The Devil in the Belfry is a theatrical monologue freely adapted from a short story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe.

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A solo performer (Dave Robb), portraying a distraught traveler, directly addresses the audience under the pretext of recruiting them on a mission to rid his home of the eponymous ‘devil’. Over the course of one hour, props, versatile costume pieces, character acting, and a violin are used to animate the backstory, in which an isolated community with strict parochial values has been upset by the arrival of a frightening - possibly demonic - foreigner.   

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Drawing comparisons between the audience’s society and his own and making allusions to other notable Poe texts with which genre enthusiasts will be familiar, the piece encourages the audience to decide whether to support the protagonist’s cause or else leave the people of the fictional town to their fate.  

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The Devil in the Belfry is both a tribute to an influential writer and a satire of the current political trend toward isolationism and xenophobia. The full-length version has been developed with support from the Guest Room initiative from the National Theatre of Scotland and had its world premiere at the inaugural Cymera Festival of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy literature in Edinburgh.  

 

 

Written and performed by Dave Robb

Directed and produced by Flavia D’Avila 

“an infectiously madcap sixty minutes” Herald Scotland