“Oh No! Not Again!”: Toxic Nostalgia and British Antisemitism in Ghost Stories by Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson

Both the original play and subsequent film adaptation of Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson’s Ghost Stories are thick with layers of nostalgia: to the writers’ shared childhood love of a golden age of horror films; to a similar love of the theatrics and conventions of Victorian séance stagecraft. But memories in which its protagonist finds himself trapped are ones rife with the antisemitism of his childhood and its long shadows in the twenty-first century. The looping of time in this surreal memory trap reflects the inevitable looping of history and historic Jewish trauma, using Gothic modes to highlight the insidious, creeping dangers and the outright hauntings. Ghost Stories displays the inner mind of Professor Goodman, a man “locked in” a coma after a suicide attempt, who lives the same stories, and the same memories, over and over again in perpetuity—particularly a memory of his involvement in the death of a classmate with learning disabilities during his teens. However, this essay demonstrates that these haunting memories are necessarily tied up with Goodman’s idea of Jewishness, of the antisemitism he experienced as a teenager and adult. The play and film are filled with a clear, loving nostalgia for genre and stagecraft. But that nostalgia turns toxic when considering the realities of the playwrights’ personal experience and the experience of Jewishness they introduce to the stage.