With the ghost of old Hamlet stalking the stage at the National Theatre and Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman's Ghost Stories continuing to chill audiences at the Duke of York's Theatre in London's West End, the long and eerie tradition of stage ghosts is experiencing another rebirth. But why does the theatre remain so fascinated with the spectral? More than film, photography or television, with their inbuilt capacity to fool the eye, ghosts in the theatre really spook us. There seems to be something about seeing the undead live that chills us all the more.
The theatre ghost has, as you might expect, been hanging around a long time. The ancient Greeks used "temple magic", letting heavy doors open by themselves via secret systems of pulleys, wheels, ropes and reservoirs and employing hidden tubes and secret passages to make the Sibyl whisper through the walls. Shakespeare's famous ghouls, Old Hamlet and Banquo, recalled the 16th-century revenge tragedies in which many a bloody ghost pointed an accusing finger at its quaking murderer. Early melodramas, too, often had a gothic theme: a "tall female figure with a pale and melancholy countenance" appeared from behind folding doors in MG Lewis's 1797 play The Castle Spectre, a bloodstain slowly spreading across her white dress.
But it was the Victorians who really loved a theatre ghost, and they developed the technical tricks and effects to bring the uncanny on to the stage (though not soon enough for an actor called Mr Egerton who, playing the Ghost in an 1819 production of Hamlet, got just one word from a Literary Gazette reviewer: "substantial"). One of the first 19th-century innovations was the phantasmagoria – a spooky magic lantern show in which images of the dead, projected onto smoke, loomed menacingly over the spectators. To make the effect even more chilling, the audience sat in the dark for the first time ever in the British theatre, the spectres floating out of the black towards them.
Professor John Pepper invented his famous spectral effect, the Pepper's Ghost, at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in 1863. This involved a carefully positioned sheet of glass and clever lighting, allowing what looked like totally corporeal figures to appear through walls, walk through real objects (and people!), and glide smoothly out through the opposite side of the set. The popular theatres seized on this new innovation and very soon dancing skeletons, talking heads and many, many vanishing ladies were appearing (and then disappearing) all over London.
The Victorians even invented a new kind of trap – the spine-chilling "ghost glide", in which the wronged ghost would ascend through the floor of the stage, moving forward without taking a single step. Very X Factor. According to the historian Michael Booth, contemporary reviewers felt that "the manner of introducing the ghost by means of a lateral ascent, instead of a perpendicular one, lent a supernatural appearance to the scene which was irresistibly effective".
While it is unlikely that 19th-century audiences genuinely believed they were seeing spirits (rowdier elements would bounce balls of paper off the Pepper's Ghost mirrors) their legacy endures, and many Victorian personalities still haunt the world of theatre today. Some are fictional, such as Mike Punter's mediums and child-ghosts in his 1875-set Darker Shores or the Fortune's long-running The Woman in Black. Some, perhaps, are more genuine: the mysterious "grey lady", said to stalk the Theatre Royal in Bath; the ghost of the actor William Terriss, who was stabbed at the stage door of the Adelphi in 1897 and is supposed to emerge "from a greenish light" on the Strand; or the sad-eyed Victorian child who is sometimes seen at the Liverpool Empire.
What is it about theatrical culture that tends so much towards the ghostly? Is there something uncanny about the theatre experience itself? And who might haunt the theatres of the future?
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