Sleeping in a house with huge four-poster beds, the young Nesbit was terrified by the gap between bed and wall. 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.
Nesbit also wrote scores of stories for adults. She was born in , 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. It was the first horror story Nesbit wrote, collaborating with her then-husband Hubert Bland. The Shadow , first published in , 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. 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.
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