticing how plausibility can become its own kind of dismissal.
Their dinner guests are Lauren (Natalie Casey), Sam’s old flame from their university years, and her current partner Ben (Grant Kilburn). As wine is poured and the conversation loosens, old histories surface and the house itself starts to enter the discussion. It belonged to an old woman who outlived her husband, a man “very good with his hands”, who improved it slowly and carefully. Sam admits he broke a promise when he cleared out and burned some of what they left behind. Ben, who remembers the area before the middle class arrived, needles Sam with “you lot” — people who buy up streets like this, strip out their marks and memories, then hand it back looking spotless and soulless. In that context, haunting begins to look less like a parlour trick and more like an argument about what gets erased, and who gets to call that “progress”.
Sound and technology sharpen the fault lines. Music slips in and out to mark mood and tension. Alexa behaves like another presence in the room, responding to Jenny but not to Sam, holding her dinner-party playlist and reviving old anthems that sketch in who these people once were. The baby monitor keeps the unseen upstairs insistently present. Outside, foxes shriek with such ferocity they sound almost human. A patio light flares unexpectedly behind semi-transparent glass. None of it is extraordinary in isolation, but together it produces a steady, unnerving tension.
The first act leans heavily on dialogue, sometimes to the point where explanation threatens to outrun action. After the interval, once the clock above the door has pushed the evening deeper into night and the group has drunk enough to drop their manners, the play finds its stride. Ben, who believes in karma and the paranormal with an openness that is both disarming and irritating to Sam, insists that experience should count for something. Jenny wants witnesses. The vigil becomes inevitable — and the debates about belief and logic start sounding less like ideology and more like a struggle over whose version of reality is allowed to stand. For that reason, the middle of the second act is the play’s strongest stretch: still funny, still socially recognisable, but with the veneer thinning and the friction beginning to bite.
Shvorne Marks holds the centre with a performance that resists easy sympathy. Her Jenny is not unravelled so much as worn down, alert to every sound and interruption, her fear sharpened by fatigue rather than hysteria. James Bye’s Sam arrives with the assurance of a man used to explaining the world to other people; his rationalism is fluent and often persuasive, which makes its slide into condescension all the more uncomfortable to watch. Grant Kilburn gives Ben an easy warmth and emotional openness that sets him slightly apart from the others, particularly when his beliefs are brushed aside with a knowing smile. Natalie Casey plays Lauren with a cool composure that keeps old feelings present but unresolved, allowing the tension to sit in what is not quite said rather than in overt conflict.
The séance itself unfolds with startling speed: the table shifts, a lamp begins to swing, fire breaks out on the hob. The effects, devised by illusionist Chris Fisher, decisively tip the room off balance and draw audible gasps. Sam insists on trickery; Ben insists on a spirit presence. The police interrupt the ritual, and the play rushes towards its conclusion — explanation arriving before anyone in the room, audience included, has quite decided what to do with it.
For all its jump scares and spectacle, the play’s real tension comes from ordinary human failures: listening too late, trusting the wrong explanations, mistaking authority for truth. Class resentment, emotional fatigue and unresolved intimacy sit just beneath the surface of the paranormal plot. 2:22 A Ghost Story exposes the uncomfortable possibility that what haunts us most is not what we believe in, but what we choose not to hear.
2:22 – A Ghost Story runs at Richmond Theatre until February 7 and continues on tour
Address: The Green, Richmond, TW9 1QJ
Duration: 2 hours including interval
Age guideance: 12+
Tickets and more information – https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/2-22-a-ghost-story/richmond-theatre/
Elena Leo is the Culture & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
