Duff nonsense: The Enfield Haunting, at Ambassadors Theatre, reviewed

The Enfield Haunting is a good old-fashioned horror show that wants to be a documentary as well. It’s based on a hocus-pocus yarn that made the front page of the Daily Mirror in 1977 and was swiftly forgotten. The play opens in an Enfield terrace that resembles a bomb site, complete with charred plasterwork, missing walls and ripped out floorboards. Peggy, a harassed housewife played by Catherine Tate, is struggling to cope with three teenage brats and a ghost that’s got loose in her home. Two ghosts, in fact. Peggy’s daughter, Janet, has been possessed by a demonic spirit that forces her to rasp out nonsense in a hoarse, throaty gurgle, like that annoying girl from The Exorcist. And there’s a mischief-making poltergeist who acts like a disgruntled caretaker, fusing the lights, thumping the furniture, vandalising the gas fire and rattling the tea service.