The Fall of the House of Usher 1957
Notes from the Attic.
(Programme Notes)
For our duplicitous and terror filled annual Halloween show this year. I write in the suspended tense and bring you a time-line where the final countdown of Edgar Poe’s last hours alive has been transplanted into the atomic age of 1957. The year that Sputnik took to the skies and the space race began. Tonight the dark and wildly broody writer of horror has just gotten an invitation to dinner from a very famous singing group called ‘Maddy and the Usherettes’. It seems that the Divas of Rhythm and Blues want the blackbird himself to perform ‘The Raven’ for a small gathering at their family mansion on the outskirts of New Orleans. It’s an invitation too good to be true and three times as deadly as Edgar Poe meets his deadly match.
Starring the Stormy Talents of:
Jose Antonio & Ellen Contente
Becca Greenwell & Melvin Hancock
Andrew Dark
Special appearance by Tom Jones as ‘Tim Roth’
The Cool Vampire Cat Staff
Fright Manager: Tommy Jones
Lighting Design: Spooky boy
Sound Design: Throbbing Universe and Son
Assistant to the Directors: John Whitley
Set design and properties: Debb and the Thin man
Props and Set supplied by Mark Tucker’s Used Furniture
Graphics: ‘Dark Dudes’
Once more, I found myself drawn to one of my favourite writers of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe. I’d already penned a show many moons ago about his last few hours alive in ‘Dream within a Dream’. This time I teamed his story and the works of another great American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher 1957’ based on the works of both these dark lords of Gothic literature. Reading it now, I think it pleased me, more than it made sense. But, we are driven by ideas which take our fancy. LOL.
