The Ghost Theatre by Mat Osman review – teenage wastrels with ambition to burn

If one tends to approach the side projects of those already successful in other mediums with a certain wariness, then it’s only because so many such side projects can whiff of self-indulgence. Not every songwriter is a TV presenter-in-waiting, just as not every actor is as accomplished a painter as they may like to think, no matter how splattered their smock.

Mat Osman does not fall into this bracket. For a rock star – he’s one of the founding members of the band Suede and continues to serve as their bassist – the 55-year-old may just be a born writer. There were intimations of this three years ago with the publication of his impressively atmospheric debut novel, The Ruins, which looked inwards for its inspiration, as rock star-written novels tend to do: both Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles and James’s frontman, Tim Booth, for example, have either new or upcoming books that also feature singers in a lead role.

But Osman’s second novel ups the ante considerably. The Ghost Theatre is set in Elizabethan London and focuses on a couple of teenage wastrels with ambition to burn. There’s Shay, a messenger girl who traverses the capital delivering items for people via her favoured route of the city’s rooftops. She’s also a trainer of hawks, and can communicate with birds and see the future through them. And there is Nonesuch, a chancer looking for his big break. Each is barely clinging to the city’s underbelly when they first meet, but, restricted as they are in social mobility because of their lowborn status, they nevertheless accrue a growing notoriety via their star billing in the Ghost Theatre, a radical brand of street performance with a lurid reputation. Unscripted immersive theatre may sound like a nightmare today, but back in 1601 – a time before Netflix and Wordle – it hypnotised all those who witnessed it.

Osman – whose brother, Richard, writes similarly involving books, albeit in an entirely different genre – is the kind of novelist who favours florid description. “How to express the audacity of a magpie’s tail feathers or the cruelty of an eagle’s beak?” he writes. “What words could capture a hummingbird’s unlikeliness, or a caged hawk’s talons? Grace. Awe. Love. Just words like leaky containers, slopping their meaning out with every movement.”

Before long, their shows make them famous and Shay is required to give private recitals to an intrigued Queen Elizabeth I. But the life of street urchins in the early 17th century rarely runs smoothly, and this is a book that wallows in the dirt, disease and heavy period detail of its era. “Houses,” he writes, “grew new storeys, and roads sprouted whole districts; slums shot up like mushrooms. London was as much a river as a city.” It is within the teeming capital’s environs that his two characters are thrust towards a dramatic conclusion in prose pinpricked with ultra-vivid imagery.

Osman has no reason to give up the day job – unlike many bands of their vintage, Suede continue to pack as much a punch today as they did back in 1993 – but if he did, he wouldn’t be unemployed for long.