The Tell-Tale Heart

Latecomers are strictly not admitted in this almost word-for-word adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s much-studied short story, and moments in we see why. As the lights go down for the production’s start, even the luminous fire exit signs at the front of the auditorium are initially covered up so as to engender something very close to pitch blackness in the theatre. And ever so slowly and subtly, what looks like a disembodied head appears centre stage and lingers there expressionlessly, fading in and out of existence under the whims of the meticulously controlled stage lighting.

It’s a hypnotic, almost soothing intro that ends abruptly when a jarring loudspeaker mambo tune blasts the ghostly serenity to smithereens. We are on edge, our senses now heightened by this most chilling warm-up segment, and the gothic horror story of a paranoid murder is ready to be told, now fully in its element.

A stuttering, dribbling Martin Niedemer fills the role of the monologue’s anonymous narrator, barely capable of stringing his sentences together as he recounts how he murdered an old man, driven not by anger or greed but by a visceral fear for one of the victim’s eyes, pale and vulture-like. With over-compensating rationality he has delicately dismembered the corpse and hidden his sinister secret beneath the floorboards, but the dead man’s heart keeps beating louder and louder, tormenting his mind and breaking him.

Director Barrie Kosky follows up last year’s Poppea with a very different, humbler product with narrower objectives. This is a focussed experiment in style that teases out wonderful visual effects from a vertiginously tall staircase and contrasts its orderly arrangement with the turmoil at the heart of the narrative. A most haunting piano accompaniment by Kosky himself and occasional outbursts of song from the Vienna Conservatory-trained Niedemer superimpose moments of beautiful lucidity to the underlying madness, creating a two-faced play as creepy and unpredictable as the propulsions of the madman in question.