'Ghost stories are having a bit of a moment' – Stef Smith on bringing a haunted house classic to the stage
With her stage adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting Of Hill House about to open at the Lyceum in Edinburgh, Stef Smith tells Joyce McMillan why ghost stories often prove popular in troubled times
There was a time when the playwright Stef Smith didn’t much like spooky ghost stories, or the horror genre to which they often belong.
“I was such a wimp,” she says, looking back at her schooldays near Callander and her student years at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. “I particularly didn’t like the blood-and-gore aspect of it; and that was how a lot of horror films seemed to be, back then.”
So it’s hardly surprising that after she graduated in 2009, Smith went on to build an award-winning career as a playwright that could hardly have been further removed from a popular genre like horror.
After a string of early successes with short, intense and often poetic plays at the Traverse – Roadkill, Swallow, Girl In The Machine, Enough – she enjoyed a major 2019 success at the Citizens’ with Nora, her version of Ibsen’s A Doll House.
Soon after, she moved to London – where she lives with her partner, the comedian Jessica Fosketew – and has continued to write successfully both north and south of the Border; her BBC television drama Float won a 2024 Bafta Scotland award, and she is now working on commissions for both the National Theatre in London, and the National Theatre of Scotland.
It was around 2021, though, that Smith was approached by London-based theatre producer Mark Puddle, who had seen Nora in London, and asked to consider adapting Shirley Jackson’s 1959 American novel The Haunting of Hill House for a touring production – a version to be based on the original novel, and not on the existing films or Netflix versions of it.
“So I read the novel,” says Smith, “and I soon began to see why Mark and his director, Martin Constantine, thought I might be interested. Shirley Jackson is a brilliant writer, working in that period in the 1950s when women were defined almost entirely as carers; and in The Haunting of Hill House, she’s exploring the idea that a house – a home – can be both a place of safety and refuge, and also a trap, a place of suffocation.”
Like Jackson’s novel, Smith’s version is set in the 1950s, in a remote American gothic mansion which is said to be haunted. An expert in the supernatural, Dr Montague, invites a group of characters to spend some nights there. Among them are two young women – Eleanor, who has led a miserable life as carer to her demanding mother, and Theodora, a bohemian, and a very liberated woman for the time. “These are really interesting characters,” says Smith, “and exploring them within the ghost story genre feels like a real, interesting side-step for me.
“Theatre is always a collaborative art-form; but here the sense of collaboration is really intense. You’re working with a set that’s almost a character in itself, a house brought to life in incredibly technically complex ways, to create amazing special effects.
“And you’re also working with the audience’s expectations, trying to explore the nuances of the story while providing those classic ghost story shocks and jump-scares that audiences love, often followed by a moment of relieved laughter.
“So yes, my feeling about the whole genre has changed, over the years. Ghost stories and horror are having a bit of a moment in theatre, just now, and I think it’s because in troubled times, they provide a safe space in which people can practice being scared, and surviving it.
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“Nowadays, too, we’re often talking about what they call ‘elevated horror’ – horror that brings in a popular audience, but also touches on bigger themes. Shirley Jackson’s book is certainly a great example of that; and it does ask the question that’s so often asked about women in these stories – is there really something supernatural going on here, or is she mad?
“What’s vital, though, is that Jackson never tries to explain everything away. The best ghost stories always have to leave that question open; and I hope that like Shirley Jackson, we succeed in doing that in this show.”
The Haunting of Hill House is at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 10-14 November
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