The Tell Tale Heart

“A macabre nightmare”… no, it’s not the name of Lana del Rey’s new single, but the best way to describe The East London Session Players and The Glory’s production of Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic horror classic, The Tell Tale Heart. As someone who indulges in the likes of The Exorcist and The Shining, I really enjoyed this voyeuristic view into the maddening breakdown that comes from meth addiction.

 


Deftly directed by Giorgio Spiegelfeld, this version is pulled from late 19th century America and translated to a modern day East London basement flat. The Glory’s very own Jonathan Wooster plays the drug addled narrator – intense, paranoid and quite frankly, a bit of a head case, he is as impressive an actor as his performance is unsettling. As the sole member of cast on stage, Wooster commands the stage with ease, not surprising following his recent non-drag turns in The East London Lecture and TRANSFORMER.

This is an immersive 60 minute sensory overload; you plunge yourself into the dark recesses of the Glory’s basement and snake your way round what can only be described as a hovel  – expertly constructed by set designed Tony Horneker – before perching yourself in the eaves. As you watch Wooster’s slow descent into madness there’s an overbearing feeling that you shouldn’t be here, watching, but you can’t take your eyes off it, he’s as desperate and unhinged as Björk at a Selena Gomez concert.

The whole experience is accentuated by the pulsing, almost hypnotic, electronica of DJ Hannah Holland’s sound-track. The narration faithfully follows the source text, mostly occurring off stage, booming in your ears, until the narrator finally loses it and is all up in your business, pulling you into his painful madness of surveillance, isolation and chem.-seshes.

This all sounds mad as a box of frogs, and it is, but I can’t recommend enough taking a furtive peek into this dark descent into madness, even if just to take you out of your comfort zone for an evening. The team have done an incredible job modernising a story that’s been parodied and adapted more often than Jocelyn Wildenstein’s face (we’ve all seen that Simpsons episode). The Glory really is a shining beacon of creative light in the London gay scene and I can’t wait to see what the team come up with next.

 

• February 1st – 5th, Arrive 7.30pm, Show Starts Promptly 8pm. £18, Strictly limited to 30 seats per show.

• The Glory, 281 Kingsland Road, E2 8AS. www.theglory.co

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