The Signalman ★★

Who doesn’t like a nice festive ghost story just in time for Christmas? Well, the Drayton Arms is giving you just that in the pub’s cosy theatre upstairs. This well-known Charles Dickens spooky short story, The Signalman, has been adapted by Mudlark Creative and the Drayton Arms Theatre as a two-handed full-length dramatisation and is running right up until the New Year. The cast is made up of wife and husband team Helen Bang and Peter Rae, who have recently performed at the Drayton in their own self-penned production of This is NOT a Murder Mystery as well as starring in An Absolute Farce of a Murder Mystery and Don’t Take The Pith!. The audience is promised the full nerve-tingling experience, as the show is advertised as using “glorious” surround sound created by sound designer and composer Steve Ramondt. We are assured that the soundscape will evoke the eerie atmosphere of the country railway station – a first for any show at the Drayton Arms. But can this production fully immerse its audience into the frightening world it promises on its poster? Will we go home on the London tube thinking about all the lost souls in those tunnels and then sleep safely in our own beds and Christmas pyjamas? Well, what an old curiosity of a shop this dissatisfying mini-drama turned out to be.

As the audience lights go down, the scene is set beside the railway tunnel at Clayton Signal Box. With a puff from the smoke machine, it starts with a short scene in front of the stage showing a silent woman reading and working beside a bookcase that rotates into an office wall with the careful hands of the stage manager. In the background there is a strange melancholic song reflecting the dull life she is leading as she moves through a carefully choreographed set of moves in this promising opening. Then she declares that she’s had enough, and with the removal of the bookcase, we are transported to a Somerset inn, with an attendant innkeeper, where she has decided to stay over the Christmas period. At this point we learn that there has been a railway disaster in that area and that the locals don’t want to talk about it. We also find out that there is a walk near the railway cutting, and our female lone traveller decides this would be a nice way to fill her time in the country. On the way, there is a bizarre scene where she meets a morris dancer.

So this is how writer/director/producer Jennie-Mae James has chosen to set up her adaptation and pull us into the original story created by Dickens. No longer is the railway worker in a dismal trench, but in a homely-looking shed containing his signal box on stage right next to the tunnel and signals. The set, designed by Karen Holley, is a really clever use of the small space and the best thing about this production, but it doesn’t feel as haunted and miserable as one would have expected. James also uses the staircase between the audience members to bring The Visitor, ethereally played by Helen Bang, up from the inn and down into the cutting amidst a loudly soundscaped rockfall. Here she comes upon The Signalman, a rather too upbeat Peter Rae, and greets him with seasonal bonhomie and an interest in his work. He feels he’s already met her, but she says this is the first time she’s ever seen him. Rae looks haunted at times as he explains what has happened to him and the premonitions he felt he should have had before grizzly disasters and murders on his patch, but it’s too much of a leap to believe that this signalman’s soul is continuously tortured by his invasive thoughts and spectral visitations. Bang acts as a sympathetic and unafraid listener as the narrative explores the signalman’s sanity and feelings of guilt, but the scenes feel disjointed and confusing to the watcher who may be unfamiliar with the original story. Ultimately one of the pair crudely and noisily meets their maker in less than an hour (which also includes the unnecessary tension-disrupting ten-minute interval).

The audience is promised a production filled with surround sound, designed by a creative audio storyteller, but what we got was definitely not surround sound, as all the music and effects appear from the front of us. The noises were pedestrian and disappointing and didn’t live up to expectations. The lighting offered little to enhance the feelings of fear, gloom and despondency. Both sound and lights could have delivered so much more to invoke the sinister sense of unearthliness with swirling mists, shadows, apparitions and creepy discord.

This playlet has wandered off the path to its signal box. The Signalman is oversold and underdelivered on its festive fear, and it leaves its audience bemused and jangled in the wrong way with its clunky progressions and abrupt conclusion.