Ghost Quartet – Boulevard Theatre

Maimuna Memon and Carly Bawden in Ghost Quartet at the Boulevard Theatre, London. Picture: Marc Brenner

Ghost Quartet continues at the Boulevard Theatre, London until 4 January 2020.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

It feels as if 2019 has been the year where London finally got Dave Malloy. First his Preludes got its debut at Southwark Playhouse, and now Ghost Quartet has been chosen to be the debut production at Soho’s Boulevard Theatre.

And as a first show, it certainly makes a statement. A song cycle devised when Malloy and three of his friends were working together on Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, the structure is very much based on their evenings spent playing music and drinking whisky.

The result is a night of storytelling, of ghost stories and flights of fancy. The story, if that is the appropriate one, is multi-threaded, nonlinear and (appropriately enough for a Halloween opening night) supernatural. This is an environment where a retelling of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher elides into Scheherazade’s 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights, where the spirit of Thelonius Monk is playing piano in a Persian Grimm fairy tale, contemporaneous with a murder on the New York subway.

Simon Kenny’s set design turns the Boulevard’s in-the-round space into a haphazard attic room packed with musical instruments and gewgaws, around which the four performers – Zubin Varla, Carly Bawden, Niccolò Curradi and Maimuna Memon – construct their evening of entertainment.

Are these four actors the quartet of the title? Or does it refer instead to the four intermingling story strands. Or the four musical sections (the songs are presented as ‘tracks’ on the four sides of a double album). Or the four brands of whisky fuelling their storytelling (samples of which are meted out during the show, which is the kind of audience participation I can really get behind).

The Ghost Quartet is all of those things, of course, for like the rest of the show there are no hard boundaries, everything merging into everything else. It means that when one of the show’s many great moments emerges, it can catch you unawares.

And there are many, from the musical – the seductive ‘Soldier & Rose’, or the jazz tone poem strains of ‘The Photograph’ – to the visual, as a telescope slowly starts rotating or a mysterious artefact made from a human breastbone is illuminated. All is brilliantly lit by Emma Chapman’s design, whether picking out actors in haze-filled spotlight, or cutting out as much light as possible for ‘Lights Out’, the only remaining illumination coming from the electronics around the place, LEDs becoming unintentional pinpricks of starlight.

It adds up to the sort of non-narrative mood piece that will not be to every musical theatre fan’s taste, and all the better for that. What nobody could deny, though, is the quality of the performance on offer. Bawden, in particular, has rarely been better, although it’s maybe unfair to pick out one performer of the four.

In an evening dedicated to the power of collaborative storytelling, the final song concludes with a powerful breakdown of the line between performer and audience that is as telling as it is awkwardly hilarious. It typifies an evening, directed by Bill Buckhurst, that is capricious, mood-fuelled, mystical and engaging. As a statement for what the new Boulevard Theatre wants to be, it’s a winner.

Scott Matthewman