The Haunting of Susan A. Kings Head Theatre.

Mark Ravenhill’s entertaining new play at the King Head Theatre is part ghost story and part homage to the venue itself.

6 June 2022

Site-responsive exhibitions are, apparently, a big thing in the contemporary art scene. The idea, broadly-speaking, is that the physical space in which art is created provides the driving force that inspires and informs the work produced. Essentially, you find a space and then find a way of sharing the story that space wants to tell.

Writer and Director Mark Ravenhill could not have wished for a site to respond to that is more atmospheric, or more heavily laden with theatrical history, than the soon-to-be relocated Kings Head. Over the last 50 years it has been a springboard for the careers of the likes of Tom Stoppard, Steven Berkoff and Alan Rickman.

But in his clever and enjoyable new work, The Haunting of Susan A, Ravenhill draws a theatrical response to the rickety claustrophobia of the King’s Head Theatre not just from the generations of directors and actors who have worked there, but from its former incarnation as the site of a boxing ring.

What Ravenhill has come up with is simultaneously a fairly functional piece of ghostly metadrama – a play about a play within a play – and an appealing commentary on the relationship that writers, actors, directors, and the audience have with the spaces in which a work is performed.

Ravenhill plays himself in the piece alongside a fantastically spooky Suzanne Ahmet. The latter takes the role of an audience member who interrupts the writer’s opening musings about the dilapidated venue’s history (the prelude, we imagine, to a request for donations for the new space that is shortly to open) with an urgent story about a ghostly apparition at the Kings Head.

Ahmet (the eponymous Susan A of the title) describes how, decades in the past, she was cast in a play at the Kings Head with a snotty director called Tim. Mid way through rehearsals she learns that the actress she had replaced committed suicide some weeks before, apparently after coming face-to-face with the ghostly wailing spirits of a mother and child.

The haunted, now-former actor tells us how, on the play’s opening night, she herself felt the same ghostly presence standing behind her. Too scared to turn around, she ran out of the theatre mid-show, never to return to the Kings Head until tonight.

Having given up her career as an actor, a bruised and broken Ahmet set out on the task of tracking down the history behind the Kings Head ghosts. Tonight, she comes prepared to reveal the horrifying truth.

Ravenhill takes the dual role of Ahmet’s author and her accomplice, sometimes encouraging the character he himself has written to tell her tale, and sometimes demanding she stops. It is all very meta, in a light-hearted but thoughtful kind of way, particularly as the audience too is asked to take a hands-on role in contributing to the unfolding action.

But will Ahmet’s revelations of the evil events that happened in this very theatre, years before, summon up the spiritual manifestations that broke her, or can the ghosts of the theatre’s past finally be laid to rest?

A witty, smart, and highly entertaining 65 minutes.

Written and Performed by Mark Ravenhill

Creative and performance Suzanne Ahmet

Duration: 65 minutes. No interval.

Full Disclosure: I paid full box-office price for the ticket.