The House of Usher, an ancient, decaying mansion, is home to Roderick and his twin sister Madeline - the last of the Usher family.
When Roderick invites his old school friend to stay with them he sets in motion an increasingly horrific sequence of events,
involving guilt, terror, obsession, drugs, catalepsy and madness, which leads inevitably to the fall of the House of Usher.
The Fall of the House of Usher is a short story which uses the elements of the gothic tale to create a revealing insight into the
disintegration of the human mind. It would make a very short play if transferred to the stage as it is, so I took the characters and
framework of the story, then looked to other works by Poe for material to expand its themes and ideas. This was not difficult, as
much of Poe's writing deals with similarly macabre obsessions: The Premature Burial, The Oval Portrait, Morella, The Cask of
Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart and many others provided material which could be woven into the tale of the doomed House of
Usher without destroying its essential atmosphere and effect.
In the original story, Roderick Usher's friend is the unnamed narrator, so for the dramatisation I simply gave him
Poe's name - Edgar. Roderick's sister, Madeline, makes only a brief appearance before the climax of the story:
"the Lady Madeline ... passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence,
disappeared." Madeline's role needed to be enlarged, so the play begins with the diagnosis of her illness, and establishes
her ambiguous relationship with her brother. When Edgar arrives, Madeline's shifting feelings contribute to the motivation
for Roderick's actions later in the play.
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The bulk of the dialogue is derived directly from Poe's writings, as is the poetry (apart from the pieces by Shakespeare).
The Haunted Palace and The Mad Trist have been retained from the original tale, where they are used to heighten the
sense of dread, and echo the themes of madness and sexual guilt, while the stories concerning the Usher ancestors
are all drawn from other tales by Poe to reinforce the inevitable doom of the cursed family.
The brooding menace of The Fall of the House of Usher has fascinated poets, dramatists, film-makers and composers for over
a century, among them Claude Debussy, Heiner Müller and Pierre Boulez. In 1928 it was twice made into a film, once by
Jean Epstein and once by James Sibley White and Melville Webber. In 1942 Curtis Harrington directed a version with himself
as both Roderick and Madeline Usher, and Anthony Perkins as the young lead.
A 1947 British film was the first full feature
made of the subject, and in 1960 Roger Corman's low-budget version with Vincent Price as Roderick Usher captured some
of the haunted feeling of the original story, in which, Corman declared, "The House is the Monster". In 1962 David Campton
directed his own stage adaptation at the Library Theatre, Scarborough, with Alan Ayckbourn as Roderick Usher. In 1988
Philip Glass composed an opera of the story, with a libretto by himself and Arthur Yorinks, which suggested the constant
presence of inescapable shadows in an atmosphere full of suspicions, half-truths, truths and lies.
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