The poster and programme have an image based on Grant Wood’s iconic 1930 painting, American Gothic, which instantly creates the right mood for something supernatural.
Controversy still rages. Was it a hallucination or was it a hoax, a children’s prank? The play is inspired by real events and by real people. However, it is not a documentary.
The Enfield Haunting has already been well documented. There has been a book, a television series and a mockumentary. Paul Unwin’s play is totally. superfluous. Unwin adds nothing of interest.
A working-class single mother and her three children live in a council house in Enfield. They have a ghostly experience. They hear lots of knockings in the walls. Furniture, bed, chairs, move of their own accord. Things are thrown across the room. A child levitates. Strange noises and words coming out of a 11-year-old girl’s mouth. She sounds like a rasping man.
The story hit the headlines of national newspapers in 1977. The Metropolitan police, the press, interrogators, the society of psychical research descended on the house to explore what was going on. David Threlfall is cast as Maurice Grosse, the famed paranormal investigator, who stayed in the house and made video recordings.
Catherine Tate plays the mother but she can’t save the play. Nor can Angus Jackson’s production which is neither disturbing nor frightening and certainly never lives up to the atmospheric poster image. It would have been more unnerving to have cast all three children with child actors.
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