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Inside No. 9 - Stage/Fright

The Playhouse, Edinburgh 

Four stars

 

Life’s a scream for Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, the creators and stars of TV anthology show, Inside No.9. Over nine (natch) series’ between 2014 and 2024, Pemberton and Shearsmith mined the ghosts of showbiz past to make something that was nominally a sit-com but which came possessed with a knowingly dark heart. The show’s dramatic marriage of 1970s hammy horror and tales of the unexpected played tricks with form, content and genre that mixed arcane gothic with post modern archness in a way that pushed whatever button was going. 

 

So it goes with this hit stage show, which sees the duo present a bumper sized live compendium designed to keep both diehards and novices equally on their toes. Opening with an extended scene-setter that plumbed the depths of every theatregoer’s worst nightmare, Pemberton and Shearsmith introduce what on one level is one great big theatrical in-joke before framing the bulk of the first half with a reboot of their Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room episode. Here, they play unreconstructed comedy duo Cheese and Crackers, who come together for the first time in thirty years. 

 

This allows for another rewind before the meat of the second half sees Simon Evans’s production open out on what initially resembles the sort of thing originally patented in Michael Frayn’s play, Noises Off. This, of course, sees Evans’ cast of eight working alongside Pemberton and Shearsmith take a wander down the sort of back stage alleyway last seen in B-movie schlock such as 1972’s theatre set potboiler, The Flesh and Blood Show.

 

What happens in Number 9, however, pretty much stays in Number 9, so the mystery of what follows will need to be solved by real life visitors to the show. All that can be intimated here is that, in terms of structure, the play what Pemberton and Shearsmith wrote peels back layer after layer of their collective psyche to continue their obsessively forensic fascination with comic horror and the co-dependent psychology of double acts that might well reflect their own ways of being. 

 

As double bluff after double bluff opens another Pandora’s box, this makes for something frightening and hilarious in equal measure. Inside No. 9 lives again. Like the creatures of the night that haunt it, immortality is guaranteed. 


The Herald, November 27th 2025

 

Ends 

 

 

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