One-man show in which Robert Lloyd Parry retells two of M R James's earliest and eeriest ghost stories.
Robert Lloyd Parry brings A Pleasing Terror to the Stephen Joseph Theatre on Wednesday 9 December, a one-man show retelling two of M R James's ghost stories. It's just Parry on stage, taking on the role of storyteller for a pair of the author's earliest and eeriest tales, so the whole thing rests on him carrying the stories from start to finish.
If the name doesn't ring a bell, M R James was the master of the English ghost story, and his work still holds its own more than 120 years after it first came out. He had a knack for the slow build—the kind of creeping dread that starts with a misplaced object or a strange detail and ends somewhere much darker. These two stories are from his early period, when he was first finding his voice, and they're among the most unsettling things he wrote.
A Pleasing Terror is part of Nunkie Productions' 'M R James Project', which is bringing James's ghost stories to the stage alongside H P Lovecraft's Gallery of Screams and H G Wells' The Time Machine. It's a bit of a wider project, so this isn't a standalone one-off—it's one piece of a larger run of classics being adapted for the stage.
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It's a mid-week show, on Wednesday 9 December, at the Stephen Joseph Theatre here in Scarborough. If you've got a thing for ghost stories, this is a good one to keep on your radar for December.
