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THEATRE REVIEW 2024

ONE MAN POE                                 
THREEDUMB THEATRE
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WRITER - EDGAR ALLEN POE

DIRECTOR - STEPHEN SMITH

520 West 21st Street

25 OCT - 2 NOV 2024

OCT, 16, 2024 
★★★★

Few American writers capture the imagination quite like Edgar Allen Poe. His tales of the macabre seem to align with the author's challenging life and a deeply rooted fascination with the occult that also enraptured audiences in the 19th century. Poe’s writing allows a unique insight into the development of this early American literary language that, as Stephen Smith explores in his One Man Poe show, has lost none of its appeal.

 

Walking into The Playground Theatre, the audience is met by Smith, in full costume, posing occasionally in a variety of positions. These early moments as the audience gathers themselves and takes their seats offer a brief insight into the tortuous mind of the man on stage. Is he the narrator, or is he the author? We can sense this torment that is making it impossible for him to gather his thoughts, and the moment he does speak, a metaphorical light comes on.

 

One Man Poe is split into two acts, the first being The Tell Tale Heart and The Pit and the Pendulum, and the second being The Black Cat and The Raven. Smith draws his audiences into the story by being able to create things that aren’t there. The set is bare sans a few pieces of furniture and other props, with the entire performance space bathed in a deep, blood-red light. Smith’s lighting design is seamlessly woven into sound designers Joseph Furey and Django Holder's masterful soundscape that’s subtle and engrossing, with Forey music adding greatly to the tension. It’s a rare gift for a performer to tell a story directly towards his audience whilst also unpacking this darkly surreal world of the author. 

 

In The Telltale Heart, a narrator grows paranoid and filled with a distasteful hatred for an old man whom he eventually kills. The old man’s crime was that one of his “eyes resembled that of a vulture—a pale blue eye with a film over it.” Almost within the first few lines of the text, Poe is trying to give his reader some form of justification for his narrators actions. And though the narrator is frank, the old man “had never wronged” him; a troublesome obsession with the man’s pale blue eye has engulfed his entire mind. Smith’s voice is, at times, nervous, a trait that appears in the other stories and gives his characters this sense of polite confusion. As thought, this moment now is the first time that they’ve spoken allowed their thoughts, and they’re each unable to convince themselves that what they are saying is right.

 

There is a fine line being traversed by the narrator, who has already come to accept the irrational thoughts that he’s having, and his growing discontentment with the old man is a sign of madness. For him, this “disease” has “sharpened” his “senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.” And now he believes that there is justification for this growing unease with the old man; it’s within these lines that the author uses his narrator to make his reader a conspirator in the murder. One of the truly remarkable gifts a writer like Poe possesses is the beauty he has in writing short stories that are in fact conversational confessions. In line with Poe’s obsession with death, religion, and morality, it seems fitting that he would use his short stories as a way to clense his own, dark thoughts.

"POE'S REAL POWER AS A WRITER IS IN THE WAY HE

CREATED PARALLELS BETWEEN HUMAN FEAR..."

As The Telltale Heart races towards its climax, you can actually feel your heart begin to beat slightly at first, and the more Smith progresses with this story, the more one becomes fully engrossed. In one scene imparticular, as the narrator creeps into the old man’s room, I could swear you could see the old man laying in his bead (even as I am writing this now, I am still convinced I saw him). Smith uses his entire body to move around invisible objects. As the narrator explains that the room was pitch black, you believed it, and when the old man cries out, “Who’s there?” you feel startled. As the tension rises, so does Smith's voice, adding an extra layer of tension.

 

This tension is continued with exceptional physicality with The Pit and the Pendulum. A performer has to have true conviction that what they’re doing is going to be believed by their audience and that it pulls them in. Moving between these stories, Smith creates an interesting air of quietness that takes over the theatre, and much like the beginning of The Telltale Heart, the moment Smith starts to speak, he drags his audience into the darkness of this new, terrifying story. The Pit and the Pendulum contains Poe’s themes of religion, death, fear, and punishment, with a narrator sentenced to death for a crime we’re not informed of. Every moment of this story is realised through some of the finest theatremaking I’ve seen in a long time. Smith doesn’t just make his audience believe the horror of what his narrator is facing; he convinces us that it is real. One does feel sorry for the narrator in a way; you get a sense that he’s guilty of nothing; perhaps that’s due to the Spanish Inquisition being the body that’s sentenced him to his doom. As Smith moves around the near empty stage, he once again makes you feel for the narrator, trapped in a fate worse than death, the unknown.

 

Opening the second act, The Black Cat, takes the audience deeper into Poe's central themes of obsession, fear, guilt, murder, and the occult. On the surface, it might appear lazy or happhazard that Poe’s stories feature either simular themes or are told by an unnamed narrator, but I feel that that’s where his power as a writer comes from. As the stories are performed, Smith is afforded the opportunity to really try to manifest these men without being too constraint to who they are. Through the narrators descriptions of his life and his home, we get enough of an idea of who he may be. Smith is able to skilfully add the final ideas of who this man may be through his performance.

 

Much like the previous stories, Smith conjures up a reality through his performance that is remarkable. If Poe’s text is designed to make the reader a conspirator in the narrator's crime, then Smith’s performances solidify this arrangement. You want the narrator to get away with it. The glee the narrator shows in The Black Cat always teeters on the edge of gloating and is almost certainly guaranteed to get caught. But the more Smith taps on invisible walls, the more I want the narrator to escape his inevitable capture.

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Bringing the series of shorts to a close is the iconic The Raven. Told in verse, The Raven also offers a neat circle back to the first story, as the narrator in The Raven is an old man with a filmy pale blue eye. This is a good touch by Smith that also offers a nod to the interconnectedness of Poe’s writing. The first time I discovered Edgar Allen Poe was through The Simpsons. Every year on Halloween they’d celebrate with their Treehouse of Horror episode, and 1990 saw the writers take on “The Raven." I wish I could tell you I was walking around a secondhand bookshop in Paris and stumbled across an ancient, battered, original copy of Poe’s short stories, but I can’t. The episode has stayed with me ever since, and though I’ve never explored much of Poe’s work, this early exposure to him gave me a good insight into the type of writer he was. Smith stays faithful to the text and to the character of the old man, and you feel his sense of confusion, isolation, and frustration. 

Smith has forged this interesting and passionate connection to Poe’s work that has allowed him to discover deeper meaning within these darkly fanciful stories. Poe’s writing offers a unique insight not only into the minds of his narrators, who may or may not be experiencing moment’s of madness, but taps into the readers moral compass. Through his performance, by staying as close to the original language as possible, Smith elevates these stories, enabling his audiences the opportunity to embrace the wonderment of Poe’s writing. Though most people will come to Poe understanding that his writing is pigeonholed as gothic or macabre, through Smith’s intricate performance of these four short stories, I would say this would be unfair and unwise. Poe’s real power as a writer is the way he created parallels between human fear, the type of fear that can induce madness. His reader becomes privy to some of the deeper most person and private thoughts of men who seem to be on the edge of sanity. Few writers have this gift, and the voice Poe gives these narrators is strangly fair and balanced, irrespective of the horrible things they do. By being able to connect to this, Smith has provided Poe’s work with a fresh voice that maintains his exploration of fear whilst offering his new audiences a fresh take on the human condition. 

© 2025 The New Current

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