There are few better suited horror writers to be brought to the stage in an ancient academic city such as Edinburgh than M R James. The medievalist scholar and Cambridge don’s oeuvre of filling his tales with like-minded, tweed-clad, grumbling old professors encountering the ancient and extraordinary feels right at home at the Fringe; even in a sleek and more modernist venue like The Symposium.
Having taken the classic story Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad, under the more commonly and preferably simpler adapted title of Whistle and I’ll Come To You, Blue Orange Arts has also made the welcome choice of adding a tragic family element to the main character of Professor Parkins (James Nicholas), adding a thematic and potentially psychological reasoning behind the events, which was not present in the original short story.
The story follows the fiercely stoic and practical, yet recently bereaved, Professor as he heads off on an academic holiday to a seaside town. While making preliminary investigations into some mediaeval ruins for a future archaeological project, he uncovers a strange object, a whistle with curious inscriptions, and thereafter begins to be plagued by odd sounds, visions, nightmares and threatening figures seemingly following him.
Alan Groucott fills out the rest of the story’s roles, with some simple costume changes, standing in for an academic colleague, the hotel landlord and, moreover, the Professor’s chance companion in these events, a retired military man named Colonel Wilson.
Groucott and Nicholas both play their roles with a comfortable, familiar ease, as the chalk and cheese pair contend with Parkin’s stranger and stranger situation, and the play provides plenty of tension and mystery. It all winds up rather well, but the ending feels just a little less substantial than it could have been, tying aspects of the story together well, but removing some of the more uncanny elements while not fully utilising the scope of their own adaptive choices. As a result, it's just that little bit unsatisfying.
It’s still a play which manages to suffuse itself with a atmosphere of dread, but one that falls slightly short of its own ambition at the final hurdle.