Ghost Stories will have you leaping out of your seat in Brighton!

There are plenty of laughs in Ghost Stories, which plays the Theatre Royal Brighton from Tuesday, July 8-Saturday, July 12, but the scares are real and intense.

David is delighted to return to the show: “I did the original in London in 2010 and 2011 and played the same part. I am just a bit greyer-haired now! But it is a real joy to come back to it and I think this production is better than the original. We've got a very good cast which we had last time as well but we've got a few more tricks for making it really scary this time, just ways of keeping people on the edge of their seats.

“I thought after the lockdowns that my time for acting was up. These days it's all about sending off self-tapes but then this came up. I turned down quite a lot over the last few years but when my agent phoned, she said to me ‘Don't say no until I have told you the whole story!’ And she told me it was this and I'm really glad I agreed to it. We have been to so many different cities and it has just been great.”

As for the story, arch-sceptic Professor Goodman is determined to debunk the paranormal. He embarks on an investigation of three apparent hauntings – as recounted by a night-watchman, a teenage boy and a businessman awaiting his first child. As the tales unfold, Goodman finds himself at the outer limits of rationality and fast running out of explanations.

“My character is the night-watchman in a big empty building,” says David. “He's been doing the job for seven years but there is something in his life that has affected him and I can't tell you what it is! And then something happens and I can't tell you what that is either!

“I really don't want to give away too much but the audience are loving it. It's almost like at the end of an opera when we get to the curtain call. There are whoops and big cheers. They really love it. There is a lot of humour in the piece as well as lots of really scary spine-tingling moments. There is a fantastic sound score that creates atmosphere, and the lighting is just brilliant at creating mood, and what is so interesting is the way that audiences vary. Some audiences enjoy the scares more than the humour, and others are the other way round. When we were in Leicester, we were playing to about 900 people and they were really quiet but then at the end the applause was just fantastic!”