King’s College Chapel sits at the centre of Cambridge like a huge brooding ghost from the past. As director Niall Wilson and I enter its soaring fan-vaulted antechapel, we remark on just how invisible it can be, sharing anecdotes of how many Cambridge undergrads we’ve known who, extraordinarily, have never once set foot inside. Lots of people seem to know it from the silent disco at King’s Affair. Wilson wants to correct this, fittingly enough, by using the iconic space to tell a ghost story.

The Spanish Tragedy is a classic revenge drama, Thomas Kyd’s proto-Hamlet from the 1580s, a tale in which the murdered Don Andrea appears as a ghost to will revenge upon the perpetrators in the Spanish Court. He remains onstage throughout the play – looking at the towering Gothic ceiling, I can understand why this location would suit a story with a constant ethereal presence. “Gothic architecture reeks of death” he says. With the high wall and high ceiling, you are being towered over by something distinctly above you. “I live next to a graveyard”, he admits, sheepishly, “I would be a massive liar if I told you that I had never come back at 1am after an ADC bar shift and heard something go bump in the night”. He’s not in this play to scare people, he says, but he is there to try and get some goosebumps rising.

He’s marshalled some impressive resources: an eight strong choir to make best use of the famous acoustic, lighting by candles, incense, the playing of the enormous organ that dominates the central space of the chapel; all these will be integral to getting that crucial atmosphere right. But his greatest star is the surroundings. “Kings’ itself is the set” he says. He had wanted to do a promenade production originally, but soon realised the problem with getting an audience of that size to walk around the chapel. Instead the audience will remain in place and the space will be used dynamically: through the rood screen, only just glimpsed by the audience, will be the secretive area of the Spanish Court, the private world. The side chapels are the entrances for the servants and lesser characters, and the “Other”, represented by Portugal and more unknown moral quantities, will be represented by the western end of the chapel, with characters coming from behind the audience. “I want to the audience to get a sense of the Chapel as a whole, not have them just be pointed forwards to watch a play”, he says.

Certainly the iconography of the chapel is perfect for the occasion. The many courtly scenes can only be embellished by the hundreds of royal symbols surrounding the action: the portcullises, roses, dragons and lions of the English monarchy all stone voyeurs of the living drama beneath. “This is a very public, very high profile, very high stakes space”, says Wilson. “When characters are watching people on stage, they will sit with the audience so that they become intimately involved with what’s going on, and aren’t just thinking ‘ooh, this is nice, we’re in King’s Chapel’”. And that can only help them be overwhelmed by the candles and the organs and the incense and the choir.

Wilson certainly seems to be on a very specific mission with this show, one he couldn’t have achieved in his now-passed undergraduate days with successes like Festen. “I am trying to evoke a sense and mood that you couldn’t get at the ADC. There would be no point bringing The Spanish Tragedy in here and setting it in a modern surveillance state, you’d be fighting against yourself.” The ramifications of the end of the play are huge, with a kingdom turned upside down, and this setting allows Wilson to make that epic point better than he could even with the biggest of budgets. There is a sense in which he wants the play to “wash over you”, with that little bit of fire and brimstone that should make tragedy a massive, overwhelming, cathartic experience. “Although,” he says “you need to remain focussed on the characters too – if you don’t care about them you won’t care about the bloodshed.” And he recognises his heightened responsibility in this unusual space: “Usually, you can leave it up to actors to make a good show of it whatever the direction, but here, if I get a decision wrong, they’re lost.”

I point out the great wooden angels that form part of the organ, mentioning they seem pretty dramatic on their own – like apocalyptic heralds calling the tragic figures to judgement. Wilson agrees, saying that the chapel has its own history of drama. Religious plays would have been performed here in the early days of the antechapel, common to many medieval Christian spaces; there are echoes and ghosts to be found in the very act of staging of the play. This is in its own way a morality play about judgement, and all the scenes in the stained glass above of Solomon in judgement can only increase the sense that characters are under scrutiny, whether religious or just of us the audience.

For Wilson, a Cambridge native, the chapel might mean something rather different. “Growing up here, I’ve never seen it as a religious building, it’s a symbol of the university. Without the university, there’d be no Cambridge. So this place is the hub of the town.” Such a significant place is a fitting setting for his last directorial gig here before moving on to the London circuit. We wander out through the ancient oak door, leaving the magnificent space to the tourists – and perhaps the ghosts.

The Spanish Tragedy runs at King’s College Chapel 7-9 November, 7.30pm