Picture: Greg Giovanini
Edgar in the Red Room continues at the Hope Theatre, London until 14 February 2026.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
American writer Edgar Allan Poe was the master of Gothic literature. With The Murders in the Rue Morgue, he’s also credited as one of the creators of the modern detective story.
His own life was not without incident. Fostered at the age of two after his father had absconded and mother died from tuberculosis, the relationship with his foster father was not a good one, and they became estranged while Poe was at university, due in part to Poe’s increased gambling debts. Poe eventually became one of the first Americans to earn his sole income as a writer, although he was always on the brink of penury.
Poe’s death remains a mystery: he was found semi-conscious in Baltimore “in great distress”, but the nature of his ailments remain unclear, and no definitive documentation remains. Whether it was due to his alcoholism, a drug addiction, or violence inflicted upon him by persons unknown will never be more than speculation.
The Shylock Project’s Edgar in the Red Room takes that mystery element and combines it with some of Poe’s own stories to create a humorously macabre musical that mixes everything together. Matt Chiorini and Greg Giovanini’s work presents Poe as both creater of, and participant in, his works, most especially as the unnamed narrator of short story The Fall of the House of Usher.
To achieve this dual role, Poe is played by both Morgan Smith and Sammy Overton, who simultaneously write the story of a visit to a childhood friend, Roderick Usher (Killian Crowley) as they participate in it. This twisted musical uses plenty of rear projection and shadow puppetry to fill the audience in on Poe’s relationship with his wife (also his cousin who he married when she was 13, a fact acknowledged but glossed over – some things are too icky even for Gothic horror comedy musicals) and with alcohol.
Smith and Overton are great fun in their dual roles, while Crowley delivers a gloriously camp, over-the-top turn as the wretched Usher. The musical numbers occasionally lean into the horror aspect of the Gothic story unfolding, but more often act as counterbalance, almost lampooning the work in a vaudevillian style. If this sounds like it might be denigrating Poe’s work, it’s not: more that it acknowledges the entertainment value inherent in the work.
The story itself extends The Fall of the House of Usher by merging it with another Poe tale, The Masque of the Red Death. That story’s protagonist, Prince Prospero, is here presented as a long-dead Usher relative, who enticed people to the mansion under the guise of partying, but killed them with a plague virus in order that he could develop a vaccine for himself. If the elision of the two stories doesn’t quite work, it keeps the Gothic elements at work throughout, deferring the payoff of the main story effectively.
Poe’s real-life death is dealt with, and discussed, by the show’s “woman in black”, Maya June Dwyer (who also choreographs and co-directs with Chiorini). Here, a musical number with lyrics based on Poe’s ‘The Raven’ may not quite work, but one respects that it’s a part of the Poe mythos that would feel odd if omitted completely.
The rest of the piece is fun, if scrappy. Sometimes the switch between Gothic horror and slapstick silliness feels a little off, but for every one of those there are moments of visual ingenuity – usually involving the production’s ever-changing backdrop – that work. There is, perhaps, a little too much reliance on a doorframe on wheels – once you’ve seen it spun round to represent yet another corridor in the House of Usher, you’ve seen it a hundred times (and you will see it so used that often).
Ultimately, though, Edgar in the Red Room is faithful to the idea of Poe’s writings: Gothic horror for entertainment’s sake, and nothing much deeper than that.
Scott Matthewman
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