Around 1862, John Henry Pepper devised a new theatre lighting technique involving a large angled sheet of glass and figures moving around below stage level.  The trick made it appear that actors on the stage were translucent phantasms who could walk through walls and furniture with ease. The technique made possible plays with impressively transparent ghosts. This new possibility in theatre coincided with a wide spread fascination with supernatural that followed the bloody American civil war. They still use this technique, by the way, in the Disney parks, where seated theatre goers are replaced with lines of suntanned tourists sauntering through a ‘haunted’ house..

            There’s something about a ghost in a live theatre production that is especially chilling. After all, photographs and video are so easy to fake, but when a ghost treads the boards you’re actually in the same room with him or her. Speaking of chilling—I once saw Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic in London. I was sitting in the front row and the cold air spilling off the stage practically froze my toes. They were using a dry ice effect to create mist. It was like when you open one of those fridges with the freezer on the bottom. There aren’t any ghosts in The Merchant of Venice, so the effect was kind of wasted. 

            The supernatural in theatre is as old as the medium. The ancient Greeks used to lower their gods onto the stage in a basket with a sort of crane, hence the deus ex machina that we still talk about. Many of you have seen Hamlet’s father on the battlements, or Banquo’s ghost seated at the dinner table, in Shakespeare’s plays.

            By its nature, theatre involves actors recreating the same scenarios and lines night after night, kind of like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Ghosts are often portrayed as re-enacting the same dramatic situation too—sword fighting in the corridor, say—or moaning in the cellar. There’s a sort of pseudo logic to this. Writers who want to explain ghostly behaviour suggest that strong emotions are being absorbed by the masonry—to be played back endlessly in the minds of receptive visitors. I’ve never liked this idea because it reduces the ghost to a sort of VHS tape. Still, it downloads the haunting into the minds of the living and almost sounds scientific, especially since modern physics is getting weirder every day, what with quantum entanglement and the multiverse.

            Given the number of creative and sensitive personnel in theatre it’s not surprising that there are superstitions and resident ghosts in music halls, and in theatres around the world,  like Drury Lane in London. For instance, if an actor names the play ‘Macbeth’ out loud he’ s doomed. There’s a well known curse that will make mincemeat of him, and it’s not surprising; Banquo’s ghost has a lot of issues to work out.

            Of course, investing in a huge sheet of glass for a play is a major pane… (sorry). Why not just have the ghost appear on stage in appropriately ghastly make up, as in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’? Charles Dickens’ Jacob Marley and The Ghost of Christmas Present invariably look like they had raided the makeup and prop departments. In the dark.

            I saw Noel Coward’s ‘Blithe Spirit’ on TV the other night, and there she was: the hero’s late wife, a sickly technicolour green, trading quips with her husband. Apparently the afterlife doesn’t improve your behaviour—or your wit. She was blithe though, I’ll give her that. It means callously indifferent, by the way. (I had to look it up.)

            There’s another type of theatrical ghost story. After a survey of Edwardian ghost stories, Roald Dahl noted that in the best stories, the ghost doesn’t actually appear. The spookiness is achieved by suggestion, and you can do that on stage too. A few deft lighting effects and there you are. Technically, Brigadoon is a ghost story since the inhabitants of that village only come to life once every hundred years. And they play the bagpipes, for God’s sake, which is an otherworldly effect in itself. 

            One of my favourite narrative gimmicks is having the audience discover that a character on stage is in fact dead—a ghost. Think Bruce Willis in ‘The Sixth Sense’. Picture this: you’re sitting talking to a nice man who is happily reminiscing about his past experiences. He’s charming, but not too up on current events. There are two possible outcomes here. You could go for the cheap shock and have this man get up and walk through a wall. Or he could walk off into the evening shadows. Only later do you recognize him from a photograph; he’s a guy that used to work here but died in an on-site accident years ago. There’s still a shock, but like fine wine, it has time to breathe.

            Nicholas Sparks used this gimmick in one of his romances. A friendly neighbour turns out to be the late wife of the heroine’s new boyfriend. Don’t worry—the spirit is all onboard with the new romance. 

            One of my favourite ghost novelists, Noel Hynd, also pulled this off in one of his stories. I can’t remember the name of the book, but the character sticks with me. I had time to get to like the fellow and I ‘watched him’ shoot baskets with the hero. He was a great guy. He just happened to be dead. In this kind of play or story, the ghost just looks like everyone else, except you later find out he died ten years ago in a traffic accident or something.  Notably, he’s never around to answer questions when you find this out. 

            In a way I pay homage to this type of spirit in Requiem for Parish, the novel I’m working on. I’ve read too much great and not so great literature to think absolute originality is possible. Freshness yes—but even Shakespeare borrowed most of his themes. By the way, there’s a case to be made that Will wrote some of the King James Bible.

            But that’s another story.