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How do you make a shopping centre in Woking spooky? I bow before Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s many career achievements: Perrier award-winners, makers of successive hit TV series, not to mention megastars (as I shall soon discover) in China. But can they convince us that there are old ghosts haunting the 90s-built New Victoria theatre, located in a shopping mall? Such is the challenge faced by the Inside No 9 duo as they take their hit show-of-the-series on tour. “We made it very much about the ghosts of Wyndham’s theatre,” says Shearsmith of the show’s West End run. “Now we have to change it so that every place we’re in, that’s where there’s a legend of bloody Belle, and that’s where she haunts.”
Over the tour, that may mean the 100-year-old Liverpool Empire or Edinburgh Playhouse: no problem. Or it might be the rather fresher Marlowe in Canterbury or Milton Keynes theatre, which opened in another shopping precinct in 1999. “That doesn’t lend itself to a legend,” admits Shearsmith, chatting over lunch at a London rehearsal room. “So we are amending the phraseology to make it sound older than it is. We’ll say ‘a quarter of a century’ rather than ‘25 years ago’. One sounds recent and the other sounds old.”
None of this was anticipated when the pair created Inside No 9: Stage/Fright earlier this year. “We never intended it to tour,” says Pemberton. Nor did they take it for granted that a stage show based on their 10-year anthology series would necessarily fly. That seems bizarre to me: the avalanche of praise for Inside No 9 since its final series makes the success of a live outing feel nailed on. But its creators made no assumptions. The TV show’s popularity “crept up”, says Pemberton. “There were times when people used to go ‘Any more League of Gentlemen?’” – their cult sketch show that ran from 1999 to 2002 – “and we’d say, ‘Well, we’re doing Inside No 9’, and they’d say, ‘Oh, I’ve never seen it.’”
He continues: “Sometimes you’d feel, because it was on BBC Two at 10 o’clock, you were falling into a crack, and it wasn’t the show everyone was talking about. It’s only when you announce something’s ending that you start to feel this enormous love for it.” Making the stage show reinforced the point. “I remember feeling with League of Gentlemen as well,” adds Shearsmith, “that you never get a sense of who’s watching it, apart from your mum and dad telling you that there’s someone in the post office who said, ‘I saw your son last night.’” With Stage/Fright, “you get to meet your audience at the stage door”, says Pemberton, “and hear what it means to them. That’s been amazing. We now feel,” he says, with satisfaction, “that it’s been a good decade’s work.”
Inside No 9 was far from a surefire hit when it launched in 2014. There may have been, as Shearsmith contends, a noble tradition of anthology shows on TV (Alfred Hitchcock Presents; Tales of the Unexpected) – but the tradition was dormant. TV orthodoxy demands recurring characters with whom audiences can build a relationship. The only constant in Inside No 9 was Shearsmith and Pemberton as stars (or cameos), and their horror-meets-comedy sensibility. And the quality and variety of their ideas – which became ever harder, says Shearsmith, to sustain.
“Doing six new stories every series for the last 10 years, it was always, ‘Wow, we got away with it again,’” he says. “All we were ever thinking was, ‘What next? Have you got any more new ideas?’” To the viewer, I say, it felt effortless. “It may look effortless,” responds Shearsmith, “but under the surface, the swan’s feet are …”, and then Pemberton finishes his sentence: “arthritic”.
The challenge with Stage/Fright was to capture the spirit of the TV show – not just its laughter-meets-chills vibe, but its tonal variety. And so Stage/Fright re-used existing Inside No 9 content (they reprise most of the series four episode Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room, about a clapped-out comedy double act), featured a celebrity guest star at each performance (Lee Mack at press night, along with Ian McKellen, David Tennant and Bob Mortimer), and also addressed the question: “What can we do – with the bows at the end, even with the pre-show message about mobile phones – that can really play with the idea of being in a theatre?”
That led to the decision not to spin a purely fictional tale, but to appear – unprecedented this, for both of them – as themselves. “We were reticent about that,” says Shearsmith. “We were terrified of looking indulgent in any way. But [director Simon Evans] said, ‘No, the fact that you’re there, and it’s live, is a massive new thing for anybody coming to see it. People don’t see you, ever: you’re always hidden behind the characters in the stories.’ So we put ourselves in it. It’s not a fourth-wall show. We acknowledge we’re all in this building together, and then things happen” – spooky things, as the ghosts of each individual theatre are summoned to the stage.
Without ever stinting on the entertainment, this all makes for a wonderfully tricksy and destabilising show, its strands united by Shearsmith and Pemberton’s palpable love for theatres and their hauntings – and for old-school entertainment, its double acts in particular. Is that a personal concern? “We never really thought of ourselves as a double act in the traditional sense,” says Pemberton. “We’ve sort of accidentally become one, haven’t we?” says Shearsmith. Their relationship isn’t toxic, like Tommy and Len (AKA Cheese and Crackers) in Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room, with “one always feeling stuck in a certain role”, says Pemberton. “We’ve always been able to change it up. We often don’t know until days before we shoot who’s going to play which character.”
“All that proves,” says Shearsmith, “is that we’re interchangeable.”
And as for all those theatre ghosts, that’s been an obsession since at least their League of Gentlemen days, when they considered setting that show’s movie spin-off in a haunted playhouse. “I wouldn’t want to be the last person to leave the theatre at night, making sure it’s all closed up,” says Pemberton. But is it harder frightening people on stage than on screen? Shearsmith had prior experience with that, having starred in League co-writer Jeremy Dyson’s long-running stage hit Ghost Stories. “How do you frighten people who’re aware they’re surrounded by lots of other people, in a theatre, who’ve all been laughing together?” he muses. “It’s hard to switch gears like that. But they’re linked, aren’t they, laughter and fear? Playing with that is fun.”
It’s also a technical feat on stage. “There’s a lot of special effects,” says Shearsmith, “a lot of magic, gore and blood. Timing is everything: there’s a ballet of stage hands and crew working in tandem with what we’re doing.” But it works: I teetered on the edge of my seat for the entirety of Stage/Fright – and you might too if you catch it on its tour. Its creators are delighted to be bringing it to their home patches of Hull and Manchester in particular. “If you’re a fan of a thing and it turns up in your town,” says Shearsmith, “you can’t believe it. I used to go to Hull New Theatre and once saw Peter Davison from the telly in some play, and couldn’t believe he was right there. It’s great!”
It’s unlikely, mind you, that the good burghers of Hull and Manchester will be as excited as the Chinese, who – as surprising as anything in Inside No 9, this – turn out to be obsessive fans of the series. “They’ve got their own live show of it that’s been running for two years now,” reports Shearsmith. “We went to Shanghai last year to see it. We got to the fifth floor of the Shanghai Grand, which is massive, and there’s a whole interactive Inside No 9 experience. It’s like walking into our minds. The show is far bigger there, and we were massive,” he says, a 56-year-old man bewildered to be treated like a pop star. “We had security, people trying to grab us – it was mad.”
There are no plans, as yet, to tour Stage/Fright to the Middle Kingdom – but then, the Inside No 9 boys have no plans at all right now. “We don’t have next year set up,” says Pemberton. “It’s the first time in a decade we don’t have anything at all that’s definite. We’ve just been rolling along with Inside No 9 for the last 10 years.” This tour lets them roll along with it for a few months more, soaking up the love. And then? “Who knows? And that’s scary, but it’s freeing as well,” says Pemberton. “We’re used to the feeling of, ‘Oh God, what are we going to do now?’ – because that’s what writing Inside No 9 has felt like all along.”
