North Derbyshire-based theatre company Rumpus is to tour a revival of The Haunted Bride, a “spine-chilling” play by John Goodrum based on Charles Dickens’ To Be Read at Dusk.
In 2025 Rumpus toured The Ripper Files!, buying into the public’s massive interest in Jack the Ripper. Now the company is reviving another of Goodrum’s adaptations.
He said, “The Haunted Bride was hugely popular on its first outing in 2011. Having spent 2025 largely in the grotesque, equally popular reality of Jack the Ripper, it’s refreshing to return in 2026 to the romantic supernatural fantasy world of Charles Dickens.”
The Haunted Bride involves 19th century tour guide Giovanni Baptista meeting up with cockney ladies’ maid Carolina Hodgkins ten years after they had an extraordinary and unsettling experience. They had accompanied newlyweds Thomas and Clara Manning on their honeymoon to the Riviera.
Gradually the two of them unfold the horrifying tale of Clara who is haunted by a dream in the nights leading up to her wedding. At the peeling, overgrown Italian palazzo where they are to spend the next few weeks, the intangible dread that haunts her reaches its terrifying climax.
Goodrum who also designs The Haunted Bride will play Baptista while Sarah Wynne Kordas will be Carolina.
Both have worked together before. Sarah Wynne Kordas was Adelaide and Goodrum played George Love in Karoline Leach’s The Mysterious Mr Love in the 2024 Colin McIntyre Classic Thriller Season at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal. And both were in Goodrum’s The Comedy of Terrors which toured in 2025.
The Haunted Bride will be directed by Karen Henson, with sound design by David Gilbrook. It will open at the New Theatre Royal, Lincoln on Wednesday 18 and Thursday 19 February. It will run until the beginning of June and will take a break over the summer before touring again in October.
There are currently no dates in Derbyshire, although The Haunted Bride will be performed at Rotherham Civic Theatre on Sunday 4 October and The Brewhouse, Burton-on-Trent on Thursday 29 October.
The full list of dates is available at the Rumpus Theatre Company website.
