When last I saw a Shared Experience production at the Tricycle, I found myself lamenting the company’s loss of regular Arts Council funding but unable to argue for its restoration. Their latest production reawakens my feelings that they may have had their day.
    
Shared Experience have always been about heightened theatricality. Usually, and by company preference, this entails blending text-based theatre with more impressionistic visual/physical sequences. Bracken Moor has none of that, and consequently the theatricality must all be located in writing and performance. When the genre in question is the eerie, that means wild melodrama. Alexi Kaye Campbell, who has confirmed himself in the last few years as a talented and fascinating playwright, here tells of the apparent spectral return of the dead son of a 1930s Yorkshire pit owner, and its effect of paradoxically revivifying his wife, who had to all intents and purposes stopped living after the accident a decade ago. It’s kind of a cross between an adolescent male version of The Woman In Black and A Doll’s House. Neon-signed parallels to the present day are thrown in for good measure: references not just to an economic crisis disproportionately affecting those at the bottom, but even reflections on the recent Olympiad, in this case in Berlin.
    
Using such a dramatic form for a serious exploration of issues of personal empowerment is a laudable project on the part of both Kaye Campbell and director Polly Teale, even if the self-realisation of a principal female character is no more than virtually every Shared Experience production for years ultimately has been about. In practice, however, it is not the commitment which subverts the spookiness but vice versa. It becomes more and more difficult to take seriously Helen Schlesinger’s performance as the reawakening Elizabeth Pritchard or Daniel Flynn’s as her pathologically denying husband Harold, however engaged and able the actors may be; it is never possible to take the fey yet oddly self-possessed Terence (Joseph Timms), son of the family’s closest friends, all that seriously even before he begins writhing and speaking the dead boy’s words. The ultimate outcomes are never in doubt, whether of the deeper personal strain or of the ghostly narrative, nor is the twist in the closing seconds. There is a certain amount of compulsion to the viewing experience, but for me it was the compulsion of seeing a noble experiment consistently misfire.

Written for the Financial Times.