Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
4 stars
It begins and ends in a blackout, with painstakingly realised shards of illumination in-between. Barrie Kosky’s startling re-telling of Edgar Allan Poe’s nasty piece of psychological gothica is transfixing from the off, lending a sweaty, claustrophobic air to proceedings that reaches out into the Lyceum’s regal auditorium to grab you by the throat. Before that, though, what looks to be a starkly lit disembodied head is counter-pointed by a full-blast Mambo version of I Could Have Danced All Night, Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner’s hit song from My Fair Lady.
It’s a typical sleight-of-hand by Kosky, who in 2007 married Monteverdi to Cole Porter in the wildly extravagant Poppea. This first-person tale of a sociopathic loner who kills his neighbour because he doesn’t like the look of his eye is a radically different stab in the dark. As regular Kosky collaborator Martin Niedermair is revealed to be squatting half-way up a steep and narrow stair-case, his every vocal tic betrays his inner turmoil.
Where lesser talents might resort to amplified heartbeats, pounding footsteps and silent movies strobes, Kosky’s approach is one of abject stillness, as with a chamber recitation, with Niedermair’s breathless ricochets of obsessively enunciated diction accompanied by Kosky’s sporadic but just as carefully placed piano bursts. Sustained over an hour’s duration, it’s as if all your fireside Halloweens have come at once. Niedermair’s Hannibal Lector-like slurps morph into a castrati-like rendering of Agnes Dei. The pause before the final word as he tells of how he cut his neighbour’s head – off – lands with a precisely executed thud. It’s a deliciously wicked rendering of a dark-hearted flight of self-destructive fancy.
The Herald, August 11th 2008
ends
4 stars
It begins and ends in a blackout, with painstakingly realised shards of illumination in-between. Barrie Kosky’s startling re-telling of Edgar Allan Poe’s nasty piece of psychological gothica is transfixing from the off, lending a sweaty, claustrophobic air to proceedings that reaches out into the Lyceum’s regal auditorium to grab you by the throat. Before that, though, what looks to be a starkly lit disembodied head is counter-pointed by a full-blast Mambo version of I Could Have Danced All Night, Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner’s hit song from My Fair Lady.
It’s a typical sleight-of-hand by Kosky, who in 2007 married Monteverdi to Cole Porter in the wildly extravagant Poppea. This first-person tale of a sociopathic loner who kills his neighbour because he doesn’t like the look of his eye is a radically different stab in the dark. As regular Kosky collaborator Martin Niedermair is revealed to be squatting half-way up a steep and narrow stair-case, his every vocal tic betrays his inner turmoil.
Where lesser talents might resort to amplified heartbeats, pounding footsteps and silent movies strobes, Kosky’s approach is one of abject stillness, as with a chamber recitation, with Niedermair’s breathless ricochets of obsessively enunciated diction accompanied by Kosky’s sporadic but just as carefully placed piano bursts. Sustained over an hour’s duration, it’s as if all your fireside Halloweens have come at once. Niedermair’s Hannibal Lector-like slurps morph into a castrati-like rendering of Agnes Dei. The pause before the final word as he tells of how he cut his neighbour’s head – off – lands with a precisely executed thud. It’s a deliciously wicked rendering of a dark-hearted flight of self-destructive fancy.
The Herald, August 11th 2008
ends
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