Name: 2:22 A Ghost Story
Start: 2023-01-21
End: 2023-04-23
Location: Lyric Theatre

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2:22 A Ghost Story - Lyric Theatre - LON

Genre: Play

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2:22 A Ghost Story

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2-22 A Ghost Story Cheryl (Jenny) and Louise Ford (Lauren) Photo Helen Murray.jpg.jpg

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2-22 A Ghost Story Jake Wood (Ben) Photo Helen Murray.jpg(2)

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2-22 A Ghost Story Scott Karim (Dan) and Louise Ford (Lauren)Photo Helen Murray

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2-22 A Ghost Story Cheryl (Jenny) and Scott Karim (Dan) Photo Helen Murray.jpg.jpg

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2-22 A Ghost Story Cheryl (Jenny) Photo Helen Murray.jpg

Born in Newcastle in 1983, Cheryl is a singer and television judge. Cheryl will make her West End debut in *2:22 - A Ghost Story* at the Lyric Theatre.

Cheryl rose to fame during the 2002 reality television series, *Popstars: The Rivals*, a show that aimed to create a girl group and a boy band. Cheryl was selected as one-fifth of the band Girls Aloud, alongside Nadine Coyle, Sarah Harding, Kimberley Walsh, and Nicola Roberts. With Girls Aloud, Cheryl achieved four number one singles, including “Sound of the Underground” and “I’ll Stand By You.” Girls Aloud went on hiatus in 2009.

From 2008 - 2010, Cheryl was on the other side of a reality show, joining *The X Factor* as a judge. While on the show, she mentored two winners: [Alexandra Burke](https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/stars-on-stage/alexandra-burke) and Joe McElderry. After a few years away, Cheryl then returned to *The X Factor* in 2014 for a further two years, coaching acts including Lauren Platt and Reggie ‘n’ Bollie. 

She returned to a judging panel for the BBC’s *The Greatest Dancer*, alongside *Strictly Come Dancing* professional Oti Mabuse, and Broadway actor Matthew Morrison.

To date, Cheryl has released four solo albums: 3 Words, Messy Little Raindrops, A Million Lights, and Only Human. She’s also collaborated with the Black Eyed Peas Will. I. Am on the song “Heartbreaker.” 

In 2023, Cheryl will make her West End debut in *2:22 - A Ghost Story*. She’ll play Jenny, a role previously played by [Lily Allen](https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/stars-on-stage/lily-allen) and Laura Whitmore. Cheryl will star alongside Jake Wood, Louise Ford, and Scott Karim.

Cheryl - LON

What’s in a name? Quite a lot when it comes to the single moniker [Cheryl](https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/stars-on-stage/cheryl), aka Cheryl Tweedy, the onetime Girls Aloud pop star who has braved the spooky environs of [*2:22 - A Ghost Story*](https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/show/26645-2-22-a-ghost-story-lyric-theatre) and emerged triumphant, in the process even helping transform the play itself – or, at least, [my view of it](https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/reviews/review-222-a-ghost-story-starring-lily-allen-at-the-noel-coward-theatre).

Initial news that longtime tabloid darling was joining Danny Robins’s play raised eyebrows as the latest casting gambit for a production that has bounced around the West End over the last 18 months, acquiring various names along the way rather like a non-musical equivalent to the celebrity-centric revival of *Chicago*. 

In fact, the performer’s open-faced tremulousness turns out to be ideally suited to Robins’s cunning weave of cacophonous foxes and domestic anxiety. Playing Jenny, a schoolteacher who is the fretful mum to a young child whose crying forms a crucial part of the play’s soundscape, Cheryl has the audience in her corner from the start.

Her natural beauty enhanced by some especially attractive costuming, Cheryl hears footsteps and wonders whether a ghost may, in fact, have broken the boiler. Small wonder in context that her first word happens to be a certain choice expletive that she lets fly with gale force. 

The effect is to ramp up the multiple aspects of unease that inform both the writing and Matthew Dunster’s staging and that give the sound-and-light aspect to the production – a shade gimmicky-seeming the first time round – greater impact here. One is aware of scarier, unbidden ghosts from the subconscious that can come to haunt any relationship, and Louise Ford, as a bibulous dinner guest called Lauren who has a builder-boyfriend (Jake Wood, returning from the first cast) in tow, mines a very real distress of her own: the stakes this time out feel greater all round. 

