Gallery of Screams

Two stories of Eldritch Horror • Adapted and Performed by R M Lloyd Parry

“Any clown with a brush and a palette knife can smear paint across a canvas and call it a ‘Witches’ Sabbath or ‘Portrait of the Devil.’ But only a great artist can make it scare you…”

In these two tales of terror by H P Lovecraft, the American master of the weird tale, an art critic and a philosopher are pushed to edge of sanity by the images and sounds they confront.

Pickman’s Model introduces us to the uncannily brilliant work of the Bostonian painter Richard Upton Pickman – a genius shunned by the artistic establishment because of his sickening canvases. But where in thunder does he get his ideas from?

Lovecraft himself counted The Music of Erich Zann, another story of haunted genius, as among his best works. In Nunkie’s version, this story of an encounter between a philosopher and a musician in a shabby Parisian boarding house comes to life as an eerie prose poem, full of mystery and tension – a subtle riposte to those who dismiss its author as a mere peddlar of grand guignol effects and ancient tentacled gods.

Robert Lloyd Parry has spend the last 13 years enacting The M R James Project, a series of one-man shows based on classic English ghost stories. Here he crosses the Atlantic to pay tribute to James’s exact contemporary – a stranger, sadder man but one with an arguably even greater talent for bringing nightmares to life.

“Merciful Creator! How could the earth hold a dream like that!”

Gallery of Screams has been produced with support from Harrogate Theatre.

“Utterly mesmerizing”
- The Washington Post on The M R James Project