My play  SIGNAL LOST AT MIDNIGHT is making its debut at the new writing festival at THE SPACE theatre in London

Continuing my fascination with reclaiming archaic art forms, I wrote a play based on Marc Bonis-Charancle’s 1903 play La Maison hantée performed at the Theatre de Grand Guignol. (Apparently, the play was made into a silent film in 1906.)

It is about a group of ghost hunters who explore an abandoned house only to discover something much much worse than they could’ve possibly imagined

The original play fitted into the Grand Guignol genre – a kind of horror comedy with extreme violence. I updated the ghost hunters to be a group of would-be ghost-hunting posers seeking to be Internet famous. Grand Guignol plays are short, and so is mine, and more than one would be performed on an evening. Due to their brevity, there is not much character development – or plot for that matter. They deliver a realistic, sharp shock with plenty of gore. They are also meant to be very realistic, in concept and style. However, realism is a spectrum, very much defined by whatever the current conception of it is.

I added in quite a lot of character development, some fairly witty interplay and a more occult aspect, which was not really part of the Grand Guignol repertoire, but left it ambiguous enough that the viewer can make up their mind if anything supernatural was going on – or just mania. And it’s still a really, really nasty, violent horror.

I’m really happy with it. It’s being produced and eminently directed by Julia Sopher, an American director based in London. She’s very good. I attended rehearsal the other day and was really pleased with the cast. Julia is a great casting director as well as really good with actors. We really enjoyed working together and hope we do it again soon.