I recently saw Room 13 at the Barn Theatre in Cirencester, which is new writing from Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel, who have previously co-written stage adaptations of The Da Vinci Code and The Girl on the Train, as well as other projects.
Directed by Loveday Ingram, Room 13 has been created for the Barn Theatre and it’s month long run at the Barn is the play’s world premiere. Debuting during Halloween season is perfect for a new ghost play, and my general impressions of the play having left the theatre was that it did well to scratch that ghostly itch.
I will be discussing some spoilers of the plot in this review and analysis as I always do with theatre reviews on the website, so if you have yet to see it, this is your spoiler warning.
The play is set between two rooms in a hotel in Denmark, where a woman who works at the hotel, Lena (Alice Bailey Johnson), shows new hotel guest Anderson (Samuel Collins) into his room. Set late at night, it doesn’t take long for the eerie atmosphere to set in. Lena visibly has a large scar across her throat and there is a creepy painting of girl on the wall above the bed where the girl’s eyes are hidden in shadow.
Anderson is in the country to collect some antique books, and soon discovers one has a hidden compartment in it with a symbol of the occult and a bone whistle with some strange writing on it. After blowing the whistle, Anderson hears some strange sounds and crying form the next room. Moments later we’re introduced to Jacobs (played by George Naylor) who is the occupant of the room next door. The characters both think they’ve heard the strange noises from each other’s rooms and this is where the fun of the play truly begins.
The men are soon joined in the room by Mary (played by Ffion Jolly) who is the wife of the owner of the Hotel, and the conversation soon turns to whether the sounds they are hearing could be of supernatural origin.
The play is well presented, but does have a fair amount of forced plot progression throughout. I can believe that the two guys may take some time to figure out if the sounds are coming from one room or another as it affects both of them if the sound is disturbing, but that the hotel owner’s wife would want to casually join these random men to stay up and tell ghost stories is something of a stretch.
Each of the characters shares a ghostly story they know or something unexplainable they have encountered in their past, and when they do this, the actors take on different roles to show these flashbacks. These are relatively well done, and its clear enough when a performer steps into a different role, but I was disappointed when I saw that the play was going the route of having these ghost stories told by each character. The reason for this is because as soon as you start having scenes that are flashbacks or side stories about other characters, you do a couple of things. Firstly, the stakes are very low, as you know all the main characters hearing the story being told survive, and secondly, and especially as the same actors playing the main characters were also playing these side minor characters, you can be sure they won’t reoccur or be vital to the ongoing plot.
It’s during these flashbacks/story telling moments that most of the ghostly stuff happens, and although there is some ghostly goings on around these scenes, for me it took a lot of the tension out of the play, as you just felt there was no real threat or danger to the characters when they were having scenes of dialogue together set in the here and now.
The way the ghostly moments and effects are pulled off in the play are very impressive. Highlights include a woman appearing in the bed when she hadn’t been there seconds earlier, a ghostly image appearing in a painting and a scary Mr Punch like character jumping out from a wardrobe. Most of the effects were done with either projection, what I suspect were hidden trap doors, combined with misdirection for cast members to get into position with split second timing. Most of the good scares do happen in the first act, and in this sense it was a shame as the first act did these so well, it did create a sense of expectation that the second act would be filled with even bigger thrills, but it wasn’t.
With the ghost stories filling in a fair amount of the time of the show, the scenes around them were more character driven and the main plot seemed to be about the potential of a romance between Anderson and Jacobs. This was pretty obvious from the get go that there was something in the air between the two, although the characters wouldn’t get the happy ending that perhaps could have been hinted at.
After act one is set entirely in room twelve at the hotel, which is Anderson’s room, the second act takes place entirely within room fourteen, which is Jacobs’ room. It’s established pretty early on that the hotel has no room thirteen based on the old superstition for why many hospitals and other establishments skip rooms numbered thirteen. But along the way here lies some issues in the writing where things start to fall apart from a logic perspective if you stop to think about things for more than a moment.
In the early proceedings of the play, it’s debated between the men whether each is actually in the thirteenth room. Anderson says Jacobs is as regardless of how they number the rooms based on superstition, his room would be the thirteenth room as it comes next after room twelve. Jacobs then makes the argument that that only works if you count from the end of the hallway that starts with room one. If you start from the other end, it would be Anderson’s room that is the thirteenth. What I’m not sure the play clarifies is that this would only make sense if there are a total of twenty-four rooms on that floor, or in fact in the hotel in total. As the only way to make Anderson’s room, room thirteen would be if Jacobs’ room was the twelfth room approaching from the other direction. And that there was an entrance/exit from the other direction, as otherwise there would be no logic to counting the rooms in reverse order…but anyway.
This may feel like nitpicks, but plays like this do invite scrutiny, as mysteries and reveals only make sense if you are able to piece together the clues that have been presented, and in the case of Room 13, they didn’t always add up to me.
