Theatre: The Mist in the Mirror.....

Presented by Oldham Coliseum Theatre
Adapted by Ian Kershaw from the novel by Susan Hill
Adapted from the novel by Susan Hill author of The Woman in Black, this tense and atmospheric new production is an otherworldly mystery that leaves a terrifying eeriness suspended in the air.
A ghostly chill falls over the New Wolsey this spring with a traveller's strange tale of threats from beyond the grave.
The Mist in the Mirror is a gothic fireside story which the audience is invited to eavesdrop on. Visual theatre innovators 'imitating the dog' will once again be on hand to create an unnerving ethereal atmosphere before the show even begins and an unsettling feeling that might just follow you home at the end of the night too...


Although it didn't actually deliver the scary chills promised it was very good. The actors all did various parts, some a little more believable than others. The story for me was a bit weak.  But the star of the show was the very clever set. It was an open fronted black box that has doors and panels that opened and closed revealing characters or room sets with ever changing projected images, so clever.

This is what one reviewer has already said (silly to say it again myself eh?).....
The interplay between the stage acting and filmic action was spellbinding with digital curtains drawing back to reveal doors mysteriously melting away and falling snow and rain against windows. Journal writing is projected onto walls in jagged spidery scrawls that appear before our eyes and trains chuff into stations with gouts of steam that meld with the eponymous mists to create a binary landscape of black and white with occasional flashes of red. The narrator (Jack Lord) is back lit in a misty crimson, his demeanour grave as he sits above the stage in one of a series of cut out spaces that are strongly reminiscent of Jan Pienkowski's Haunted House pop up book for children. As in this classic book, characters and special effects dart or drag in and out of doors, cellars and riverside haunts, moving swiftly and in deathly silence from opposite sides of the well designed set. We move from an ocean steamer close to docking to a Thames side lodgings with requisite taciturn and odd host to trains complete with resident psychics who invite you to stay at their country house, finally arriving on a snowy Yorkshire moor for the denouement in Monmouths ancestral home, isolated, crepuscular and forbidding.
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