A Ghost Among the Living
He is a man who has delved into the past and now cannot escape it, a scholar who has studied the works of Edgar Allan Poe, dissecting his horror stories, his poetry, his detective fiction, even the treatise on seashells, granted access to hold manuscripts and first editions, now come to share his knowledge and insights of his research but having brought something else along with him as well as his notes.
Preparing to discuss and perform excerpts of The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, Ligeia and The Masque of the Red Death, his focus is interrupted during his recitations, carefully rehearsed but now disturbed, prepared to discuss the grotesque and the visceral, the meticulous construction of the precise prose, but instead haunted by a ghost which occupies his mind and will not be denied, twisting his performance.
Their acclaimed previous Fringe productions having adapted the works of, M R James, Henry James, Lewis Carroll, G K Chesterton, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, the Brothers Grimm and George Orwell, now the duo of Antonia Christophers and Noel Byrne of Box Tale Soup are taking a different approach in their most ambitious show, raising the dead with a ghastly portmanteau of Poe in A Ghost Among the Living.
Reciting The Raven as though it were a protective mantra as he hears the haunting voice of a woman singing, nevertheless, she persists, echoing as do the themes of Poe’s work, madness an overburdening of the senses which pushes the swollen brain to murder, the reader a witness and co-conspirator to concealed bodies and horrified betrayals of the mind.
With dynamic props becoming miniature sets, atop a carousel to accommodate the audience sat in the round, the interactions of human and puppet has never been better as each sequence is staged differently, the murder of an elderly benefactor, the descent of elegant Fortunato into the vault, increasingly inebriated and bedraggled, the unwanted guest at the exclusive gathering of the Prospero’s peers.
A foggy haze cast into the rafters early on, hanging over the scholar like a bleak December sky, the colour green is absent until the introduction of the beautiful and august Ligeia, the brief joy of love only a mask concealing tragedy, A Ghost Among the Living a monstrous meta-text, the doomed scholar exploring and explaining the words even as he experiences them, “All that we see or seem… but a dream within a dream.”
A Ghost Among the Living continues at Queen Dome at the Pleasance until Monday 31st August
