The darkness is drawing in. The evenings are getting longer. Halloween is approaching. There is no better month than October to stage a story by the genius of horror writers - Edgar Allan Poe.
Waterdonkey Theatre will stage Heart, a stage adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart, in the Town Hall Studio each day up to and including Saturday at 8.30pm.
Poe published The Tell-Tale Heart in The Pioneer in January 1843. It follows an unnamed narrator who insists on his sanity after murdering an old man with a ‘vulture eye’. He then hides the victim’s body by cutting it into pieces and hiding it under the floorboards. However the narrator’s guilt manifests itself in the hallucination that the man’s heart is still beating under the floorboards.
Waterdonkey have taken a very individual approach to staging Heart.
“In Heart, our objective has been to invite the audience ‘into’ the performance by creating compositions on stage, using interwoven elements of movement, sound, and text,” explains Waterdonkey’s Lindsey Morck. “We hope to create an emotional response in the audience, and that our performance will be something one experiences rather than just watches.”
Waterdonkey do not follow the narrative or tell the story of The Tell-Tale Heart straight. “In the story we find the essence of terror, doubt, empathy, and guilt in the relationship between the reader and the narrator, the narrator and his murder victim,” says Lindsey. “We strive to create the same feelings between the audience and the actors.”
Waterdonkey Theatre was founded by the 2007/2008 members of the MA in drama and theatre studies at NUI, Galway. The class will graduate on October 22.
For tickets contact the Town Hall on 091 - 569777. See also www.bebo.com/WaterdonkeyTheatre
