It’s 1am and two podcasters with a troubled past relationship, Olivia (played by Bronwyn Elizabeth) and Dave (played by Thomas Willshire), meet at an abandoned house near the Devil’s Punchbowl in Thetford.
The former owner of the house, Dr Amelia Harbinger (Nesba Crenshaw), was allegedly the victim of the supernatural hound, Black Shuck, in a brutal and bloody unsolved murder which occurred some 30 years earlier.
Olivia, who has an ongoing problem with alcohol abuse, possibly had her own encounter with something akin to a mysterious black dog one drunken night 14 months earlier.
She is drawn to the decades-old mystery in the hope that her investigation for a new podcast will debunk the myth and exorcise her own demons.
Soon she is cast into the midst of a creepily tangled web which is intertwined with found footage, cruel psychological experiments and the manifestation of a ghost, as well as the Black Shuck legend itself.
Staging The Devil’s Punchbowl
The cast made great use of the intimate stage space at the Hope Theatre upstairs at the iconic Hope and Anchor pub in Upper Street, Islington. The creepy atmosphere was enhanced by the imaginative use of sound effects and the frequent plunging of the stage into total darkness.
There were some genuine jump scares courtesy of Nesba Crenshaw’s ghostly Dr Harbinger. The use of audio playback as Olivia records episodes of her podcast drawing her deeper into the mystery adds to the unfolding narrative.
Fourth cast member Tom Hartwell plays the identical twin sons of Dr Harbinger, Timothy and James, both as children, subject to the bizarre child-rearing experiments of their deranged mother, and as adults being interviewed by Olivia while sucking her into the twisted dark past of their family and the tragedy that unfolded at the Devil’s Punchbowl.
For a while I began to think that there would be some sort of Jekyll and Hyde moment, revealing that Timothy and James were the good and evil sides of the same person.
As it turned out, the brothers were key to an entirely different climactic revelation, which I will not spoil here.
The play packed a huge amount into its 75-minute run time and put me in mind of the type of really great short story you might find in a really great horror anthology.
Interview with Jamie Rycroft and Thomas Willshire
I interviewed the writers, Jamie Rycroft and Thomas Willshire (Dave), about the background to The Devil’s Punchbowl and their own personal experiences.
Here’s what they had to say.
What are the particular challenges involved in bringing a horror story to the stage?
Thomas: The stage play perhaps sits in an awkward middle ground between two more successful horror mediums: literature and cinema. Since a horror novel plays out in your imagination, you can describe the undescribable, like Lovecraft, and not have to worry about how it’s represented.
Then on the other end of the spectrum, horror movies can use editing and special effects to make the scares they represent as heightened as possible. The difficulty with theatre as a medium is that it’s somewhere in the middle; you feel the need to represent things on stage, but you don’t have as many tricks in your arsenal as a film.
I hope that we’ve found some success in making a horror play by studying the classics in the genre: “The Woman in Black”, “The Haunting”, “2:22 A Ghost Story”. What these plays have in common is that they tap into theatre’s power as a medium of storytelling.
Theatre stems from the same roots of storytelling as the campfire ghost story, and we realised that for a lot of the play, you don’t need to show all of the horror, just describe it, and let it develop in your imagination.
Though once or twice, we want to make you jump out of your seat, too. We just aren’t going to tell you when.
The Devil’s Punchbowl is partly set on the Norfolk fens, which have provided a backdrop to some classic horror stories. Is that a part of the country you are personally familiar with?
Jamie: I lived in Cambridge for nine years, and visited Norfolk occasionally. The whole of East Anglia, in my opinion, has an uncanny and unsettling quality to it.
It’s far too flat, for one thing, which often makes you look to the mists on the horizon, convinced there is something shadowy that you’ve just seen out of the corner of your eye.
As soon as you leave the enclaves of a town or city, you’re very quickly isolated in fenlands, where it feels like there are no signs of people anywhere around.
It’s a wonderful part of the world but also a strange one, where many inexplicable encounters still occur. We’re excited to hopefully bring something of that energy over to London this Halloween.
The legend of the monstrous dog Black Shuck is woven into the narrative of the play. Are there similar myths or urban folklore associated with the area you currently live in or where you grew up?
Jamie: I used to live near a different Devil’s Punchbowl, which is over by Hindhead in Surrey. In an early version of the script, we debated whether to set it in the Devil’s Punchbowl in Surrey or Norfolk, and we chose the latter because its associated mythology is a lot more powerful.
Surrey’s Devil’s Punchbowl is supposedly caused by the Devil scooping up pieces of the land to throw at Thor: an undeniably cool story, but not very scary.
The Devil’s Punchbowl in Norfolk is smaller and perhaps not as impressive, but with its ability to mysteriously fill with water when there hasn’t been any rain, it’s a lot eerier. Meanwhile the story of Black Shuck has compelled me ever since I first heard about it.
Thomas: These days, we live in London, which has successfully covered most of its ghosts in concrete and glass. But out in the countryside, they still roam.
The play’s main character, Olivia, sets out to debunk the superstition surrounding an unsolved murder. When it comes to supernatural phenomena, would you consider yourself to be a believer, a sceptic or somewhere in between?
Jamie: I don’t personally believe in the supernatural, though I think that everyone has at least one experience in their life that cannot be explained by rational means: I know that I have.
We can only perceive the Universe through the tiny pinhole of our senses, so it would be arrogant to presume we know everything that is out there.
Whether the unknown lines up with the monsters that people in the past and present saw and still see, who knows?
But horror is a good way to puncture the confidence we’ve built up as supposedly rational beings, and remind us that when we face the inexplicable, we are all the same scared animals underneath, afraid of what’s out there in the dark.
The Devil’s Punchbowl blends crime with folk horror. What do you think it is about British folk horror that seems to strike a chord with so many people?
Thomas: Britain is an ancient country whose folk history has been erased and written over many times, but the old stories still bleed through.
Whether it’s Black Shuck, the other demon dogs that inhabit other parts of the country, the Green Knight that fought Sir Gawain from Arthurian legend, the Redcap stalking the Scottish border with his cap soaked in the blood of its victims, or indeed many others, a lot of what unites these creatures are that they are wild, and natural.
Perhaps that’s surprising because Britain stereotypically appears in our imagination as a “green and pleasant land”. But that hasn’t always been the case, and despite our efforts to tame this country’s nature, the vast majority of the land is still countryside.
We’re drawn to folk horror as it reminds us that as soon as we step out of the comfort of our homes, like Sergeant Neil in “The Wicker Man”, we are at risk of facing the unknown horrors of our past, which have been around a lot longer than any of our modern society.
Where to see The Devil’s Punchbowl
The Devil’s Punchbowl runs at the Hope Theatre, above the Hope and Anchor pub, 207 Upper Street, Islington, London N1 1RL, from 27 to 31 October 2026. Performances begin at 7pm.
Tickets for performances from 28 to 31 October cost £18, or £16 for concessions, plus booking fees. The production is for audiences aged 18 and over.
