7 Ghosts

DAVID It’s this damn house. I always said it was haunted.
SARAH Well... it is now.

7 Ghosts, BBC Radio 4, 20 March 2023, 2.15

My new radio play, 7 Ghosts, is a ghost story, or rather a patchwork of ghost stories. A few years ago I wrote a play called My Life is a Series of People Saying Goodbye which had a fairly inventive structure: it was also a patchwork of different stories (of people saying goodbye) but rather than cutting between scenes, they faded into one another with the actors, characters, dialogue, setting changing at different speeds, creating, I hoped, a kind of tapestry of different kinds of farewell rather than a single linear story. I wanted to look at that fragmented structure again. And I’ve long wanted to write a ghost story. This is an attempt to bring the two together. I want us to pass between stories the way ghosts pass through walls.

In fact we pitched this a while ago and the BBC commissioner was enthusiastic but always wanted something else that we pitched first and encouraged us to pitch again the following year. Finally in 2021 they bought it. By that time, the project had significantly morphed in my mind. When lockdown happened in 2020, and so many things were cancelled, I had time to attack my guilty reading pile. And the first thing I read (in fact listened to as an audiobook) was Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga. It’s a beautiful book, bringing together a wealth of historical materials to tell a story about which I was shamefully ignorant. And a couple of months later, the George Floyd murder happened and the Black Lives Matter moment rippled across the world. And the Colston Statue was pitched into Bristol Harbour. And the Rhodes Must Fall campaign accelerated. And in my academic department we talked more and more about decolonising the curriculum. And suddenly it seemed to me that 7 Ghosts might be a way of thinking a bit about contemporary Britain’s difficulties in coming to terms with the legacies of slavery.

I’ve written black characters before, though mostly I have been specifically unspecific about the ethnicity of characters, and we’ve always had diverse casts in my radio plays. This is one of the first plays that directly addresses issues of race.

That said, the patchwork structure allows for a range of different concerns and styles. There are some comic moments here, some that are troubled and pained, some that are moving, others that are enraging, and, yes, I hope, one or two moments that are scary.

We had a great cast: Kobna Holbrook Smith (who narrated David Olusoga’s audio book!) plays David; Ani Nelson plays Sarah; David Annen is Sir William (who was in Here’s What I Did, Zola - Fire, My Life is a Series); Fanta Barrie is Florence and Isabelle; Max Runham plays Robert and Elliot; Don Gilet (who was in Exemplar) is Sir Robert and Ejikeme; Sarah Berger plays Charlotte and Caroline Tobin.

The play is directed by Polly Thomas and assistant-directed by Jelena Budimir. The composer is Jeremy Warmsley and the sound designer is Eloise Whitmore.

I wrote a long piece about the process of writing this play which you could read here:

• Writing 7 Ghosts