Claire Louise Amias and Jonathan Rigby discuss Haunted Shadows at Grimfest 2024
Edith Nesbit may be best known for her children’s books, especially the classic The Railway Children, but maybe less well known is that she also wrote four collections of ghost stories. It’s these that Claire Louise Amias has mined to pull out two dark and contrasting stories that shine a light on the overlooked works of the well known writer to create Haunted Shadows: The Gothic Tales of Edith Nesbit, which will be coming to Old Red Lion Theatre as part of this year’s Grimfest
We caught up with Claire, along with director Jonathan Rigby, during rehearsals to discuss the allure of gothic storytelling, the complexities of Edith Nesbit’s character, and the timeless appeal of horror in theatre, and how they have turned these into the eerie world of this chilling one-woman show.
A spooky welcome to you both, shall we begin with some introductions.
CLA: Hello, my name is Claire Louise Amias and I’m the performer and adaptor of the show. I’m co-artistic director of the production company, A Monkey With Cymbals.
JR: And I’m Jonathan Rigby, the director of Haunted Shadows: The Gothic Tales of Edith Nesbit. I’m also an actor and horror critic / historian.
CLA: We’re performing the show at the Old Red Lion Theatre near Angel tube station in London. It’s a really atmospheric and historic pub, which is rumoured to be haunted.
JR: We’re appearing as the final show of Grimfest – a month-long festival of horror theatre. So it’s the perfect place for us to launch Haunted Shadows.
What can audiences expect from the show?
JR: Everybody loves MR James, with good reason, but sometimes the women who wrote immensely effective ghost and horror stories are overlooked. Edith Nesbit was pre-eminent among these – and, as this show makes clear, she had plenty of traumatic childhood experiences to draw upon when writing them. In addition to these fragments of autobiography, the show comprises two widely contrasted tales. The Shadow (1905) is a highly disturbing psychological horror,and A Strange Experience (1884), which has never been reprinted, is an old-school, necrophilic Gothic tale. We also explore Nesbit’s traumatic childhood, which influenced her writing.
What inspired the creation of Haunted Shadows?
CLA: I wanted to create a new one-woman show after the success of my previous one, The Masks of Aphra Behn, which enjoyed two tours and receiving an Off West End ‘Off Comm’ award. In my family, A Ghost Story for Christmas was always a festive tradition, and one year my brother presented me with a collection of Edith Nesbit’s Gothic short stories. I was hooked. I adapted The Shadow into a short film script about ten years ago, but it sat in a drawer gathering dust. Recently it occurred to me, while reading a biography of Nesbit, that the links between her troubled childhood and her dark tales would be an interesting subject for a new theatrical show. My brother had uncovered A Strange Experience in his research at the British Library, and when I read it I found that it not only had a female narrator but was rich and Gothic and extremely dark. So Haunted Shadows was born.
Claire, what drew you to play Edith Nesbit?
CLA: Edith Nesbit is the narrator in Haunted Shadows, and she becomes her various characters as she tells the stories. Nesbit herself was an intriguing character. A founder member of the Fabian Society and a committed socialist, she wrote to earn a living, and her early works were mainly short stories and poems published in magazines. Many of them were Gothic tales. She became hugely successful as a children’s writer, of course, with The Railway Children and Five Children and It being the most famous. In The Enchanted Castle the nightmarish side of her work is explored through the Ugly-Wuglies – dummies made out of household objects that are brought to life.
At the height of her success she held frequent house parties with well-known writer friends in attendance, people like George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells. There are many accounts of Nesbit and her guests playing charades and various party games. So Haunted Shadows is set during an abstracted version of a party game – the theme being ‘the first thing that frightened you’.
In her writing Nesbit also explored the strange triangular love affair between her husband, Hubert, and Alice, the woman who was his lover. She had two children by Hubert and they all lived with Edith, who brought up the children as her own. This peculiar situation, perhaps shot through with buried resentment, is explored in The Shadow.
What has been the biggest challenge in this role?
CLA: Edith is an extremely complex character – part childish and impetuous bon vivant, part traumatised Gothic storyteller. Also, as with many one-person shows, the challenge is in switching roles. In a comic character – as with my last show, The Masks of Aphra Behn – the switch can be used to humorous effect. The trick in Haunted Shadows is to make it chilling and, hopefully, simpler. Also, when dealing with a character witnessing a supernatural event, the onus is much less on emotion-memory and lived experience, and more on digging deep into your imagination.
Jonathan, as the director, what’s your favourite element of the show?
JR: Well, I’ve been a horror devotee since I was ten (a very long time ago) – so I guess the show’s horror element would qualify here. I’ve written several books on horror cinema – books like English Gothic, American Gothic and Euro Gothic – and even a stage adaptation of Dracula. Where ghosts are concerned, I acted in a lovely part-animated film several years back called Borley Rectory (Claire was in that too, actually), and also in last year’s instalment of the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas series. So basically this show couldn’t be more up my street if it tried.
What has been the biggest challenge in realising the vision of the show?
JR: Conjuring the fear and the period flavour. Always a marvellous combination, and lovely when you get it right.
Is this going to be the show’s first time on stage?
JR: Oh yes, this is the world premiere of Haunted Shadows: The Gothic Tales of Edith Nesbit.
Do you have any plans for what comes next after the show’s run?
JR: We already have plans to transfer the show to The White Bear in Kennington in 2025! It will run for two weeks from 27th January to 8th February.
What do you hope the audience thinks after watching the show?
CLA: I’d love for audiences to reassess Edith Nesbit’s body of work. Most people only know her for her children’s stories, but she wrote some dark, powerful gothic tales. I hope people will appreciate the full scope of her writing.
Thanks to Claire and Jonathan for chatting with us. Haunted Shadows: The Gothic Tales of Edith Nesbit will being playing at the Old Red Lion Theatre between the 28th and 31st October, part of the Grimfest season. Further information and tickets are available here.