A PLEASING TERROR. To 6 January.
London
A PLEASING TERROR
by M R James
New End Theatre 27 New End NW3 1JD To 6 January 2007
Tue-Sat 9.45pm
31 Dec 8pm
Runs 1hr 30min One interval
TICKETS: 0870 033 2733
www.newendtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 December
A darkened room, a comfortable chair, a single malt to hand, would be perfectly complemented by these dark tales well-told.
It’s not necessary to be a ghost-story fan to like M R James’ tales, which form an especial corner of the genre’s chamber. These Victorian and Edwardian tales inhabit dark, candlelit stairways, empty churches or ancient colleges. The supernatural emerges gradually from a world of academics, clergy and antiquarians (many of his tale-bearers fitting more than one such description).
Both stories in Robert Lloyd Parry’s performance emerge from a love of the antique, not unalloyed by keenness to discover material of value. The desire for some rare French volume occasions Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook; an antiquarian dealer’s catalogue begins the grim events recounted in The Mezzotint.
Parry’s lit by just 3 candles (gradually diminishing to one) in the first story, one side of his face continuously in the dark. For the second, one candle shines each side of the leather armchair where he sits. Around, half-seen, half-suggested are objects any of which might have their own ghostly tale to tell.
Parry goes a considerable step better than the author, who read his stories to friends, by memorising them. He neatly contrasts the style of telling. For the first, his surprisingly light-toned voice (no deep macabre tones and ultimately the eerier for it), has a sustained manner, heightened only by Parry’s fingers flickering over the candle-flame in a sinister echo of events being described.
If Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook came out of James’ visit to France, The Mezzotint has an Oxford setting related to his work at that university’s Bodleian Library. But James was a Cambridge man, and director of that university’s Fitzwilliam Museum; his narrator can scarcely bring himself to mention Oxford by name. There are several such glimpses of humour in this later piece and an aptly more forthright, tonally varied manner to Parry’s account of the mysterious re-enactment of grim events depicted in the title illustration.
James knew how to develop a sense of horror and fear out of the regular lifestyle and rational-seeming world of his main characters. Parry respects the stories, never seeking gratuitous effects and containing the ghostly crescendo within the world-view of each narrator.
A Pleasing Terror can be booked for private functions; anyone with the funds to splash out and looking for a Victorian/Edwardian themed event with a literary flavour, could do worse than consider this show. Parry can be contacted at: roblloydparry@hotmail.com.
Performer: R M Lloyd Parry
2006-12-24 22:19:28