The Shadow in the Dark – The Banshee Labyrinth, Edinburgh
Edith Nesbit is best known as a writer of children’s fiction, but alongside her classic novels such as The Railway Children, she explored a variety of genres, including horror. The Shadow in the Dark is comprised of spoken word adaptations of several such stories, told by a trio of actors.
Edith (Rebecca Hale) sits at a wax cylinder machine, surrounded by candles. She speaks into the recording device, telling us of her memories of childhood, and of how she became afraid of the dark.
Hale’s Edith speaks in the way I always imagined she would. In her crisp accent, she is soothing and deliberate. She gives the impression that she is telling a bedtime story, but the atmosphere is sinister. In The Mummies at Bordeaux, she tells of a creepy childhood encounter in a charnel house, th...