An Uncommonly good ghost story

The uncommon thing about a Common Ground production is that you never quite know what you’re going to get, not just in substance but in tone. It will most likely be written and directed by the multi-talented Pat Whymark and Julian Harries will no doubt make an appearance on stage. Beyond that, all bets are off. We’ve seen a haunting dramatization of Coleridge’s epic poetry and a dream that is Dostoevsky’s nihilistic journey into the abyss, but come Christmas we’ll get a knockabout farce of a very silly murder mystery.

The Ghost of the Toll Point Light presents yet another side to the company’s offering with a claustrophobic tale of Isaacs Troop, a lighthouse man haunted by his past, and in his present. William Oxborrow perfectly captures the tortured soul of a man doubting his own sanity, when all he has to keep himself company is a ghost that may or may not be all in the mind. Julian Harries is the eponymous ghost of the Toll Point Light, teasing Troop with a turn of phrase or the upending of a cupboard’s contents. Special effects are deployed sparingly but effectively, as is atmospheric back projection and music, while the staging is as handsome as we’ve grown to expect from this company.

Jack Grimes, the third party disrupting this quarrelsome duo, is played by Charles Venables. The tense interplay between Oxborrow and Venables would make for an arresting drama on its own, as audience sympathies bounce from one to the other, but that wouldn’t have been very ghostly. Instead we are treated to a tale that twists and turns, repeatedly wrong footing the audience by taking the drama in the most unexpected of directions. Reminiscent of Dickens’s Signalman or the stories of MR James this was a tightly plotted and economically presented mystery that was both fun and absorbing.