The Ghost Train (play)

The Ghost Train is a stage comedy-thriller, written in 1923 by the English actor and playwright Arnold Ridley.
The story centres upon the social interaction of a group of railway passengers who have been stranded at a remote rural station overnight, and are increasingly threatened by a latent external force, with a denouement ending.
The play ran for over a year in its original sold-out London theatrical run, and is regarded as a modern minor classic. It established the 20th century dramatic genre of "strangers stranded together in a railway scenario in constrained circumstances" thrillers, leading to the films such as "The Lady Vanishes" (1938), "Night Train to Munich" (1940), "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" (1974) and "Narrow Margin" (1990).
Background.
Ridley was inspired to write the play after becoming stranded overnight at Mangotsfield railway station (a now "lost station", on the defunct Midland Railway Company's main line), during a rail journey through the Gloucestershire countryside. The deserted station's atmosphere, combined with hearing the non-stop Bath to Gloucester express using an adjacent curved diversionary main line to by-pass Mangotsfield, which created the illusion of a train approaching, passing through and departing, but not being seen, impressed itself upon Ridley's senses. The play took him only a week to write. After a première in Brighton, it transferred to London's St Martin's Theatre, where – despite unenthusiastic reviews from the theatre press critics – it played to sell-out audiences from November 1925 to March 1927.
Original cast.
Changes to the cast during the run included Sydney Fairbrother (from June 1926) as Miss Bourne, succeeded in the role by Connie Ediss in November 1926.
Ridley himself played Saul Hodgkin, the station master, in several productions over many years. He told "The Guardian" in 1976 that when he first played the part he had to make up carefully to look old enough, but latterly "I had a job to make myself look young enough".
Plot summary.
The plot revolves around a party of assorted railway travellers who find themselves stranded in the waiting room of an isolated country station in the evening. The station master tries to persuade them to leave the site as he is closing the station for the night. They refuse to leave, citing the lack of alternative accommodation for several miles around. He warns them of the supernatural danger of a spectral passenger train, the ghost of one that fatally wrecked in the locality several years before, that sometimes haunts the line at night, bringing death to all who set eyes upon it. Incredulous of his story, they still refuse to leave, and he departs leaving them facing a night at the station.
The main body of the play is then taken up with the interaction of the varied assortment of the passengers: strangers thrown randomly together in the odd social intimacy of happenstance that rail travel involves, representing a cross-section of English 1920s society. There are a variety of escalating dramatic incidents combined with a heightening tension as the latent threat of the spectral train's possible appearance is ultimately dramatically realised, bringing disaster and death to the group as foretold.
The story then resolves from a socio-suspense drama into a spy adventure, when it is revealed that the "ghost train" is quite real and is being used by communist revolutionaries to smuggle machine guns from the Soviet Union into England, and the story of the "ghost-train" has been concocted to scare potential witnesses away from the scene of the operation. A British Government secret agent incognito in the stranded passengers' midst is then revealed; the agent confronts the revolutionary gang in a gun battle on the station, and the revolutionaries' covert operation is defeated.
Production.
In its first run in London, for its climactic moment elaborate special-effects utilizing visual and audio devices were used to create the sensation of a train passing close by on the stage at high speed, including garden-rollers running over wooden laths, thunder sheets, etc. Reviewing the premiere in "The Manchester Guardian", Ivor Brown wrote, "the gentleman in charge of 'Noises off' becomes at times the protagonist, ... he can make a noise so like a train that he might impose on the station master of a terminus; meanwhile, he can throw in a hurricane, as it were, with the other hand."
Books.
A novel based upon the play entitled "The Ghost Train" was published in 1927.
There is a strong resemblance between several elements of this plot and the "spook train" in "Five Go Off to Camp" by Enid Blyton (published 1948).
Opera.
A chamber opera based upon the play entitled "The Ghost Train" debuted at the Carolina Chamber Music Festival in New Bern, North Carolina, US, in September 2012, scored by Paul Crabtree for six singers and an instrumental ensemble. In February 2016, it was performed by the Peabody Chamber Opera in the roundhouse of the B&amp;O Railroad Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.