One Man Poe – King’s Head Theatre, London

Writer: Edgar Allan Poe

Director: Stephen Smith

The festive period is a time for spooky stories and those eager to avoid the overly sentimental and often saccharine interpretations of Dickens’ most famous story, then Stephen Smith’s One Man Poe at the King’s Head Theatre could be the perfect antidote. Offering three classic stories in a single performance, Smith’s theatrical adaptation proves that Edgar Allan Poe’s work needn’t be confined to Halloween and Fright Fest.

Directing himself as the narrator of three tonally different monologues, Smith combines shorter works, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Raven, with a long middle section devoted to The Pit and the Pendulum, and it is this latter work that is the primary reason to catch this production at the King’s Head. It is a particularly evocative dramatisation of Poe’s story that uses the changing impressions of its unnamed narrator as chapters around which Smith builds the pacing and atmosphere of the story.

Focusing on a protagonist thrown into a dark dungeon by “the inquisition”, the audience meets the only character in a state of some despair, groping his way around the prison in order to understand its dimensions. Smith enacts the story while delivering it, utilising the length of the small King’s Head space as the character discovers more about his place of confinement. The charge comes from Poe’s own rhythm and particular choice of vocabulary that generate feelings of claustrophobia, fear and tension, and Smith trusts in the writing to create the necessary effects of this increasingly intense tale.

With much left to the audience’s imagination, Smith instead gently nudges the visual impressions of the story using a particularly effective lighting design that begins with low spotlight to emphasise the gloomy confines of the prisoner’s cell. Full blackouts and a blue haze play with the changes of pace and various dangers that Poe subjects his hero to – particularly when confined and unable to move – while Smith takes the character through a ranging emotional state from despair to adventurous confidence and to the very edge of a physical and existential abyss.

The empathy for the narrator’s plight in The Pit and the Pendulum makes an enjoyable contrast with the murderous confidence, even arrogance, of Poe’s guide to The Tell-Tale Heart, a supernatural story about a grubby murder and the perpetrator’s overwhelming guilt. Smith opens his show with the disconcerting confession of murder, enjoying the character’s emphatic delivery, filled with pride at his own intelligence in ridding himself of a neighbour with a damaged eye.

There are interesting lighting changes here too, making good use of a single candle to create a sinister atmosphere, particularly when calmly describing the disposal of the old man’s corpse and Smith uses the rhythm of Poe’s writing to shape the delivery of this piece. Rhythm is also important to the final monologue, The Raven, which is written in rhyming couplets, and Smith successfully avoids a singsong style to retain the meaning of the original tale.

It requires a further performance transformation and Smith, who allows the audience to witness that process between scenes, morphs into an elderly man, leaning on a stick and adopting a wheezier vocal. While the characterisation is impressive, it is perhaps the least satisfactory of the three presentations, partly because the rhyme dulls the more chilling notes, but it also struggles to compete with the immersive storytelling of The Pit and the Pendulum that immediately precedes it.

Combining a sinister madman, a tortured prisoner and grief-plagued old man, One Man Poe is a must for Poe lovers and anyone looking for an eerie alternative to the endless festive cheer. The combination of Poe and Smith will have your imagination running wild.

Runs until 7 January 2023