Dead Men’s Eyes at The Met, Bury

Dead Men’s Eyes: Two Ghost Stories by M R James at The Met, Bury, Manchester, 27 November 2019, from £13 - Book now

If it’s good enough for Mark Gatiss-directed Peter Capaldi vehicle Martin’s Close this Christmas and, er, The Archers before it (Robert Snell still can’t sleep at night after Jim regaled him with an M R James story in the bird hide at Halloween), then this double serving of the master of the English ghost story should add a chill factor to an evening out.

Tonight, R M Lloyd Parry performs two chilling and thrilling tales from Montague Rhodes James in Dead Men’s Eyes, the sixth instalment of Nunkie Theatre Company’s M R James Project. The series of one-man shows seeks to revive the tradition of oral, supernatural storytelling that was perfected by M R James in Cambridge in the years leading up to World War One.

In A View From A Hill, a pair of old binoculars reveal the grisly history of an idyllic stretch of English landscape – “Put it down, you fool! Do you want to look through a dead man’s eyes?”; while in The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas, a treasure-seeker comes face to face with unspeakable horror at the bottom of an ancient well. Don’t have nightmares…