The Tell-Tale Heart

On Wednesday, my boss, Jill, had an extra ticket to go see a Sydney Festival performance of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, and she invited me to go with her. I was super excited mainly because The Tell-Tale Heart is my favorite Poe story and also because the reviews for it were really good! The play was eerily FANTASTIC!

Here is a recount of the experience:

Upon entering the theater, an irritatingly bright blood-red curtain glares back at you. Then very slowly, the lights dim to total blackness. For six minutes, the audience sits in the type of silent darkness that doesn’t allow light to penetrate its solemn blanket. You couldn’t see the hand in front of your face. Ironically, the six minutes passed quickly and a single, dim ray of light lands upon a figure. Your eyes strain to see what it is. The light brightens and grows bigger at a painfully slow pace. Finally, you make out that it is a man’s face.

The light hits him as such that he looks like a floating face somewhere above the stage. Joyous music blasts, which startles the audience, and juxtaposes the unmistakably disturbed face. Slowly his body materializes and we see that he is sitting on a daunting narrow staircase illuminated in an unsettling orange-red light that runs from the bottom of the stage to the ceiling.

In a chilling voice, the man brings to life Poe’s prose. He makes the audience uneasy as he climbs the steep stairs. At one point, he seems to channel Hannibal Lector, slithering his tongue around and making slurping noises. For 50 minutes the audience is tensely engulfed in his narrative, watching as he slowly drives himself insane with his nervosa. His body quakes; he violently stakes his head; he screams; he spits.

Unlike any rendition of The Tell-Tale Heart that I have heard in school, this one wove in two songs for the actor to sing and excluded the sound of a heart beating. At first I did not like how the play steered away from Poe’s original work as I know it, but after some thought, I realized that the songs were appropriate and developed a new dimension of the character. Additionally, leaving out the sound of the beating heart left room for the imagination to take over (which is sometimes more effective), but also created a less literal presentation of the work. All in all, I thought that the show was fantastically executed, and I feel privileged to have seen a new interpretation of The Tell-Tale Heart.

Get a glimpse of the show! Click here.