Back in London, we are offered more haunted souls from Conor McPherson in a new play, The Veil, at the National Theatre. McPherson is one of those precocious Irish playwrights who has been winning awards since the age of around six, with ghosts-and-Guinness yarns like the 1990s hit, The Weir.

The Veil doesn't want for ambition — how many modern writers use German transcendentalism as the intellectual backdrop to a country-house play?

We're in a grand pile outside Jamestown in 1822, with Lady Lambroke (a divinely throaty Fenella Woolgar) trying to marry off her tense daughter, Hannah (Emily Taaffe), to rescue the estate's ruinous finances.

Alas, while highly-strung Hannah fixates on the suicide of her father ten years  earlier, present threats are all around, including revolutionaries and house-burning tenants living below the breadline. Into these cheery circumstances wander the defrocked clergyman cousin Berkeley (Jim Norton) and his laudanum-soused companion, Charles Audelle (Adrian Schiller), a philosopher-plagiarist with an unhealthy fixation on liberating the uneasy spirits of the place.

It takes some nerve to pull off a scary séance scene — memories of Margaret Rutherford in Blithe Spirit undermine the enterprise — but this one is truly chilling with a couple of bone-shaking shocks.