Six original ghost stories from the playwright behind 2 Graves and World’s End, premiering at Theatre Royal Brighton
Award-winning playwright and radio dramatist Paul Sellar, whose stage work includes the West End transfers 2 Graves and World’s End, returns with his first full-scale stage production in over a decade as Love and Other Terrors debuts for an initial one-night special performance at Theatre Royal Brighton 9 February 2027.
The Brighton debut is the first outing for the production, developed with support from Arts Council England, with plans to develop the production further for a London run.
The debut will take place on Valentine’s week and brings together a deliciously dark collection of six original spine-tingling tales, each exploring the unsettling side of love. From loss and unrequited longing to obsession and the consequences of leaving feelings unspoken, each tale reveals a different terror of the human heart.
In recent years, Sellar has been focused on his highly popular radio work, which has taken him away from his first love of stage drama. His radio work falls firmly in the thriller genre and includes the four-part BBC Radio 4 series How to Build a Supertower and the thriller The Gold Killing, both Drama of the Week, while The Takeover (BBC Radio 3) was nominated for the Prix Europa and shortlisted for the Imison Award.
Recreating the intimate thrill of traditional ghost storytelling, Love and Other Terrors blends slow-burn ghostly prose and propulsive gothic verse with live and recorded music, layered soundscapes and atmospheric lighting.
In the crumbling remnants of a once-grand library, chief librarian Charles Armitage opens a collection of disquieting tales including a motor journalist attends a speed-awareness course, an antique dealer is drawn to a fire-ravaged château, and a music-hall magician pursues a dangerous trick. Each finds themselves drawn into an escalating nightmare. Armitage returns between the stories – brought to life by different performers – to introduce each new tale, as his own dark secrets gradually emerge.
Conceived as a bumper book of ghostly horror, Love and Other Terrors draws on the anthology format of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone as well as the fireside storytelling tradition of M. R. James.
GET TICKETS
Paul Sellar said: “I have always been drawn to thrillers, ghost stories and gothic horror, and this has been reflected in a lot of my early work. It’s been such a joy to return to the genre. Love and Other Terrors is a classic portmanteau horror, a compendium of contemporary gothic, and it’s straight from the heart. These stories were like an exorcism for me, emotional and psychological catharsis. You want to not just revive the form but elevate it. It’s a case of striking a nice balance between old and new, and when it works there’s nothing better.”
