Visits from the Darkness

Performed by GERARD LOGAN Directed by GARETH ARMSTRONG Music by SIMON SLATER Nighttime…and something very particular happens. We all fear the monsters of our imaginings to be lurking in the darkness; under our beds or behind the curtain. Patient, malevolent, supernatural. Most terrifyingly, we know that our own terror may summon these creatures out of our imaginings and into flesh. Visits from the Darkness is an evening which explores this phenomenon. In Charles Dickens' The Signalman a visitor to an isolated railway cutting engages in conversation with the man responsible for safety on the line. He listens with disbelief as the signalman relates his terrifying encounters with a spectral figure, whose appearances seem to presage horrendous and tragic accidents. FP McGreal's The Cabinet of Cruelty is set in the days when the wireless was pre-eminent. A grandiose, prickly writer-broadcaster, Granville Cedric Hampton, is terrified when a fictional character he has created starts to maraud him with nightly visits, pleading with Hampton to go no further with his current story. These pleas are dismissed…with catastrophic consequences.