Writer: Edith Nesbit (adapted by Claire Louise Amias)
Director: Jonathan Rigby
Invoking the dead silences of “the long, dark nights when I was little”, Haunted Shadows links the childhood terrors and adult work of prolific author Edith Nesbit. Did those times, when she was “lonely, and very very much afraid”, shape the author’s imagination? Sleeping in a house with huge four-poster beds, the young Nesbit was terrified by the gap between bed and wall. She saw it as “a dark space, from which, even now in the black silence, something might be stealthily creeping”.
Frightening voids and absences feature throughout the ingenious web of stories in this spooky one-woman show. Below the Gothic paraphernalia of dim lamplight and creeper-covered buildings, lurk sinister psychological undertones. Not all tales of fear involve ghosts, Edith Nesbit reminds us at the start of her story A Strange Experience. Some of them deal with the “ghoulish nature of the living”.
Best known for popular children’s books like The Railway Children, The Story of the Treasure Seekers and Five Children and It, E. Nesbit also wrote scores of stories for adults. She was born in 1858, not far from the White Bear Theatre, where the play is staged. Claire Louise Amias plays Nesbit, brilliantly mixing narrative verve with an undertow of dread and crawling malice. Claire’s brother Elliott Amias, who is compiling and annotating a complete volume of Nesbit’s Gothic tales and verse, discovered A Strange Experience in his research at the British Library. It was the first horror story Nesbit wrote, collaborating with her then-husband Hubert Bland. Published in Longman’s Magazine in 1884, it has never yet been reprinted.
Haunted Shadows knits together creepy memories from Nesbit’s own autobiography with three of her most disturbing stories. The Shadow, first published in 1905, is a compelling tale of menace and memory. The narrator is a lonely housekeeper and we gather, through fleeting asides, that her best friend and lover had married each other. “This is not a rounded-off ghost story,” she explains at the start, but the gaps in her narrative become more chilling as the listeners’ imaginations fill them in.
The evocative soundscape for Haunted Shadows, designed by Keri Chesser, variously includes music and chatter, steam trains or birdsong, bees over a summer lawn, a horse-drawn hansom cab, or the ghostly sounds in a mysterious Tudor pavilion at night time. The unearthly sighs of the dark entity at the heart of The Shadow were recorded by James Swanton, another excellent performer of classic ghost stories.
Over her black silk dress, Amias adds a crocheted shawl to become the housekeeper or a green sash and white corsage for the party-going young woman in The Pavilion. With a velvet cape, lace scarf and newspaper, she is the narrator of A Strange Experience answering an advert for a companion and heading for a suitably remote and terrifying mansion. Amias showcases Nesbit’s range and skill as a pioneering writer of uncanny stories. Jonathan Rigby’s direction brings out all the sinister whispers in the background of these well-constructed tales.
Runs until 8 February 2025