NUNKIE THEATRE COMPANY DVDs

The DVD of the critically acclaimed one-man show "A Pleasing Terror" is now available to buy.

The DVD includes performances of "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book" and "The Mezzotint" filmed on location in Hemingford Grey Manor in Cambridgeshire.

In Canon Alberic's Scrap-book, a young Cambridge antiquary discovers the devil in the details of an old book in a medieval town in the French Pyrenees . . . In The Mezzotint a ghoulish revenge is enacted within a work of art, before the helpless eyes of a museum curator in Oxford . . .

You can order online here. All prices are inclusive of packaging and postage.

UK £13.50

Europe £14.00

Rest of World £14.50

Alternatively you can send a cheque made out to Robert Lloyd Parry for the relevant amount to Nunkie Theatre Company, 8 High Street, Great Eversden, Cambridgeshire, CB23 1HN, United Kingdom.

Please write the address for delivery on the back of the cheque.

Next year, Quis est iste qui venit?
"Oh, Whistle . . . " on DVD.

For more information please contact roblloydparry@hotmail.com or telephone at 07722 859011.

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REVIEWS

The Fortean Times
David Sutton

Many readers will be familiar with the work of Montague Rhodes James, the mediaeval scholar and Provost of Eton and King's College, Cambridge, now best remembered as the author of what many consider the finest ghost stories ever written in the English language. James, as is well known, wrote many of his exquisitely spooky tales to be read aloud among friends at Christmas Eve gatherings; and anyone who has ever sat before a winter fire and done just this knows how well-suited the stories are to such treatment (the BBC even dug up Christopher Lee to read some on telly a few Christmases back).

Robert Lloyd Parry has been touring his one-man stage shows based on MR James's stories for some years now, and this DVD captures two of them for posterity under the title A Pleasing Terror – "Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook" (see FT206:56–57) and "The Mezzotint", a pairing of two delightfully creepy tales in which James's characteristically obsessive yet naïve antiquaries come upon disturbing pictures of things that you really don’t want to see . . .

Parry, who here bears a striking resemblance to James himself, is the ideal teller for these wonderfully suggestive tales, capturing perfectly the rhythms of the author's prose, the circumlocutions that skirt the unnameable and the deceptively breezy tone that is gradually overtaken by ghastly horrors. If you haven’t read these stories, I shan’t give anything away here; and if they are – as for me – old favourites, then it’s a real pleasure seeing them read by someone who so obviously knows and loves his James.

Filmed precisely and with a minimum of fuss in the suitably atmospheric Cambridgeshire locale of Hemingford Grey Manor, this DVD reminds us that, for all the special effects and CGI we're constantly bludgeoned with in contemporary horror movies, there's not much that can compete with listening to a good ghost story by flickering candlelight – Jackanory for forteans, and highly recommended.*****

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Ghosts & Scholars
Rosemary Pardoe

Since December 2005, Robert Lloyd Parry has been giving his one-man M.R. James performances, starting with A Pleasing Terror: Two Ghost Stories by M.R. James, followed by Oh, Whistle..., and finally A Warning to the Curious, throughout the country (and occasionally outside it). A Pleasing Terror consists of narrations of "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book" and "The Mezzotint"; and Lloyd Parry has garnered enthusiastic reactions wherever he goes with both it and the follow-ups. Vast numbers of G&S Newsletter readers and contributors have got to see the three shows and told me how much they enjoyed them (see the reviews in Newsletters 11 and 14), but the only time one of them was scheduled for a venue within easy reach of me here at Chester, the performance was cancelled. I began to think I was fated never to see any of them.

Now, however, we have a permanent record of A Pleasing Terror, so that even those of us who failed to get to a live appearance need not feel left out. This 70-minute Nunkie Theatre Company DVD was recorded in Hemingford Grey Manor in Cambridgeshire (of Lucy Boston's Green Knowe fame, and where Lloyd Parry has appeared several times): the viewer is not, in fairness, shown very much at all of the house itself, but the setting is conducive to a good antiquarian atmosphere.

Since the live A Pleasing Terror has already been reviewed in the Newsletter by Katherine Haynes, and separately on the G&S web site by Laurence Staig, I don't think there's a lot I want to add to their almost uniformly favourable comments, except to say that I mostly agree with them. Lloyd Parry enacts the two stories (good choices both; especially "Canon Alberic") superbly, and with a restrained but telling use of a very limited number of props, the most important being a candle in the first tale, along with a notebook, a glass of whisky and so forth (with a cameo role for Arthur Gray's Tedious Brief Tales in "The Mezzotint"!). I'm not sure it's all exactly as MRJ would have done it, and I'm not quite in agreement with those among his audiences who have said that they could imagine they were really witnessing MRJ himself at one of his readings; but if this is a criticism, it's an entirely insignificant one. The important thing is that the production is scary where it should be scary, funny where it should be funny, and never less than compelling. "The Mezzotint" is close to perfection; "Canon Alberic" once or twice just very slightly over-dramatic for me and I'm not terribly keen on the voices used for the sacristan and his daughter.

The general presentation of the DVD is good: both the sleeve and the disc itself feature Paul Lowe's sinister illustration for "Canon Alberic" (which first appeared on the front-cover of G&S 26). There is a small amount of background information on the back of the sleeve, but unfortunately no accompanying booklet. I hope this omission might be rectified with the appearance of Robert Lloyd Parry's second DVD, containing Oh, Whistle... ("Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" and "The Ash-Tree"), which is scheduled to appear in 2010 and may be out by the time you read this. I've no doubt that it'll be every bit as good as A Pleasing Terror (although the stories aren't quite so much to my own personal taste).

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