When Australian enfant-terrible Barrie Kosky pulled the rug from under classical music purists last year with his take on Poppea, Monteverdi’s 17th century romp of love, lust and assassinations, it was a flamboyant introduction to a fearlessly irreverent maverick. This year Kosky’s return heralds a very different prospect, as he brings to life Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, as an equally claustrophobic chamber piece.
First published in 1843, Poe’s first person narrative is heard through the confession of a murderer who, having acted on impulse, is given away by the very thing that was presumed to have been silenced forever. Kosky’s version, first performed in Vienna four years ago, takes a strikingly minimalist approach to what could be a melodramatic schlock-fest.
“I’ve always loved Edgar Allan Poe’s stories ever since I read him at school,” says Kosky, who performs the piece with Martin Niedermair as well as composing the music for the Malthouse Melbourne production. “I loved that element of claustrophobic horror contained within them, and became attracted to both the erotic and the psychotic. The stories take place in some very dark places, and that can be very seductive.”
Especially if, like Kosky, you saw Steven Berkoff’s own grotesque stage version when aged a very impressionistic ten.
“I was blown away,” says Kosky now. “Utterly blown away. One of the many wonderful things about the story is that it’s written in the first person, so you don’t really have to adapt it, but that’s what makes it so palpable to a theatrical treatment. As well as that, the subject matter is very ambiguous. We’re never quite sure whether the protagonist committed the crime, so I’m interested in deconstructing it. When Poe wrote it, he was the godfather of crime fiction, but there are so many post-feminist concerns in there as well about the erotic. It’s a profoundly disturbing piece of literature.”
Poe’s work has long been recognised as classic American gothic, and has readily been championed by other mediums. Film versions fate as gar back as the 1930s, while more recently, Lou Reed looked to Poe for inspiration on his album, The Raven, a spoken-word collection he performed in Edinburgh in 2006. Steven Berkoff too has looked at other Poe tales. During the 1970s at his most expressionistically exploratory, his production of The Fall Of The House Of Usher was required viewing foe anyone interested in a slow-burning theatrical form a million miles away from the safety net of conveyor-belt rep. Kosky too is clearly in thrall to the dark underbelly of the imagination which Poe explored, and which make his yarns so much more than pulp fiction.
“It’s about fear,” Kosky points out. “It’s not just about a man who did or did nor commit a crime. The elements of horror and gothic tension are only the beginnings of the piece. But even that alone can have an effect on an audience. It’s played on a very thin staircase, and what we’ve found is that once you start the audience don’t move, and are even scared to breathe.”
A long way, then, from Poppea.
“It’s a different world,” Kosky admits. “The world of Poppea is very much a world of release and sweat and visceral erotic outpouring. Those characters were constantly sweating their emotions. Here it’s the opposite. It’s very controlled and repressed. It’s like as saucepan with its lid on about to boil over.”
When Kosky arrived in Edinburgh with Poppea, his five year tenure as artistic director of Vienna’s Schauspielhaus was about to come to an end following his resignation the year before. It was a stormy few years which at times rocked the old-school establishment’s ideas about how classic opera should be treated. His work with Berlin’s Kosmische company similarly rocked the boat. A sexually explicit take on Ligetti’s Le Grand Macabre, involving necrophilia and bucket-loads of blood, was particularly incendiary, becoming something of a cause celebre. His relationship with the Kosmiche continued with a version of The Marriage Of Figaro, while in the last year Kosky has whipped up a revival of his look at Orfeo at the Berlin Staatsoper, new productions of Iphigenie en Tauride at the Komische, Peter Grimes in Hanover and Mahagonny in Essen.
In June, it was announced that Kosky will take charge of the Kosmische from 2012. This is vindication indeed for Kosky’s radical approach, which isn’t shy of populism, as his very different look at Kiss Me Kate in Berlin has already proved. If anything, Kosky’s imprimateur on the classics – all sex, death and decadent displays of sumptuousness – resembles the 1970s and 1980s era of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre when it too opened up the classics beyond the dusty relics they’d often become to reinvent them as something dangerously sexy. Kosky, then, is a natural descendent of Phillip Prowse’s flamboyantly visual approach. The Tell-Tale Heart, though, more resembles Kenny Miller’s studio-bound horror-based compendiums taken from literary works.
“I choose the pieces I work on very carefully,” says Kosky. “I believe theatre artists have a few qualities which excite them, and themes which they’re exploring again and again. What I’m interested in, and they keep on cropping up, are notions of neurosis, psychosis and he eroticism of dreams. It seems very natural for me to want to explore all that.”
And where, oh where, did such dark fascinations come from?
“Oh, childhood,” says a blasé Kosky, before stressing that “I had a very happy childhood. But I was given a lot of experience of theatre and opera from my grand-parents. From an early age I was attracted to things that weren’t normal for that age. I was seeing work by Marlowe and Kafka when I was fifteen, and I saw Lindsay Kemp’s production of Flowers when I was eight. That had an enormous effect on me. I mean, after that, how can you be interested in more conventional theatre?”
Seeing Poppea as a formative theatrical experience might ell have the same effect on hungry young minds. As Kosky is keen to point out, though, The Tell-Tale Heart is something very different again.
“Of people come expecting Poppea,” he says, “they’re in for a huge shock. But in a good way.”
