When a wealthy British widow dies, leaving behind a disputed will, her attorney sends the company clerk, Kipps to investigate. This entails that he spend a couple of nights doing paperwork at the old woman’s ancient mansion, surrounded by endless stretches of the English Channel. Kipps’s encounter with a spirit which haunts the house constitutes the main plot of Susan Hill’s novel, Woman in Black, which Theatron’s production Shey is based on.

Director Saswati Biswas, who also plays Kipps, does a remarkable job of capturing the murder-mystery backdrop of the original English story — adapted for stage by Stephen Mallatratt and translated into Bengali by Salil Bandyopadhyay. From the sound of creaking doors and footsteps of unseen entities to simulating scenes of fog-shrouded seas, lit up in the half-moon (Kanishka Sarkar’s sound, Badal Das’s lights and Ajit Roy’s set), this racy ghost story is an out-and-out thriller — a well-made one at that — without pretensions to a message.

The play follows a play within-a-play structure, with Kipps asking a director for a cathartic staging of his story so that he could be exorcised of its ghost. While you sympathise with Asesh Choudhury as the unsure actor, Anita Roy as ghost is spooky as she appears silently and suddenly anywhere in the auditorium. Maybe even right behind you.