The writer single-handedly making London spookier
An interview with Danny Robins, writer of Battersea Poltergeist and 2:22: A Ghost Story
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Until very recently Danny Robins was best described as a BAFTA-winning comedy writer who had worked alongside people like Lenny Henry and Dara O’Briain. But at the start of 2021, Robins’ docudrama podcast The Battersea Poltergeist was released, and he quickly became known as the man more likely to send a shiver down your spine than make you giggle.
Danny had already produced one supernatural podcast series called Haunted, but it was the story of the haunting of teenager Shirley Hitchings in 1950s London (brought to life by an excellent cast that included Toby Jones) that really captured people’s imaginations and led to the series being commissioned for a major television series.
This summer, Danny’s play 2:22: A Ghost Story launched in the West End, providing Lily Allen with her West End debut and picking up rave reviews along the way. Yesterday the play opened at the Gielgud Theatre for a second run with a brand new cast that includes Giovanna Fletcher, James Buckley and Stephanie Beatriz.
Not one to rest on his laurels, Danny is currently writing the script for the Gunpowder Plot immersive experience, which opens in May of next year at the Tower Vaults (right next to the Tower of London).
We managed to get a few minutes of Danny’s time to talk about his early years as a struggling writer in London, what makes the Battersea Poltergeist story such an enduring tale, what it’s like to have the future of Theatreland resting on your shoulders, and how you go about writing an ‘immersive experience’ (he also told us where the best sourdough in Walthamstow can be found).
Hi Danny, thanks for taking the time to chat to us. You’re not from London originally, right? Can you tell us when and why you moved here, what’s kept you here and (most importantly) are you a North London or a South London person?
I grew up in Newcastle, and I moved to London after university. I had already started coming down to London quite a bit because I’d done National Youth Theatre here and I used to come up while I was a student in Bristol to do comedy gigs.
I think London always had this intense call for me, this kind of excitement and feeling of being at the heart of everything, at the centre of everything. So for me it was a no-brainer. As soon as I finished university I wanted to move here and I've been here ever since. I’ve always lived in north London really. I’ve lived in Fulham, Camden, Kentish town and Walthamstow.
I arrived here as a penniless aspiring writer and worked at the bar at the Old Vic theatre, basically earning nothing. I had a stint working in the Trocadero at the IMAX cinema there, where they would show these really, really boring films. At that point I believe IMAX was a Mormon corporation and they had very high ideals about what kind of entertainment they could show on those giant screens. So they would show these very dull documentaries. We’d try and whip up excitement beforehand but then it would be really boring!
My other memory is of the popcorn and it being kept in these big plastic bags that were nibbled by mice or rats. The popcorn would be put into this thing and heated up and then cooled down and then put back into the packs at the end of the day. It’s like the most unhygienic thing you can imagine.
I was doing those kinds of crappy jobs and writing every spare second. Just really trying to make it, you know.
You mentioned comedy gigs. That was your main focus for quite a few years right? It wasn’t until recently that you started writing more dramatic things and scaring the bejesus out of us.
Yeah, prior to this year my main earnings were through comedy. This year has been this amazing year of ghosts. I’ve been focusing on this genre and shifting myself from writing comedy to writing more drama, and it’s been an amazing, transformative year from that point of view, and it really does hinge around this brilliant London story of the Battersea Poltergeist.
Ghosts has been a lifelong interest of mine. I’ve done a few things about ghosts over the years, but I made I made the series Haunted a few years back, which actually sprang out of the research for 2:22: A Ghost Story. When I was researching that lots of people told me ghost stories and I just felt like these were great stories that shouldn’t just sit on my hard drive. I should do something with them.
So I made the series Haunted and while I was making that, somebody told me about Shirley the woman at the heart of the poltergeist story and introduced me to her. That’s where Battersea Poltergeist came from. So in a way, all of these things sprung out of the research for 2:22: A Ghost Story.
What do you think it is about that story that really captured people’s imaginations and what was it about Shirley’s story that made you want to turn it into an entire podcast series?
I think there are a very small number of ghost stories that stand the test of time because they are genuinely quite robust to sceptic theories. The Enfield Poltergeist is another London-based example of one. We keep returning to those because there’s enough mystery in them to repel any efforts to explain them.
For me, Battersea is like that, even more so than Enfield is. It feels like it’s such a deep and rich story with so many inexplicable, puzzling things to it. But it also features this incredibly ordinary family on an ordinary street that is entirely recognisable, and therefore feels incredibly frightening, because if it can happen to this family then it can happen to us. I think that's the most frightening thing about it.
