Common Ground’s Ghostly Goings on
Posted on 23rd October 2026
Common Ground Theatre’s prolific polymath Pat Whymark has once again written the company’s latest production, directed it, and composed and performed its musical numbers. Along with co-founder Julian Harries, she’s even had a hand in the stage design. Harries, alongside Ellen Pallant and Joseph Aylward, looked to be having a fine old time in this twisty, turny tale of ghostly goings-on in The Phantom of Friar Street. The play’s title is a clever bit of wordplay that hints at the supernatural but also the suffering of amputees returning from war at a time when the very real pain experienced in phantom limbs was poorly understood and often dismissed.
Having enjoyed both their New Year farces and their uncompromising literary adaptations, I was wondering what I was in for this time, and the truth is that Friar Street sits somewhere between those two extremes. Whymark’s signature wit is still very much in evidence, but it’s deftly delivered with understated subtlety. As we’ve come to expect from Harries, he’s able to throw away a casual quip that nonetheless lands. Aylward portrays an altogether more earnest fellow, a straight man to Harries’s excellent comic timing. I wonder if Whymark had Joseph Losey’s film in mind when the master-servant relationship was developed. In any event, it’s a relationship that is cleaved apart by Ellen Pallant’s winning portrait of Mabel. Was she the woman who dropped her pastries in front of Jack, despite them having only just met? That would be telling. What I can say is that Pallant’s decision to play her with a gauche, almost childlike demeanour does much to rationalise the labyrinthine plot twists centred around the character, while her fine singing voice adds poignancy to Mabel’s sunny disposition.
You have to admire the ingenuity and ambition with which Whymark plots. This clever, literate play owed an obvious debt to the grim short stories of M. R. James, and yet had a neat, uplifting resolution that Dickens would have been proud of. Were Jack’s experiences just laudanum-induced hallucinations or the result of a special sensitivity towards the spirit world? The clues are evident in Mark Sterling’s inventive and genuinely creepy lighting effects, and by the close of play, any ambiguity is banished. Throughout, however, Whymark maintains a delicate balance, never allowing the audience to forget the physical and mental torment veterans were expected to endure long after the fighting ended.