All in the mind | 3 January 2019

The Tell-Tale Heart is based on a teeny-weeny short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The full text appears in the programme notes. Here’s the gist. A madman kills his landlord and is haunted by a ghostly heartbeat that prompts him to confess his crime.

Anthony Neilson’s adaptation turns both characters into women and gives away the ending in the opening scene. An English writer lodging with a young Irish landlady is accused of murdering her by a detective. At a stroke, all uncertainty is effaced. The only remaining mystery is why Neilson can’t understand his chosen genre. He tries to interest us in the causes of the murder, and we watch the developing relationship between landlady and lodger. The English writer is a haughty prig whom Tamara Lawrance struggles to invest with warmth or vitality. (Not her fault, the characterisation is feeble.) The Irish landlady is a needy and eccentric chatterbox who aches to befriend her new tenant. The amazing Imogen Doel plays her with so much charm and naturalism that she appears not to be acting at all. Just behaving. The characters, both faintly bisexual, consider a fling but the landlady is overly shy and the writer seems stupefied with ennui and superiority. So there are no gymnastics in the bedroom and therefore no sexual motive for the killing. What about money? Nope. And it hardly helps that the murderer, being female, is far less likely to commit a violent crime than in Poe’s original.

So why does it happen? The play struggles to find answers. Clunky recorded speeches give us glimpses of the writer’s troubled psyche. But this hardly explains why she chooses to jeopardise her blossoming career by bumping off an innocent stranger. A weird additional motive is provided by the landlady’s deformed eye socket, which the writer finds repulsive.