Many love affairs are dogged by some bad luck, but few are quite as cursed as that between teenagers Edgar and Annabel. There relationship is played out in cemeteries and leads straight to the grave via tuberculosis, escaped monkeys, close shaves and murder. The opening show in this year's London International Mime festival, Teatro Corsario's puppet piece draws on the gothic horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe, including The Black Cat and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. It operates at a place between fiction and biography, life and death itself.
It's a technically assured show and the company manipulate outsize puppets and scene changes with tremendous aplomb. The latter are particularly impressive: one minute we are watching a man dispose of his wife's body from a boat; the next we are involved in a life-and-death struggle under the water complete with giant rays. There is a fluidity and hallucinatory quality to the evening that makes it feel like a bad dream. But this Spanish company manipulate our emotions rather less successfully in a comic-horror show that is like looking at a Spanish arthouse silent movie with added toilet humour.
The tone of this tragic farce, in which Edgar becomes a puppet caught up in events and manipulated by unseen strings in an uncaring universe, is never consistent. Although it has some genuinely bloody moments, there's little real horror in an evening that seems to owe more to movies such as Carrie than to the dark, haunted imagination of Poe, whose own life was dogged by a series of unfortunate events. In the end, it is neither funny nor scary enough, and the lack of emotional underpinning means the fate of the doomed lovers fails to touch the heart.
