The Tell Tale Heart

*****

Edinburgh International Festival

After the lights turn off into the theatre room, after a few moments of absolute silence and darkness, the lights start vibrating over a humane figure which does not succeed in acquiring a clear shape: a young man’s face stands immobile, while infinitesimal changes of the lighting compose successive strangely obsessive faces .The beginning of this performance of peculiar accuracy directed by the controversial Barrie Kosky and based on a gothic story of Edgar Allan Poe is made by a single minimum illuminating spot that is driving our glance too high and too deep into the complete darkness of the stage and of the theatre.
The Tell Tale Heart is a performance that reconstitutes the hallucinatory state, by disrupting the horizontality from the stage and by deliriously enhancing the verticality. The staircases of the house of the murdered master acquire an excessive quality in this monologue spoken loud by an obsessive man consumed with hate and regret and suffering from a severe mental disease . During the first 10 minutes of the performance the man just sits still with his hands on his knees, the head still and his expression blank , starring at a fixed point ahead of him , while the lights cut into the darkness only a few steps on the immense stair. His story is a difficult one: “The disease has been sharpening my senses.”The sound is amplified in the manner of cinema halls , enhancing the mad solipsism of the character who exposes the story of a kill like an automat who gets stacked from time to time for a few moments . The stopping of the flow of words due to tiredness and afterwards the precipitated continuing of the idea make his way of speaking – , with illogical stops, permanently menaced by difficulty — a testimonial on the state of thought disarticulation and of dissonance between the two different positions adopted by the author of the crime.
The obsessive motive of the monologue is the cold glance of the master, and this motive is getting very the actor and the director throughout the performance. The disintegration of the human figure due to agitation and dement self-control create an extremely vivid image of madness. The tension of his immobility is punctuated by the signs of a severe retarded condition which prevents the character from fully understanding the human emotions. The tension will burst in the middle of the performance into a horrible shouting. The mad propension towards the absolute is marked by bizarre crossings between recounting the story and singing opera arias.The tension is amplified by a piano on which the director Barrie Kosky improvises during the performance on music by Bach Purcell or Wolf
For each sequence of the monologue the scenographer Anna Tregloan and the light designer Paul Jackson have created captivating images by cutting into the darkness of the stage a minimalistic picture with peculiar boldness. The audiences realize only after the end of the show that the only set is a nightmarish staircase, extended to the infinite and going nowhere, a sort of hell that holds the mad man captive in spite of his endless search of a way out. The versatility of the theatrical images finds its contre- into the demand to observe details of finest quality for extremely long time in a very strange way compared to the normal way of seeing the hole visual field. The strangely slowing rhythm suddenly turns into a very brutal one , perfectly succeeding to convey the terrifying universe and to make a glimpse into the dark side of life of the grotesque Edgar Allan Poe tales. Sophisticated crossing between music, text and performance art , the production “The Tell Tale Heart” is a theatrical event of extreme refinement who offers a delirious insight into the mind of a mad man who had murdered his master. The performance creates a one hour state of terror that troubles the audiences in an undesirable and shocking, but very intense way. “Our job is not to direct traffic on stage. It is not to bathe the audience into a warm glow of civilized experience. Our role, when we are tackling these classics, is to interpret them in a way that is truthful to us. “