Edgar Allan Poe could not be absent during this year’s London Horror Festival, and in Gimcrack Productions’ debut his short story The Fall of the House of Usher is the basis for an eerie three-hander (renamed The End of the Line). In the original, an anonymous narrator enters the house of twin siblings Roderick and Madeline, the former a nervous hypochondriac and the latter falling into deep trances every so often. The house is said to be alive, and as Madeline dies and is entombed indoors, strange things start to happen.

Hannah Tottenham’s poetic adaptation sees the setting moved from wild nature into an urban bedsit, where the twins live on booze and cocaine as Anna, an old friend, steps through the door. The narrator, Anna (Abbiegale Duncanson), has a story: she has gone into law, to much hilarity on Madeline’s part (well played by a dark Paula Brett). As the three grow used to being together again, Anna is drawn back into the self-destructive lifestyle she supposedly left behind all those years ago. Roderick (an intense Andrew Futaishi) has invited Anna, although it never really becomes clear why. Strangely, although Anna is at first reluctant to stay for more than a few moments, she then starts urging both to get jobs and go outside; Roderick and Madeline do not seem to want anything from her.

This flaw in the setup causes quite a lot of problems for the performance. While the mood is convincingly bleak, and the use of dust throughout a clever Poe-esque hallmark, the characters do not give us much to look at after being introduced. Roderick’s constant angry convulsions occur without warning and apparently without reason, and Madeline just keeps falling into bouts of catalepsy. The pair’s intellectual exchanges are profound and paranoid at the same time, but do not lead the narrative any further. Roderick’s energy is badly matched with the others’, too: there is no development in the forcefulness of his outbursts. When his sister dies, arguably a moment of great despair since they are shown to have an almost sexual relationship, so much energy is spent already that his reaction is a bit too timid to my taste.

The aftermath of the death includes Anna, but still only as a bystander, as she, like the narrator in Poe’s original, helps Roderick to place the body in the family tomb (or in this case, the bathtub: the tomb is destroyed). I won’t spoil the ending, however it has to be said that despite a good effort at segments of physical theatre and a bold choice of source material, The End of the Line cannot survive on its poetry alone.

The End of the Line played the Etcetera Theatre. For more information, see the Etcetera Theatre website.