SILENCE IN THE LIBRARY (Thornhill Theatre Space)****

 

By Louise

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oejlw4iBxwg

Available until: Unknown

Silence in the Library is a very creepy ghost story written by Benjamin Peel and performed by Nigel Fyfe. I like ghost stories a lot. My friends and I used to tell ghost stories when we stayed over at each other’s houses. It seems like a very long time ago now. If I get the chance to do it again (I’m sure we’ll be allowed after everyone’s had the vaccine, but my friends might decide they’re too old for ghost stories), I think I’ll play this story for everyone on my phone. It’s a really good story and Mr Fyfe tells it much better than I would.

Mr Fyfe plays Pat, a man who works for the council and looks after abandoned buildings, including an old library. He tells his audience about the time he met two photographers called Freya and Josh who like visiting and photographing abandoned buildings. They want to go and take photographs of the library and Pat is a kind man so he says yes. The two photographers go into the library… and something happens.

This is a really good story for several reasons. Mr Peel has written a really creepy story and it does feel eerie listening to it. I could really imagine the library, all sort of echoey and shadowy and a bit like a ghost itself. Mr Fyfe tells it really well. He tells it quite slowly to get the tension up and he does pauses which probably seem longer than they are because you’re imagining what scary thing he is going to say next.

But – and this is more unusual for a ghost story – I really like the way Silence in the Library has a personal angle. In a lot of ghost stories, you don’t get to know much about the characters. The story about the man with the dog who licks his hand really makes you shiver even when you’ve heard it twenty times, but he is just ‘the man’ and all you really know is that he’s quite nervous about being alone and the dog makes him feel more secure.

Silence in the Library has real characters who you get to know. They have stories and histories and there are things they care about and things they want to do. Mr Peel doesn’t go into a lot of details because this would distract from the creepiness, but he tells us enough for us to get a really good sense of what Pat, Freya and Josh are like. This means you care about the characters, but the story is still eerie enough for you to feel like something might jump out at you in the dark, which is really important with ghost stories.

It's a good play and I really enjoyed it.