Lucas Iverson joins A Ghost in Your Ear, the headphone horror play Jamie Armitage made for Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, as its New York run is recast and re-dated.
Lucas Iverson takes the actor's role in A Ghost in Your Ear in New York, replacing Harry Richardson, who has withdrawn from the production because of unforeseen circumstances. The play is the binaural ghost story that Jamie Armitage wrote and directed for the Downstairs space at Hampstead Theatre, where it sold out last winter.
Iverson, who is making his Off-Broadway debut, is best known on screen as James Ogilvie in The Pitt and Simon Coolidge in The Gilded Age. His stage work has been largely American - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at Yale Rep, Frankenstein and Othello for Shakespeare Theatre Company - and he trained at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.
The recasting comes with a new schedule. Performances at Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre now begin on Saturday 3 October rather than Tuesday 29 September, and a week has been added at the far end, so the limited run finishes on Sunday 22 November. Anyone holding a ticket for a performance originally scheduled between Tuesday 29 September and Friday 2 October will be refunded and offered the chance to rebook for a later date.
For London, the interesting part is how much of the Hampstead production has travelled. Armitage directs his own script again, and the sound design remains with Ben & Max Ringham, the brothers whose work runs from Prima Facie to the National Theatre's Bacchae. Anisha Fields designs set and costume and Ben Jacobs, an Olivier winner for Oliver!, lights it. The production was originally produced by HFH Productions and Playful Productions, and casting is by Taylor Williams, with general management by TT Partners.
The premise is unchanged too. An actor arrives late at a recording studio to read an audiobook, the engineer - Owen Campbell, of A24's X - starts the tape, and the ghost story he has been handed gradually stops staying on the page. The audience listens through headphones, and the binaural recording rig on stage puts the voices inside the room rather than in front of it.
It was that trick, as much as the script, that won the London notices: four stars from the Financial Times for “high-tech horror that gets under the skin”, four from The Guardian for “truly terrifying headphone horror”, and four more from The Standard and Time Out. London Box Office reviewed the Hampstead run in January and called it “an absolute gem”.
Armitage is a familiar name here for other reasons: he was Tony-nominated for co-directing SIX, he was an associate director at the Bridge Theatre until this year, and his debut play, An Interrogation, also ran at Hampstead. A Ghost in Your Ear was his second.
No further London dates have been announced. The New York run continues at the Minetta Lane Theatre, 18 Minetta Lane, until Sunday 22 November, with tickets sold through AudibleTheater.com; a limited number of $35 rush tickets go on the TodayTix app from 9.00am ET each day from Saturday 3 October, and $35 student rush tickets are sold in person at the box office from 1.00pm ET on the day of performance, with a valid student ID.
