Lily Allen on making her West End debut in 2:22 - A Ghost Story

London's West End might have a glamorous reputation, but Lily Allen can confirm it's a slightly different story behind the scenes.

"Today I found a little dead mouse in my theatre dressing room caught down the back of the sofa," she tweeted during rehearsals for 2:22 - A Ghost Story. "I think he's been there for most of the pandemic."

Now based in the US, Allen is currently in London for the play's 10-week run at the Noel Coward Theatre. Her participation has attracted equally large amounts of audience praise and tabloid interest during previews, which has been a blessing and a curse.

"I'm riding a wave of excitement and terror, which is pretty constant," she tells BBC News. "But it's just really nice to be here in this theatre and be one of the first things that people have been coming to see after the weird year-and-a-half we've had."

Unlike some of the more well-established shows which have returned recently, such as The Lion King and The Mousetrap, 2:22 is one of the first brand new productions to have launched in the West End since 19 July - the date from which the government allowed theatres to reopen with full capacity audiences.

Allen joined the production earlier this year, after receiving a call from a casting director one day while she was wandering around New York. "He sent me the script and I read it, and my husband [actor David Harbour] read it, and we were both just blown away by it. So I spoke to the director the next night, and I was here six weeks later," she explains.

It is, of course, a precarious time to be working in theatre. Hairspray, Jersey Boys and Andrew Lloyd Webber's new iteration of Cinderella are among the shows which have recently had to pause performances due to Covid outbreaks.

Allen says producers have been "pretty rigorous" with the safety protocols. "But also there's only four of us in this cast," she notes. "Cinderella and a lot of the other productions have much bigger casts and crews. We're a relatively small bubble. And we haven't gone out partying and drinking and that kind of stuff. It's been pretty easy to keep on top of it somehow, touch wood."

The singer and actress plays Jenny in the play, a woman convinced her house is haunted. Every night at 2:22am, she can hear sounds coming from elsewhere in the building, often through her child's baby monitor.

One night, while she and her partner (played by Hadley Fraser) are hosting a dinner party with two friends, Jenny persuades the rest of the group to stay up until the early hours to convince them she's telling the truth.

"It's a primal instinct to want to be scared, but also to know it's just fiction," Fraser says of the continuing audience appetite for frightening stage plays.

"There's a comfort to knowing you can walk out of the theatre at the end of the night, but you've been scared witless for two hours. I would hope our show is a fine balance between psychological suspense, some jump scares, and it's also really funny."

When he started 2:22 five years ago, playwright Danny Robins asked if any of his Twitter followers had ever seen a ghost. He was soon deluged with replies. "I started to build up this cache of amazing real-life ghost stories," he explains. "And I thought this is great research, but I need to do something more with this."

He launched his first podcast series, Haunted, based on the Twitter thread's material. That, in turn, led to a successful Radio 4 series The Battersea Poltergeist, before he "came full circle" and finished writing 2:22. "So actually this play is what sparked my paranormal broadcasting career," he laughs.

Producers couldn't have hoped for a much better name than Allen to drum up media interest in the show. But as a relative newcomer to stage acting, she is open about how much of a learning curve she has been on.

"The whole thing is massively overwhelming... but it's been an incredible experience. Everyone's been so supportive and patient, because I'm literally the village idiot. I don't know what I'm doing," she says (although Fraser quickly disagrees).

It's certainly a change of scenery for Allen. As a singer, she had a particularly successful chart spell in the late noughties, with hits including Smile, The Fear, LDN and Not Fair driving consistently high album sales.

She's also a much sought-after guest vocalist, having collaborated with Mark Ronson and Professor Green among others. In 2019, she teamed up with DJ Spoony for a sublime cover of Shanks & Bigfoot's Sweet Like Chocolate.

But while she has extensive experience of playing live, Allen says stage acting is a "completely different" discipline. For one thing, she's not able to engage with the audience. "The fourth wall thing is completely insane," she says. "It's a completely different experience being on a stage and trying to actively captivate an audience with your being.

"You're trying to pull people in with your anecdotes or your chat between songs. And that's how you're trying to engage with people. So when I get a laugh [in the play], my instinct is to be like..." she mimes doing a joyful celebratory dance. "And then I have to be like no, you're not Lily, you're Jenny."

Added to which, she now has to project her voice more and memorise reams of dialogue - which must be a bigger challenge than remembering her own lyrics.

"Well, I actually have a karaoke screen when I'm singing," Allen smiles. "So I don't even know the lines to the songs that I wrote!" Presumably she knows the 2:22 script off by heart though? "Yes," she replies, "although I missed out a significant chunk last night, i.e. the plot."

We ask how she recovered. "I think Jake rescued me," she recalls, referring to her co-star, former EastEnders actor Jake Wood. "But it's different for each mess-up, you know?!"

Allen's involvement in the show is a double-edged sword. While she brings a huge amount of publicity (and therefore ticket sales) to the production, she also faces the extra pressure that comes with being a media magnet.

"She's under this scrutiny that no-one else encounters," notes Robins. "Every single night she leaves the theatre, there are headlines the next day about what she's wearing. It's all 'Lily steps out of the theatre in a casual top' or 'Lily wears these shoes'. Why are we judging this woman who's doing her West End debut and acting brilliantly by what she's wearing when she steps out the theatre?"

Allen is speaking to journalists a few days before the official opening night, when the industry will deliver its verdict on her acting abilities. Many stars try to avoid reviews so as not to impact their performance.

"I'm dreading it," she says. Dreading the critics' reviews? "Yes." So she'll read them? "I mean, I think it's pretty unavoidable, really. Because I do quite a lot of promotion with my Twitter, Instagram, and you're always trying to use those kind of things in order to [promote the show]. But I'd need to read them to see if they're good or bad, to see whether I post them up or not."

Allen is committed to the West End run for the next three months. Does this mean her music career is on ice for the time being? "For 12 weeks, sure," she replies.

There was a report earlier this year that her next album would be inspired by the MeToo movement, with different tracks named after abusive men. Any truth to that? "I mean, I think that's a bit of a Daily Mail journalist filling in the gaps," she says, playing down (although not explicitly denying) the suggestion. "I don't want to say too much about [the music]," she concludes. "But I'm not done."

2:22 - A Ghost Story is playing at the Noel Coward Theatre in London until 16 October.