Last night Stuart and I went to see Anthony Neilson's enjoyably schlocky The Tell-Tale Heart at the Dorfman Theatre on London's glitzy South Bank.
Based on the short macabre, gothic tale by Edgar Allen Poe,
The Tell-Tale Heart is a twisted, graphic and darkly-comic treat.
This meta, post-modern, funny, retelling turns unreliable
narrator into a playwright (Tamara Lawrance). Struggling to write a follow-up
play after her debut smash hit, the writer rents a Brighton room from a
landlady (Imogen Doel) in hopes of breaking through her writer’s block. When
Doel’s Landlady reveals to Lawrance her hideous - and cartoonish - eye
condition, Lawrance becomes haunted by the vulture-like orb that sees right
through her. Interspersed are scenes with the Detective (David Carlyle)
interrogating Lawrance’s writer over the whereabouts of a missing woman.
Things soon take a turn for the gory and we are soon
climbing the heights of high drama. Murder, drugs, suicide, gore, and LGBT
politics - it is a heady mix knowingly full of references to other gothic
tales.
Most of its last half hour acts like it’s about to end and
then refuses to, rebounding each time you think it might have finished with a
new, madder scene. It is all feverishly enjoyable. However, an actual important
final twist feels a bit tossed away, buried under an avalanche of mutant
blood-red herrings.
Great fun though.
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