John Astin, eccentric father Gomez Addams of the Addams family, plays Edgar Allan Poe in Once Upon a Midnight, a play about the life of Poe.
At first it seemed a tedious prospect, to plod chronologically through the events of Poe's dark and tortured life.
Astin throughout looks suitably mad, dishevelled and nerve-wracked. His movements are detailed and fastidious. But his interaction with the props, (his fondling the chairs), seems too pre-meditated. He colludes intimately with the audience, confessing the sins and spoils of his life.
Astin's job is to relate to the audience as not Poe but the ghost of Poe, who has come back to put a few facts right.
The lighting is spectacular. When Astin narrates a fantastical plot to kill his foster father, John Allen, he is lit from the side in chiaroscuro, like a Caravaggio painting. Astin, though, is too affected in conveying tragedy to convince. Poe's confessions were not moving, neither was the recounting of the deaths of his mother and wife from consumption, "the red demon".
His ability to switch from character to character, however, was very comical. This flexibility is a vital skill for a one-man show, and he pulls it off. But Poe was not a comedian, and we know that from his work. The play is neither comic, nor tragic, nor tragi-comic. When he recites Eureka, Astin brings the full passion of genius of Poe to the stage. Poe was condemned a pantheist and other things for this philosophical book, but Einstein and the Buddha would have understood his ravings: "All of life is change, each change affects everything else. Space and duration are one, time and space inseparable."
Poe descended to opium. When he is dying, his figure is lit with an aura, as he sees "the perfect whiteness of the snow . . . all the pain of my life, the struggle, the demons, coalesced into a perfect unity . . . the fever called living conquered at last." Poe packs up and as he leaves, he says : "I have given you the truth tonight." Somehow we know that tonight we met Poe.
This show was also performed at Galway Arts Festival on Tuesday and Wednesday
