James’ ghost stories are terrifying but 'pleasing'

9:58am Tuesday 24th October 2006

As part of an acclaimed national tour, Nunkie Theatre Company is bringing A Pleasing Terror - Two Ghost Stories by M R James to the Met in Bury.

The stories are Canon Alberic's Scrap-book and The Mezzotint.

James says: "If any of my stories succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained."

The production, to be staged on Wednesday, November 1 starting at 8pm, is the work of actor, writer and art historian Robert Lloyd Parry.

Mr Parry said: "I have always had an interest in M R James, and it's strange, but people have more than once commented on my physical resemblance to him, even before this project started.

"Over a century after their first publication, his 1904 Ghost Stories of an Antiquary remain the most admired supernatural tales in the English language.

"James first performed the stories to friends at King's College, Cambridge, where he was a Fellow and later Provost."

In Canon Alberic's scrap-book, a young Cambridge antiquary discovers the dark side of manuscript illumination, in a mediaeval town in the French Pyrenees, and in The Mezzotint, a ghoulish revenge is enacted within a work of art, before the helpless eyes of a museum curator in Oxford.

Tickets are £8 or £6. Box office: 0161 761 2215.