Netflix should turn this into a series: Southwark Playhouse’s Fabulist Fox Sister reviewed

The Fabulist Fox Sister is a one-man show about the three American women who are credited with inventing the trade of spiritualism. It all happened by accident. A younger sister discovered that by cracking her toe joints on the floorboards she could generate noises that scared her parents. Kate Fox, the eldest, claimed the sounds were made by a lonely ghost who wanted to communicate with the living. She invited the neighbours around to contact their deceased relatives. The ploy worked and the sisters took their fake routines to New York where they became a huge success. Even the threat of exposure by the press didn’t dent the public’s belief in their powers.

This show covers a lot of ground and it looks at a fascinating moment in history when the decline of traditional Christian faith created a need for more primitive connections with the afterlife. Kate ought to be a fascinating guide on this journey but she’s immensely prickly, cold, heartless and calculating. Grief is just a money-spinner for her. When the American civil war breaks out, she’s ecstatic: ‘Two million people wanting to talk to spirits. Kerching!’ She hasn’t a shred of sympathy for her victims, not even for a businessman with four dead children who promotes her show. She dislikes women intensely, referring to ‘our idiot mother’, and cattily denouncing her sisters for trivial faults.

The script uses a modern vernacular — ‘in New York I seanced my ass off’ — which puts us at a distance from the period rather than opening us up to it. When Kate takes her show to London she wins the admiration of Arthur Conan Doyle. ‘I’m so famous my fans are famous,’ she cackles.