A Ghost In Your Ear
06 January 2025
Hampstead Theatre
5.0 out of 5.0 stars
A Ghost In Your Ear is the new play by Jamie Armitage, currently playing at the Hampstead Theatre until the 31st January. The show uses binaural headphone technology to immerse its audience in the story. There have been other plays that have attempted to incorporate this auditory experience, to varying degrees of success, often distancing the audience too much from the live experience and thus shifting from a raw theatre connection to a more curated, less intense and personal. But Ghost In Your Ear is the perfect vehicle for a beheadphoned audience, being set in a recording studio where an actor is hired to record a binaural audiobook horror story. While he reads the text off screens in the recording booth, George begins to hear sounds through his own headphones, and as the ghost story intensifies, so does the haunting in the studio.
The stage design feels similar to Armitage’s previous work, An Interrogation, with just one room, cut off from the audience by a large glass panel that makes it feel like we are secretly spying on the characters, held in grey tones and with few adornments. For this play, the room behind the glass is a recording booth, with sound proofed walls, boom mikes hanging from the ceiling, cables and stools, and a grey head on a tripod in the middle of the room. The head is the recording device for binaural audio, allowing the voice actor to direct their voice at different directions, moving around the head-shaped recording device. Behind this, we see a window to the smaller mixing desk room, where the sound engineer sits to observe and direct.
Upon entering the theatre, there is no light behind the glass wall, and all lighting within the auditorium is a dark and dramatic red, leading to the audience being reflected back in an ominous red hue where the stage would be. A great way to set the mood for the spooky proceedings to come.
George, played by George Blagden, has experience in recording audio experiences, so he is not at all suspicious when sound engineer Sid books him for another job without presenting a script. It is a last minute booking with a tight deadline, so he is ready to just get on with it, making the recording studio his playground for acting out the tense ghost story. Blagden is extremely capable in the role, beautifully utilising the space and the binaural technology to create a tense atmosphere while making the story come to life. Jonathan Livingstone plays Sid, who has a much smaller role in the story, but one that is pivotal to the plot. The two hander works incredibly well and really fleshes out the audio-story that has no right to be as intensely fascinating as it turns out to be.
It is rare to see well done horror genre theatre on stage, this one is a prime example of a deliciously unsettling tale come to life for a live audience. The subtlety with which the beginnings of the haunting slip past before really delving into the meat of the story is gorgeously realised. There is an incredible build-up that has a fantastic pay off at the end, leaving the audience gasping in dread. The moments of complete darkness serve a purpose, and are never frivolous, while the story itself is well crafted and progresses with ease. This show is a wonderfully distressing haunting that stays with the audience long after the proverbial curtain falls.
A Ghost In Your Ear is a stunning example of both the horror genre in theatre, and binaural technology used well without distracting from the live experience.
