An interview with Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson ahead of their spine-tingling production of Ghost Stories visiting Newcastle Theatre Royal next week

Things that go bump in the theatre

After numerous successful runs across London, Ghost Stories is taking its jump-inducing, goosebumps-raising show back on the road to complete its first full UK tour, including a visit to Newcastle Theatre Royal (Tue 22 – Sat 26 Apr 2025). We caught up with the show’s writers, Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson, to hear all about their shared love of horror, giving audiences a trick and a treat, and keeping the spooky secrets of the stage hit.

Supernatural stage scarefest Ghost Stories is something of a modern The Mousetrap – despite having run for the best part of seven decades, no-one spills the beans on Agatha Christie’s record-breaking secrets – and Ghost Stories is exactly the same.

Despite having premiered 14 years ago and enjoying a subsequent film adaptation starring Martin Freeman and Paul Whitehouse, the secrets that make Ghost Stories such an unusual and successful show have remained elusive, well-guarded as they are by both its creative team and audiences.

“Secrets are precious,” explains the show’s co-creator Andy Nyman. “If you give people a secret that they really enjoy and you ask them nicely to keep it, they do.” If anyone should know about secrets, it’s Nyman. Before writing Ghost Stories, he was the man behind many of Derren Brown’s mystery-filled stage shows and early TV performances.

The secretiveness with Ghost Stories, he says, was born out of frustration that these days “Everything is spoiled for you. Every single film and television trailer ruins plot points. Jeremy and I love the experience of telling people a really good story without them knowing anything about it in advance. You feel the buzz in the audience; it’s an exciting thing to sit and watch.”

So, what can they say about Ghost Stories? Well, Andy explains: “Ghost Stories is a 90-minute scary, thrill-ride experience about a professor of parapsychology who investigates three inexplicable hauntings. That’s as much as you get and that’s more than we ever used to give.”

If you push him a little harder, he’ll tell you it’s: “A rattling hour and a half that will make you roar with laughter, leap out of your seats and talk about it for a very long time.” And that’s really all you need to know about the specifics of the show; it will make you scream like a banshee and giggle like a schoolchild, probably at the same time.

Nyman and co-writer Jeremy Dyson, best known for his work with The League of Gentlemen, have a long history that reaches back far beyond the start of their Ghost Stories journey, but begins with horror and a shared love of the genre that saw them forge a teenage friendship.

“It probably started, for me, with Scooby Doo,” says Dyson of his infatuation with creepy tales. “There were a lot of scary things for kids around in the 70s, and lots I was enchanted by. Doctor Who would have been a part of that, which in the 70s had a real horror edge to it. So, the groundwork was done by the time I was seven or eight years old. People used to buy me collections of ghost stories for my birthdays. They were supposed to be for kids, but they were the most terrifying tales.”

Throw in horror double bills on BBC2, screened at a time when there were only a trio of channels available so “whoever was doing the programming just picked the best stuff,” and public safety films that were as terrifying as any big screen offering, and you have a culture that bred a shared sensibility, certainly between Nyman and Dyson, if not a much wider generation of horror fans.

“It’s a very English genre,” says Dyson. “Certainly, when it comes to the supernatural side of things. The English sensibility defined a lot of that. It’s a very English tradition, and there’s no question that’s part of what we’re celebrating in Ghost Stories.”

Yet despite the best British traditions of both horror and theatre, stage horror is not a genre you see very often, even with the fact that a theatre gives you the ability to control the entire 360 degrees of an audience’s experience. With Ghost Stories’ emergence at the Lyric Hammersmith 14 years ago, and its immediate success, this has slowly begun to change.

“I think it’s hard to do well,” opines Dyson. “You have to have a love both for theatre and for horror. It’s a bit like comedy. People talk about comedy writers having funny bones. I think you need scary bones to write horror.”

“We cannot wait to take it around the country and let people see it and experience it in their hometowns,” says Nyman.

Ghost Stories plays Newcastle Theatre Royal Tue 22 – Sat 26 Apr 2025. Tickets can be purchased at www.theatreroyal.co.uk or from the Theatre Royal Box Office on 0191 232 7010.