Room 13 Ending Explained
The biggest culprit in this regard in the play came with what was something of a red herring ending. In one of the final scenes, we have Anderson, Mary and Jacobs in Jacobs room, and they discover that the door knob wont open and they are trapped in the room. There’s some chaos with the lights and time passes to the next morning and we find that the door is still locked, and Anderson and Jacobs are spooning together on the bed asleep. They wake to find that Mary is no longer in the room, but that the door is still unable to be opened.
From this they massively leap to the conclusion that despite both being asleep and potentially not seeing Mary exit the room, that they therefore must both be ghosts. Many films and stories have famously had the twist that the main characters turn out to be ghosts without realising, but the way they work themselves up into a state and can think this was really poor. They each justify that incidents mentioned from their pasts may be that they are actually dead, and that they both have unlikely reasons to be in Denmark, so clearly they must both be dead and ghosts. This makes no sense and is purely plot convenience.
For this theory to have been correct, it would mean that weeks or months of their lives where they interacted with people would have been in their imaginations, and there was no real justification for why their being ghosts would take them to each other and in Denmark when it wasn’t established that they had any previous connection to each other of the country.
The icing on the cake for this theory was the idea that Anderson notices that the wall that separates room twelve and room fourteen is actually an additional wall and that therefore they have both been staying in room thirteen this whole time. This is a clever reveal to justify the title of the play being Room 13, or it would have been if it had made any sense…which it doesn’t. If room’s twelve and fourteen are actually combined, it doesn’t mean that they are actually the missing room thirteen, it would just mean that they are actually part of room twelve, as the room they thought was twelve would still be room twelve, and it would just mean that the either side of it is also room twelve. This therefore means that the play called Room 13 never actually features room thirteen at all. Again, this moment felt clever until you think about it for even a split second.
The two guys realise that they aren’t ghosts when Lena returns and assures them that they are actually there, and then the true ghost story is revealed that the reason Mary could disappear from the room despite the broken door knob is because she was the ghost.
This again was kind of obvious, and I’d be interested to watch the play again to see how they laid clues and hid this truth in plain sight throughout the play. Lena not knowing who Mary is would suggest that despite them being in scenes together throughout the play, that Lena must never have had an interaction with Mary, or that if Mary spoke to Lena at any point, that Lena had to have not responded to her.
This does beg the question as to why Mary would have carried on as she did in the play and not reveal that she was a ghost. She did introduce the idea of a ghost not knowing they are a ghost, but when you hear Mary’s tragic backstory of how she was essentially a prisoner of the hotel owner, it begs the question of how and why the ghost of Mary would have carried on like normal and these facts about her not coming up until the reveal at the end.
Also, and I’ll admit that I’ve only seen the show once, I’m sure we saw Mary stay for drinks and physically interact with objects throughout the play. Maybe in this universe she can touch anything, and maybe Lena didn’t witness any floating cups if it was that she didn’t see her as she didn’t blow the bone whistle as the men had.
We did get a flashback to show Mary’s tragic ending and this is well done with more misdirection to hide that they swapped out the actress playing Mary with a double so they could have her walk off the stage in one direction and then instantly appear on it for a shocking hanging scene.
The play could have ended three or four times before it does, and after Anderson and Jacobs find out the truth they discover a hidden box under a floorboard and they intend to go to authorities to get justice for Mary. This is when Christof (at least I believe that is the character name) enters, and we see the husband of Mary for the first time in the penultimate scene of the play. He realises that the guys have discovered his secret, which again I have questions about. I’m not sure why Christof would hide evidence that he killed Mary under a floorboard in this room, as I thought Mary had hidden it, and if that was the case how did Christof understand that this floorboard being disturbed mean any risk to him?
The scene ends with the hotel manager seemingly about to attack Anderson and Jacob, but ends ambiguously. The true final scene then takes place when a new character, who is played by the same performer as Lena is brought up to room fourteen and Christof delivers much of the same dialogue as Lena said to Anderson in the first scene when he arrived to the hotel. At first I thought this was showing how Lena came to be at the hotel herself, but the scene is revealed to be after the rest of the events of the play when the girl finds the bone whistle and Christof reasons that this must be something that belongs to a previous guest at the hotel. It’s clever in that it hints at a dark fate for Anderson and Jacobs, as obviously Christof is still running the hotel without having been arrested, and you have to believe that Anderson wouldn’t have chosen to have left it there. So it suggests that Christof has killed them.
Conclusion
It was a good show. At times it really does make you jump, and it is well performed and executed. The play is also filled with plenty of laughs and good character moments. And although a lot of my discussion here has been to pick apart potential gaps in the story and weaker areas of the plot, it’s only because the show was very good that these areas which I feel could still be ironed out, do deserve discussion. The cast were all very capable, although I do maintain that they were given an uphill battle to make their belief that they are ghosts seem plausible.
I would like to see the show again, and I’d be interested to see if the play gets an afterlife (pun intended) at other venues in the future. I could see this doing well in a theatre in London, and with some tweaks to the script and a more effects and stage magic to enhance the ghostly effects this could be a fantastic show. As it is, it’s a good show and at time a very good show.
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