As horror production It Walks Around The House At Night comes to London’s Southwark Playhouse Borough, George Naylor tells The Theatre Playbook about taking on the starring role in Tim Foley’s play, why the audience is one of the characters and the challenge of performing in darkness.
Amid a blur of hotel rooms, George Naylor has been touring the UK with theatrical horror It Walks Around The House At Night. But he’s soon set to enjoy an extended stay in London when the show begins a four-week run at Southwark Playhouse Borough.
The chilling ghost story from theatre company ThickSkin centres on Naylor as Joe, an out-of-work actor who in a state of desperation mistakenly accepts a rich stranger’s offer of an unusual yet well-paid gig during another dull shift at the bar.
Finding himself playing a ghost at an old countryside manor, Joe expects a few cheap scares but soon uncovers the nightmarish terrors roaming the haunted grounds at night.
Promising jump scares and unexpected frights, the show comes from playwright Tim Foley (Jurassic, Electric Rosary) and director Neil Bettles (How not to Drown, The Unreturning), who led Naylor through a week of rehearsals before the show opened in Wigan last year.
Now performing the largely one-man show every night, it is still evolving – and that has proven to be one of the joys of the job for Naylor.
“In my head, a play, especially like this, should never stop growing and changing because Tim’s written something where there’s so much there to delve into and get your teeth around,” he tells The Theatre Playbook. “Neil and Anna Berentzen, the associate director, and Tim have been so encouraging in the sense of, ‘No, keep playing, keep exploring, don’t let it settle, keep changing, keep finding it.’
“That’s been a real joy to do every single night going, ‘I’m going to focus on this point, I’m going to go down this road tonight and see where that leaves me.’ Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
“Every now and then I’ll do a play where the director’s like, ‘Right, I’ve directed it and that’s it now,’ and I always think, ‘Well, you’re limiting your actors massively because they’re not robots, they’re not going to regurgitate the same thing every night. They want to keep exploring and keep growing and finding more and more detail.’ That’s been very much encouraged on this.”
Joe is a “queer, working class, out-of-work actor who’s existing in survival mode and has been dealt a very bad hand in his life,” the actor says of his character. “But the joy about Joe is that he faces it all with humour and there’s a naivety about him that is really fun to throw yourself into going, ‘Well, let’s just see if this works.’
“There’s an honesty about him. Not all the time, but there is an honesty about him. I don’t want to give too much away about stories. But there’s a mystery is there around the manor or why he’s there.”
Naylor was familiar with Foley’s writing after working on some of his Doctor Who audio dramas and he was immediately keen to pick up his script when it came through. After a couple of rounds of auditions, he then met co-star Oliver Baines for the first time.
That means he isn’t entirely alone on stage during the 90-minute run time, with Baines appearing as The Dancer. The show also features the voice of Paul Hilton, as Joe’s night spirals out of control.
“It’s essentially a solo show. But I have Ollie there,” Naylor says. “Ollie’s a brilliant actor and dancer and there’s a huge dance sequence in the middle of it.
“Then, of course, he’s doing the monster-y bits as well. But the frustrating thing is that I rarely can or am allowed to see Ollie, so it does very much feel like a solo show to me.”
There is another character in the show – the audience.
“At the top of the show, people are very nervous and very tense and even a bit giggly because that kind of fear lets itself out like that, and I love that,” the actor says. “That’s always so much fun to play with. There’s lots of comedy moments as well. So a lot of laughter happens all throughout, actually. It’s really nice.
“As the show twists and turns, people find that there’s more to it than just the jump scares. They kind of go, ‘Oh my God, there’s an actual thing here.’ Hopefully they care about what’s happening to Joe, what he discovers along the way and who he thinks he loses along the way. By the end of it, we always leave them on a laugh, but there’s also food for thought at the end as well.”
The show touches on themes of class and contemporary “social tensions,” delving into a “real anger that’s bubbling for a lot of people,” Naylor says. “It explores how disposable wealthier people think that working class people are. It discusses that quite a bit as well as the mystical and the supernatural.”
Now bringing It Walks Around The House At Night to Southwark Playhouse Borough, the actor believes the show will continue to adapt and change, while he’s also looking forward to spending a significant amount of time in one theatre.
“It’s such a strange thing every time we do move it – the scale and the shape of the room, where the audience is positioned. It always has such a direct effect onto the play, as it does with any play,” he says. “But with the nature of this specifically, because it’s just me and the audience talking directly, the second that you put a gap in front of the stage or you put them on either side, that has a ripple effect all the way through the play, what they can see and what they can experience.”
The layout of each venue the show is performed in also brings with it unique challenges, as Naylor must get to grips with each stage layout while also performing in darkness.
“There’s so much darkness in the play, as it should be, and it’s brilliant. Neil’s built a play that really plays with that element and what we can get away with,” he says. “Some of the jump scares are really ridiculously simple, but so powerful because we’re in just complete darkness.
“So going to new venues, and even in the rehearsal process, going, ‘Ok, so I walk off the stage at this point’ but I can’t see where anything is. So [I’m] having to come up with systems where I won’t walk into anything, hopefully. Darkness has been a fun, but also constant, challenge. It takes a couple of goes to find that new rhythm and to compensate for it. But hopefully at the Southwark, we’ll have really good blackouts and it’ll be really fun to play with.”
Equally in the dark, audiences can looking forward to plenty of jump scares, some mystery and some laughs. “Expect a little bit more than just your typical horror,” Naylor adds. “Expect it to be tense. There’s a lot of tension.”
It Walks Around The House At Night plays Southwark Playhouse Borough from Wednesday, March 4 – Saturday, March 28, 2026. Tickets here.
Top image: It Walks Around The House At Night. Credit Tommy Ga-Ken Wan (image supplied)