'Lily Allen and Cheryl have been haunted by fame': meet the writer behind 2:22 A Ghost Story

Danny Robins has sustained a professional writing career continuously for more than two decades, beginning when he was just eight months out of university. He has created comedy shows for BBC television and radio, and adapted his own sitcom with Sir Lenny Henry into a critically acclaimed play. Yet in the years leading up to the pandemic, he “ached of failure”.

“I felt a life of being frivolous and facetious wasn’t satisfying me. I felt like I’d run aground, that things hadn’t worked out and that nobody cared.” He was down to the last £5 of an overextended overdraft and thinking about packing it all in.

Then he found his salvation – not in God, but in poltergeists. His play, 2:22 A Ghost Story went straight into the West End at the Noel Coward Theatre in 2021 and has just opened at the Apollo for a record-breaking fifth transfer in two years. It is showing at its third theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. Set in a haunted Victorian doer-upper, four characters argue about faith, love and class as the clock hurtles towards the denouement – and twist – at 2:22am.

While researching the play, a spectral Abigail’s Party, Robins found himself inundated with real-life stories, which he has turned into three hit Radio 4 podcast series and a live tour coming this autumn. Far from feeling pigeonholed as “a paranormal polymath”, the writer is thrilled to have finally found his niche. “I feel like the ghosts saved me,” he muses as he sweeps his luxuriant fringe across his forehead.

The 46-year-old has been enraptured by “the drama of hauntings” since his childhood in Newcastle, in what he now sees as “a direct rebellion” against his mother, a teacher who had turned her back on her own parents’ Catholicism to become a devout atheist. The interest was reinforced by a panic attack he had at the start of his second year at the University of Bristol, when he hallucinated angels.

“I thought I was dying and it gave me this really profound and quite crippling fear of death,” he says in the Apollo’s first-floor bar, by a window overlooking his name up in lights. “I think a lot of what drove me towards a greater interest in ghosts was this kind of paradox, that they are terrifying but also present this amazing hope. As somebody who is a terrible coward about many things and certainly about death, I really loved that idea of a second chance. And I think clearly there’s a reason why we are all collectively interested in ghost stories at the moment, and it’s to do with the threat of climate change and war and Covid.”

Robins insists there is a reason we have not consigned ghost stories to the same scrapheap as elves and unicorns. “There’s something about us as a society that needs ghosts. They offer some kind of buffer zone between us and death. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ is the biggest question in the history of the universe.”

The father of two is “a sceptic who wants to believe”, while his Swedish wife Eva recoils from the whole thing. He concedes that the paranormal industry “has huge potential” for grifters. “There were certainly people who built careers on what I feel is an exploitative chicanery,” he says, citing Derek Acorah, the late medium who starred in TV’s Most Haunted. But all Robins has found is “this beautiful community” of believers relieved to have found fellowship away from the familiar mockery and scorn.

The success of the play is in no small part down to its eye-catching casting, starting with Lily Allen, who got an Olivier nod before she was followed by another pop star-turned-debut actor Cheryl (formerly Cole). The part of frazzled and spooked new mum Jenny has also been played by ex-Love Island host Laura Whitmore, with Jaime Winstone now in the role.

Both Allen and Cheryl received favourable reviews and Robins bristles at the phrase “stunt casting”. “It really annoys me when people say, ‘Why don’t you cast a real actor?’ A real actor doesn’t have to be somebody who’s had the money to go to drama school.”

It was initially programmed as a gap filler while the musical Dear Evan Hansen was waiting to return post-pandemic. “When we did the first run, I said, casting this, you’ve got to think: ‘Who is worth catching Covid for?’ And clearly Lily Allen was.

“But we would not be casting these people if they were crap at acting. Cheryl and Lily were able to draw on this amazing background of performing. I think both have been haunted by the press, by fame. Lily literally had a stalker. You can bring all of this stuff to this performance.”

While Robins felt a “definite sniffiness from the critical establishment” about the very idea of a contemporary ghost story in the theatre, 2:22 replaced older theatregoers nervous of crowded spaces with an audience of mostly under-35s, many of whom he suspects have never seen a play before. Robins himself caught the theatre bug at six – watching Henry V at the RSC (“I was a ridiculously precocious child”). By 15, he was touring pubs doing stand-up with his friend, now top-flight comedian, Ross Noble.

Like a doctor pestered by fellow dinner party guests about their ailments, he is bombarded with spooky anecdotes on a daily basis. “I was in a meeting with a BBC finance person and they told me a poltergeist story. It’s quite amazing and lovely and, at the same time, you open up your inbox and the first thing you see is ‘I was blessed by a demon” and you’re slightly thrown by it.”

He is most moved by the domestic tales. “There’s one that I looked at years back and it still sticks with me – just about a woman who could smell Lynx Africa in her house. That was her late husband’s scent and she felt that it meant that he was present. I thought that was beautiful in its simple mundanity.”

He also cites the story of the haunted Belfast hall of residence, told to him by a former student, now eminent geneticist (known only as Ken), on his podcast Uncanny – which was followed up in two later episodes thanks to the addition of listeners’ own testimonies. Robins’s response to a dramatic moment in the narrative, “Bloody Hell Ken!” is printed on merchandise he sells to devotees on his website.

The play has already transferred to LA, opens in Melbourne in July and will tour the UK from September. Robins is also spiriting up a book, a BBC2 series and two US TV adaptations. The only thing Britain’s ghostbuster-in-chief is still eagerly awaiting is his very own encounter with the supernatural.

“I do want it,” he says, with a slight hesitation. “I want it a lot, and at the same time I wonder if I should be careful what I wish for because I do wonder if my mind could cope with it. I wonder if it would unhinge me permanently.”

2:22 A Ghost Story runs at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, until September 17. 222aghoststory.com

Uncanny: I Know What I Saw tours from October 10 to December 1 uncannylive.com