The Signalman review: Another Charles Dickens ghost, another counsel

A spectre visits a signalman on the eve of disaster, in Charles Dickens's story. Photo: Alan Craig

The New Theatre, Dublin
Dec 3-15

★ ★ ★


It’s no surprise to find A Christmas Carol onstage at this time of year but rarely do we see The Signalman. Written by Charles Dickens after a traumatising rail crash, and published at Christmas, this mightn’t be as reassuring as that novella about the rewards of philanthropy, but it still relies on the conventions of Victorian literature to make sense of a changing world: another ghost, another counsel.

This one is a mysterious spectre, each time visiting a terrified Signalman (Daniel Reardon), warning him to clear the railway track, on the eve before a tragic disaster occurs. Gloomy in atmosphere, and driven by fear, the plot resembles that of a horror story. 

Director Matthew Ralli’s production for The New Theatre and Witchwork brings the necessary suspense. The Signalman’s tiny outpost extends, in Lisa Krugel’s imaginative set, to rail tracks that narrow and lead into a dark tunnel. Details such as a red gaslight and a bell telephone animate on their own, as if operated by a phantom. 

Those unearthly surprises aside, Jane McCarthy’s adaptation is more grounded in social concerns. A Gentleman (Marcus Lamb) climbs down onto the track, and asks the Signalman about his isolated and penniless lifestyle. Intriguingly, Reardon’s performance, restrained to the point of belonging to a more absurdist play, describes an existence that’s less punishing and more meaningless. 

Lamb’s inveterate Gentleman, meanwhile, insists that the spectre’s visits are nothing more than delusions, setting up a debate between what’s real and what’s not. He recalls his own sister’s struggles with paranoia and hysteria, but the Signalman examines the particulars, seeking truth in her accusations against a wrongdoing husband: “Passion, you called it”. 

In Lamb’s ostentatious delivery, those misconceptions about working conditions and personal testimony ring hollow, like an entrenched hypocrisy, or humbug. There’s something charitable about seeing that at this time of year, as if Dickens’s “Carol philosophy” was speaking new meanings. 

As a horror play, however, The Signalman has too few scares from beginning to end. There are unnerving details but they come in long straining passages of dialogue that don’t always hold the tension. The finale may land like an overwrought jump scare, but it does push The New Theatre’s resources towards striking new displays.