IT WALKS AROUND THE HOUSE AT NIGHT

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★★

“a well-conjured fright fest, a confident piece of storytelling and a wholly entertaining experience”

The play that brought writer Tim Foley to award-winning attention was Electric Rosary, which featured a robot nun. With this new work, he sticks with matters spiritual but turns his attention to the classic haunted house mystery.

We’re talking ghosts, shadows, ancient curses and the portrait of a sickly child.

This is obviously a one-man play, that man being the dynamic and companionable George Naylor. Only he isn’t alone, is he? Because there is Pete Malkin and Joshua Pharo and Tom Robbins as well.

They are, in turn, sound designer, lighting and video designer, and set designer. They deserve upfront credits because they work wonders. The production is sensational in all interpretations of that word, filling the black box with sufficient jump-scares, crashes, whoops, and spooky backdrops to create something akin to a theme park ride.

Then there’s director Neil Bettles who has taken a cinematic script and devised an evening packed with theatrical trickery to match Foley’s fireworks.

To the story then, and the small seed which grows and keeps growing until, at one point, you think: enough with the new things. We’re beginning to lose our way.

Which is an apt analogy. For Joe (Naylor), a down-on-his-luck actor, has been commissioned by sinister toff David Linden to walk around the eerie perimeter of Paragon House in period costume to frighten his nieces who are staying for the holidays.

Doesn’t turn out like that, of course, because Joe fears he is not the only one making the mysterious trudge through the dense thickets and lonely trails. There may be two people circling the house. Or maybe three. And maybe not even people at all.

Announcing a character called The Dancer (Oliver Baines) upfront doesn’t give the game away but does suggest we are not alone in unusual and kinetic ways.

Joe wants to leave, but he fancies David and he’s getting paid an astronomical sum. Also, there’s a strange compulsion to untangle this knotty puzzle. Because Paragon House was demolished decades ago according to Google, and who is that man at the window?

Critics of Electric Rosary declared that Foley tried to cram too much into the second half. He avoids part of that problem here by not having a second half at all – no interval snifter to settle the nerves – but he does insist on wringing the cloth dry in search of a topper. The plot, like the forest, gets thicker and more impenetrable the further we wander in.

However, there’s no escaping the grip of this play: it is a well-conjured fright fest, a confident piece of storytelling and a wholly entertaining experience if your idea of fun involves a growing sense of menace.

IT WALKS AROUND THE HOUSE AT NIGHT

Southwark Playhouse Borough

Reviewed on 9th March 2026

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

IT WALKS AROUND THE HOUSE AT NIGHT

★★★½

“this little production still packs a gutsy punch”

Director Prime Isaac sets out their stall early in Bitch Boxer, confining all the action to the ring. Partly this is practical – a ring is bulky and the Arcola studio small – but it also tells its own tale.

Chloe (Jodie Campbell) is a fighter. Even when she’s not boxing, she’s fighting. Her whole life she has put up two fists first and asked questions later.

In case the message still isn’t clear, designer Hazel Low has set up a punch bag in the corner made up – cleverly – of old jeans and shirts, like a doner kebab of compressed cast-offs. Chloe fights everywhere she goes; it is the stuff of her life.

The suggestion that she refashioned her hobby into her attitude aged 11 when her mother left doesn’t entirely convince. But as we meet her years later, Chloe’s motivation is clear-eyed.

She has just lost her dad and her coach. He told her, more than once, you’ve got to fight for the things you love Chloe.

Yes, Dad.

She misses him endlessly.

Meanwhile, a small piece of history is happening round the corner from her Leytonstone home. It’s 2012 and the world’s sporting elite is converging on Stratford where women’s boxing will feature in the Olympics for the first time.

This is Chloe’s destiny now, her one shot at glory, and she has a reason to focus, punishing herself with a gruelling schedule. Burying her hurt beneath fresh bruises.

It’s tempting to call the play a one-hander but that would be to the detriment of the combinations that Jodie Campbell expertly delivers throughout this very physical production.

She works hard – jab, jab, cross, hook. She keeps her head defended and her emotional carapace intact, but the glimpses we do get – at home with tender girlfriend Jamie for example – reveal a sweet young woman, brittle but not broken, grieving but not knowing it yet.

Campbell’s performance is full of charm and swagger even when she’s coming closest to meeting the demands of the play’s overwrought title. Bitchy, maybe, but never a bitch.

So when she’s in the ring, fighting for the championship – energised by Jessie Addinall’s inventive lighting design – we’re rooting for her, not just in this particular contest but in life, which is tougher.

Charlie Josephine’s streetwise script fails to ask the hard questions and there’s an inevitable over-reliance on boxing analogies. But to give that tendency one more round, this little production still packs a gutsy punch.

Tag Archives: Giles Broadbent

IT WALKS AROUND THE HOUSE AT NIGHT

★★★★

Southwark Playhouse Borough

IT WALKS AROUND THE HOUSE AT NIGHT

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★★

“a well-conjured fright fest, a confident piece of storytelling and a wholly entertaining experience”