A lot of these stories often revolve around troubled people and troubled families. With Enfield it’s quite a troubled family. But Battersea just feels incredibly normal. They really feel like this ordinary, loving family and then their lives transform almost overnight. It’s so frightening from that point of view. Also it’s got this incredibly atmospheric backdrop of postwar London. In the 1950s London was still recovering from the war, but suddenly rock and roll exploded and you’ve got the invention of the teenager, and here we have a teenager at the very heart of this story.
I feel like it’s just got such a lovely backdrop and it also has all these parallels with our own times. You’ve got this sense of two societies, the young and old, rubbing up against each other and the friction that that engenders. Also, we’re living through this moment right now where we are immersed in chaos and uncertainty. We are sadly surrounded by death right now and I think you can draw a real parallel between our times and the postwar period, both Second World War and post-First World War, where you have this rise of interest in the supernatural and people trying to process everything that’s happening to us through searching for answers about what happens to us after we die.
We are confronting our own mortality now and so inevitably we reach for ghosts as a potential comfort I guess. There is lots about the story that resonates with people and it was also about a family holed up in their house with the nation’s media outside and this poltergeist inside. The show came out at the moment where we’re all inside, nursing claustrophobia in lockdown. When you’ve been in your house nonstop, everything takes on this kind of alien, slightly sinister quality. The mundane shifts to something threatening. So I think people could relate to that story and about this trapped family.
You did a live version of Battersea Poltergeist, and now it’s been commissioned to become a TV series. By Blumhouse no less. Can you tell us anything more about that? How it’s going?
It was pretty amazing when Blumhouse came in for it as they are obviously one of the big names in horror. So that was very exciting. I went from recording episodes in the shed at the bottom of my garden to fielding calls from Jason Blum!
I am writing a script at the moment and we’re hopefully very close to a deal being done with a network. It will be a big beast hopefully, with Hollywood money behind it. But what’s really exciting is that it’s this amazing journey that Shirley has been on.
As a teenager she was plastered across the newspapers in a really exploitative, sensational and really salacious way. Lots of people talking about her being in love with this poltergeist - it had this very uncomfortable tone. Now here she is telling her story on her own terms, kind of reclaiming that story. I think it’s really powerful.
So she’s delighted that the story will be told in this way, and it will be told in an eight part documentary series and an eight part drama series. The drama series takes the story and runs with it and turns it into an exciting thriller series. Then the documentary series will give you all of the real life people behind it all.
Let’s talk about 2:22 A Ghost Story for a second. Because you were one of the first big West End plays that was tasked with ‘reviving Theatreland’ after lockdown. Plus you had Lily Allen making her West End debut. That must have been a lot of pressure.
Things were kind of delayed and ideally we would have come out earlier, but also I think it gave the show an amazing opportunity to be part of that first flush. Literally we were one of the very first things to be able to have a room full of people that didn’t have to socially distance. Which meant there was already a buzz in the room because of that.
Of course that came with its own set of nerve-wracking circumstances. You’re nervous enough when you’re putting on a new play, and then to have the Sword of Damocles of COVID hanging over your head is something else. I was convinced it wouldn’t happen at all, I thought the government was going to shut everything down again.
But also there was that question of would people treat us on the same terms because we hadn’t gone through that route that things normally go through of being on somewhere else first? We hadn’t been at the National Theatre or the Royal Court or the Bush or wherever before going to the West End. It’s kind of an amazing act of hubris to open this brand new play by a new writer in the West End. And people were saying ‘Is this stunt casting with Lily’? I guess my response to that was, ‘If it’s good, then hopefully, all those questions are irrelevant,’ and thankfully, people responded really well to the play and really well to Lily and the rest of the cast and it was great.
Plus, there was this desperation for a night out at that point! A ghost story felt like a brilliant vehicle for all of the stuff you wanted to get out of your system. To just be able to go into the theatre and to feel this cathartic thing, to get excited and scared and gripped. Holding on to the armrest and gripping on to your partner! I think that that’s what we all needed. I think we did well in a way that maybe some more traditional or serious plays didn’t at that time, because people wanted an event, they wanted a night out. To have something excite them that they could go talk about afterwards.
The other thing is we attracted a very young crowd. If you look at the analytics of who’s buying tickets, older people are still not very comfortable about going back into crowded theatres. It’s young people who are driving this sector now, which is the flip of what it was before. So coming out with a show that feels like it appeals to a younger crowd is really crucial and having Lily in the first run, and having the cast we’ve got this time, it’s certainly appealing to younger people.
