Review: GHOST STORIES at the Peacock Theatre

Date: 15th October 2025

Stars: 4

The strange thing about Ghost Stories at the Peacock isn’t the jump scares. It’s the way the room starts working against you. It’s subtle at first. A draft you’re not sure you imagined. A seat creak that isn’t yours. A gap between heartbeats that feels one beat too long. The play has been around since 2010, but it wears its age like something that’s learned to hunt slowly. It doesn’t rush you. It waits until you’re the one doing half the work.

Jonathan Guy Lewis opens the night as Professor Goodman with a calm, sensible voice – the sort of man who probably thinks sensible things keep him safe. They don’t. The stories come one by one: a man alone in the dark, a drive gone wrong, a child and a silence that doesn’t sit right. And the twist, of course, the one we’ve been drip fed throughout and didn’t realise that was the case until the end. They sound ordinary, almost disappointingly so, until the edges of each story start to warp. And that’s the clever bit – horror that feels like something that could actually happen always lands harder than the kind with glowing red eyes.

The lighting, by James Farncombe, isn’t just design. It’s strategy. He doesn’t light the stage so much as decide how much of it you’re allowed to see; a corner disappears, a shape flickers, and suddenly the familiar becomes suspect. The effects follow the same principle. No bombast, no dry ice tsunami. Just quiet little betrayals of your own sense of what’s solid.

Dyson and Nyman’s direction is meticulous, though it never looks it. They know exactly how much to give away, how long to hold a silence, how to sneak a laugh in the door before slamming it. The humour isn’t there to soften the blows. It’s bait. You laugh, you unclench, and the thing you’ve been waiting for – or worse, the thing you’ve convinced yourself isn’t going to happen – happens.

The set itself is a trickster. Under full light it’s as bland as a corridor you’ve walked through a thousand times, but bland things are perfect hiding places. A wall doesn’t need to move much to make you doubt your own memory of it.

By the end, the room doesn’t erupt – it exhales. People blink at each other like they’ve just stepped back from something that didn’t entirely want to let them go. The scares work because they never fully arrive. They brush past you, as if they have somewhere else to be.

That’s the genius of Ghost Stories. It isn’t about what you saw in the dark. It’s about what you’re still half-listening for when you’re standing outside on a busy London street, trying to laugh it off and failing just a little.

Ghost Stories plays at the Peacock Theatre until 8th November: https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/ghost-stories/