A Ghost in Your Ear

A Ghost in Your Ear begins with a performer alone in a recording booth, working through the night on the audiobook of a ghost story. The text stays a text for a while. Then, somewhere in the small hours, something in the studio starts answering it.

The audience listens through headphones, so every breath, footstep and turned page arrives at the ear rather than from the stage. That closeness is the design of the whole piece. The story being read aloud and the room it is being read in stop being separate places by degrees, and the reader loses the ability to say which of the two is the one currently happening.

Jamie Armitage wrote and directs it, with sound by Ben and Max Ringham and lighting by Ben Jacobs. It was built for the stage as a sound-first work rather than adapted from an existing text, and it had an earlier run before this one that drew strong notices.

The frights are made of audio rather than spectacle. A voice moves behind the head. A whisper lands on one side and not the other. A sound that belongs inside the story turns up in the room instead. Because the effects are placed in the ear rather than thrown from a wall of speakers, they are quieter than most horror staging and considerably harder to shake off afterwards.

It runs on a single idea and the idea holds. By the time the reader stops being certain what is on the page, the audience has lost the same footing, and there is nowhere in the room to look that puts it back.