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The ghost in A Ghost in Your Ear does not stay on the stage. It comes through a pair of headphones, and every person in the audience is wearing one. Jamie Armitage’s “truly terrifying headphone horror” (The Guardian), which sold out its world premiere run at London’s Hampstead Theatre, is now playing Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre in New York through November 22, with Lucas Iverson (HBO’s The Pitt) and Owen Campbell (A24’s X) starring.
An actor arrives late to a sound studio for a last-minute audiobook job and is handed the script of a ghost story he has never read. As the engineer cues the recording and the night wears on, the horrors begin to escape the page and haunt the studio itself. Campbell plays Sid, the recording engineer, and Iverson plays Lucas.
A Microphone Shaped Like a Human Head
The show was built with sound designers Ben and Max Ringham, the brothers behind the Tony-nominated sound of Broadway’s Prima Facie and A Doll’s House. The trick is a binaural microphone: a stereo mic shaped like a human head, with a microphone placed in each ear. Speak into the dummy’s right ear and the sound arrives in the right side of every pair of headphones in the house, down to the feeling of a whisper inches away. The Ringhams used the same approach for Blindness, the off-Broadway headphone show that was one of the first productions to play after the pandemic shutdown.
London critics singled out how close it gets. “Worse than any loud jump-scares, there’s nothing quite so creepy as someone unseen whispering in your ear, to the point where I’m half expecting to feel a breath on my neck,” wrote Miriam Sallon in her WhatsOnStage review, adding, “That is not a suggestion, dear director, please don’t do that!”
What the London Critics Said
- “If you’ve come to be scared, you’re in the right place.” The Guardian
- “High-tech horror that gets under the skin.” Financial Times
- “A proper scary little gem.” Time Out (four stars)
- “Smart, intricately-crafted, and properly scary. Bring a friend to hold onto!” BroadwayWorld (four stars)
Time Out called the play “a technically dazzling MR James tribute,” and the ghost story being recorded has the classic shape: a man travels to the remote house of his late father and starts finding out about a father and grandfather he never really knew. Armitage traces his own interest in the genre to one show. “My obsession with horror theatre started when I was 12 and saw The Woman in Black for the first time,” he said when the London run was announced. “I hope it scares them out of their wits.”
Armitage earned a Tony nomination as co-director of Six. A Ghost in Your Ear is his second play as writer and director, after the police procedural An Interrogation.
Owen Campbell and Lucas Iverson Lead the New York Cast
Campbell played RJ, the young filmmaker shooting a movie on a Texas farm in Ti West’s X, the film that started the trilogy that continued with Pearl and MaXXXine. His other film work includes Super Dark Times and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and he made his Broadway debut in Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen.
Iverson plays James Ogilvie on HBO’s The Pitt and Simon on The Gilded Age. This is his off-Broadway debut.
Tickets and the GHOST20 Discount Code
The show runs about 90 minutes with no intermission at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, 18 Minetta Lane in the West Village. There is no late seating and no re-entry, and the theater warns of loud noises and flashing lights. Tickets are on Ticketmaster, and iHorror readers can use code GHOST20 for a discount. Show details are on the official Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre page.
Audible is recording the New York production and will release it later as an Audible Original, so the headphones will eventually come home with you.