Photo: Ruth Horry

REVIEWS

Oh, Whistle... Two Ghost Stories by M.R. James
Performed by Robert Lloyd Parry

THE STAGE, 29 December 2008
Evelyn Curlet

Robert Lloyd Parry brings two further MR James ghost stories to the stage in Oh Whistle, the sequel to his thrilling production A Pleasing Terror. On an intimate, candle-lit stage, ensconced in a leather armchair and surrounded by piles of books, Parry relays the tales in the style of the inimitable author himself. This is story-telling at its finest, delivered in confidence, building in pace and allowing the full horror of the imparted tale to take effect.

James’ writing is both elegant and powerful, and much credit is obviously due to the strength of the stories themselves, which have engrossed readers for more than a century. James penned one ghost story a year to perform before friends at Christmas in his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge. Parry’s triumph is in bringing the delightful but dusty language to life, animating the passages with skill and suggestion to ensure that the audience is left hanging on his every word. The first, The Ash Tree, a story of witchcraft and vengeance down the generations, has the audience so silent and intent that a large crash causes the room to jump in fright. The second, Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad, a tale of nocturnal horror on the Suffolk coast, unfolds, sending a chill down the collective spine. A pleasing addition to the tales is a strong vein of wry humour, which Parry brings out admirably. Set in the cosy confine of the Baron’s Court Theatre, Oh Whistle is a gloriously ghostly and chilling winter treat.

CHELMSFORD WEEKLY NEWS
Michael Grey

An academic snoozes in his armchair. He wakes to share with us a couple of ghost stories from the master of the genre, M R James.

R M Lloyd Parry is a consummate performer. Sticking very close to the text, he nonetheless makes each story sound fresh and spontaneous, and convinces us that we are individually his only audience.

Both stories come from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. The first, The Ash Tree, is a creepy tale of witches and revenge. The second, also set in East Anglia, is the more famous Whistle and I'll Come to You, a subtler, scarier story altogether. It was wonderful to watch Lloyd Parry make an apparition from a handkerchief, and, at the start, press his lonely supper into service as a lively High Table conversation. Best use of soup in a supporting role. There was humour, too, especially in this second piece, drawing us in to the narrative.

For atmosphere, the shadowy figure of the storyteller was lit only by a couple of candles, and although this was undeniably effective, even in the Cramphorn, we did lose some detail, and occasionally, words decayed too quickly into the darkness.

But a tour-de-force of the story-tellers art, and I'd certainly travel to hear him again, perhaps in a suitably spooky setting.

GHOSTS & SCHOLARS: THE M.R. JAMES NEWSLETTER
Roger Johnson

Within the course of just a few weeks I was fortunate enough to see three ghostly theatrical presentations: a good adaptation of The Turn of the Screw by a professional touring company, an outstanding production of Don Taylor's The Exorcism by an amateur drama group, and a no less excellent one-man show by Robert Lloyd Parry. If you saw A Pleasing Terror, Mr Lloyd Parry's first performance as M.R. James, you'll need no encouragement from me to see this second touring production; but perhaps you didn't? Very well, then...

Entering the auditorium, we can make out on the darkened stage a motionless figure in an armchair. Behind it in the gloom is a wooden hatstand, with a coat and hat hanging on it, and nearby are piles of books, and a small table, with more books, a decanter and tumbler, and a couple of candlesticks. As our eyes grow accustomed to the dimness we see that the man in the chair is unmistakably the Provost of King's College, Cambridge; he is aged about forty, so we have apparently travelled back in time to the first decade of the twentieth century. Somewhere, not too loudly, a gramophone is playing a record of traditional folk songs, but there is something just a little odd about the sound. Gradually we recognise the curiously ethereal and sexless high male tone of the counter-tenor.

As the house lights go down, part-way through the song "Black is the Colour of My True Love's Hair", Dr James stirs and awakens. He puts a match to the candles, whose uncertain light will be the only luminance for the next forty minutes. Then he pours himself a drink, perhaps to fortify his nerves against the horror of the events at Castringham Hall, and he prepares to tell us the story of "The Ash-Tree"...

