Writers: Matt Chiorini and Greg Giovanini
Directors: Matt Chiorini and Maya June Dwyer
‘Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see,’ a maxim attributed to writer Edgar Allen Poe, is also a warning to the audience joining Edgar in the Red Room by Matt Chiorini and Greg Giovanini at The Hope Theatre, a 65-minute chamber musical that attempts to combine Poe’s famous stories with the circumstances of his own death. In what becomes a scramble, The Shylock Project could make better use of their concept of the dual writer – “the man and the myth, the genius and the tragedy’ – in the structure of a piece that offers up an amusing possibility for Poe’s end but never uses its central device to comment on the man behind the stories.
Two versions of Edgar are presented to the audience, known collectively as ‘The Writer’ and played by Morgan Smith and Sammy Overton. One assumes the duties of narrator, actively seen physically committing the stories to paper as they unfold and engaging in meta exchange with Poe’s real-life events, most notably the illness of his wife, which frequently intrudes on the narrative. It is a strong proposition used to reasonable effect throughout, but could offer much more to Edgar in the Red Room. There are opportunities to explore whether Poe is writing the stories or whether they are writing him, probing the extent to which a consuming need to write or escape by writing arguably made the stories more real to him than his life – an existential look at Poe as a man burying himself in his fiction.
The real and the imagined could also intersect via this meta overlay that Chiorini and Giovanini include. At present, this is rather haphazard and sometimes confusing for the viewer, but there could be far stronger psychological and emotional connections between what Poe is living and what he is writing, dramatising how the two speculatively bleed into one another. And this would give strength to the second version of Poe, who is the character being written, the first-person point of view, who enters his fictional stories. There are some potentially big questions here about Poe as a creation, either of his own making or something we as readers project back onto him posthumously, which would give the show a little more purpose.
The tone of Edgar in the Red Room is variable as a result, initially aiming for light farce but often straying to a much darker drama as elements of his stories are re-enacted. The songs are too few but also range from very serious tunes about plague and dying wives to Music Hall and jauntier numbers, but they rarely serve the forward momentum as it builds to scrappy chaos. There is plenty of imagination here, with some really good techniques including silhouette puppetry, projection, lighting effects and an impressive raven costume for Dwyer as Woman in Black, but for The Shylock Project the questions to consider are whether their subject is a creator or a character, a literary legend or an ordinary man and how to make every choice in their show contribute to the mystery of Edgar Allen Poe.
Runs until 14 February 2026
