EVERY GHOST STORY EVER, Four Presidents at Baron’s Court Theatre 22 - 28 Oct

‘A wonderfully creative exploration of the ghost story, deconstructing the mechanics of memory’★★★★ ½

What do ghosts represent, and what do they say about us? Wuthering Heights portrays life as extending its passion and vengeance far into death, connecting our spirits actions to our own secretive behaviour. The father of Hamlet, as a ghost, commands his son to ‘revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’, and Quint and Jessel in James’ The Turn of the Screw can be viewed either as genuine ghosts, or hallucinations born from the repression of the Governess.

Ghosts are commonly catalysts for madness and psychological tools used to torment the living. Readers of ghost stories must therefore ask; is this ghost real, or just a projection of a broken mind?

In a wonderfully creative exploration of this idea, Billy Bones (Billy Morton) shatters expectations by exploring folklore and spookiness in a presentation-style piece. It is fantastically intimate and almost conversational with the audience, as though they are sitting around a table together. Morton creates a natural atmosphere for organic participation, where members of the audience become an integral part of the narrative.

Morton at one point tells a story that rejects some classic rules for creating a ghost story; while this is funny, it also serves to dissolve our expectations of how we receive stories of any kind, including this play itself. The contents of the stories are hilarious and informative; Morton goes beyond simply telling his audience these stories and uses the space to perform every section in a wonderfully dramatic and professional way.

History, literature, comedy, folklore – these are all aspects of us that we use to map the boundaries of our minds and use to make sense of what we know – or in this case, what we don’t know. What puts this performance above others of the same kind is the presentation of cultural history as an interconnected web of all of these things; it mirrors the techniques of W.B Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, using visual artefacts and a highly associative narrative style to take the reader/audience on a digressing journey. It also resembles the style of Paul Stanbridge’s To Me My Mind a Kingdom Is, where the mechanics of memory and storytelling are completely deconstructed with similar digressions.



Any technical mistakes or omissions in the performance did not affect the movement of the play; Morton steers the show forward regardless of what answers the audience gives, and what props don’t work.

Every Ghost Story Ever plays until 28 October at Baron’s Court Theatre, Hammersmith.

Written and Performed by Billy Morton.

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