53Two, Manchester – until 7 November 2025
Reviewed by Sal E Marino
4****
As the lights drop on Wightwater’s modest set — a small and tired radio-booth of peeling wallpaper and flickering equipment — Frankie Lipman establishes a haunting, claustrophobic tone. The premise is deceptively simple: Terie, a radio host whose career has long since departed the mainstream, now presents The Paranormal Show to an ever-thinning audience of late-night listeners. She spins haunted-house jingles, adverts for cereal, and ghost-sound effects into the static—but the twist is that something in the booth is listening back, and tonight it broadcasts.
The play explores weighty themes: shame, fear, the decay of voice and what happens when what you broadcast comes back to claim you. The setting of a radio studio, replete with static hiss and unseen callers, works as a metaphor for isolation: Terie is not just abandoned by the world, she’s abandoned by herself.
The writing has a sharp edge — wry humour mixed with genuine unease. Lipman suspends you in a world where the unseen is as present as the seen. At times, however, the dramatic arc feels compressed: some of the deeper revelations come too quickly to allow the audience full emotional digestion. The tension does build well, but its resolution arrives maybe a beat too soon.
There are creeping moments of genuine surprise: when the studio monitors crackle with voices that shouldn’t be there, or when Terie fears the unseen caller is in the room rather than on the line. These are handled with deft subtlety rather than jump-scare theatrics, which lends the show a sophistication that is rare in fringe work.
The atmosphere is one of slow unravelling. Lighting often holds on the booth in half-shadow, suggesting both confinement and exposure. The ambient soundscape is layered cleverly: you hear distant traffic, the hum of heating, the faint flicker of studio monitors—but always there is the possibility of something more sinister creeping beneath. This design serves the text well: the play is less about what happens and more about what could happen, the un-seen menace that lurks behind broadcast waves.
Wightwater has a genuine sense of place, a voice you want to listen to, and moments of real chill. It’s a compelling and haunting piece worth seeing.