By William Triplett
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Robert Lloyd Parry, itinerant British performer and learned devotee of ghost stories, hopes Washington audiences love a good supernatural tale. Or that they at least have a good healthy fear of them.
Parry, who performs tonight in the restored 19th-century rowhouse called Corner Store near Eastern Market, bases his one-man show on the ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James, the British writer who is esteemed as a master of the genre. (Oh, and did we mention the rowhouse at Ninth and South Carolina Avenue SE, according to its owners, was once the site of a murder?)
In his show, Parry tries to channel James, who wrote his peculiarly disturbing stories to be read aloud and who made a ritual of reading a new one to friends and colleagues at Cambridge University every year. Dressed like an Edwardian don, working by candlelight, Parry dramatically narrates a pair of stories for audiences very similar to how the author did.
"People do still find M.R. James scary," says Parry, 37. "I wonder if he doesn't tap into some deep-seated fears. I mean, reduced to their most basic, James's stories are about a very familiar world into which something monstrous breaks through momentarily. I suppose anyone could have that fear."
Parry's piece is not entirely original. In the 1980s, the BBC broadcast actor Robert Powell did readings of James's stories. But unlike Powell -- and James, for the matter -- Parry doesn't read from manuscripts, having memorized the tales. His storytelling, which he has toured successfully, has developed a cult following in the United Kingdom, and even netted him a Hamilton Deane award from the Dracula Society.
"Most readers today probably don't know James," Parry says, "but there is a large minority that still does." In England, he's never been out of print since his first published collection in 1904. "And I've never known anyone who's read him and not liked him. To read him is to be very fond of him indeed."
Parry first encountered James's stories courtesy of his father, who gave him a collection more than 20 years ago. "I was into Sherlock Holmes at the time, so it fit right in." But the tales didn't have an enduring effect until after he'd finished studying classics at Oxford and found himself working at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
"After working there a couple years, I learned James had been the museum director around 1900 when he first wrote stories," Parry says. A medieval scholar who worked on rare manuscripts, James was widely known and respected. In the museum, he had an office -- essentially a Victorian library -- where he likely wrote some of his stories and definitely read them aloud to a coterie of other scholars.
"There are descriptions of the readings that, after chapel, drinks would be flowing in his room, all his mates were there, and he'd come in with a sheaf of manuscripts and blow out all candles except one -- then just sit reading his story," Parry says.
Re-reading the stories, Parry was struck by James's elegant and slightly archaic prose; the authoritative use of historical and scholarly facts; the casual, seemingly mundane world that gradually -- then suddenly -- becomes creepy, menacing.
As in "Casting the Runes," when a man can't sleep because of odd sounds in his house. He decides to check the time by reaching for the watch under his pillow. But he finds something else, James writes: "What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being."
"James said reticence was most important thing in a ghost story," Parry says. "Something is always being held back or happening just out of eyeshot." But James, who believed ghosts should be "odious and malevolent," ultimately delivers.
"There's just a great control of style," Parry says, "an effortless ability to turn a phrase and to structure a story -- the great originality of the imagination, and it's all perfectly timed. A lot of them are like very well-told jokes, but instead of making you laugh, they give you a shiver."
In December 2005, the Fitzwilliam Museum planned a special exhibition of medieval manuscripts that James had catalogued. As a complement, Parry offered to perform as James, reading two of his stories to an audience in his office. The museum agreed.
"I was confident they could be performed as monologues, because that's how they were written, which is perhaps what sets them apart from other ghost stories," Parry says.
The performance was a hit. "Lloyd Parry restores the charm and pleasure of the original tales with his excellent and convincing storytelling," the Cambridge Evening News wrote.
Parry landed a three-week slot at a fringe theater in London. Eventually, audiences raved and he began to book the show into pretty much any venue in Britain that would have him.
Last November, he was invited to perform in Saratoga Springs, Fla., at the World Fantasy Convention. More applause, as well as an invitation to perform this year at a small theater -- "tiny," Parry says -- in New York. The Washington dates were an add-on to the New York run, which he is just about to finish.
"We're more an art salon than a theater," says Kris Swanson, an artist who, with husband Roy Mustelier, owns the Corner Store. "But Robert's show is a good fit."
The Corner Store is a grand brick structure at the end of a line of rowhouses. Since its construction in 1870, it has been split between business space on the ground floor and living space above. In 1968, it was a family corner store, as it always had been in one form or another, when an attempted robbery went bad and an employee reportedly was shot to death.
"The family boarded it up and it stayed that way until 2001, when we bought it," Swanson says. Today, the ground floor is a neighborhood gallery with one large room of exposed brick and hardwood floor serving as an occasional performance space capable of seating about 60 people. It's here that Parry will tell two of James's tales -- "The Ash Tree" and "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" -- by candlelight.
Wine and light fare also will be on hand. Maybe even a real ghost or two?
Asked whether he believed they existed, James, reticent as always, said only, "Depend upon it, but we do not know the rules."
Robert Lloyd Parry will perform tonight at 7:30 at Corner Store, 900 South Carolina Ave. SE. $15 in advance, $20 at the door. 202-544-5807.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.