Michael Hordern and, more recently, David Collings have set the standard for narrating Monty James's ghost stories. Their achievement will not, I think, be bettered in sound alone. But those friends and colleagues who were present at the first readings in the Provost's rooms were treated to more than just the telling of the stories: they experienced, as some have recorded, a performance. We've seen attempts to re-create that experience on television, with Robert Powell and Christopher Lee as James; the results were entertaining, but ultimately unconvincing. Robert Lloyd Parry, however...

To say that Robert Lloyd Parry is M.R. James, or to suggest that he's in some way possessed by the spirit of James, would be absurd. I'll just say that, while he is in character, he is completely credible as MRJ. And he too does not merely tell the great ghost stories: he performs them. Thinking about it afterwards, I am struck by the amount of preparation that has gone into Oh, Whistle.... The use of light and shadow is precisely judged. In "The Ash-Tree", with the illumination reduced to a single candle (and how many actors or directors would risk that, I wonder?), Mr Lloyd Parry's hands become the spiders that overrun Sir Richard Fell's bed: it's a very disturbing illusion. In "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad", a white linen napkin serves more convincingly than Jonathan Miller's technical trickery to conjure up the shrouded being unwittingly summoned by Professor Parkins.

A book or two is employed during the performance, which is not exactly unexpected, but rather less conventional use is made of a soup plate.

The esteemed Editor of this organ believes that "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" is grossly over-rated. Perhaps the originality of the "intensely horrible face of crumpled linen" has led many to praise the story just a little too highly, but Robert Lloyd Parry's rendition reminded me that it's not only a splendid "creeper": it's also very funny, and the humour provides a judicious contrast to the literally fearful suspense. After the interval, while the gramophone is playing the song that gives the tale its title, Mr Lloyd Parry returns to the stage carrying a soup plate, spoon and napkin, and proceeds to act the prologue - which, you'll remember, takes place "at a feast in the hospitable hall of St James's College". He finishes his soup, and puts the plate down beside his chair, and of course we promptly forget about it... until it suddenly and unexpectedly provides the sound of Parkins' makeshift screen collapsing. The shock serves as a beautifully judged false climax, breaking the tension and immediately racking it up several notches.

I had the interesting experience of seeing Oh, Whistle... twice, on successive evenings in East Anglia earlier this year. The Cramphorn Theatre in Chelmsford, built just thirty or so years ago alongside the larger Civic Theatre, had a full house on the Friday, but for some reason the audience as a whole was not receptive. There was definitely something missing. Things were different on the Saturday at the Quay Theatre in Sudbury. The Quay is a Victorian warehouse beside the River Stour, converted at about the same time that the Cramphorn was built, and it has the rich atmosphere of a much older theatre. The auditorium was perhaps three-quarters full, but everyone in the audience was with the actor right from the start. The suspense was almost tangible; the laughter was gratifyingly audible. And the management provided one little extra touch: they switched off the emergency exit lights, so that the small yellow radiance of the candles - or, for much of the time, the one candle - really was the only light. This time the experience was complete.

Those present when the Antiquary first told his ghost stories were uniquely privileged, but, thanks to Robert Lloyd Parry, we have the next best thing.

THE ORCADIAN, 1 May 2008
Peter Ford

Every now and then the Gable End Theatre manages by some miracle to bring an outstanding experience in professional theatre to Hoy, and it happened again on Friday, April 25th, with Robert Lloyd Parry¹s one-man piece of performance storytelling, realizing two of the finest ghost stories of M. R. James.

James was a distinguished academic who wrote his stories for telling at Christmas to friends and students, basing them on his deep knowledge of antiquarian documents and folk beliefs, so creating an authenticity combined with a suggestiveness to stir our primal fears in tales that have lost none of their power to unnerve in the century or so since they were first published.

