Review: IT WALKS AROUND THE HOUSE AT NIGHT at Southwark Playhouse Borough

Date: 9th March 2026

Stars: 3

Pretending to be a ghost sounds like a fairly easy job… Walk around the outside of a big old house after dark, circle the grounds, make enough noise to unsettle the people inside and go back to your room until the next night. Simple enough.

That’s the job Joe takes on in Tim Foley’s It Walks Around the House at Night. An out-of-work actor, he accepts a strange offer to spend a few nights outside a remote manor house, wandering the grounds and playing the role of a ghost in order to frighten the owner’s nieces who are staying there. It’s an odd bit of work, but work all the same.

The premise is a good one – the idea of someone literally walking around the exterior of a house in the darkness, performing the role of a ghost while people inside try to convince themselves they’re imagining things, has real potential to be unsettling. The play begins with that sense of possibility.

Director Neil Bettles keeps the staging relatively restrained, letting the tension build gradually rather than relying entirely on sudden shocks (although there are a few jump scares, of course – what self-respecting horror would ignore that quick and easy jolt?), and Joshua Pharo’s lighting and video design create long shadows and moving darkness that suggest a wider world beyond the stage. Then there’s Pete Malkin’s sound design that threads through the piece with creaks, distant movement and subtle disturbances that keep the atmosphere simmering.

And for a while, it works.

But the problem is that the storytelling often tends more towards explaining events than letting them unfold naturally, and important parts of the narrative feel skipped over, as if the play is rushing through key moments in order to reach the next attempt at a scare. As a result, the story sometimes feels slightly breathless when it could have benefited from slowing down and letting the unease settle more.

Ironically, one of the most effective moments is also one of the quietest – a beautifully choreographed dance sequence used during one of the storytelling passages (a voicemail that’s one hundred percent exposition, so givin the audience something to look at was hugely important). It’s elegant, eerie and genuinely memorable, doing more with suggestion than some of the more direct attempts at horror.

The tone, however, can feel slightly uneven. The humour lands well at the start and seems to be part of Joe’s character – the kind of nervous joking someone might use to steady themselves when they’re alone outside a dark house in the middle of the night. But because those jokes keep appearing even as the situation becomes more unsettling, they sometimes dilute the tension, meaning moments where Joe clearly should be frightened are occasionally undercut by a line that makes it seem as though he’s suddenly not all that bothered after all. And if that’s the case, why should the audience be scared?

The creature itself – whether monster, demon or ghost – is genuinely unnerving when first suggested, but once it becomes a bit more visible it loses much of its mystery. Holding that reveal back for longer might have allowed the dread to build more effectively.

There are also a few narrative conveniences that feel slightly too neat, including the arrival of someone whose academic interests happen to line up perfectly with the supernatural questions the story is asking.

By the end, the final sting lands as a clever piece of wordplay, but it doesn’t quite leave the chill the production seems to be aiming for.

It Walks Around the House at Night has an intriguing idea at its centre – a man hired to frighten people from outside a house slowly wondering whether something else might be circling the building with him. But with key parts of the story rushing past and the humour sometimes loosening the tension just as it forms, the play spends more time explaining its ghost story than letting it properly creep up on you.

It Walks Around the House at Night plays at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 28th March 2026: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/it-walks-around-the-house-at-night/