A Ghost In Your Ear

A Ghost in Your Ear is a horror play for two performers, written and directed by Jamie Armitage. The action takes place in a sound studio, where a ghost story is being recorded as an audiobook and starts to behave as if it were alive. Each audience member wears headphones throughout, and the sound is binaural: voices and noises appear to travel around your head rather than arriving from the stage alone.

Audible Theater presents the New York premiere at Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre in the West Village. The play is an original work rather than an adaptation, and it began in London. In New York it was first announced as a limited engagement and was extended afterward. Audible also intends to record the run and release it to listeners worldwide as an Audible Original.

The setup is easy to describe. An actor is called in at short notice and reaches a sound studio late. Nobody has shown him the script yet. It is a ghost story, and he begins to read it into the microphone. As the session continues, what he is reading seems to leave the page and take over the room.

The play describes itself as gothic horror and a psychological thriller. The studio is its only location, so the tension comes from what you hear as much as from what you see. How the night ends is not covered here.

Armitage came to this play from musical theater, having co-directed Six. The idea of writing for headphones came from The Encounter, a headphone-based work by Simon McBurney. Armitage wanted a horror play in which the headphones have a reason to be there, and a recording studio provides one. The audio is part of how the story is built, not an effect laid over it.

The set is a working sound studio. Among its props, a blank-faced microphone head plays a central part and helps show the audience where their ears are placed in the room. With so little space to work in, the scares come from a few simple devices rather than large effects, and the headphones do most of the work.

After every performance the theater sanitizes and inspects the headphones. Anyone who hears a fault in the audio is asked to speak to staff before the show begins.

The play had its world premiere at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs in London, with performances starting in December 2025. George Blagden and Jonathan Livingstone led that cast. Its London producers were HFH Productions and Playful Productions, and the run sold out.

The New York production began performances at Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre in October 2026. As of October 2026, the two-person cast is Owen Campbell, who plays Sid, and Lucas Iverson, who is known for the television series The Pitt.