He realized (unlike many today) that what we think we see out of the corner of the eye is more alarming than any head-on confrontation with supernatural horror.

On the stage at the Gable End, Robert Lloyd Parry of Nunkie Theatre Company created James’s bachelor study with the simplest props, including a table at his left elbow cluttered with decanter and glass, books and three-branched candelabra; another candle stood on a smaller table to his right; the candles provided the only light against the blacked-out stage; more books and papers scattered the floor.

He sat in an easy chair, in which the audience discovered him napping as they came into the auditorium, but was soon to wake and, in reminiscent tones, begin recounting his two chosen stories.

The first was “The Ash Tree”, concerning an aristocratic prosecutor at the seventeenth-century witch trials, who attracts a grisly fate to himself and his heir a generation later from the curse of a hanged victim, whose eight-legged familiars take up residence in the ash tree outside his bedroom window.

The second was the famous “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, the tale of Professor Parkins who, on holiday on the east coast, discovers an ancient whistle in his probings at the site of a ruined chapel, blows it out of curiosity and summons up both a wind and a revenant that invades the spare bed of his hotel room and, at the climax, fashions itself a body out of the sheets.

Lloyd Parry’s enactment of these events was utterly hypnotic, holding the audience in thrall, using his face in profile, first one way then the other, in the candlelight, his hands creating expressive shadows across the auditorium walls and ceiling; then dousing the candles till only one remained in the reduced pool of light, or startling our nerves with a sudden clatter of falling furniture.

The modulations of his performance, word perfect and finely balanced, moving from humour to fright, made this a hugely enjoyable entertainment a piece of elegant theatre, as a fellow audience member whispered in my ear, and essential viewing for all those who have even the most modest interest in the craft of acting.

Normally you would need to travel at least as far as Aberdeen or Inverness to catch anything as fine, and it would still be doubtful if it could look as good as it did in the intimate space of the Gable End.

SUFFOLK FREE PRESS
Mary Dunk

The creepy old Suffolk houses lurking in M R James' ghost stories, providing gloomy backdrops for seriously scary hauntings and happenings, are uncomfortably close in this production.

R M Lloyd Parry re-tells the two stories 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad', and 'The Ash Tree', in an electrifying solo performance.

Victorian readers thrilled to this type of story, narrated by a learned gentleman character, who assures his audience that he has heard the tale from elsewhere. Spooky events, redolent of past wrongdoings, witnessed by respectable Bishops or retired Colonel characters, never failed to seize the imagination.

R M Lloyd Parry's mastery of this genre is superb. Speaking from the depths of a fireside armchair, the stage barely lit by four candles, he is every inch the learned scholar sharing his tales with us. The few props required are within arms' reach – table, books, but are not entirely visible, their presence suggested rather than realised. As with the props, so the stories.

'Oh Whistle..' recounts the amateur efforts of a Cambridge professor who, intending to practise his golf in a remote Suffolk coastal spot literally falls into the ruins of a forgotten Templar church. Poking around, he just happens to find something resembling a whistle, which he just happens to blow on return to his hotel in the shadowy evening. Trying to ignore the shadowy figure chasing him across the lonely, windswept beach, he falls victim to terrible nightmares and ghastly goings on. The full cast of rattling window panes and night storms reinforce the haunting quality of this tale. Lloyd Parry's rendition would have done credit to the master himself.

The eponymous Ash Tree grows, of course, just too close to a country house which has seen better days. The third generation owner pays too little respect to local tales of the past, and has the grave of a suspected witch disturbed with building works at the Church. Lloyd Parry enlivens the conversational, fireside tone with the voices of the different characters. They all knew, as we did, that no good would come of it, but Sir Richard thought better and was dead the next day. The never fully answered endings to both stories hang uncomfortably in the imagination.

What a pleasure to listen to such an accomplished storyteller in the intimacy of the Quay Theatre. Even those cynics who dismiss the supernatural should check that the window's shut before retiring for the night. Just in case.

For reviews of A Pleasing Terror, please click here.