Anyone with a taste for ghastly gothic will know their Edgar Allen Poe so Stephen Smith has his work cut out to give us a new take on the master of the macabre.
Fortunately, he does, with a carefully staged build-up of horror. The setting is all smoke and candlelight, you can almost hear the deathwatch beetles in the walls as Smith commands the stage as the narrator of Poe’s work. The One Man Poe tour has a repertoire of six pieces, three or four of which are produced each night.
In The Tell-Tale Heart speaking with black hair, a pallid white face and red-rimmed eyes, Smith makes a more than convincing madman, eager to tell us that the meticulous planning of the murder of his friend is proof positive that he is not insane. At the dead hour of the night, the crazed assassin creeps into the room of his victim, committed to a pointless act of violence
The wild-eyed and gesticulating murderer is transformed with a quick costume change to the tortured victim of the Spanish Inquisition with greasy locks and blood dripping from his forehead in The Pit and the Pendulum.
The entire story is a man in a pitch-black dungeon in Toledo trying to work out the parameters of his prison and discovering new horrors – the deep pit, the swinging blade, the walls closing in. All have to be created out of nothing but Smith’s ability to spin a story from Poe’s words and his actions.
Finally, the doddering scholar in his comfy chair is confronted by the knocking on the door with no apparent visitor, the rattling of shutters with no one behind them and finally the dread spectre of The Raven. This eccentric academic, ‘deep into the darkness peering’ is the closest to the audience of Smith’s creations but distanced from us by his glass eye which suggests all is not as it should be. Nor is it: that bird is a portent of doom.
Smith’s passionate performance gives us the full-on goth figures of fiends in aspects of menace, such a delight for the spooky season. He really does make that grave sing and those skeletons dance. It chilled the very marrow in my bones.
Playwright: Edgar Allen Poe (adaptation)
Director: Stephen Smith
Cast: Stephen Smith
Duration: 80 minutes
Until: 1 November