- Location: By Crieff, Perthshire, PH7 3RF
- Opening times: Wednesday to Saturday 10.00am – 5.00pm, and on Sunday 2.00pm – 5.00pm. CLOSED Mondays and Tuesdays, and from November to February inclusive.
- Entry: Adults £10.00, under 16s free.
- Access: Parking onsite
Annie and I visited the fabulous Library of Innerpeffray in the dying days of October, just prior to it closing for the winter season. However, it still hosts the occasional special event between now and its March reopening, so here we are back again to see the Nunkie Theatre production Not Dead Yet, a reading of three tales by the generally acknowledged master of the English ghost story, M. R. James (1862 – 1036).
James was an acclaimed mediaeval scholar who served as provost first of King’s College, Cambridge (1905 – 1918) and then Eton College (1918 – 1936), but it is for his ghost stories that he best remembered. They began life as Christmas Eve entertainments James would read to colleagues and select students at Cambridge and Eton and were later published in a series of collections beginning with 1904’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Like countless others I first became an M. R. James in the 1970s courtesy of the BBC adaptations of his stories in their Ghost Story for Christmas strand.
As far as I can tell Nunkie Theatre is a one-man band called Robert Lloyd Parry, who plays the part of James and recreates those Christmas Eves past by reading his stories by candlelight. Sadly, this means that the event doesn’t take place in the library itself, the combination of rare books and candles considered potentially even worse than that of Metallica and Lou Reed.
The adjacent Victorian Schoolroom, built in 1846, served as the venue for the event. It held perhaps fifty people and appeared to be a sellout. The tales told were ‘The Tractate Middoth’, ‘Rats’, and ‘An Evening’s Entertainment’. The first two were excellent, but ‘An Evening’s Entertainment’ isn’t one of James’s best and I tend to recoil when grown men imitate the voices of grandmothers and their young grandchildren. That aside, Robert Lloyd Parry was excellent, a wonderful storyteller and a gifted actor who brought a great deal of warmth and humour to these spine chillers. Anyone interested in attending one of his performances can check out dates at the Nunkie Theatre website here.
Destination or diversion?
I’m calling this particular trip a destination, as it was a specific event consisting of two halves lasting approximately 45 minutes each with an interval of 20 minutes. The Library of Innerpeffray’s schedule of events is here.
