A Nasty workshop.
In 1979, during my time at the Cockpit theatre in London. I first penned this story concerning the last night of Edgar Allan Poe‘s life. It was now 1987 and twelve years had passed since its first performance. I’d approached Elmwood theatre to let me direct on their main stage and they asked me to do a workshop in order to see what I could do. Halloween was only a month away and this old chestnut came to mind. I decided to take another look at this piece and give myself a birthday present at the same time. I was about to be thirty years old.
The Alan Parsons Project: A Dream Within A Dream (1976)
I was 19 years old when Alan Parsons’ album ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’ came out. It just blew my mind with its hard rock ballads mixed with orchestral arrangements. Passionate songs which explored the stories and the man behind them. It became the soundtrack to my first script as I penned ‘A Dream within a Dream’. The original script was performed at the Cockpit theatre London in the same year as the album was released.
As a young boy in the early 1960s I watched with my father, the films made by Roger Corman from the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. These starred Vincent Price and one of them ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ adapted by the brilliant Richard Matheson. Completely captivated me with its themes of premature burial, madness, dark secrets and desperate madness. I fell in love with Vincent’s performance as the manic Roderick Usher and his ‘morbid acuteness of the senses’ and his ghost-like sister played by Myrna Fahey. The beautifully tragic Madeline Usher, whose life is gradually wasting away as she falls into deeper and deeper catatonic trances. And, more completely under the spell of the family curse and her brother’s madness.
