The Enfield Haunting review: Catherine Tate’s spooky tale is epically, almost thrillingly bad

Paul Unwin’s poltergeist story, inspired by ghostly shenanigans in 1970s East London, has the ingredients for a hit – but it’s a January frightfest for all the wrong reasons

Catherine Tate stars in ‘The Enfield Haunting’ (Marc Brenner)

Telly star Catherine Tate must be rueing the day she signed up to The Enfield Haunting. On paper, it probably sounded like a great idea. Playwright and Casualty co-creator Paul Unwin dramatising an intriguing real-life 1970s London poltergeist case in the atmospheric confines of the West End’s Ambassadors Theatre: what’s not to like? But in the flesh, it’s epically, almost thrillingly bad.

Here, Tate plays Peggy, an Enfield single mum who’s beset by supernatural goings on, the actor’s natural sense of humour visibly fighting against a script that’s almost certainly meant to be played straight. "It’s a bleedin’ poltergeist!" she exclaims in horror, clutching her chest, starring in an inadvertent recreation of what Eastenders would be like if it did Halloween specials.

She’s not the only one: most of the cast are afflicted with cases of accidentally-hilarious-itis. Her tormented younger daughter Janet (Ella Schrey-Yeats) is barely visible beneath a The Thing-esque mass of tangled blonde hair, while her older sister Margaret (Grace Molony) stomps around swearing and constantly disappearing to the toilet, which she bafflingly, and increasingly hilariously, calls the “Pardonnez-moi”. Interfering neighbour Rey (Mo Sesay) is suspicious that this girl is behind the spooky, bumps and crashes besetting this household, but his oddly-pitched interventions only end up making things worse: he can’t even look after his cat Spider (which delivers appropriately haunted mewls on cue).