The real thing about Jonathan Gems’ The Paranormalist, at Greenwich Theatre is the imposing house and garden setting by Dermot Hayes, with its Georgian windows, vast living-room-cum-office, plants and shrubs, and a neighbour’s wall, often banged on by a do-it-yourself fellow, the banging interrupting Barbara’s psychoanalytical sessions with her patients. Barbara, getting older in years, is madly ambitious; her daughter Mopsa, forced toward abortion by her mother, wants to get away, to university or somewhere; grandfather Sonny is immersed in gloom and his paranormal activities; Tom from the USA, is after material, and possibly persons, for his psychic experiment institute; David is a young man having an affair with Barbara, but really after Mopsa, and involved in rather pretentious-sounding TV work. One and all have a potty streak, which contrasts vividly with the sobriety and near-stateliness of the house.

The paranormal, and a mass of psychic considerations, as it were, stalk around and in and out of the people and the place, as poor aged Sonny is threatened with eviction (into an old people’s home) by selfish Barbara. Tom seems to sway this way and that in thought and feeling; and the others sort of wriggle about the house. The climax to oddity and the mysterious comes with an exorcism conducted with due ceremony and gravity by Sonny.

Jonathan Gems gives us a good picture of a wayward middle-class family, partly educated and intelligent, partly plain silly and self-centred, and the paranormalitics are often fascinating, and surprising. But the eccentricity is not contrasted well enough with normality for it to be totally effective, and the characters, well-devised on the comic-daffy level, are lacking in some kind of humanity and seriousness which would make them more interesting than at present they turn out to be. More overall fun and conviction might be gained with tauter, sharper direction and acting, and the realisation of a rhythmic pattern and a progressive forcefulness. This achieved, the play might well draw good audiences on transfer to the West End. It certainly has good qualities and Gems is obviously a man for the theatre.