REVIEW: A GHOST OF A CHANCE by Nick Hennegan at Tabard Theatre, Chiswick 2 - 19 April 2025
‘impressive production of an overstretched play’ ★★★
Many things are deadly in the theatre. Cleopatra’s asp. Edward the Second’s poker. Virtually any poison you can think of in Agatha Christie. But there’s little more deadly than the words “Do you remember”? Especially when followed by lengthy back-story exposition about how the characters on a stage in front of us reached the crisis point that sits at the heart of a drama. And that’s a problem in this curate’s egg of an impressive production of an overstretched play where the director Nick Hennegan has done a brilliant job with lights and sounds and disembodied voices to cover for a repetitive script by the very same Nick Hennegan.
Say a thing three times and it is true, but say £232 million pounds about 232 million times and it begins to feel like overkill. That detail drilled and redrilled into the audience’s head isn’t the only one. Phrases multiply repeated and scenes that vary little in tone or tempo, added to a tendency to tell rather than show the past that’s brought our principal character, Bob (Greg Snowden), to the darkest of dark places, make a strong central story the weaker. Which is a shame because there’s a brilliant idea here.
Admittedly it’s not a wholly original idea (Marlowe, Goethe and even Peter Cook and Dudley Moore have thoroughly mined it before this), but Hennegan does have his own particularly nasty Faustian bargain in mind as a father in the depths of despair is offered the traditional untold riches in return for a price. And his Devil is a deeply sinister voice-only presence (voiced by Guy Masterson), until it inhabits the body of Bob’s daughter.
Hennegan has also coaxed two strong performances. Particularly so from comparative newcomer Juliet Ibberson as Tamsin, the daughter, switching very sweetly from naturalistic teenager to robotically possessed entity (the special effects aren’t quite up to a 360-degree Exorcist headspin, but there’s a sense of it in her glass-eyed stare). Atmospheric music by Hennegan’s long-term theatrical partner Nick Robb, a very inventive lighting design from Nat Green, some nice tricks involving a fridge, clever use of audiovisual to fill out the back story – all this is great, too, engaging, building a sense of dread. Care has been taken, attention paid to the sound, visuals and staging.
But a stripping of the verbal repetitions to reduce the show to a brisker running time would prevent the drops in dread and tension that result from going over the same points (dad’s lost his job, his wife might be leaving him, the house might get repossessed, he had a mostly happy childhood until adulthood got messy) and the unvarying temptation-resistance-temptation-acquiescence-temptation-resistance rythym of the scenes.
This is the show’s afterlife – a version first ran 27 years ago in a Birmingham pub theatre and then, award-winningly, at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s been revised, updated, and, one suspects given usual Edinburgh running times, extended a bit. Less might leave us wanting more.
A GHOST OF A CHANCE by Nick Hennegan at Theatre at the Tabard, Chiswick 2 – 19 April 2025
Director: Nick Hennegan
Box Office: https://tabard.org.uk/
Reviewer David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), and Better Together (Jack Studio, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.
