2:22 - Coward/Gielgud/Criterion/Lyric/Apollo/Gielgud

The fifty minutes of act 1 were so dull that barely a quarter of the audience bothered to applaud.

Act 2 offered little improvement, but, inexplicably, generated an ovation and wild applause from most. I can only assume they were diehard Lily Allen fans, as this production lacked any redeeming features.

The concept might have worked well as a 30-minute Inside Number 9 episode, but spun out to two hours, the countdown to 02:22 felt like an eternity. Besides, Reese and Pemberton would have thrown in witty dialogue, engaging characters and some dark humour, none of which we have here. In any case, I suspect the overall conceit would have been vetoed on the grounds of having been done before.

The sound design was woefully bad. A clichéd low background rumble hints at impending danger, but it's so quiet that it's pretty much drowned out by the hum of the AC. Other times, effects go very loud suddenly. I think these are meant to be jump scares, but not one worked; they were simply irritating. There was no nuance or subtlety. The accompanying lighting was similarly ham-fisted.

So, what of the leading lady? I generally prefer to single out good performances rather than criticise the bad, but I'm £60 down on the affair, and feeling a little miffed at being suckered in -- my own fault for being naive, I know -- so I'll make an exception. The kindest thing to say is that Allen's acting isn't terrible. But it's mechanical and unconvincing. Even were this in the provinces at a fraction of the price, I would feel short-changed. On a West End stage, it's taking the proverbial.

If you appreciate good theatre or enjoy a fine horror, I think you'll be disappointed. This one is solely for Allen groupies.

It just scrapes into the two-star category.

Act 1: 19:34-20:23
Act 2: 20:44-21:36

I think the critics are cutting the play, and Allen, a LOT of slack. It's a very minor evening, and incredibly overwritten (some of it is laughably pretentious and I don't think real life refugees would much appreciate being compared to ghosts ..... )

That said the audience last night reacted as if if they were at rock concert at the end.

There was a mention of this in The Metro yesterday, which said LA "has managed to mostly remember the play's script without the prompter, but added: 'I missed out a significant chunk last night i.e. the plot.'" Setting the bar a bit low perhaps?

It’s a shame it never happened. I saw a recording of the workshop with Sheridan Smith and Michael Xavier and it was great.Some brilliant songs too.

Just picked up some cheap seats to this on Tuesday. Oddly cheap, actually - they're right next to band 2 seats and from Seat Plan, there doesn't seem to be anything off about them...

Holding off until more word of mouth reaches me. Very mixed press reviews, no one exactly raving about it, don't want to waste a precious theatre evening on something that this board seems to be labelling "slight".

I’m going to make a wild guess about the denouement of this 



Tell me I’m wrong!

I was left fairly unimpressed by this. I ended up going as a result of some positive commentary latterly on here as well as the fairly kind reviews, and I wish I hadn't.

I agree that Lily Allen was pretty good, she's not playing the easiest character ever written and she pulls it off. Jake Wood was also surprisingly good, he ends up playing to type as an East End geezer but was comfortable onstage. Hadley Fraser is always a favourite and it's a pleasure to see him on stage again.

I also agree that there is some good dialogue, there are some funny lines, there is some nice writing weaving around the ghost story plot, which when the set up is 4 people in one room over several hours needs a lot of work and effort to hold the audiences attention. 

That's right about where all of my praise ends.

To be honest my main criticism is the fact that we just deserved so much more from the play. We deserved more spooks, we deserved more twists and turns, we deserved more of a moral or emotional backbone to the plot. For some reason every single scene ends with a scream sound effect and cheesy flashing lights, which most of the time is non-diegetic, the sole purpose of which is to make the audience jump. I'm happy to be shocked, I love the rush of a good jump scare, but it's really cheap and brainless to create them for absolutely no plot point whatsoever. Meanwhile in the actual context of any scene, there are shockingly few frightening moments. I kept predicting set pieces or character moments they were about to throw at us, and then nothing would happen at all, and the scene would just end with a fake scream sound effect.

As a non-spoiler example, towards the rear of the set there are patio doors which are mentioned a few times in the dialogue, and outside is a foggy night with a motion-activated outdoor light. This is used a couple of times to minor effect, but the obvious really spooky thing would be for a dark figure to be illuminated briefly, perhaps only to the main character when the others are turned away. Or perhaps the patio door that keeps being left open would slam shut suddenly when a key bit of dialogue is mentioned. Or a message appears on the glass. Or the glass shatters. Or the light flickers. Anything. There's a moment involving the unseen bathroom which is mildly unsettling, and I thought "oh great, there are going to be escalating moments of unsettlingness that topple the characters off their perch" which ends up being revealed as nothing at all, and no further moments like it really occur.

To reveal why I really left with a sour taste in my mouth would be to give the whole game away, but all I will say is that if you'd asked me about 15 minutes into the first act to plot out the most predictable outcome based on what had happened so far, I could have told you it. And not only that, together we'd have come up with something much more creative and interesting instead. If that sin was not great enough, when the entirely predictable conclusion occurs, instead of it being threaded around an interesting commentary on something, or a great moment of emotional breakthrough for a character, it's just left hanging as if the plot point was enough to justify our attendance for the whole evening. News flash, it was not enough for that. Not by half. If you're not intending on going, in spoiler tags at the bottom I'll outline my issues.

Overall though I just thought it was weak, it wasn't a bad setup or concept, there were some decent moments in it, but it's almost like the writer just sort of gave up at some stage and decided not to bother creating something complex or meaningful, and figured if we put some star names in it during a desperate time for interesting plays in the West End we can get away with a first draft. It's not 1 star, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone other than fans of occasional loud noises.

I'm impressed you picked up on it so soon andrew - my friend and I didn't have a clue until the very end

I'm thinking Daniel Bedingfield, Kate Nash, Honey G and Clarke Peters.