Jude for the West End
Edinburgh Oscar winner in Enfield Haunting
Edinburgh school student Jude Coward Nicoll has been cast alongside Catherine Tate and David Threlfall in The Enfield Haunting, playing in London’s West End at the Ambassadors Theatre for a limited season.
The 16-year-old pupil at Broughton High School voiced the role of The Boy in Oscar and BAFTA winning animation The Boy, The Mole, The Fox And The Horse and has appeared at the Traverse in Strange Town shows Over The Waves, Beneath The Surface and Stolen Futures.
Jude Coward Nicoll and Noah Leggott, who will be alternating in the role of Jimmy Hodgson.
Jude will be making his professional stage debut in the role of Jimmy Hodgson (alternating with Noah Leggott), the son of Catherine Tate’s Peggy Hodgson, in the new play which is based on one of the most famous poltergeist events in the world.
David Threlfall will be playing ghost hunter Maurice Grosse, with Ella Schrey-Yeats and Grace Molony as Jimmy’s older sisters, Janet and Margaret.
The Hodgsons had no idea what a poltergeist was when, in the summer of 1977, furniture and toys started moving of their own accord. They were an ordinary, working-class family, who lived in a North London council house at 284 Green Street, Enfield, but for the next eighteen months became the centre of one of the most famous poltergeist events in the world.
first-hand accounts
Janet, the possessed sixteen-year-old, was nearly pulled out of a window. The local lollipop lady saw her floating six feet in the air in an upstairs room and Janet was found fast asleep in a neighbours’ bed. There are tapes of Janet growling for hours in a voice that doctors said would destroy a sixteen-year-old girl’s vocal cords after a few minutes.
Catherine Tate and David Threlfall who will play Peggy Hodgson and ghost hunter Maurice Grosse.
Paul Unwin’s new play is the story of one night in the spring of 1978 when events were approaching a climax. Based on the first-hand accounts of one of the ghost hunters, The Enfield Haunting is the true story of what happened when Peggy Hodgson tries to protect her three children from something that is incomprehensible, deeply disturbing and is hurtling to a terrifying conclusion.
Playwright Paul Unwin says: “Before Guy Lyon Playfair, the poltergeist expert, died in 2018, I spent a long afternoon with him in his basement flat in Earls Court. He and Maurice Grosse had spent months with the Hodgson family trying to protect them, but also make sense of what was going on.
terrifying
“What Guy told me was terrifying. So much of what appears to have happened was impossible to fake and yet at the centre of the whole thing were real people trying to make sense of their lives. The Enfield Haunting is a psychological ghost story. It is a ghost story for now.”
Directed by Angus Jackson, The Enfield Haunting will play at Brighton Theatre Royal and Richmond Theatre, before moving to The Ambassadors Theatre in London for a limited West End season from 30 November 2023 until 2 March 2024.
Listings
Theatre Royal Brighton, New Road, Brighton, BN1 1SD
Tue 14 Nov – Sat 18 Nov 2023
Evenings: 7.30pm; Thurs, Sat Mats: 2.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here.
Richmond Theatre, The Green, Richmond, TW9 1QJ
Tue 21 Nov – Sat 25 Nov 2023
Evenings: 7.30pm; Wed, Sat Mats: 2.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here.
Ambassadors Theatre, West St, London WC2H 9ND
Thu 30 Nov 2023 – Sat 2 Mar 2024
Mon – Sat: 7.30pm; Thurs, Sat Mats: 2.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here.
Ella Schrey-Yeats and Grace Molony, who play Janet and Margaret Hodgson.
ENDS
