If Edgar Allan Poe had had a blissfully happy childhood would he have become the writer of creepy stories such as The Tell-Tale Heart or The Raven, which this gothic hallucination of a show has found inspiration for its title? Probably not, but nothing is certain (least of all biography) in this macabre and compelling operetta from Canada's Catalyst Theatre that operates at the boundaries of fact and fiction, reality and nightmare, and offers a skewed perspective on a life beset by abandonment, madness, drink, death and despair.
Knowing something of Poe's work before you enter the theatre would be useful if you want to catch the references to beating hearts, walled-up kittens and fears of being buried alive. There's a wonderful moment when the young Edgar imagines his recently deceased actress mother screaming inside her glass coffin – as if even death cannot stop her performing. Another when the six-year-old Edgar seizes an axe as if his creativity is being released along with his inner axe-murderer. Being called to the bar here doesn't mean taking up law.
It's a witty and atmospheric evening and no less stylish or mannered than you might expect from the company that had a hit a few years ago in Edinburgh with The House of Pootsie Plunket, which relocated Electra to the icy Canadian wastelands.
This work has a jaunty libretto and score by director Jonathan Christenson, and a sensibility that places it somewhere between Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott's staging of Shockheaded Peter and Lemony Snicket's children's novels, A Series of Unfortunate Events.
With its hoop-wire skirts like prisons, pantaloons, white-faced actors and artful lighting, it all looks very Tim Burton, and Laura Krewski's choreo-graphy is distinctive with its jerky, puppet-like movements that suggest fate and not free will is at work here.
In fact, it is all something of a grotesque marvel. But sometimes a little imperfection, something a little more maverick, less controlled and more ragged can be a good thing in the theatre. This is a piece to admire, but its West End, dead-behind-the-eyes slickness and sameness over two acts makes you long for something less self-consciously clever, and much more wildly inventive and free.
