The Enfield Haunting review: Catherine Tate’s spooky tale is epically, almost thrillingly bad

Telly star Catherine Tate must be rueing the day she signed up to The Enfield Haunting. On paper, it probably sounded like a great idea. Playwright and Casualty co-creator Paul Unwin dramatising an intriguing real-life 1970s London poltergeist case in the atmospheric confines of the West End’s Ambassadors Theatre: what’s not to like? But in the flesh, it’s epically, almost thrillingly bad.

Here, Tate plays Peggy, an Enfield single mum who’s beset by supernatural goings on, the actor’s natural sense of humour visibly fighting against a script that’s almost certainly meant to be played straight. "It’s a bleedin’ poltergeist!" she exclaims in horror, clutching her chest, starring in an inadvertent recreation of what Eastenders would be like if it did Halloween specials.

She’s not the only one: most of the cast are afflicted with cases of accidentally-hilarious-itis. Her tormented younger daughter Janet (Ella Schrey-Yeats) is barely visible beneath a The Thing-esque mass of tangled blonde hair, while her older sister Margaret (Grace Molony) stomps around swearing and constantly disappearing to the toilet, which she bafflingly, and increasingly hilariously, calls the “Pardonnez-moi”. Interfering neighbour Rey (Mo Sesay) is suspicious that this girl is behind the spooky, bumps and crashes besetting this household, but his oddly-pitched interventions only end up making things worse: he can’t even look after his cat Spider (which delivers appropriately haunted mewls on cue).

The real investigator in this story is Maurice Grosse – played with a welcome injection of dignity by David Threlfall. But he’s got his work cut out supplying tension here. If you’ve listened to hit podcast The Battersea Poltergeist (partly inspired by the same real-life case), watched notorious BBC spoof Ghostwatch, or thumbed through a book of supernatural phenomena in a charity shop, you’ll be familiar with the broad themes at play. The theory goes that poltergeists are drawn to the energy of attention-starved teenage girls – but unfortunately, attention-starved teenage girls are also drawn to pranks and finding creative ways to pull focus. Which is it here?

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Bizarrely, Unwin fumbles this question, robbing this play’s mercifully short 75-minute running time of any potential mystery or tension. It’s clear from the beginning that the girls are faking some stuff, but it’s also clear from the beginning that there’s a ghostly bald man in a Les Miserables-esque tattered coat who messes with the furniture in the blackouts between scenes. The other question, the one about why it’s all happening, is massively neglected too. There’s some nonsensical cod-psychology about Gross’s dead daughter, there’s the looming threat of Peggy’s violent ex-husband, and there’s a generically nasty guy who used to live in the house: again, Unwin probably needed to pick one of these and roll with it.

Seasoned director Angus Jackson’s production doesn’t have much a read on any of this mess. He just serves it all up, lukewarm, in a generic suburban house set that’s so artfully distressed it probably needs an emergency Arts Council bailout, then shoves some Bay City Rollers on the soundtrack so the audience remembers this story isn’t the only taste bypass to come out of the Seventies. At the curtain call, everyone, on and off stage, looks a bit shellshocked. Perhaps by the welcome January reminder that theatre, like ghosts, is a complex and ephemeral thing – and never a straightforward equation of “established talent + bankable stars = hit”.

Ambassadors Theatre, until 2 March