‘Count Magnus’ is coming to Scarborough in the SJT’s busy run up to Christmas! It will be the fourth successive year Robert Lloyd Parry has brought his thrilling one-man show to town - and there is every reason to suppose a seasonal tradition may be in the making. This year one of the two spooky stories he delivers will be about the Swedish count who on a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands has an encounter with dark forces!

The writer and popular performer is more than usually looking forward to this venue in his crowded nationwide tour. Though based in his hometown of Southport, he has fond memories of Scarborough. “It’s always an appreciative sell-out audience, and I love to come back,” he says firmly. “My Mum was an Ilkley lass and it was natural for her to want to spend holidays on this lovely coast. My parents were theatre-lovers and we always came across for Ayckbourn productions.” He adds for good measure that he had an uncle who went to Scarborough College.

This is the busiest time of the year for Robert, crisscrossing the country with three or four one-night shows a week. “Ghost stories by flickering candlelight work best in the dark and gloomy months,” he smiles. “They are more atmospheric and believable in the shadows - and frankly much more scary.”

He is one of a very small number of those performing ghost stories and ten years ago when he began there were even fewer. “There are others,” he acknowledges, “because ghost stories are growing in popularity and people seem to like to escape into a bygone world and be comfortably scared.”

There can be few performers of this kind who grip their audience quite as much as Robert. Impeccably attired, he ensconces himself in a leather winged chair, glints at his audience through owlish steel-rimmed specs and proceeds to hold forth, narrate, perform, call it what you will. He binds a spell, though speaking in measured donnish tones. It is, he imagines, how the great M.R. James, ghost writer par excellence, might have done it.

Robert has in his repertoire17 of James’s amazing ghost stories, all committed to memory, delivered unaided, and he is an avid student of the writer, to whom it is his proud boast he bears a striking resemblance. Not for nothing was he chosen to appear as ‘the author’ in Mark Gatiss’s acclaimed BBC documentary, MR James: Ghost Writer. Modern audiences, however, might find a likeness to the late Robert Hardy, in facial expression and avuncular tone.

‘Student’ is perhaps not the right word to describe Robert, who has edited two scholarly works on Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), the Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and has a third in preparation. An Oxonian, himself - Brasenose College no less - he shows none of the bantering antipathy to people from the ‘other place’. “Every Christmas Eve for thirty years James entertained a small circle of Cambridge colleagues and friends or his students at Eton, with a specially written story.”

Published between 1904 and 1919, collectively they form one of the finest and most influential works in the ghostly genre - taking it away from the melodramatic clichés of Gothic Horror and sensational supernatural elements. “His stories are more compelling because they are grounded in reality,” he says, “and, perhaps surprisingly, lightened by dry humour.”

The profile of Robert’s audience is unusually wide. It seems all ages are attracted to the way classic ghost stories seem to explore basic human emotions, confronting the unknown while enjoying a chilling yet thrilling experience.

To speak without prompt for ninety minutes - with only a short break between the two stories - must be a prodigious feat of memory? He scoffs at the suggestion. “It’s based entirely on sheer hard slog,” he asserts. “I learn 3 new ones a year in chunks - and it’s a rigorous and tedious process of repetition but once I’ve got it in my mind, it’s hard-wired.” It’s his firm conviction that we would all be capable of learning so much more if we were willing to apply ourselves.

Most of us would prefer to save ourselves the effort, especially when we can have them brought to us by a master storyteller. Robert’s visit is rapidly becoming part of the countdown to Christmas in Scarborough. Prepare to be thrilled.

Count Magnus: Two Ghost Stories by M.R. James is at the Stephen Joseph Theatre on Friday 12th December.