Staging The Tell-Tale Heart
JA
December 01
It was a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton … It was the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.
In the spirit of honesty I’ll confess that the first time I’d heard of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart was not via print, or even the Malthouse’s recent staging. It was, instead, through the comic genius that is The Simpsons (yes that’s right, the episode where Lisa hides her new classmate’s diorama out of jealousy, but ends up revealing it soon after, tormented by the sound of a tiny beating heart made out of paper and glue). And before you sniff at this integration of pop culture and classical literature, don’t forget The Simpsons’ excellent rendition of The Raven for their Halloween special all those years ago – Bart as the Raven, Marge as Lenore – or in fact this version by Star Trek’s Q.
From pop culture to stage culture then (and if you pause for a moment, this leap probably says something in itself about the wide, transformable appeal of Poe’s dark tales). Barrie Kosky’s reimagining of The Tell-Tale Heart previously ran as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, and was based on a 2004 production for Vienna’s Schauspielhaus. It comes to the Malthouse for its return season under the directing hand of Michael Kantor, and what a return it is. The story begins in utter darkness – the total, claustrophobic kind that prevents even the barest hint of night vision, and leaves your eyes straining. Very gradually, we’re able to spot a face in the blackness. It’s Martin Niedermair, our narrator, and our murderer, revealed by some very clever and intense lighting.
Eventually, he begins to speak, in a monologue of tics and twitches, every word and syllable lingered upon, drawn out and filled to it’s chilling best – he lives, it seems, with an old man (a father figure? a landlord?) whose Evil Eye he cannot bare to see:
I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He has never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture – a pale-blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.
He plans his murder with the utmost care, entering the old man’s room for seven nights to watch him, until, finally, on the eighth night, his victim wakes and our narrator is able to illuminate the eye by the smallest light of a lantern, thus providing him enough incentive to go through with his plan. It is the beating of the old man’s heart, however, that clinches the act:
Meantime, the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man’s terror must have been extreme … And now at the dead hour of the night, and amid the dreadful silence of the old house, so strange a noise as this excited me into uncontrollable wrath.
He conceals the body under the floor. When the police arrive, they are unable to detect anything, until the man begins to imagine that he can again hear the sound of the beating heart coming from underneath the planks, the noise growing until he finds it unbearable and eventually confesses his crime.
The staging of short stories or books can appear deceptively simple. Unlike movies, which often rely on lavish sets, costumes or special effects, contemporary theatre seems to find its strength in the barest, yet most evocative, elements. This is demonstrated most clearly in the Malthouse’s production of Poe – the minimalist set, a solitary staircase, provides a perverse optical illusion. What at first appears to be the ordinary part of a house soon comes to represent an inner world of tortured madness, particularly when Niedermair begins to climb and contort exorcist-style along its vertical axis. It’s no mistake too that, from some angles, the stairs look like the very boards under which the telling heart is concealed. Similar minimalism was used as well, albeit less effectively, in the MTC staging of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, where Robyn Nevin strode from chair to chair, alone in her various stages of practicality and grief.
Texts like these – produced as monologues – rely on the strength of prose and delivery. In this there is something of the magic of being read to by someone who is able to do all the voices, who knows where a pause should be or a comma should fall. In this vein, the only part of The Tell-Tale Heart that I felt didn’t quite work was where Niedermair breaks into song (Bach, Purcell and Wolf for interested parties) as this broke the reverie of his narrative and made me all the more aware of my surrounds. But still, this was only for a few moments, and at its conclusion you’ll be hyperaware of every creak and croak of the theatre, half-trying to pick out the sound of a watch enveloped in cotton wool.
The Tell-Tale Heart is showing at the Malthouse until Dec 2.
Our Friends
- Overland
- Alien Onion
- Ampersand Duck
- Andrew McDonald
- A Pair of Ragged Claws
- Arts Victoria
- Australia Council for the Arts
- Ben Eltham
- Bookshow blog
- CAL
- City of Tongues
- Crikey
- darkly wise, rudely great
- David Astle
- Elmo Keep Does Stuff
- The Ember
- Fly the Falcon blog
- Going Down Swinging
- Griffith Review
- Hackpacker
- Harvest
- HEAT
- Island
- Killings blog
- Literary Minded
- Lorraine Crescent
- Lynden Barber
- Mandy Ord
- Marcus Westbury
- Matilda
- Meanland
- Melbourne University Publishing
- Mel Campbell
- The Monthly
- Musings of an Inappropriate Woman
- Oslo Davis
- Paul Callaghan
- Read, Think, Write
- Sleepers Publishing
- Sorrow at Sills Bend
- SPLOG
- Tom Cho
- Virgule
- Wet Ink
- Wheeler Centre