World premiere of a Poe double bill featuring 'The Business Man' and 'The Case of M. Valdemar', performed by Stephen Smith.
Stephen Smith brings One Man Poe to the York Medical Society on Saturday 11 July, with the night serving as the world premiere of a new double bill: The Business Man and The Case of M. Valdemar. Smith runs Threedumb Theatre, and this is a one-man show that puts the work of Edgar Allan Poe front and centre.
The Business Man is a political satire on capitalism, while The Case of M. Valdemar follows an experiment on a dying patient. Together they make up the new programme Smith is debuting here in York. He describes the whole thing as a 'marathon of the macabre', and that's a fair summary: it sits right in the cross between dark humour and Gothic horror, and it's all delivered by one person on stage.
There's a bit of a story behind it, too. One Man Poe started during the pandemic as a series of Facebook Live sessions, and from there it grew into something that's toured internationally, with shows in Dubai, Malaysia, New York and Baltimore. The thing that stands out is the sheer amount of text Smith takes on—he's memorised over 18,000 words of Poe's writing, so the whole night is carried by his voice and his memory rather than a script on a stand.
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He's open about where the inspiration comes from, too. He cites the Poe cycle made by Roger Corman and Vincent Price, and he's interested in Poe's obsession with mortality and human nature rather than just the monsters. It's that side of the work he's after—the darker, more psychological stuff—and that's what you'll find in these two stories. The show is at the York Medical Society, 23 Stonegate, on Saturday 11 July.
