COLD TO THE TOUCH
Adapted from the stories of M.R. James
(originally titled AN UNSETTLING EVENING)
Cold To The Touch is a deliberately lean and
sparse theatrical production that adapts five of M.R. James’ most famous short ghost
stories and plays them out in a single production of atmospheric chills,
heart-stopping shocks and slow-burning dread.
It will be masterclass in creating mood and
hair-raising tension, telling tales where that which is not seen, is infinitely more chilling than that which is.
Cold To The Touch will
take audiences out of the comfortable world of the logical, technological and
pragmatic, and return them to the childhood fears that hide inside all of us
until brought out by the right circumstances.
The five short stories chosen to be adapted
are;
CANON
ALBERIC’S SCRAPBOOK: An English amateur
archeologist travels to a remote cathedral in France in search of artifacts to
outdo his similarly-motivated friends.
As night falls, eerie, mocking laughter arouses his interest in the
building, and a pale and nervous verger shows him a book that suggests an
unpleasant possibility as to the culprit.
A
WARNING TO THE CURIOUS: A young History student of good background has squandered his
inheritance money on the fast life in London.
He arrives in the English seaside town of Seaburg with the aim of
replenishing his fortune by digging up the legendary third crown of East
Anglia, buried somewhere on the coastline. Unfortunately for him, he will be
successful.
NUMBER
13: A traveling
academic staying in Room 14 at a Denmark hotel, finds the quaint national
tradition of having no rooms numbered 13 to be amusing….until the room beside
his becomes occupied in the night-time hours by more than the salesman staying
in Room 12
OH
WHISTLE AND I’LL COME TO YOU MY LAD: A schoolteacher, holidaying upon the desolate
beaches of Burnstow, discovers an antiquated whistle whilst poking amongst a
ruined Templar abbey. Blowing the
whistle attracts to him the increasingly undesirable attention of….something.
CASTING
THE RUNES.
When a magazine editor refuses to publish the disturbing articles of a
local self-professed master of the occult, he finds himself in mysterious
possession of a slip of paper bearing strange Runic symbols and the English
words…’Seven days are allowed’. From
then on, he cannot escape the rising feeling that he is being followed…and not
by a man.
In an era of smartphones, the Human
Genome Project and The God Delusion, Cold To The Touch escorts the
unsuspecting audience back to a time and place they had forgotten. It will be an unsettling return, but a memorable
one.
-
Andrew Hawcroft.
Copyright ©Andrew Hawcroft 08/01/2010
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