The Signalman at Lowry

Charles Dickens’ nerve-shredding short story The Signalman gets staged at Lowry this January – the perfect Christmas gift for anyone who likes being scared in the dark.

23 years after A Christmas Carol made Dickens the patron saint of the festive ghost story, he wrote one that has little interest in redemption. The Signalman first appeared in the 1866 Christmas issue of his magazine All the Year Round, tucked inside a portmanteau of railway tales. Where Scrooge’s spectral visitors arrive with a moral lesson and a resolution, the ghost in The Signalman brings neither – only a warning…

Its witness is a conscientious signalman (played by Doctors’ Chris Walker) on an isolated stretch of line. He’s seen the figure twice before, and both times death followed. Now it’s back, and he can neither decipher it nor report it without being thought mad. Can a well-meaning traveller (played by Father Brown’s John Burton), who chances upon the signal box while out walking, calm the man’s fears before he spirals into self-destruction?

Dickens wrote The Signalman 18 months after surviving the Staplehurst rail crash, where 10 people died and he spent hours carrying river water to the injured in his hat. The story’s dread is therefore personal, and Francis Evelyn’s adaptation for Middle Ground Theatre Company goes further still, writing the crash into the signalman’s own past.

Dickens found his horror in ordinary machinery: a telegraph, an electric bell that rings when it shouldn’t, a red danger light. Middle Ground’s staging adds some Victorian mischief of its own, with books leaping from shelves and cupboards opening on their own. Michael Lunney’s stunning, eerie design splits the stage between the firelit signal box and the cold track outside, where projection does the work of the tunnel and whoever – or whatever – comes out of it.