IF YOU want classic theatre with an innovative and contemporary emphasis - look no further than the Old Laundry theatre Season and a one-woman show that celebrates gothic literature.

Adapted and performed by accomplished actor Rebecca Vaughan and directed by Guy Masterson, Female Gothic tips its hat to the brilliant, evocative, thrilling and eerie ghost stories created by the great and incredibly popular women writers of the 18th and 19th centuries – Mary Shelley, George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), M E Braddon, Edith Wharton, and Edith Nesbit.

It tells of an artist, gripped by the clutching fingers of a dead past; a scientist, defying nature in the dark realm of the senses; an expectant father driven mad by creeping shadows, all in the script of Dyad Productions haunting play that puts the Victorian fascination with tales of mystery and the supernatural centre stage.

Described by The Scotsman as “a near perfect piece of theatre,” the play lurks in the unquiet, stygian darkness between life and death, where a lone, haunted woman tells chilling tales of the macabre and uncanny, of love, loss, death and the darkness beyond, illuminating the curious frailties of human nature.

Staged at the Bowness venue on Friday, November 22 (8pm).

Box office 08445-040604.