Laura Davis meets Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, creators of new stage show Ghost Stories

A YELLOW ringbinder flies off a bench in the small rehearsal room, landing on the floor with a dull thud. Silence.

Then: “It’s just one of the spirits in here, there’s a lot of them.”

It makes sense that Andy Nyman, lifelong horror fan and co-creator of illusionist Derren Brown’s stage and TV shows, should leap to the supernatural to explain the unexpected.

He cherishes fear and has a way of carrying himself, with exaggerated facial expressions and dramatically stressing certain words, that’s part-ringmaster, part-Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling.

It’s not hard to imagine him whispering spooky tales to the other boys in the former girls school dormitory he once shared with League of Gentleman writer Jeremy Dyson.

They met at Jewish summer school as teenagers (“We’re Jew-ish,” quips Nyman), and remained best friends ever since, despite living in different parts of the country – Dyson in Leeds, Nyman in Leicester.

Although both chose to work in a similar field, this is the first time they have had the chance to collaborate – on the Liverpool Playhouse’s season opener, Ghost Stories.

“I took my collection of rag mags with the dirtiest jokes, which is what we bonded over, and then we discovered we had this love of horror,” says Nyman, dressed in the 1982 Chai Summer School sweatshirt (“It still fits me, which gives you some sense of my physique as a 15-year-old boy”).

“We did a mock seance with a Ouija board, do you remember?” Dyson asks him.

“We made up this story that a girl had been murdered in the grounds. All I remember is terrifying the people in the next dorm and all these girls shrieking.

“Then we stayed best friends and had the same conversations with our fathers when they got the phone bill – ‘you were on the phone for two bloody hours to that lunatic of a friend!’.”

As an adult, Nyman was to follow up their original seance with another held in the pitch black surroundings of an underground prison, which later formed the blueprint for Derren Brown’s 2004 TV show.