Have Yourself A Scary Little Christmas – are there ghosts loose in the manor hoose? (Lyric Theatre until 6 January)

Step into Darkwood Manor where the unseen Lady Alice is convalescing upstairs with her care assistant Ciara, the handyman McKillop is pootling about, the butler is lingering in the corner of the main room at a piano, and in waltzes the absentee man-in-charge Toby for his annual Christmas visit, this year accompanied by his fiancée Nancy.

Have Yourself A Scary Little Christmas is a ghost story without many scares. There’s a heist, a fraud, a séance, a few mummers, a good load of skullduggery, some double crossing and a great sax solo from the resident musician Frankie McIlvanna. Stuart Marshall’s wooden Hansel & Gretel library set neatly forms the backbone of the manor house

Conor Grimes and Alan McKee have been making adolescent and adult audiences laugh at Christmas time for decades. This year’s script feels novel and the first outing for a new show that will doubtless be refined and revamped over coming years. McKee plays the cast-strapped city boy Toby with an eye for antiques, old and more modern; while Grimes enjoys getting to grips with the more rural McKillop.

Ali White adds an air of mystery as a celebrated psychic medium and, in the second act, has great fun with her spirit voice. She’s a big presence on stage and totally owns her big revelatory musical number based on the popular I Will Survive. Nicky Harley is underused as the plain-speaking Ciara who brings more than a hint of scepticism to the manor house along with disapproving glares that could cut other characters in half.

There are some great physical effects during the séance – the second show I’ve seen in a couple of weeks that incorporates one into the script – and the cast are to be applauded for fully committing to that pivotal scene as well as the play’s other moments of mayhem. Hopefully the Lyric Theatre bar’s wine rack is well stocked with bottles of Jacob’s Creek wine given its importance to the plot.

The cast all have good comic timing and a sense of how to move in comedic ways. During the interval, someone categorised the show as having “Tyrone humour”. Plenty of audience members were shrieking and snorting with laughter, and in some cases sounding like they were wetting themselves, during a bewildering Forrest Gump sketch that somehow materialised in the first act. My funny bone is hard to tickle so my limited laugh count may not be as good a guide to whether the show was hilarious.

Oddly, classic elements of Grimes & McKee shows – so frequently directed by Frankie McCafferty – that I’ve come to expect were largely missing this year. Particularly absent was the normal tomfoolery that usually includes deliberate mistakes (once accidental, then repeated nightly), ad libbing and corpsing. By sticking quite rigidly to the ghost story narrative, they omitted any crowd-pleasing, fourth-wall breaking references to local politicians or topical events. Thunder and lightning effects accompanied nearly every mention of ‘Darkwood Manor’ yet this repetition never became the knowing butt of a joke. Maybe as the run progresses, there’ll be space to let the script and the choreography meander.

The ending felt anti-climatic with a neat and just yet tame resolution to the uncovered situation. The best heists – at least on film and TV – seem to lull audiences into a false sense of security letting them believe that they understand exactly what has just happened, before another layer of double or triple crossing is deftly revealed and the audience are once again wowed having had the wool pulled over their eyes.

Have Yourself A Scary Little Christmas continues at the Lyric Theatre until Saturday 6 January.

Photo credit: Johnny Frazer

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