2:22 A Ghost Story – a night to remember as two couples stay up late (Grand Opera House until Saturday 18 November)

It’s been a stressful few months. What with the new house and the renovations and starting to redecorate, on top of a new baby, and husband Sam disappearing off the grid to the island of Sark on an astronomy field trip. Jenny’s sleep has been disturbed by a voice at 2:22am for several nights. She’s tired and could do with more of a hand with the asparagus in the kitchen as she’s thrown a dinner party for Sam’s old mate Lauren and her latest boyfriend Ben. It’s going to be a late night.

The clue is in the title. 2:22 A Ghost Story plays out a supernatural tale with just four people and a baby in the house. Sam (Nathaniel Curtis) looks down – physically and intellectually – at everyone, a smart arse with a logical answer for everything and an instinct to share his knowledge along with his supply of jokes about Catholicism. Curtis manages to simultaneously project warmth, smugness, with a dash of ick. Jenny rarely relaxes, and Louisa Lytton plays the new mum like a coiled spring, snapping at Sam and worrying about her unsettled child.

Joe Absolom seems to revel in his role playing the slow burning disruptor, a self-made builder with racist tendencies, who at first seems to be the voice of the working class amongst the four adults, before he steps out to share his own backstory and takes the wind out of Sam’s sails. Lauren (Charlene Boyd) bounces between her fondness for Jenny and her long-time friendship with Sam. Hostess Jenny totters around on platform heels for the guts of six hours, while Lauren slips her shoes off and wanders about barefoot.

Each scene is brought to a premature end – startling many in the audience every time it happens – as the lights flicker and the room’s clocks race forward. Anna Fleischle’s set adds to the unsettled vibe with a kitchen living room exposing its social history and with an out of proportion vaulted ceiling that wouldn’t be out of place in a cathedral. The steel beams supporting the extension and new patio doors are absurdly thick for a domestic property. The kitchen’s island unit is impractically low, adding to the sense of a distorted perspective (though probably a design decision that preserves sightlines around the auditorium).

It’s a good script for actors to get their teeth into. There’s almost a race to get the lines out in the early parts of the play. Pairs of characters neatly talk over each other: the wine has only begun to flow and the couples are already animated. The dynamic range for the characters and directors (Matthew Dunster and Isabel Marr) is quite limited, veering from intense to angry to frantic and then shocked. Instead, the tension is ratcheted up with a candlelit scene and a flambéed toy. Ian Dickinson’s soundtrack is very muted, barely audible even when the characters are discussing a playlist. The cast are neatly reflected in the shiny glass of the doors that lead out to the garden where foxes are fornicating and a thick fog is brewing.

The big reveal near the end provoked audible gasps from around the stalls. Looking back, the clues are there in the earlier dialogue and actions, though there’s a completely unnecessary foreshadowing (though the accusation is pointed at the wrong person) that somehow detracts from the cleverness of Danny Robins’ writing

It’s ambitious to try to sustain an audience over two hours with a domestic drama that turns into a ghost story with only one major twist. There was a loud buzz of conversation between scenes: people were certainly engaged and 2:22 A Ghost Story had some of the Grand Opera House audience on the edge of their seats. Performances continue until Saturday 18 November.

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