Richmond Theatre – until Saturday 10th October 2026
Reviewed by Carly Burlinge
4****
There is a particular kind of dread that only live theatre can deliver — the kind that creeps up your spine in real time, in the same room as you, with no camera cut, no close-up, and no post-production trickery to save you. The Haunting of Hill House, adapted for the stage, understands this instinctively. It doesn’t try to out-scare the Netflix series or to out-write Shirley Jackson’s original novel; instead, it finds a theatrical language all its own — one built from shadow, silence, and suggestion — and for the most part, it works beautifully.
The atmosphere is unquestionably the star of the evening. The production leans hard into everything that theatre does better than film: darkness that is actually dark, sound that you feel in your chest before you consciously hear it, and empty space that the audience’s own imagination fills with far more than any special effect could. The set — a skeletal, subtly tilting version of Hill House itself — shifts and warps between scenes in a way that keeps the audience perpetually off-balance, never quite sure what corner of the house they’re looking at or what might be standing just out of view in it. The lighting design deserves special mention here, because it does something quietly remarkable: it turns ordinary theatre space into a series of corners you’re afraid to investigate. Shadows pool in places they shouldn’t, doorways seem to breathe, and the house itself feels less like a backdrop and more like a character — patient, watchful, and hungry. The soundscape completes the effect, layering whispers beneath the dialogue, creaks that have no obvious source, and low, wrong frequencies that sit just under the level of conscious hearing. You feel the house before you ever see it, and long after you’ve left the building, you keep feeling it.
The performances hold their own against all that atmosphere, which is no small feat. The ensemble is tight and well-drilled, each actor moving through the space with the kind of precision that makes the scares land cleanly rather than clumsily. But the production is smartest when it remembers that the real haunting isn’t the house at all — it’s what the characters carry into it. Grief, guilt, and the stubborn refusal to let go of the dead are the true ghosts here, and the script gives those quieter moments room to breathe between the shocks. The central performance, in particular, grounds the supernatural chaos in something painfully, recognizably human, and it’s in those scenes — two people in a room, saying the things they’ve never been able to say — that the show is at its most unsettling. The house, it turns out, doesn’t need to do very much at all; it just needs to give people permission to tear themselves apart.
Where the production stumbles is chiefly in its second act, which occasionally over-explains what the first act so beautifully left ambiguous. There is a temptation, common to adaptations of well-loved horror, to spell things out for the audience — to make sure they’ve understood the rules of the haunting, the history of the house, the meaning of every apparition. But Jackson’s genius was in what she withheld, and the show is at its best when it trusts the audience to fill the dark spaces themselves. A few of the scares, too, land with a thud rather than a whisper — loud, sudden, and effective in the moment, but less lingering than the quieter dread that surrounds them. And there is one monologue near the end that tells us, at length, things we had already felt perfectly well on our own. These are not fatal flaws — the production’s strengths far outweigh its missteps — but they do mean that the second half never quite matches the haunting, delicate power of the first.
The verdict, then, is a genuinely unsettling, beautifully crafted piece of gothic theatre that respects its source material while finding a stage language entirely its own. It is a show that understands the difference between a jump scare and a haunting, and that knows the latter is far more powerful — and far harder to shake off. Bring a friend to hold onto during the dark bits, and maybe someone to walk you home after. Just don’t be surprised if, on the way, you find yourself glancing back at the house you’ve just left — and wondering whether it’s really the house you’re still thinking about, or something it left behind in you.