Inside No 9: Stage/Fright review – slick chills as Shearsmith and Pemberton haunt the West End

The Guardian

29-01-2025

'We finally ran out of ideas!' jokes Reece Shearsmith towards the end of this maiden stage outing for the hit horror-comedy Inside No 9. The TV show ended after nine series and 55 episodes, each one a surprise. So are Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton now winding down? Not a bit, if Stage/Fright is any guide. From its murderous prologue on – hands-down the most memorable mobile phone announcement ever made in a theatre – this live show is as twisty and unpredictable as the best of their episodes on the BBC.
Some of those episodes are recalled here, in a two hours-plus performance that retains the TV series' anthology spirit. You don't leave feeling like you've seen one play but several. There's the retread of series four yarn Bernie Clifton's Dressing Room, which casts Shearsmith and Pemberton as former end-of-the-pier double act Cheese and Crackers, reuniting for a last feeble hurrah in a draughty church hall. There's the kidnap scene (ostensibly one of Cheese and Crackers' sketches) in which a celebrity guest is taken hostage and obliged to improvise their way out of trouble.
Prior to those, our hosts give us a spine-chilling spiel about the haunted history of the Wyndham's theatre, where they tell us an actor once lost her life in a misbegotten production of gothic melodrama Terror in the Asylum. Act two pitches us into a rehearsal for that same play, with Shearsmith as the smooth director, Pemberton as a maniacal surgeon, and Miranda Hennessy as a TikTok star turned leading lady spooked by the curse which haunts her role. There is nice work too from Anna Francolini as a hatchet-faced matron with a detachable eyeball. If that feels like a lot to wrap your head around – well, our hosts have more in store that I'm not allowed to tell you. And in any event, keeping you on edge, a little uncertain of what you're watching and where it's going, is all part of the project of this tricksy, one-step-ahead show.
Arguably, its portfolio nature comes at the expense of cohesion – although we're never far from the haunting theme, as lights flicker and the living are forever mistaken for the dead. Lily-livers such as me may spend half the show teetering on the edges of their seats, as Shearsmith and Pemberton deliver jump-scares on stage and, because their Terror in the Asylum production is trendily multimedia, on an upstage screen too. But alongside the thrills, there's laughter, as Shearsmith performs a patter song about chemistry, Pemberton puns ('My migraines!' / 'Your yourgraines?'), and Cheese and Crackers take various 1970s celebrity names in vain. (Good luck anyone under 45 getting those jokes.)
It's a slickly produced spooky wheeze, distinguished by Shearsmith and Pemberton's clearly personal obsession with the double-act dynamic and old-school entertainment, and with theatres and their ghosts. One gets the impression they'd happily haunt the Wyndham's stage centuries hence – failing which, the echo of tonight's gasps and giggles should at least linger for quite some time.
At Wyndham's theatre, London, until 5 April