The Haunting of Helena Blunden

At the Waterfront Hall, Belfast

The “terrible tragic tale of Helena Blunden” is a ghost story which refuses to be exorcised. Helena was a young woman, with a glorious singing voice, who worked in the spinning room of a Belfast linen mill in the early 1900s. She died at the age of 16 but the circumstances of her death remain shrouded in mystery. Writer Bernie McGill and composer/writer Paul Boyd have resurrected the ghost of Helena in this neat little 90-minute musical, stylishly directed for Big Telly by Zoe Seaton.

Diego Pitarch’s rickety set perfectly recaptures the dusty, crumbling interior of the now silent mill, while Conleth White’s lurid green lighting lends it something of the atmosphere of that much bigger West End extravaganza Wicked. Going one step further in that direction, our first encounter is with a witch-like character in Charlotte McCurry’s pale-faced, inky-clad Susan, though she turns out to be just an unhappy, mixed-up kid from a wealthy, dysfunctional family.

There is a curious mix of the homespun and the sophisticated about this entertaining show, which uncovers an intriguing episode in local history and folklore. Helena Bereen is an affecting presence as the elderly Maggie, who fled Belfast after the blitz and joined the Queen Alexandra nurses, but whose disconnected consciousness throws bright beams of light onto the gruelling conditions under which young women such as herself and Helena (a beguiling Roisin Gallagher) toiled, day in, day out. And there are other things she seems to know – or deny – like the hazy details connected to the apparent deaths of Helena and her baby son, born out of an intimate relationship with the mill owner. And just what is her relationship to Susan’s pompous father (Karl O’Neill)? The questions multiply. While the dialogue is at times a little clunky and expositional, the songs are possessed with Boyd’s familiar musical swagger and would find a home on any commercial stage – though there is something slightly queasy in a catchy number about self-harm, whose chorus tells us that “Susan was a cut above the rest”.

Tours to Drogheda, Coleraine, Downpatrick, Omagh, Newtownabbey, Castleblayney, Lisburn, Ballybofey, Sligo and Enniskillen.