If you’re looking for some Halloween fun, why not join the Penny Blood Radio Theatre at the Omnibus Theatre on Halloween night? There will be two tales of the occult, presented in the style of a 1940s radio broadcast, and energized by live Foley sound effects. This event grew out of the Tales from the Penny Bloods, an audio play podcast developed by Julia Warren and Arnold Schmidt, based on our mutual interest in nineteenth-century fiction.
The programme will feature two plays: The Elixir of Life and The Green House.
The Elixir of Life is based on a comic play by William Bayle Bernard from 1833: ‘Professor Augustus Mondragon is an avid collector of antiquities – including Egyptian mummies! The prize of his collection is a sarcophagus – alas, it is empty! But Sir Charles has a mummy to spare – in exchange for a bride….’
From magic potions and Egyptian mummies to classic haunted houses : The Green House is adapted from Allen Upward’s ‘The Story of the Green House, Wallington’, the first of a series of ghost tales published 1905-1906 in The Royal Magazine. It introduces the ghost-hunting duo Hargreaves and Miss Alwynne Sargent; by day, house estate agent and secretary respectively; by night (when the ghosts come out to play), ghost detective and psychic medium. Instead of seances and trances, Miss Sargent communicates with the Other World while she is asleep, often sleep-walking her way to clues and solutions.
They figure among early psychic detectives in fiction, followed in 1913 by Wiliam Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki. When it came to adapting the stories for audio, I saw an opportunity of bringing in more characters with similar tastes, to make a team of three: Hargreaves the house agent, at heart a sceptic; Carnacki the debunker of the supernatural; and Miss Sargent, a psychic ‘sensitive’.
With them they bring their own network of colleagues, friends and relatives: Mortimer, fellow house agent, Miss Sargent’s mother and aunt, occasionally Carnacki’s mother, and of course, Mr Tibbs, ghost hunter cat by default.
The Green House is an affectionate tongue-in-cheek adaptation: it contains the traditional haunted house: (What is its secret? Why has it changed hands so many times?), with a phantom Cavalier at Aunt Sargent’s thrown into the mix – and will Hargreaves have jam on his waistcoat again?
Allen Upward’s stories were originally introduced as ‘… a New Series of exciting Ghost Stories. They are entirely Different in Conception from Anything of the Kind that has ever been Published before.’ And they are different – neither Victorian gothic or sentimental, nor modern horror, they sit very well in the realm of fin-de-siècle uncanny, eerie, and haunting fiction, while maintaining a romantic charm that develops with each successive tale. The first two stories have been adapted (Green House,Tapping on the Wainscot) with a third due out later this year, which combines Upward’s ‘Secret of Horner’s Court’ with Hodgson’s ‘Searcher of the End House’.
We’ve had fantastic fun working with the cast who have brought boundless energy, experience and enthusiasm to the project. Our Halloween show features Lucy Archer-Woodcock (The Canterbury Tales, Gaslight), Jonathan Brandt (BBC Radio 4’s Home Front, A Deed Without a Name), Kait Feeney (A Quiet Place: Day One, The Fall of Orfeo), Jason Greenwood (Inheritance, Monster Awakens), Steff Knappe (Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphosis), and John Martin (Terror, The Producers)
The Green House was first broadcast on KCBP Radio as part of the Pacifica Network in 2023, before being uploaded to the Penny Bloods Podcast channel on Youtube, where it garnered over 5,000 views within the first month. It has picked up a few awards as well, and we’re looking forward to bringing it to London at the Omnibus theatre.
Allen Upward
Poet, novelist, playwright, barrister, defender of nationalist causes and, for a short time, publisher – George Allen Upward, despite his considerable output and presence in the latter part of the ‘long century’, was something of an obscurity for much of the twentieth. His works range from philosophical to speculative, from political and visionary to the supernatural and science-fiction; he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Bernard Shaw, Jerome K. Jerome, and W.B. Yeats and exchanged letters with such as Augustus John, Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain, and Lloyd George – yet today, he is barely noted in the publishing world beyond the set of ghost stories ‘The Ghost Hunters’, and even those are rarely seen in their complete form. Tales from the Penny Bloods Podcast aims to lift the veil of obscurity from the works of this forgotten literary genius.
Performance 31/10 @ 19:00. Tickets @ https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/penny-bloods.