Your next project is the Gunpowder Plot experience that’s opening next year near the Tower of London. How did you get involved in that?
Well I’d worked with the director before. I did a play called End of the Pier at the Park Theatre in Finsbury Park. Hannah Price was the director, and she’s now the co-artistic director with Mark Ravenhill of the King's Head Theatre. She’s directing The Gunpowder Plot. She's working with a company called Layered Reality who did this thing based on Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, which uses virtual reality to create this immersive theatre experience. The technology is incredible, the virtual reality is mind blowing.
The Gunpowder Plot will be a mixture of live actors and lots of theatrical special effects and also the virtual reality in certain rooms where you’re taken off into Jacobean London. It feels like if you made a really exciting film about the Gunpowder Plot, and then it kind of explodes in front of you and comes to life!
Immersive theatre is such a big thing at the moment and I feel like maybe one of the reasons is because it delivers that thing we’ve started to expect in every other branch of culture, which is it’s on demand. You go to Spotify or you go to Netflix, and you can have stuff whenever you want it. This is theatre whenever you want it. You don’t have to turn up at a theatre at 7:30 at night, you come at 10 or 15 minute intervals throughout the day; you go through as a group and it’s intensely, excitingly, purely theatrical. It's a massive shot of theatre in your arm and I’m ready to get in and do this in these lovely atmospheric vaults.
Yeah, what’s that been like for you? That location must a great toy box to play with.
It’s really interesting creating a piece for a place, because normally I’m coming up with an idea and then finding a place that will put it on. But to be location-specific is nice and exciting, and it’s shaping the way we tell the story.
It’s such a good story as well! I mean, the gunpowder plot is probably my most favourite historical moment. It’s got everything. It’s so thrilling. So terrifyingly tragic, and it couldn't be more apt for now. It takes place in a time of plague you know. The opening of Parliament was delayed a couple of times which is horribly familiar right now. It’s got a country completely divided. There’s so many resonances for now, I think it feels very timely. And ultimately, these plotters were these young activists, they were these people who wanted to change the world, who felt that the world was not fair, and just chose to change it in the wrong way. So I think we can see a lot of resonances to young people’s frustration with the old order.
It’s interesting because most people think they know the gunpowder plot story, because they were told about it when they were young kids. But then you think about it and you realise you only know the bare bones.
I think that there’s a lot of things like that, where you feel like you know the story then when you read it or when you hear it, you realise you don’t. There are certain stories which are embedded in our heads as cultural reference points, but when you rediscover them and find out what really happened and the nuances behind them it’s very exciting.
And what’s it like writing for an immersive experience? Is it very different for writing for, say, the theatre?
It’s very different because there’s so many practical considerations around things like how you get people through a space. Logistical things about use of actors when you've got this circular flow of people coming through and you need to get a certain actor back to be able to do a scene for the next group. There’s a lot of stuff like that, which is very different.
But technical constraints can sometimes lead you to good artistic stuff as well. When you’re driven by certain rules it focuses the mind and storytelling-wise it was a fairly blank canvas.
We’ve been able to tell the story in the way that feels most exciting and the way we’ve chosen to go is that you enter and you get enlisted as a spy in the pay of King James who is trying to infiltrate the gunpowder plot. But then as you meet the plotters, your loyalties are swayed. So we flip between both sides. I guess that sort of thing feeds into a lot of my work: where you’re torn between belief and scepticism, that idea of the push and pull between two different viewpoints, two different beliefs. I think that is a really strong narrative driver.
And we don’t have to wait until Bonfire Night 2022 for this do we?
No, tickets are on sale right now and it’s coming May next year. It was delayed. We were meant to open in November 2020. But that delay has given us a chance to reboot and look at it again. I think it’s all the better for that delay actually. That hiatus that COVID provided was useful for a lot of creative projects, just to reassess in the same way that a lot of us reassessed our lives during COVID, and it enforced a period of contemplation and internalisation. I think that was quite productive, for lack of a better word.
Before we go, do you have any recommendations for good, local independent businesses that people should know about? That you think people should support?
Yeah, sure. I would definitely recommend Mario’s Cafe in Kentish Town (above), which is where I used to live. That was where I used to sit and hobnob in lunch breaks between writing when I was back in Kentish Town.
In Walthamstow I would recommend Today Bread, which is an independent bakery. I’m going to sound horrifically middle class here, but it does a lovely sourdough bread. And they deliver it right to our door. Every Friday they deliver a loaf and Parker Dairies deliver our milk. It’s great!
Tickets for the Gunpowder Plot experience are available here.
Tickets for 2:22: A Ghost Story are available here.
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