Visions of Poe by Michel David Treloar
Christ Church St. Kilda until Sept 20, 1997
Reviewed by Kate
Herbert around Aug 25, 1997
The master of Horror long before Stephen King
was American poet and short-story writer, Edgar Allen Poe. His style was
Gothic, spine-chilling imagery provoked by sublimely colourful and evocative
language.
Michael David Treloar, a graduate of the VCA Drama School,
has leapt, polished boots and all, into Poe with a solo performance integrating
his writings. Treloar locates the piece in a church that provides an immediate
design concept and other-worldliness impossible to achieve with a theatre set.
The design elements he does introduce are effective.
Ceiling-high scarlet velvet curtains, a bolt of red taffeta, a heavy Victorian
chair, table and candles all enhance the sense of impending doom inherent in
Poe. The delicate life-size doll adds a surreal edge to images of loves lost or
murdered.
Treloar selects two poems, a ballad 'Annabelle Lee' and 'The
Black Cat', a horror story of the drunken husband who entombs his wife's
murdered body in the wall of his house with the couple’s tell tale cat.
He punctuates the performance with verses of 'The Bells',
accentuating the onomatopoeic language that reverberates with the increasingly
tormenting bells. His least successful selection was the story of a masquerade
ball but he follows with the skin-creeping gruesomeness of 'The Black Cat'.
Poe's rhythmic form and percussive rhyming style is never
more insistent and successful than in 'The Raven', that infamous bird of doom
"which quoth 'never more' " as it perched on the door of the
narrator, mad with grief for his lost love.
Treloar has excellent technique that supports his
performance in the not inconsequential task of creating a solo show without the
aid of a director - or a net.
He creates compelling images with his body in conjunction
with Kathryn Anderson's dramatic lighting and has almost flawlessly mastered
Poe's blindingly difficult Virginian accent and uses his resonant voice to
great melodramatic effect with Poe's language.
Treloar takes his performance seriously. His playing is
relentlessly fraught, intense and tortured which sometimes tilts into the
earnest and indulgent. There is little irony in his use of Victorian
histrionics and posturing and, particularly early, the focus is on his
technique leaving one strangely unmoved by the horror and preoccupied with his
method as an actor.
However, it is a commendable and generally absorbing
production from a talented young artist with some spectacular text by Poe.
KATE HERBERT
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