Arnold Ridley’s The Ghost Train is a comedy – this is non-negotiable. Many interpreters over the past century have overlooked the fact, reading it as melodrama, but thankfully director Yvette Owen in her new production for Chester Little Theatre has gone all out for the laughs.
Two couples, newly-weds Peggy and Charles and on-the-brink-of-divorce Elsie and Dick, are on a late night train in the middle of nowhere, along with the elderly, eccentric Miss Bourne and her parrot. The airheaded Teddy Deakin pulls the communication cord because he loses his hat through the window and presto, the group become stranded at a deserted station with no more trains due till the morning.
Cue the arrival of station master Saul Hodgkiss, who attempts to frighten them all into walking miles to the nearest village with tales of a ghost train haunting the station, but they are having none of it and hunker down for the night. When Julia Price suddenly arrives, seeking refuge from two pursuers, the plot becomes thicker than the pea soup fog that you just know is falling outside the waiting room walls. Mystery and confusion ensue, only to be unravelled by two last minute plot twists, involving smugglers and an undercover agent.
The production is, quite correctly, set very much in period, with the ensemble affecting clipped R.P. with varying degrees of success. In the vocal department the greatest triumph comes from Alex Wright as Teddy and Kat Tanczos as Julia. Wright is superbly cast as the idiot who lands them all in the dire situation, while Tanczos is gloriously over the top, channelling something between Celia Johnson and Tallulah Bankhead, sentences tripping over themselves as they fall from her lips, accompanied by fluttering hands and histrionic gestures.
Jo Ridgley and David Rogerson take the parts of Elsie and Dick, and they make maximum comic mileage of the marital tensions that might just benefit from being stranded together with a group of crazy people. Meanwhile Lisa Buckley and Angelo Edwards make an odd couple as the newly married Peggy and Charles, deprived of their planned solitary wedding night. Peggy is like a movie starlet, while her husband cuts more of the dash of a wayward gangster, in a suit fits him almost as well as his dialect.
It’s the extra layer of silliness in cross-gender casting for Saul Hodgkiss and Miss Bourne that really sets the tone, making sure we know the production has its tongue firmly in its cheek. Ellen Buckley is the diminutive station master, replete with a false beard that looks as if it came from the inside of a sheepskin coat, and she plays it like the equivalent character straight out of a British horror film. William Wood’s Miss Bourne is as prim as she could be until she gets a few swigs of brandy down her throat, after which some first rate loose-limbed slapstick ensues.
Owen’s reading of the play more than nods towards Told by an Idiot’s glorious 2015 production at Manchester’s Royal Exchange, including the use of drag for Bourne and Hodgkiss, a few conjuring tricks and some minimalist elements of set. It’s a neat conceit for the players to open the imaginary doors in alternating directions or not at all, a trick that they wisely only begin to do with full comic effect after giving the audience time to spot it and emit the first chuckles.
Maybe it’s because they can’t imagine Dad’s Army’s Private Godfrey having such a sense of humour that so many directors try to play this 99 year old piece straight. Yvette Owen is clearly among those thinking more of the twinkle in his eye. Arnold Ridley wanted to make people laugh in this splendidly funny thriller, and Chester Little Theatre audiences are treated here to a version that goes full steam ahead on the laughter express.
The cast of The Ghost Train - Picture © Stephen Cain
This review was originally written for publication by Good News Liverpool
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