Janie Dee has had to withdraw from the production of The Haunting of Alice Bowles for personal reasons, but the producers, Original Theatre Company, have announced that Tamzin Outhwaite will now be playing the titular character in this new supernatural thriller by Philip Franks, adapted for the first time from the M.R. James chilling short ghost story, The Experiment.
Original Theatre Company has already produced the critically acclaimed lockdown productions of Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong Online, Louise Coulthard’s Watching Rosie and the new commission by Torben Betts, Apollo 13: The Dark Side of The Moon. The Haunting of Alice Bowles is the company’s fourth original online production since theatres were closed by the Government in March this year. It will be available to watch via originaltheatreonline.com from 7.30pm on 17 December 2020 until 28 February 2021.
In 1918, the recently widowed Alice Bowles is left destitute as she seeks to solve a mystery left by her late husband Francis. Moving to 2020, YouTube urban explorers Matt and Caitlin uncover a mysterious grave in an abandoned churchyard. What starts as harmless entertainment soon turns darker when their discovery begins to unwrap a mystery which has lain dormant for over a century.
Philip Franks said: “I’ve loved M. R. James ever since I was terrified by ‘Whistle and I’ll Come To You’ on the BBC in 1968. A series of brilliantly subtle and scary adaptations of his ghost stories were a highlight of Christmas viewing for many years. Now it’s my turn. I’ve taken a very short story of his – as far as I know never dramatised before – and given it a modern twist for our troubled times. I hope audiences find it pleasurably terrifying.”
