A deliciously dark collection of original ghost stories comes to Theatre Royal Brighton on 9 February 2027. Arriving just days before Valentine’s Day, it offers Londoners a darker kind of date night, just an hour from the capital by train.
Paul Sellar, the award-winning playwright whose work has transferred to London’s West End, is returning to the stage with Love and Other Terrors.
The theatrical compendium brings together six original standalone tales, each exploring the unsettling side of love. From loss and unrequited longing to obsession and the consequences of leaving feelings unspoken, each story reveals a different terror of the human heart.
The evening is set in the crumbling remnants of a once-grand library, where chief librarian Charles Armitage opens a collection of disquieting tales. A motor journalist attends a speed-awareness course that takes an unexpected turn, an antique dealer is drawn to a fire-ravaged château and a music-hall magician pursues a dangerous trick. Each finds themselves pulled into an escalating nightmare. The stories are brought to life by different performers, while Armitage returns between them to introduce each new tale as his own dark secrets gradually emerge.
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. Conceived as a bumper book of ghostly horror, it draws on the anthology format of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, as well as the fireside storytelling tradition of M. R. James.
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.”
Sellar’s path into theatre was an unusual one, writing his first play, The Bedsit, in a sixth-form detention where it was fished out of the bin without his knowledge, and entered into a playwriting competition. It was among one of the winners of the competition and went on to be published by Faber and Faber. His plays 2 Graves and World’s End went on to transfer to the West End at the Arts Theatre and Trafalgar Studios respectively. In recent years, Sellar has focused on writing for radio including the four-part BBC Radio 4 series How to Build a Supertower and the two-part thriller The Gold Killing, both selected as Radio 4’s Drama of the Week.
Love and Other Terrors plays the Main House at Theatre Royal Brighton, New Road, Brighton BN1 1SD, on 9 February 2027. Tickets are on sale now at atgtickets.com/shows/love-and-other-terrors/theatre-royal-brighton
