Today I had the privilege of sitting in on the first rehearsals for my play, ‘The Haunting of Exham Priory’ with Rumpus Theatre Company (@RumpusTheatreCo on Twitter). It was a lot of fun to see the process of rehearsing, and very exciting to see the play finally being performed in front of me, rather than just in my head. I also had to, quite understandably, provide some input on the pronunciation of the more esoteric words from Lovecraft’s lexicon.

Devising minor edits on the fly was a new and interesting writing challenge. My writing style is best described as “slow and steady”, but I had to think fast today when the need arose to make changes to lines that didn’t quite sound right when read aloud.

As I said, an interesting challenge, but I think I just about managed to cope!

David Gilbrook as Mr Delapore and Nicholas Bourne as Captain Norrys.

I’ve just been trying to write a few lines of background about HP Lovecraft and ‘The Haunting of Exham Priory’ for the show program. It wasn’t easy to put everything succinctly, but this is what I came up with…

Howard Philip Lovecraft was a 20th century American horror writer, most famous for his short stories The Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness. ‘The Haunting of Exham Priory’ is based on Lovecraft’s story The Rats in the Walls. Written and set in 1923, it was first published in the March 1924 edition of the horror magazine ‘Weird Tales’.
Although Lovecraft only achieved real fame posthumously, The Rats in the Walls received much acclaim when it was published. Years later, Lovecraft wrote that the story was “suggested by a very commonplace incident — the cracking of wall-paper late at night, and the chain of imaginings resulting from it.”

I spotted the poster for my play in the foyer of the Pomegranate Theatre in Chesterfield when I was there at the weekend. It’s now my general life goal to increase the number of public buildings where my name appears on the wall (excluding police stations and halls of remembrance).

I was there to see ‘Raffles: The mystery of the murdered thief’ by Rumpus Theatre Company which was highly entertaining and well worth catching while it’s on tour.