BBC Scotland Radio Drama: Moyamensing: Scenes from the Life, Death & Dreams of Edgar Allan Poe

BBC Scotland Radio Drama
Moyamensing: Scenes From The Life, Death & Dreams Of Edgar Allan Poe
By Marty Ross

A live recording of a radio drama for BBC Radio Scotland

Edgar Allan Poe - drunk, desolate, death-haunted - finds things getting worse as he is locked overnight in Philadelphia's Moyamensing Prison... where his worst nightmares await him. An obscure but true incident from the closing act of Poe's life inspires a surreal, scary and darkly comic psychological portrait of the tragic genius.

Poe left an account not only of his incarceration in Moyamensing, but also of the hallucinations he suffered therein: horrors to match anything in his fiction, but strange beauties too. Follow him through encounters with sinister guards, hungry rats, a murderous doppelganger and a surgeon over-keen to wield his saw on the living, but also a meeting with a sublimely beautiful woman echoing more than one of the women Poe loved and lost.

Scottish playwright / storyteller Marty Ross is steeped in Poe's imaginative world. 21st Century Poe - his storytelling show at 2013's Edinburgh Fringe updated three classic Poe tales to contemporary Glasgow and at this year's Edinburgh Fringe & London Horror Festivals he is performing a storytelling version of Moyamensing. Marty has written many radio dramas for the BBC, with particular emphases on horror & the fantastic, as well as surreal evocations of the inner lives of artists, from Arnold Schoenberg to William Shakespeare.