The Tell-Tale Heart
This morning I awoke from uneasy dreams. I'd had a nightmare that I was at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, at a The lights had dimmed in the theatre and the audience was sat there, waiting for the play to begin. After a significant wait, a figure could just be discerned in the darkness. There was some giggling, but it was swiftly hushed. Suddenly a face was illuminated and hung in the air - like the illuminated mouth of , and yet without any of its power or menace. The face continued hanging there for a rather a long while, calling to mind Queen's video for Bohemian Rhapsody. It is commonplace to speak of comic timing, but within tragedy there is an equal danger of timing being wrong and tipping what is intended to be serious into the hilarious. This is exactly what happened in this bewilderingly bad production.
When the rest of the stage was revealed we saw a figure on a steep flight of stairs, with a pianist seated to the left at his instrument. There then followed a drawn out delivery of the story as a monologue with the actor (Martin Niedemair) scuttling up and down the flight of stairs, at intervals gnashing his teeth or breaking into song. At one point, to signify his character's anguish, the actor shook his head so violently that he appeared in danger of falling of the staircase; this provided the evening's one moment of true drama, but not in the way the director intended. Niedemair is miked up so that his every gnash and snuffle is amplified around the theatre, and music is a significant part of the performance, so it is an irony that the director (Barrie Kosky) has done nothing with sound of the Tell-Tale Heart that so horrifies the narrator. The truth is that there is really nothing you can do with the sinister beating the heart unless you are performing the story rather than reading it aloud on a staircase.
What has convinced me, however, that this all must be the feverish invention of my own mind is the laudatory nature of the and that I've looked up today from the play's run in Australia, coupled with the jaw-dropping news that Kosky has been appointed artistic director of an in Berlin. I can only hope that this will not prove to be a recurring dream - I could do without developing a phobia of theatrical performances.
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