It Walks Around the House at Night
The instructions given to Joe and the expectation upon him were clear from the start: it walks around the house at night, not in the house but specifically in the gardens, through mud and rain in the dark, a game played upon the young nieces of David Linden at his home of Paragon Hall near Hexley, a regular patron of the bar where Joe works, aware he is an actor whose “between roles” has gone on longer than he might like.
An offer of accommodation and the £2,000 fee for five nights work more than Joe could dream of even if the gentleman offering it weren’t handsome, flirtatious and obviously wealthy, there is a suitable period costume to be worn and rules to be obeyed; walk, don’t run, never approach the house, never double back, and no mobile phones while performing as “the ghost,” simple enough but Joe soon breaking them when he senses he is being followed.
Almost a one-man performance against a backdrop of a darkened room, the bed and fridge on a tilted wooden floorboard platform which leads to the back wall against which the count of days, the ominous Tudor mansion illuminated in the night and the forest are projected, George Naylor is Joe, initially confident but increasingly distressed, with Oliver Baines as “the dancer,” half seen in nightmares which impinge on Joe’s rational waking self, questioning his benefactor and the purpose of his role.
It Walks Around the House at Night written by Tim Foley and directed by Neil Bettles, the staging is minimal yet complex, involving sound and light and the precise movement about the stage as shapes emerge from shadow in a flicker or a flash, the hoped-for safety of the Lodge where Joe sleeps set within a large rectangle of soil which acts as a boundary between what is within and what is beyond but creeping closer every night from the trees and the glowing mushrooms beneath the ivy.
With Naylor switching between the “speaking” characters, Joe, bitter and justifiably resentful at the opportunities his handsome ex-boyfriend Rufus was born to, career doors opened by his father’s connections in theatre, his boss at the bar and David, an enigma whose shifting moods make him more mysteriously attractive, the money and flattering attention quickly persuade Joe to brush his concerns aside.
Told in a taught single act of ninety minutes of powerful sound, dynamic lighting and excellent stagecraft of movement, character and shifting props which creak, groan and shift in the restless night, It Walks Around the House at Night is a minimalist play which defies the limit of what it has to work with, a nightmare of scratching claws and twitching branches and the steep price paid for trying to bargain with the darkness.
It Walks Around the House at Night continues on tour until Friday 13th November
