Worthing dates

It's clearly good casting for a ghost story. George Naylor describes himself as “the most fearful actor in London.”

”People think that I must really love horror from the fact that I'm in this, but I don't! I'm terrified! I'm very much a chicken!”

And maybe that's how he will let us into the mind of Joe whom he plays in It Walks Around The House At Night which ThickSkin theatre company brings to Worthing, a play by Tim Foley, directed by Neil Bettles, on Monday and Tuesday, November 9-10 at the Connaught Theatre

When an out-of-work actor takes a job playing a ghost at an old countryside manor, he expects a few cheap scares but soon uncovers something far more frightening.

Joe is barely scraping a living working in a bar. So when a rich handsome stranger offers him an unusual but well-paid gig, he can’t say no. But the role turns chillingly real as Joe begins to suspect something else is lurking in the shadows…

“We opened in Wigan last year. We did the show up there to work it out and see how it would go and then we put it to bed for Christmas and now we're back into it. There are two of us in the cast. It's a one-man show but not a one-man show at the same time. Ollie is a fantastic actor but he does all the dance sequences and I'm the one doing most of the talking and the storytelling.

“It is about a queer working class actor who is out of work and falls for this rich aristocratic guy that is in his bar most nights and offers him a job but the job is not all that it seems. I'm not sure how much I can tell you! The job is to be a spook for a scare walk but there is a plot unravelling that Joe does not know anything about, a very supernatural happening that he is being sacrificed too…

“He is queer and he is working class and he finds himself a bit of an outcast. He is a very isolated figure at this point in his life. He has lost contact with his father and his mother is not a reliable source of comfort for him, and his queerness matters because it makes him more other, I think. If he was straight he would have more connections.

“And I think there is a lot of anger in him. It is about his place in the world. It is a weird time for him when we meet him. His last shreds of innocence have fallen away and he realises that this is what life is like. He realises that life is unfair and that it is cruel and that people will push him aside. And there's a lot of anger about his job as well as an actor. It is very unforgiving when he thinks of other people who are doing much better than he is.”

As for his own belief – or not – in the supernatural, George says: “If there is actually anything out there then I don't want anything to do with it! I'm happy in my ignorance. Ignorance is bliss as far as I'm concerned and I've not come across anything so far.

“But it's funny because before last year I had not done any horror of any kind in film or TV or whatever but I've now done two plays which involve the presence of jump scares. It is so interesting because it's so technical. If you miss a beat the whole thing falls apart. The specificity of that moment is something really to be admired. It just has to be so precise.”