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RM Lloyd Parry performs MR James’s ghost stories |
A dose of the winter chills is just the thing
Antonia Quirke feels a chill down her spine as she hears ghost stories read by actor Robert Lloyd Parry
THE first thing you notice about the actor Robert Lloyd Parry is not so much his height – he’s enormous – but his skin, which has a finish of ivory, the skin of someone who sits indoors leaning up against defunct radiators, occasionally opening a window to scrape out a pipe.
When he performs two ghost stories, Cannon Alberic’s Scrap-book and The Mezzotint, by Edwardian academic M R James on stage at the Hampstead Theatre over Christmas and New Year, this skin of his, lit only by candles, radiates as though undergoing some secret chemistry, as luminous as the stories.
“James composed them not initially for print but to read out loud to his friends in King’s College Cambridge, usually at Christmas” Lloyd Parry says at a pub in Kentish Town where he sits in a coat of colossal dimensions.
“And they’re essentially dramatic monologues. I think certainly the eight that make up his first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, published in 1904, have an oral feel to them. Friends record what a brilliant raconteur and hilarious mimic James was.
“He would apparently have his scholarly chums in stitches with his impersonations of Suffolk tradesmen, and fellow dons. So I’ve left the texts of both stories pretty much as James wrote them – the asides, the descriptions, the dialogue, they all work well spoken out loud.”
James read his first ever story, Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book – about an academic who travels to the Pyrenees and encounters a creature in a black cloak – to the Chit Chat Society, a group of mainly old Etonians, at Cambridge, on October 28, 1893.
But it became a Christmas tradition. The bachelor dons left behind in college after Michaelmas term would gather in his rooms and listen, with varying degrees of interest, to James as he read his freshly penned horrors by the light of a single candle.
Lloyd Parry has actually learnt the stories by heart, but the atmosphere he evokes on stage is very much that of the Edwardian don’s study. He performs with an insistent, absorbed tenderness. Why this enthusiasm for James? “My dad lent me an old copy of the collected ghost stories when I was 14 and I was seduced by the world in which the stories are set as much as the extraordinary events that takes place in them,” he says.
“I still am a bit of a sucker for tweed overcoats, damp churches and solitary jaunts to the Norfolk coast. Then I found out about James’s life beyond his ghost stories.
“He was a great medieval scholar who spent much of his working life in King’s College Cambridge and had actually been the director of the Fitzwilliam museum, where I once worked, at the time that he first started writing his stories.
“And on rereading them I admired them more than ever – his scholarly background adds massively to the charm and effectiveness of the stories.”
Ah yes, the medieval… It is everything to James. We hear of demons. Things bent on settling a score. Things under pillows and things sitting up unexplained from beds, things with fingers like sticks and mouths that suck away at fabric, things with one tooth and a shallow jaw, things you’d never ever want to meet.
James took all this from the illuminated manuscripts he catalogued. “These books are beautiful works of religious art but they are full of medieval weirdness too – hairy monsters with faces in their backsides, harpies in the margins, zombies chasing knights on horseback in the offices of the dead.
Though he writes what are called ghost stories, ghosts as we understand them – spirits of the dead who return to earth – don’t occur that often in James. The American phrase ‘weird literature’ perhaps covers the genre better.
Because more often than not they are demons or spirits of vengeance. In Canon Alberic’s scrap-book the climax is provided by a figure straight out of the apocryphal Old Testament, a body of work that James translated and edited.
For something to be truly scary it helps if you can believe in the possibility of its being true, and James uses all his academic ammunition to persuade the reader or listener that what he tells us is factual.
So in Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book he uses his skills as an art historical cataloguer to great effect in describing a picture of King Solomon confronted by a demon of the night. And this prepares us for… well… I’d sooner not say. No, please don’t push me on this…” (At this point a shadow falls across Lloyd Parry’s wide brow and he is silent for some 20 minutes, before slipping away into the thick yellow fog that has suddenly filtered into the pub, bringing with it a slight smell of mould, and an even fainter haze).
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