Theatre review: The Tell-Tale Heart

Celeste (Tamara Lawrance,) an actress-turned-writer, wins an award for her debut play but turns it down at the ceremony, in an attempt to make a political point that misfires and makes for a lot of bad publicity – even Judi Dench hates her. She tries to escape the attention by renting an attic room in Brighton to write her follow-up, but her writer’s block persists, and she ends up distracting herself by making friends with her landlady. Nora (Imogen Doel) has led a sheltered life, home-schooled and nervous about being seen in public without the half-mask that covers a facial deformity. Confident that she’s above discriminating against her friend because of her looks, Celeste convinces her to show her what she really looks like, but it turns out the enormous right eye hiding under the mask is too much for her to cope with. Disgusted and haunted by the eye, Celeste wants to get it out of her life in any way she can, even if that means murder.

In other words Anthony Neilson’s The Tell-Tale Heart isn’t so much an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story as a riff on it, picking out which elements of the original it wants to play around with and taking them into new directions.

Poe Selector

One of these is a metatheatrical look at the way writers may use their work as a kind of confessional: Interspersed with the action are scenes of the Writer being interrogated by a police Detective (David Carlyle) for the landlady’s murder; in these scenes all the character names are different and it starts to become apparent that one of these versions is the truth, the other the writer’s new play about it. So it’s a play-within-a-play, but you’re not always entirely sure which is which. And this is far from the full extent of the playfulness in Neilson’s adaptation – funnily enough one of the first of his plays I saw was Relocated, which revealed him to be able to put genuinely frightening scenes on stage, but for this classic horror, although a few creepy moments are included, he’s more concerned with his usual near-the-knuckle silliness.

So although the show is also a pretty clear satire on artistic types who are self-satisfied with their own liberal attitudes (Celeste is quick to tell Nora how accepting she is of difference, but she’s actually a bundle of neuroses and phobias who can’t deal with anything outside of her control) for the most part what we get is a very gory comedy. And although it’s a lot of fun, it leaves the evening off-balance: Ultimately the Grand Guignol and special effects (Francis O’Connor’s set hides plenty of neat surprises*) are what we’re here for, and as a result the first act, which basically spends an hour building the relationship between Celeste and Nora, feels like it’s dragging its heels getting to the good stuff. It’s largely Lawrance’s nervy, paranoid performance and Doel’s gormless charm keeping it going at this stage.

But after a grisly cliffhanger things ramp up for the second act as Celeste buries body parts under the floorboards and her guilt manifests itself in creepy noises and visions, as well as eggs, so many eggs. Carlyle’s roles expand to include a policeman with musical theatre dreams and a very blackly comic ghost; Nigel Edwards’ lighting, which has so far been divided between traditional lighting for one reality and stark house lights for the other, goes nuts, sending a red spotlight searching through the audience; and Neilson responds to his first show at the National by casting its writing department as a demonic voice demanding scripts. Richard and I were agreed that the second half was when the piece came to life and it could have probably worked even better with the early scenes heavily cut and the whole thing at 90 minutes without interval; I can see what Neilson’s doing by trying to build the heart of the piece in the women’s twisted friendship, but in the end the heart everyone will remember is the one dripping blood into the bathtub.

The Tell-Tale Heart by Anthony Neilson, based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, is booking until the 8th of January at the National Theatre’s Dorfman.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

*although it does fall foul of the Dorfman’s endlessly awful sightlines: Richard and I were moved to different seats because the ones I’d originally booked had turned out to be unacceptably restricted and taken off-sale, but even so being on the audience right side of the auditorium meant we missed a lot of what was going on with the bathroom, the typewriter and the dumb waiter. If we were on audience left we would have likely not been able to see the trap door, but on balance that wouldn’t have been as much of a loss so if you’ve got the choice, go for the higher seat numbers.