The play invites specific comparisons to *The Exorcist* only to dismiss them but I actually thought, unexpectedly, of Edward Albee’s *Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?*, another anatomy of marital discord that has a spectral presence hanging over it in George and Martha’s much-discussed but unseen son. 

And if you’ve already seen *2:22*, as I have, it’s fun to see the way in which Robins sets up clues that prepare one for the denouement (pay attention, for instance, to Alexa), while finding a psychological basis for the scaremongering that Cheryl foregrounds in a beautifully achieved balance between bewilderment and rage. 

Playing the know-all husband Sam whom the spiky Lauren derides as a “sarcastic bastard”, [Scott Karim](https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/theatre-news/interviews/the-invisible-hands-scott-karim-on-how-stories-should-make-sense-of-the) finds in the play’s resident rationalist a level of aggression that I didn’t locate in Hadley Fraser’s admirable performance in the first cast. And it’s giving nothing away to say that the play has an odd contemporary echo in the recent disappearance in California, while hiking, of the British actor Julian Sands that lends an unnerving resonance here. 

Anna Fleischle’s expert set locates in design terms the aspirations of neurotic homeowners Cheryl and Sam in a play that puts gentrification under the spotlight, even as its fraying, peeling aspects are  a visual correlative to the characters’ shredding nerves. 

Is Cheryl on this evidence ready to play Hedda Gabler? I’m not sure about that, and one is aware at the start of the performer needing a scene or two to get a voice not trained for the legitimate theatre up to the level of projection that colleagues like Karim possess from the start. (Oddly, it’s Wood among the current foursome whose diction seems muddiest.) 

But the casting directors have savvily noted a media-friendly presence who has more to show for herself than her CV has allowed to date. That Cheryl returns the faith invested in her constitutes a large-scale pleasure, as it was a small-scale one the other afternoon to note the large clock in the theatre foyer set permanently at 2:22. 

Now if only the matinees could start at 2:22, you’d have some sort of ultimate fusion between form and content. No matter: The foxes have a field day throughout the play, and so, in a strong candidate for this still-young theatre year’s happiest surprise, does the audience. 

*2:22 - A Ghost Story* is at the Lyric Theatre through 23 April. Book *2:22 - A Ghost Story* tickets on London Theatre.

[![LT - CTA - 250](//images.ctfassets.net/6pezt69ih962/1t6HRGmhlYl70k6PmR0mOZ/3caac861bc1d4233cd7844652c925623/LT-CTA-250.png)](https://ticket.londontheatre.co.uk/booking/calendar?product_id=26645&content_product_id=26645&venue_id=163)

*Photo credit: Cheryl (Photo by Helen Murray)*

'2:22 - A Ghost Story' review — Cheryl triumphs in her West End debut

Read our review of 2:22 A Ghost Story starring Cheryl at the Lyric Theatre at London Theatre.

2:22 A Ghost Story starring Cheryl Review | London Theatre

Read our four-star review of Cheryl in *2:22 - A Ghost Story* at the Lyric Theatre. The play runs in the West End through spring 2023.

The Lyric Theatre opened on 17 Dec. 1888. From the twentieth century, the theatre's typically hosted plays and musicals. Notable shows include *The Royal Family* starring Laurence Olivier, and the original production of Willy Russell’s *Blood Brothers*.

In recent years, the Lyric Theatre has become heavily associated with Michael Jackson — the *Thriller Live* concert ran for 13 years. Michael Jackson then made way for Bob Marley with *Get Up, Stand Up! The Bob Marley Story.* Nimax Theatres has owned the Lyric Theatre since 2005.

## Lyric Theatre Seating Information

The auditorium has four levels – Stalls, Dress Circle, Upper Circle and Balcony. In the Stalls, the view of the stage is slightly obscured by the overhang of the Dress Circle in Rows Q and R. 

In the Dress Circle, there is a shallow rake.

The Upper Circle offers shallow legroom. The balcony does not hinder the view. 

The Balcony is very high up, but the seats offer a good view of the stage.

2:22 A Ghost Story Tickets

About 2:22 A Ghost Story

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434 Reviews

Nella 2090

Michaela Aisling

Dylan S.

blue_wind

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Cheryl

2:22 A Ghost Story cast and creative team

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Lyric Theatre

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