Ottawa Fringe 2014. The Poe Show
Is it a spoof of a horror show? Is it a tribute to Edgard Allan Poe’s writing and the general atmosphere of his literary world? Is it a field day for the sound effects person? It’s a bit of all of that but mostly this is an experiment in staging one of the most important English language short story writers of the 19th Century. What shines is Poe’s prose that is taken directly from his short stories,- chopped down a bit with the juicy parts remaining. It’s all narrated by the actors and it is all from Poe except for the ending where the characters eventually take things into their own hands…. A bit of Pirandello’s revenge perhaps. Since it all appears to be coming from Poe’s nightmares things are not straighforward , that is clear. However, much of the physical movements as well as the repetitive sound effects (muffled screams and weak screetching ) appear to work against the text because if they seem to be spoofing the text, the spoof is not well done. . The spoof has to be clear and come from a heightened form of performance… Even the choking and strangling were not melodramatic enough to be intentionally phony. They looked like a limp form of realism or amatures fooling around and that is certainly not the effect they wanted to create. And then, just to clarify things, why not bring up a little poster/screen on the side announcing the title of each story just as the TROIS COUPs from French theatre resound in the background, announcing the next text.
As for the actors. they make their way through it with reasonable skill. A good fringe experiment that highlights all the problems that confront a director when he takes on a literary work such as this one and then tries to give it a personal touch and a new spin.
The Poe Show Plays at the Studio Leonard Beaulne
Written by David Beecroft, directed by Stewart Mathews
With Jeremy Piamonte, Sarah Duplancic, Hannah Gibson Fraser, Anna Lewis
A Vanity Project production (Tim Oberholzer)
bring it up to the 21st century.