SYDNEY FESTIVAL/THE TELL-TALE HEART
The Tell-Tale Heart with Malthouse Melbourne for Sydney Festival, CarriageWorks, Bay 17, Redfern, January 18-22; www.sydneyfestival.org.au or 1300 723 038
Barrie Kosky does nothing in half measures and neither did Edgar Allen Poe – his inspiration for this 50 minute work of horror, madness and claustrophobia. Unlike Kosky, however, Poe is a more subtle, creepy, frightener which is somehow more cruel than Barrie’s more human(e) approach of in-your-face blood and viscera.
The Poe short story of a madman quietly telling the darkness (audience) about how and why he killed an old man and how and why he was found out, is pared back and totally lacking in melodrama, as is the piece Kosky has devised for piano and one actor – Martin Niedermair. It’s also pared back to the elements of light (brilliantly executed by Paul Jackson) and a setting consisting of a vertiginous flight of narrow wooden stairs (Anna Tregloan) in an otherwise black void. Kosky sits unobtrusively at a black grand piano to one side of the space and plays – his own original music plus songs by Bach, Purcell and Wolf – which is something like washes of colour in the all-enveloping darkness.
Total silence and darkness are two things to which city dwellers are not accustomed and both are confronting. The Tell-Tale Heart begins with both. After what may be a minute or two – perhaps less, perhaps more – breathing and heartbeats and the other tiny sounds of being alive are magnified in one’s own head and also in the velvety blackness. Eyes cast about for reassurance: a stray chink of light, a red dot of a monitor; it’s almost possible to hear thoughts – what’s going on? When is something going to happen? What if I have to get out/pee/faint/be sick/scream? You don’t have to do any of these, of course, but the magnifying effect of silence and darkness on fragile urban minds is remarkable.
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Then there’s Niedermair. He begins to appear, a pale golden face and finally a body, on the pale golden stairs. He looks almost angelic – on his way up to heaven perhaps – until he starts talking. Then, as he matter-of-factly relates his plans and reasons for murder, with a voice miked in such a way as to emphasise salivary sibilance, the pop of pursed lips and the clack of angry teeth, his calm, quiet voice becomes more and more alarming and the stairs begin to take on a life of their own as the light plays in such a way as to suggest movement and menace both above and below.
The Tell-Tale Heart has been a festival success in Melbourne and in the UK, and Vienna where it originated. In Sydney is may have been better in a smaller space, such as the Seymour Centre’s “black box” as the fear and claustrophobia generated by Niedermair’s extraordinarily sustained and intense performance was tangibly dissipated by space and distance. Nevertheless, it’s a pulverizing gem of story-telling, characterisation and theatrical wit and a reminder, not that one is needed, that Barrie Kosky (adapter and director as well as piano-player) is one of the more remarkable talents we have.
