Inside No. 9‘s continued success is, as far as I’m concerned, utterly astonishing. Coming off the back of cult classic sketch show The League of Gentlemen and the brilliant but short-lived Psychoville, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton must not have been expecting anything more than for Inside No. 9 than for it to run for three, maybe four years — nor to be bothered at conventions decades down the line by highly devoted, highly annoying fans like me.
And yet, eleven years, 55 episodes, and two BAFTAs later, Inside No. 9’s seamless blending of comedy, horror, and drama has thrust its two writers firmly into the mainstream, proving the relevance of the rarely-seen anthology genre in the modern TV landscape.
The show officially ended at, appropriately, the conclusion of its ninth series in June 2024, but even before that series began airing, Shearsmith and Pemberton announced that they would be bringing Inside No. 9 to the stage in 2025. After its sold-out limited run in Wyndham’s Theatre in London, Inside No. 9: Stage/Fright began touring the UK in September, including a week at the Manchester Opera House.
In many ways, Inside No. 9 taking to the stage represents the show finally coming full circle. An episode of Psychoville, shot in a single take in one location, provided the impetus for Inside No. 9’s creation, and the show would essentially become a series of experiments in the TV play format.
Not only that, Stage/Fright serves as something of a self-indulgent victory lap for the series creators, with plenty of fourth wall breaks and nods to the series’ past, as well as an entire adaptation of the episode ‘Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room’. The tale of the eighties refugee double act ‘Cheese and Crackers’ reuniting for one last pathetic performance is just as funny, clever, and emotionally affecting as it was on TV, though it’s a little strange to hear the lines that I can quote from memory delivered so much more broadly for the stage.
The show stays true to the anthological nature of the TV series: a running throughline about the theatre being haunted takes the audience on a ghost train ride through several different tales. After opening with a deliciously dark skit that most certainly gets across its point about turning your phone off, Shearsmith and Pemberton introduce us to Bloody Belle, claiming that she is the ghost of an actress who lost her life during an ill-fated production of ‘Terror at the Asylum’.
Within the aforementioned ‘Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room’, we get ‘The Kidnappers’ — as an in-story comedy sketch, it’s the most unambiguously light-hearted the show ever gets, involving a pair of incompetent kidnappers and their rotating celebrity guest victim (Ralf Little for us). It’s a charming stream of slapstick and wordplay (“Roger that!” / ”I said no names!”) that echoes several episodes of the TV series, and firmly cements the first act as the more comedic of the two.
Act two begins with a rehearsal of a revival of ‘Terror of the Asylum’, its 1950s pulp horror trappings brushing up against Shearsmith’s wonderfully exaggerated comic performance as one of the asylum inmates: at one point singing Tom Lehrer’s ‘The Elements’ to the bafflement of TikToker-turned-terrible actress Sherrie (Miranda Hennessy). The rehearsal is interrupted halfway through, and from there the lights dim and the haunting truly begins in earnest.
Stage/Fright’s production and design are gorgeously gothic, dripping with atmosphere and clearly influenced by Shearsmith and Pemberton’s penchant for ghost stories. A background window becomes a glass double door, a large screen displays footage captured live onstage from a camera carried by the actors, and a single lamp heralds the arrival of Bloody Belle.
Stage/Fright is a show as much about Inside No. 9 as it is about theatre itself. Shearsmith and Pemberton offer wry metacommentaries about “finally running out of ideas” and how ridiculous they think the twists are, but it’s a well-earned send-off for one of the most innovative and consistently high-quality TV series of the twenty-first century. The stage format is so perfect for their particular proclivities that it’s hard to believe this is their first go at it.
Spotlights fall and sets are dismantled in real time, alongside an abundance of jump scares, but the love the pair have for the ephemerality of live theatre is clear and quite charming. If anyone deserves to haunt the Opera House for centuries, it is most certainly them.
Inside No. 9: Stage/Fright is touring until 6 December.
