Alex Harvey & Victoria Finney – The Willows

Theatre

A hallucination in sound and voice, Alex Harvey’s adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows exploits a tension between dream-time and clock-time through Victoria Finney’s lamplit one-woman recitation of the legendary short story.

Drawing on Blackwood’s entanglement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, occult modernism and early 20th-century mystical experimentation, Harvey and Finney’s interpretation treats the text not merely as fiction but as an incantation— a deliberate shaping of inner experience through rhythm, cadence, breath and a phantasmic sound design. Blackwood and his esoteric contemporaries believed that words, spoken in the right order, could open the mind, expand perception, even shift reality. This adaptation approaches the story in exactly that way.

This immersive performance revives the nearly-lost practice of adult storytelling: a communal act of sitting in a darkened space, surrendering to a voice, and allowing one’s inner world to be shaped by language. What emerges is both intimate and mythic—a fire-lit encounter with a text that links 19th-century gothic nature writing to the birth of 20th-century psychological horror. A cross between Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Blair Witch Project.

The Willows is not a reading, nor a play, nor a radio drama.

It is a ritual of attention—a space where story becomes spell, voice becomes instrument, and the natural world becomes a site of supernatural rupture.