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The Enfield Haunting review: A talented cast, doomed to perform this nonsense night after night. Beware a true West End HORROR, writes PATRICK MARMION

'Every so often we get the toe-curling opportunity to see good and sometimes famous actors struggling to marry their professional dignity to their contractual obligations,' writes Patrick Marmion

But this play from Paul Unwin (creator of TV's Casualty), over a decade in the making, has so many balls in the air it never gets close to identifying a plot — never mind nailing the poltergeist suspected of setting up a portal between the living and the dead in a North London council house. Joel Goodman and Jan Osborne's rippling, unmemorable compositions suffuse the piece with melancholy, with Joe Bishop emerging as a more sensitive Turing than Benedict Cumberbatch created in The Imitation Game. In Jane Miles's shoestring production (desk, blackboard, bike), Zara Cooke plays everyone else: Turing's devoted mother, the headteacher who wrote him off as 'lazy, idle and slow' and Joan, the young woman who helped crack the code by suggesting that 'Heil Hitler' and the weather forecast occurred in every message.

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