Danny Robins says he has been obsessed with ghosts since he first found stories of Britain’s haunted houses in the library at his Newcastle primary school.
“Paranormal history fascinated me. I went to see The Woman in Black as a kid and I think I loved the theatricality of ghost stories and their spooky drama,” he says.
British playwright Danny Robins believes we “need ghosts, even as we fear them”.
In recent years he has made a career out of those stories – a successful podcast called Uncanny that interrogates supposed ghost sightings, a forthcoming TV series, a book due out later this year called Into the Uncanny that he describes as “my personal journey into the supernatural”, and a hit play – but still counts himself a sceptic.
“I’m a sceptic who wants to believe,” he says. “I’m on this journey searching for proof.”
Robins wants to believe in ghosts, he says, because he has a longstanding horror of dying. When he was in his early 20s, he collapsed with what turned out to be a panic attack: harmless, ultimately, but frightening enough. “I was hallucinating angels and I spent a good year after that thinking I was going to die at any moment,” he says. “It made me desperately wish that death was not the end – and very much of a fan of the idea that ghosts were real because that suggested there was hope.”
He thinks everyone shares that hope. “I think there is a very good reason we haven’t put ghosts on the same pile of redundant superstitions as unicorns and elves and all the other things we used to believe in. They are the buffer zone between us and death.“
We need ghosts, even as we fear them – although why we assume ghosts to be threatening is a good question, he agrees. “I think if you look at other cultures, ghosts are much more tied to a celebration of ancestors,” he says. By contrast, the English-speaking cultures see death itself as cruel, possibly damaging. “So our ghost stories are full of scary, vengeful ghosts like poltergeists, which are aggressive and violent because they are unhappy about being dead.” That is the paradox at the heart of the ghost story, he adds: it is simultaneously frightening and comforting.
The Australian cast of 2:22 A Ghost Story: Gemma Ward, Remy Hii, Daniel MacPherson and Ruby Rose Credit: Wayne Taylor
And compelling, judging by the success of Robins’ play 2.22. A chiller about things that go bump in the night, it has played for two years in London’s West End, had a short but successful season in Los Angeles, and is now about to open – having been tweaked for the local market - in Melbourne; more international productions are in the works. As Robins points out, 2.22 is actually structured as a classic locked-room mystery rather than a ghost story. Another universal: we all love a puzzle.
Central to the story is new mother Jenny – originally played by Lily Allen – who tells her husband Sam and their dinner guests that she has been hearing footsteps in the baby’s nursery at the same time each night. Sam, a pompous academic husband, scoffs at her fears. “That is the heart of the play,” says Robins. “What do you do when the person you love doesn’t believe you? If someone won’t even acknowledge that your fear is valid, that becomes a hugely demeaning and disappointing thing.”
Their visitors’ views are more uncertain. Lauren, a sophisticated American, is soon too drunk to care, but her recently acquired tradie squeeze Ben turns out to have form when it comes to the other side. This emerges only after he has torn a few strips off his yuppie hosts. Sam and Jenny are renovating in Ben’s old suburb; along with the nervous chat about windows being opened in the night, there are some snippy debates about gentrification.
The four of them resolve to stay up, booze and bicker until the appointed hour to see what is really going on. Blasts of music, flashing lights and distant screams of mating foxes help ramp up tension until a killer plot twist at the end that has the audience jumping and gasping. Most of them are a good 20 years younger than average West End theatregoers: this is the crowd that came out swinging after COVID.
“My intention writing the play – and the intentions of the production and direction – was to create an event that felt like a big night out and catered for that crowd,” says Robins. Even after they know the twist, he says, a surprising number of them come back for a second viewing.
Robins is 46. He started his writing career as a stand-up comedian, working pubs and clubs in the north-east, before moving into writing sitcoms.
“I’ve made documentaries, travel programs, written sitcoms, I was trying to be everything,” he says. “I reached a point where I felt I’d failed at it. I was earning a living as a jobbing writer but nobody really cared. Now I feel I am trying to do just one thing that I find incredibly interesting.”
That said, much of 2.22 is drawing-room banter, which probably comes as a surprise to young patrons raised on ghost stories as horror. “I can’t imagine writing anything that wasn’t funny,” says Robins. “But I do feel more empowered from moving from being a comedy writer to just being a writer.”
It is also a privilege, he says, to be entrusted with other people’s stories. The one that catapulted his Uncanny podcast to viral fame came from a respected geneticist – definitely a card-carrying sceptic – who was given a notorious room in a Belfast college where unknown hands would beat on his door in the middle of the night. Decades later, he was still chewing over the experience.
Robins’ favourite, however, concerns a woman who went to see a medium’s stage show and dismissed it as nonsense until the medium stopped her in the foyer to repeat her best friend’s dying words. How could that happen? You don’t have to swallow a belief in the supernatural, he says, to be intrigued by the inexplicable. “You can interpret these sightings as potential proof of afterlife or as incredibly fascinating psychodramas and ask: why do people feel this way?” he says. “Each one to me is a little adventure I go on.”
Like an old-school medium, Robins tours shows about his investigations. Whole families come along, some telling their own tales. “The ones that send my pulse racing are the ones who say ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, but I think I’ve seen a ghost’,” he says. “Because that’s a huge disconnect that creates utter turmoil in you as a person. And for anyone who is any kind of student of the human condition, anyone who is a writer and teller of stories involving people, that is a great starting point. All stories begin with conflict and that is as big a conflict as they come.”
Asking questions about what happens after we die, he says, has given his life a new sense of purpose. “It is the most interesting debate, the subject that will start a conversation in any place or time in the world. I feel it is the biggest question in the history of the universe,” he says. “I’ve devoted myself to trying to find an answer to it and I’m totally aware of the futility of that. We’re going to be talking about it forever, but I do think it’s very exciting trying.”
2:22 A Ghost Story opens July 25 at Her Majesty’s Theatre.
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