Conversation With An Acid Bath Murderer, Old Ship Hotel Wine Cellar, Brighton, to May 28

But he used his charisma for much darker deeds than extortion. He was the Acid Bath Murderer – the English serial killer who was convicted for six murders during the 1940s.

Nigel Fairs’s great-grandfather put the shackles on the man also known as The Vampire Killer.

But when Fairs, a playwright and actor, came to write Conversation With An Acid Bath Murderer 30 years later, in the 1980s, he had no idea about the grisly coincidence.

“It’s one of those family stories handed down,” he says, ahead of a new version opening tonight in which he plays the lead for the first time.

“But the spooks seem to go on and on. We performed the show in Arundel Jailhouse and an actor friend of mine’s aunt was lined up to be Haigh’s next victim.

“She went to tea with him and he described everything that went on, and sure enough she would have been his next victim if he hadn’t been arrested.”

Fairs’s grandfather also rented Haigh a car in Burgess Hill, though he admits it’s probably not the same one the killer sent off Beachy Head in an insurance scam.

Strangely enough, Haigh, who claimed he used to drink the blood of his victims, has his waxwork in Madame Tussauds, and in his day was something of a celebrity.

“He was a cult figure. You’d have crowds of women outside the courts where he was tried, in Horsham and so forth, and they were obsessed in that blood-thirsty, English-people-love-a-murderer way.”

Fairs, who did his research from Haigh’s own account of his life story, written while he was in prison and published in the News Of The World, was intrigued because he wanted to try to understand his motivation.

“He had bizarre morality about life, which you can trace back to his upbringing in the Plymouth Brethren, where everything was a sin.

“He wasn’t allowed to read newspapers or books, other than the Bible, or to listen to the wireless, and his father built a huge wall around the garden to keep the sins of the world out.

“So I didn’t want to present him as a big fat villain. What interests me is how he justified these murders to himself.”

He says Haigh wanted the money – he was definitely a conman – but there is an alternative side, presented by Haigh himself, which made out he was a vampire. He then pleaded it was his unusual religious beliefs and a supreme being that led him to the killings.

“One argument was that he said that to avoid being hanged, he rather hoped he’d be put into Broadmoor for being a lunatic,” says Fairs.

The show takes place in the cellar of the Old Ship Hotel and Fairs says it will be chilling.

“It’s a frightening concept coming down to the cellar but because he is so charming it’s almost like a seduction.

What I’m hoping is that the audience come out chilled, but also have empathy.”