The Signal-Man / The Trial For Murder – Review – York Medical Society
By Karl Hornsey, November 2026
‘Tis the season for ghostly storytelling, and there cannot be a finer person in the land to chill the bones than James Swanton, who returns to York this week with his double-bill of spooky Dickens’ tales. This hour-long one-man performance in the wonderful setting of the York Medical Society on Stonegate in the heart of the city was truly mesmerising, as Swanton brings The Signal-Man and The Trial for Murder back to York for a third successive year.
While Dickens, certainly on the spectral front, may always be best remembered for the ultimately heartwarming A Christmas Carol, he was also an author who could bring the darker side of ghostly goings-on to life, and The Signal-Man is one of the most chilling stories in the genre, and one that has inspired many other authors in turn. Remarkably, this story appeared as far back as 1866, along with The Trial for Murder and The Haunted House in Three Ghost Stories. It’s also remarkable that the seminal TV version of The Signal-Man, adapted by Andrew Davies and starring Denholm Elliott, marks its 50th anniversary this year, and this adaptation by Swanton is wonderfully engrossing from the first minute.
Dickens embraces the supernatural in these two stories and this is a truly immersive experience in a small room seating around 40 people, with Swanton dominating from the moment the lights go out and he calls out to The Signal-Man. Part horror and part supernatural mystery, the narrator tells the story of The Signal-Man and the spectral warnings of disasters that then ensue on his remote railway line. Swanton has carved out a reputation as the go-to man for Dickens, thanks to his one-man play Sikes & Nancy and his performances at the Charles Dickens Museum in London, as well as keeping very good company in the horror genre in Inside No 9 and Mark Gatiss’s Lot No. 249, one of the now-annual ghost stories favoured by the BBC. He simply is a tour de force and produces an hour of storytelling that has to be experienced to be believed.
Swanton seamlessly moves from The Signal-Man to the lesser-known The Trial for Murder, in which the ghost of a murdered man takes matters into his own hands to ensure justice, as he appears to the foreman of the jury in his trial, as well as other members of the juror, much to the macabre horror of his murderer. If anything, Swanton’s performance reaches another level in the second story, with clever and simplistic use of lighting creating a particularly ghostly atmosphere. It’s a truly special experience and one that I can’t recommend highly enough.
The Signal-Man is on in York until Sunday, with Swanton’s A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man at the end of November
image: JTU Photography
Karl’s love of writing was piqued at the age of eight, when he won a Blue Peter badge in an essay-writing competition. The location of said badge might be a mystery now, but the memory never fades. Hours spent writing about sport as a teenager, in pre-internet years when you had to make your entertainment, honed his skills, and Karl has worked in TV and radio listings at PA Media for 28 years, and the age of hybrid working means 50% of that can be at home listening to Classic FM and thinking about his next visit to his beloved Yorkshire Dales.
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