YOU wouldn’t think the lost world of pulp horror fiction would transfer well to the stage, would you?

For one thing, how on earth do you configure the aliens or fighting machines not actually of this earth?

Or in the case of the century old melodrama, At the Mountains of Madness , give a presence to the ‘old ones’ inflicting such terror on a hapless bunch of research scientists in Antarctica?

But the answer to all those questions that RADA-cum-RSC actor Tim Hardy and director Max Lewendel must surely have been asking themselves as they began adapting H.P. Lovecraft’s classic turned out to be quite a simple one.

For as Lewendel wrote: “The starting point for the staging of Lovecraft is the unreliable narrator.

“William Dyer, the narrator in At the Mountains of Madness , must look at us, in our eyes, lock our gaze, and expose not some CGI (computer generated imagery) terror lurking behind the walls, but the terror within ourselves, our own tiny place, alone in a universe vaster than we can ever comprehend.”

And that’s exactly where the Queen’s Hall audience was taken last Wednesday – out of Hexham and into uncertain territory, where the fear of the unknown crushed us into tiny specks.

The wonderful, charismatic Tim Hardy held us in the palm of his hand as the maddened (mad?) Dyer desperate to warn off another scientific expedition about to set sail for Antarctica.

His own team of 20 professors, postgraduate students and mechanics had noticed the change in atmosphere as their two wooden, ex-whaling ships entered the ocean at 62 degrees south.

One of the students, the brilliant Danforth, who ultimately lost his mind due to the horror he witnessed, had quoted Edgar Allen Poe: ‘ ...myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins, while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.’

Lyrical and stylish, this one man show produced by the Icarus Theatre Collective was nothing short of mesmerising.

Only Dyer and the broken Danforth had returned. At the end of the 70 minute narration, we weren’t sure exactly what they’d seen, but we went home with just a hint of a warning ringing in our ears - Pandora’s box had been opened.

Helen Compson