Compiled entirely from Poe’s short stories, poems, essays and letters, The Remembrance Of Edgar Allan Poe reveals how the Master of the Macabre drew on the tragedies in his own life to create unforgettable works of beauty, mystery and imagination.
In this brilliant monologue Dillon’s performance is astonishingly versatile, a tour de force, driving together the passions, concerns and torments of this monomaniac genius with a determination and vigour that is exhausting to watch, let alone perform.
THE SCOTSMAN
From the early battles with his adoptive father, John Allan, and the big-nosed comedy of Lionizing, though the horror of his young wife’s sickness and the teeth-pulling obsession of Berenice, to the final years of mourning and The Raven‘s famous haunting refrain of “Nevermore!”, Dillon has woven a dream-like tribute to a life of undying hope, passion, poverty, disease and drunkenness.
Darkly powerful and brilliantly performed… mesmeric, physically eloquent, Dillon acts body and soul. Saturnine, menacing, savage yet vulnerable, his creation is part Jack Nicholson at his most manic, part depressive, moving in distracted, tranquilised limbo. Dillon’s delivery is magnetic. He stabs words out like a knife-thrower, shoots volleys with Kalishnikov ferocity or mouths them slowly with deliberation and pain. You can only bleed for Poe… but you can marvel at Dillon’s virtuosity.
YORKSHIRE POST
In 1991, George Dillon was invited to play Edgar Allan Poe off-off-Broadway in New York. The production never opened, but Dillon was inspired by his own recent bereavement and Kenneth Silverman’s excellent biography (Edgar A Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance) to create a solo show about Poe, using only Poe’s own words. In 1993 he toured a preview as a double bill with Berkoff’s Say a Prayer for Me & Hell, and then premiered The Remembrance of Edgar Allan Poe at Edinburgh. He returned to Edinburgh in 1996 and toured the show alongside Hell & Other Tales and Stunning the Punters in 1997.
An electric display of emotions, heightened by expressive physical movements and precisely enunciated words – from sotto voce to screaming sorrow and anger. Thorough, talented, amusing, provocative, soul-searching, this must be seen. Dillon is, we are told, an actor with “no formal training”; a genius.
THE STAGE
Performed with technical brilliance and punishing ferocity, The Remembrance of Edgar Allan Poe details the consumptive story-teller’s obsessive loves in life and literature and contains an unforgettable rendering of Poe’s classic poem, The Raven.
THE INDEPENDENT