The Tell-Tale Heart, EIF, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Aug 9-10, 8pm, Aug 11, 2.30pm
www.eif.co.uk
The Herald, August 5th 2008
ends
First published in 1843, Poe’s first person narrative is heard through the confession of a murderer who, having acted on impulse, is given away by the very thing that was presumed to have been silenced forever. Kosky’s version, first performed in Vienna four years ago, takes a strikingly minimalist approach to what could be a melodramatic schlock-fest.
“I’ve always loved Edgar Allan Poe’s stories ever since I read him at school,” says Kosky, who performs the piece with Martin Niedermair as well as composing the music for the Malthouse Melbourne production. “I loved that element of claustrophobic horror contained within them, and became attracted to both the erotic and the psychotic. The stories take place in some very dark places, and that can be very seductive.”
Especially if, like Kosky, you saw Steven Berkoff’s own grotesque stage version when aged a very impressionistic ten.
“I was blown away,” says Kosky now. “Utterly blown away. One of the many wonderful things about the story is that it’s written in the first person, so you don’t really have to adapt it, but that’s what makes it so palpable to a theatrical treatment. As well as that, the subject matter is very ambiguous. We’re never quite sure whether the protagonist committed the crime, so I’m interested in deconstructing it. When Poe wrote it, he was the godfather of crime fiction, but there are so many post-feminist concerns in there as well about the erotic. It’s a profoundly disturbing piece of literature.”
Poe’s work has long been recognised as classic American gothic, and has readily been championed by other mediums. Film versions fate as gar back as the 1930s, while more recently, Lou Reed looked to Poe for inspiration on his album, The Raven, a spoken-word collection he performed in Edinburgh in 2006. Steven Berkoff too has looked at other Poe tales. During the 1970s at his most expressionistically exploratory, his production of The Fall Of The House Of Usher was required viewing foe anyone interested in a slow-burning theatrical form a million miles away from the safety net of conveyor-belt rep. Kosky too is clearly in thrall to the dark underbelly of the imagination which Poe explored, and which make his yarns so much more than pulp fiction.
“It’s about fear,” Kosky points out. “It’s not just about a man who did or did nor commit a crime. The elements of horror and gothic tension are only the beginnings of the piece. But even that alone can have an effect on an audience. It’s played on a very thin staircase, and what we’ve found is that once you start the audience don’t move, and are even scared to breathe.”
A long way, then, from Poppea.
“It’s a different world,” Kosky admits. “The world of Poppea is very much a world of release and sweat and visceral erotic outpouring. Those characters were constantly sweating their emotions. Here it’s the opposite. It’s very controlled and repressed. It’s like as saucepan with its lid on about to boil over.”
When Kosky arrived in Edinburgh with Poppea, his five year tenure as artistic director of Vienna’s Schauspielhaus was about to come to an end following his resignation the year before. It was a stormy few years which at times rocked the old-school establishment’s ideas about how classic opera should be treated. His work with Berlin’s Kosmische company similarly rocked the boat. A sexually explicit take on Ligetti’s Le Grand Macabre, involving necrophilia and bucket-loads of blood, was particularly incendiary, becoming something of a cause celebre. His relationship with the Kosmiche continued with a version of The Marriage Of Figaro, while in the last year Kosky has whipped up a revival of his look at Orfeo at the Berlin Staatsoper, new productions of Iphigenie en Tauride at the Komische, Peter Grimes in Hanover and Mahagonny in Essen.
In June, it was announced that Kosky will take charge of the Kosmische from 2012. This is vindication indeed for Kosky’s radical approach, which isn’t shy of populism, as his very different look at Kiss Me Kate in Berlin has already proved. If anything, Kosky’s imprimateur on the classics – all sex, death and decadent displays of sumptuousness – resembles the 1970s and 1980s era of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre when it too opened up the classics beyond the dusty relics they’d often become to reinvent them as something dangerously sexy. Kosky, then, is a natural descendent of Phillip Prowse’s flamboyantly visual approach. The Tell-Tale Heart, though, more resembles Kenny Miller’s studio-bound horror-based compendiums taken from literary works.
“I choose the pieces I work on very carefully,” says Kosky. “I believe theatre artists have a few qualities which excite them, and themes which they’re exploring again and again. What I’m interested in, and they keep on cropping up, are notions of neurosis, psychosis and he eroticism of dreams. It seems very natural for me to want to explore all that.”
And where, oh where, did such dark fascinations come from?
“Oh, childhood,” says a blasé Kosky, before stressing that “I had a very happy childhood. But I was given a lot of experience of theatre and opera from my grand-parents. From an early age I was attracted to things that weren’t normal for that age. I was seeing work by Marlowe and Kafka when I was fifteen, and I saw Lindsay Kemp’s production of Flowers when I was eight. That had an enormous effect on me. I mean, after that, how can you be interested in more conventional theatre?”
Seeing Poppea as a formative theatrical experience might ell have the same effect on hungry young minds. As Kosky is keen to point out, though, The Tell-Tale Heart is something very different again.
“Of people come expecting Poppea,” he says, “they’re in for a huge shock. But in a good way.”
The Tell-Tale Heart, EIF, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Aug 9-10, 8pm, Aug 11, 2.30pm
www.eif.co.uk
The Herald, August 5th 2008
ends
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