The Nag’s Head at the Park Theatre – review

The Nag’s Head tells the story of the pub of the same name, inherited by estranged siblings Connor (Gabriel Fogarty-Graveson), Sarah (Cara Steele) and Jack (Felix Grainger) after their father’s death. Disagreeing on what to do with it, the three end up entangled with some local ghosts, demons, and Greene King representatives, and Scooby-Doo adjacent hijinks ensue. Through the lens of their relationships (or lack thereof) to the pub, the play tells a comic ghost story ostensibly about small pubs in small towns, but (possibly) mostly actually about a haunted painting.

The play takes some time to get into its stride, and could probably stand to lose some of its running time, both letting us reach the ghostly shenanigans more quickly and maintaining more tension overall, currently lost in the interval. The play and production both are much more comfortable in the terrain of comedy than horror, and there are a lot of delightful, laugh-out-loud moments of farce, which the cast do really well in.

There are some inconsistencies in plot and character that the jokes can’t quite patch up, and a lot of the story and text feel underexplored. The play tries to skewer both Greene King’s attempts to turn all local pubs into a monolith; and the need for every pub to have a unique selling point (or a ‘quoi’, as they put it), and while both are very funny, they don’t quite add up. Similarly, the stage design could benefit from some more thought, often contradicting the way the characters are describing the scenes, particularly the pub pre- and post-Greene King-ification.

Despite its flaws, The Nag’s Head offers a fun evening, and a good warm-up for pantomime season – if not quite Halloween.