Poe: Macabre Resurrections | Theatre review

by Luisa Dahringer

★★★★✰

Poe: Macabre Resurrections by Second Skin Theatre is an exceptionally entertaining experience, showing five of Edgar Allen Poe’s most gruesome tales in a venue that he once visited regularly: St Mary’s Old Church in Stoke Newington, the oldest protestant church in the country.

On a cold and gloomy winters night, fog and shadow will accompany you whilst witnessing the bizarre macabre resurrections.

An entertaining preacher guides you through the evening as you hover on the church benches.

Visitors were asked to explore different angles of the church and stand throughout the first two skits, unable to see, I cursed to myself with my eyes closed. Everything after certainly made up for it though.

Gruesome tales

Art director Andy McQuade pulled together a group of writers and actors to shape and rewrite five particularly gruesome tales by Poe and turn them into shuddering modern tales, acted out with excellence.

Premature Burial will take you out on the surrounding necropolis and is about the death of a British soldier, The Pit and the Pendulum is about an Afghan under interrogation in America and The Black Cat about a distraught single mother.

The Raven, an actor who appears as a reoccurring visitor in the Church will undeniably remind you of Nosferatu as once played by Klaus Kinski. With a great finale of The Masque of the Red Death, visitors witness a cult convention.

The play manages to link Poe tales with modern societal issues, on a purely enjoyable level. To spend a night in shadows and fog in a ‘haunted’ church, listening to the words of the author and poet Poe, is definitely a night I would recommend.

The Church Street Theatre, St. Marys Old Church, Church St, Stoke Newington N16 9ES

£14, £12 concessions, until December 4

Tues- Sat until 8pm, Sunday 8.20pm