Following a successful run of a dramatized version of the stories,  HAUNTED SHADOWS, in 2024, production company A Monkey with Cymbals presents a longer version featuring three chilling stories,  The Shadow, The Pavilion and  A Strange Experience at White Bear Theatre 28 January – 8 February 2025 

First question to Claire. What inspired you to create a one-person show based on Edith Nesbit’s stories?

Claire: Well, first of all, I loved her children’s books in my youth, and in adulthood I lapped up the handful of Gothic short stories that are regularly reprinted.

I also discovered that she was a fascinating person – a founder member of the Fabian Society and a committed socialist, for a start. 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 – about 60 in total, most of which have never been reprinted. She became hugely successful as a children’s writer, of course, with The Railway Children and Five Children and It being the most famous. But I noticed that in another of the children’s books, The Enchanted Castle, the nightmarish side of her work is in there too – in the form of the Ugly-Wuglies, dummies made out of household objects that are brought to life.

Then I read Eleanor Fitzsimons’ excellent biography of Nesbit, which opens with a chapter entitled The Mummies of Bordeaux – which is all about her traumatic childhood encounter with ‘natural mummies’. And at that point I knew I’d found fertile ground to create a new one-woman show. I decided that Edith would tell the audience about her childhood terrors, and while doing so would recount some of her fictional grim tales.

You noticed a local connection too, didn’t you?

Claire: Oh yes, I realised that Nesbit was born in Kennington. I’ve performed many times at the White Bear Theatre, so I knew it would be the perfect venue. Nesbit’s father (and her grandfather before him) ran an agricultural college on Kennington Lane, just five minutes’ walk from the theatre. A lovely coincidence.

Also, 2024 was the centenary of Nesbit’s death, so at Halloween we performed a shorter, one-hour version of the show at the Old Red Lion in Islington. We’ve now added an extra short story, plus a few other non-fiction Gothic titbits from Nesbit’s own life, making the White Bear version closer to 90 minutes.

Jonathan, as a director what particularly attracted you to this project?

Jonathan Rigby:  Well, quite apart from the fact that Claire is a superb actress, I’ve been a horror devotee since the age of ten, and I’ve since written several books about horror films. So it seemed like a perfect fit. I also relish the opportunity it gives us to shine a light on some neglected Gothic tales. Everybody loves M. R. James, with good reason, but sometimes the women who wrote immensely effective ghost and horror stories are overlooked. Edith Nesbit was arguably the greatest of these – and, as this show makes clear, she had plenty of traumatic childhood experiences to draw upon when writing them.

Have you also had a longtime interest in horror, Claire?

Claire: I’ve always liked ghost stories, certainly. And the various adaptations of them have always interested me too, particularly the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas films. In my family we watched all the old 1970s ones on repeat every year, on tape and then DVD. I loved them. Back then they were usually adaptations of M. R. James stories, with a Charles Dickens one thrown in.

I’d also read a lot of Nesbit’s Gothic tales and, about ten years ago, I had the idea to adapt her story The Shadow into a short film in the style of A Ghost Story for Christmas. But the script sat in a drawer gathering dust. As it happens, this was around the time that Mark Gatiss was reviving the BBC series so brilliantly – and his latest one, coincidentally, is a version of Nesbit’s Man-Size in Marble, retitled Woman of Stone. It’s a fantastic adaptation, and it’s great that Nesbit’s rather neglected Gothic works seem to be having a moment right now. In fact, there’s been a growing interest in the whole Ghost Story for Christmas tradition in recent years.

Jonathan, I believe you appeared in one of the recent BBC ghost stories?

Jonathan: That’s true, yes. I’ve known Mark for well over 30 years, right back to when we did an odd little fringe show in Little Venice and bonded over our shared interest in horror and fantasy. Quite a few times over the years we’ve discussed people like Sheridan Le Fanu and E. F. Benson and Algernon Blackwood – you know, potential alternatives to M. R. James. And just last year Mark branched out with a Conan Doyle story, in which I was very happy to do a little cameo. I was the servant-type character that so often appears in these stories – not the servant who has privileged knowledge of all the weird stuff that’s going on, more the type of servant who hasn’t a clue. So that was fun. And now Mark has just done Man-Size in Marble, which turns out to be the first horror story he ever read – and therefore a story that has a great deal to answer for! So there’s a very nice ‘something in the air’ symmetry about the fact that we’re all now sharing, quite coincidentally, in this long-overdue revival of Edith interest.

Claire, how did you go about assembling the stories included in the show?

Claire: I started with my favourite story, The Shadow. That one had to be in the mix. I needed stories with a female first-person narrator, and The Shadow is perfect for that. My brother, who’s currently compiling an anthology of Nesbit’s complete grim tales, 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. I adapted both these stories, which we put on at the Old Red Lion. The new story is called The Pavilion and was adapted by Jonathan, who’s changed it from a third-person narrative to a first-person female protagonist. The whole show is sort of interlaced with little fragments of autobiography, taken from a series of articles Edith wrote in 1893.

What can we expect from these stories, Jonathan?

Jonathan:  Well, The Shadow is a very disturbing psychological horror tale from 1905, featuring a highly unconventional and downright horrible haunting. And, as Claire says, A Strange Experience is a real scoop. It’s a lurid slice of old-school Gothic set in an old dark house, the kind of setting Claire and I very much enjoy. It was Nesbit’s first ever weird tale and was published in magazine form in 1884 – but it’s never been reprinted since. As for The Pavilion, our added story for the 2025 version of the show, that one strikes me as a real trailblazer – though I can’t specify which particular horror subgenre it blazed a trail for, as that would be a spoiler. Let’s just say it has that classic Nesbit mix of poignancy and skin-crawling nastiness. It’s from 1915, so we have a very wide 40-year spread of Nesbit’s weird fiction.

I think the show gives a really good idea, not just of her range, but also of her trademark preoccupations, because similar themes crop up in all the stories – even the autobiographical bits. Childhood fears, after all, are very individual yet also universal. And the same applies to ghost stories. I mean, we’ve used the word ‘Christmas’ quite a lot here, but it’s our belief that ghost stories aren’t just for Christmas, they’re for all the year round. So hopefully Haunted Shadows has quite a life in front of it – at any time of year.