What does the first day of rehearsals look like?

The door suddenly slams.

A pocket of cold air.

Silence, and the faint sound of unearthly singing voices.

These are not moments from Even More… Ghost Stories by Candlelight, but from Toynbee studios on day one of rehearsals.

There’s about thirty people in the wood panelled courtroom, the teams from Pentabus and Hightide, the cast and most of the creative team, and some funders and trustees from the organisations and Jerwood Foundation.

The atmosphere is a mix of nervous and excited – it’s like the first day of school, if everyone was nice, and working together to create something terrifying. So more like PE.

We’re all gathered to hear the read-through of Even More… Ghost Stories by Candlelight. It’s a co-production with HighTide that will tour the East and West of England across October and November, before finishing with a run at the BAC in November.

Keaton Guimarães-Tolley and Sarita Gabony in rehearsal. Photo: Ali Wright

There will be four ghost stories by candlelight, each written by a different writer. From the West of England they’re Florence Espeut-Nickless, a former Pentabus Writer-in-Residence who, as well as Ghost Stories, has just finished her National Theatre Connections commission and Simon Longman, also a former Pentabus Writer-in-Residence and George Devine Award winner.

From the East they’re Anne Odeke – currently up for four prizes, including best playwright, at the Black British Theatre Awards for her play Princess Essex – and Rosa Torr, an alumni of HighTide’s Writers Group.

Each one of them has written a monologue that touches on the supernatural. This strange, wood-panelled courtroom feels like the perfect place to tell of uncanny things.

Before we start Elle While, Artistic Director of Pentabus welcomes everyone and speaks about how, growing up, there was an absence of stories set in places like where she was from.

Elle’s thrilled to be presenting a show that puts the rural centre stage, and also reflects that the process for the writers has been a little more like a TV room – collaborating, sharing ideas, interrogating what makes something ghostly.

Elle While and Sarita Gabony in rehearsal. Photo: Ali Wright

Florence Espeut-Nickless speaks next. Her piece follows Troy, in a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU), and she speaks about her own experiences of working in a PRU. For Flo, writing a ghost story was a new challenge – the form encourages a whole different way of thinking.

Rosa Torr tells us that she was helping a friend move her belongings into storage after a nasty break up and she was struck by how cold and sinister the self-storage place was. She took that, combined it with the small hours of the morning, and thought it was the perfect place to set her piece.

Simon Longman has loved ghost stories for a long time. He was inspired by the narrow lanes of where he grew up, and of the landscape having a character and an overwhelming force. Simon also likes that when you tell a ghost story in a pub or on a train, someone else starts telling one. It’s a shared language.

There are apologies from Anne Odeke, on a writers’ retreat, and Titilola Dawudu, Artistic Director and CEO of HighTide, speaks last, of the importance of theatre at a time like this, with marches like Unite The Kingdom happening, and the desire for rehearsals and the tour to be a carefest. We’ve got to look out for each other.

Designer Lu Herbert then showcases the model box.

It’s an ambitious set for touring, featuring a few bits of magic from John Bulleid, the show’s illusion designer (Inside No. 9, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), that I’m not allowed to name. You’ll have to see it.

What’s beautiful about having four distinct stories take place on the same set is how each one invites us to see those features differently – for example what we might initially read as scuff marks are seen as burns once we hear Troy’s story, and, spoiling nothing, how motifs recur both in the writing and on the set…

A door slams and we settle back down.

It’s finally time to hear the pieces.

The cast are Sarita Gabony, who you might know from Our Generation at the National Theatre, or Love Labour’s Lost at the RSC, and Keaton Guimarães-Tolley, who’s just come back from the Edinburgh Fringe with his hit show Francisco de Nata, described as “we are under his spell… a masterclass,” by Broadway Baby in its 5 star review, one of many.

What strikes me listening to the four pieces is how distinct their rhythms are.

Florence Espeut-Nickless’s The White Horse has a relentless, questioning ferocity, a contrasting with Simon Longman’s Cold Oak Lane, which is precise and still.

Fittingly for a piece that takes place on a WW2 fort over the sea, Anne Odeke’s The Takeover has a choppy energy, pulled in two directions at once, tidal. And Rosa Torr’s The Consequence of Diving Lots accelerates and accelerates towards the end.

They’re chilling.

And this is day one, before the cuts and tweaks, before Sarita and Keaton get to work closely with Elle, and before the illusions and the set come into play.

Day one of rehearsals takes place on one of the last days of summer – a golden, warm, glorious day – but the show is touring in the cold dark night of Autumn.