Camden Fringe: Scott Robinson on Edgar A. Poe’s Last Call

Scott Robinson brings Poe’s final hour to Camden People’s Theatre for the show’s UK debut

Edgar Allan Poe spent five years of his childhood at school in London, a detail that gives Edgar A. Poe’s Last Call an unexpected local thread as it arrives at Camden People’s Theatre for its UK debut. Written and performed by Scott Robinson, the solo show imagines the writer’s final hour, pieced together from poetry, memory and the voices of characters he created, after workshop productions in New York and Brooklyn.

Ahead of the run, Scott Robinson answered a few questions for Red Bus Londinium.

Red Bus: The show focuses specifically on Poe’s final hours rather than his life more broadly. What drew you to that narrow, intense window rather than a wider biographical sweep?

Scott Robinson: “There is a gentleman rather the worse for wear…” is a quote from a pleading missive dispatched to a local doctor in Baltimore, Maryland after Poe was found delirious in a tavern. He was dead four days later.

I have always been fascinated by the mystery of Edgar’s last moments. He was on the brink of attempting to change his life for the better by marrying a wealthy woman, and in the end, was it his alcoholism in control? The lure of a free drink compelled him to leave the train headed to his new life, and at last, that desire killed him. To create this piece I kept imagining his final hour, his life flashing before his eyes. What would he see? Confusion, hope, the characters he had created, bad decisions, lost loves, and ultimately, the loneliness of the end. Edgar becomes the “unreliable narrator” of his own life. His last moments are informed by all the giant themes of his struggles in life.

Red Bus: You’ve described weaving together poetry, music and memory. How much of Poe’s own words made it into the script, and how did you decide where his voice ends and yours begins?

Scott Robinson: Certainly, the strongest text is Edgar’s. We tried to use some of the intense historical text, “I will not live another day,” and still be able to tell our story in an hour. When you write a show based on a real figure you start by burying yourself, Poe would love that image, in the facts and the historical data. And then slowly, painfully, you can sift through and see where your story fits and where it takes you and the audience. His language was so rich, so evocative, it was very inspiring.

Red Bus: Your comments in the press release touch on screens, choice and “non-commercial” experience. How does a solo show about a nineteenth-century writer end up saying something about how we live now?

Scott Robinson: Last Call reminds us of what the human mind and imagination are capable of without digital intervention. The man wrote with paper and ink. He invented a genre in American literature. His equivalent of selling out was to indulge that genre and pour out the darkest and most horrific stories he could imagine. He needed the money that magazines would pay him for horror stories. Sadly he never made any real money, mostly because writers in the 1800s were not protected by international copyright. Stories and poetry were published all around the world, stolen basically, with no remuneration for the writer.

Poe and Dickens were two strident and early voices for the necessity of international copyright laws. Today, ninety per cent of what we do is moderated by a screen, and our data and logs of our activity are sold without us ever seeing a dime. People realise the current push for generative AI is founded on everything we’ve ever written, recorded, posted or created and shared online. Lots of unpaid labour benefiting AI companies. Poe, and Dickens, would have been livid.

I think we’re going through the eye of the needle right now. Everyone is tired of screens and commercial corporate “content.” People are yearning for the real, immediate, and inimitable experience of being present in a theatre.

Red Bus: The production uses voice recordings for Virginia, Roderick Usher and Berenice alongside your live performance. What did that choice let you do that a fully solo, unaccompanied performance couldn’t?

Scott Robinson: I wonder what it must have been like for Poe to carry his created characters, many of which live in uncomfortable stories, in his head. As his sanity ebbs and flows I thought it would be interesting to hear from characters as “the inmates take control” of the asylum. As his life flashed before his eyes, might these be the voices he summoned? It was also a lot of fun to “act” with very creative voice actors on the piece.

Red Bus: This is the show’s UK debut after development in New York and Brooklyn. What’s changed, if anything, in bringing it across the Atlantic and into Camden Fringe specifically?

Scott Robinson: Edgar spent five years as a child in London, Stoke Newington and Chelsea, so it seemed fitting to present the show to a British audience. And I was really amazed to learn of Poe’s friendship and activism on copyright with Dickens. Getting to perform at the Fringe in Camden is a real thrill.

In this version we’ve upped the ante in terms of trying to immerse the audience in the concept of a person’s final hour. It’s something no one takes time to think about, too horrific, but Poe is a perfect tour guide for imagining what might go through your mind at your last. Brooklyn was more of an attempt to try out certain elements of the script, like direct address. So the show has only gotten more exciting in this iteration. I am also looking forward to bringing Edgar outside of the theatre confines and presenting him to audiences “in the street.” He’ll be out there trying to drum up an audience by handing out flyers, or maybe just begging for a pint. What? That’s being true to character!

Edgar A. Poe’s Last Call plays Camden People’s Theatre, 58-60 Hampstead Road, from Tuesday 11th to Saturday 15th August 2026 at 7.15pm, with an additional 3pm performance on the final day. Running time is 60 minutes with no interval, and the show carries a 16+ guidance for content covering death and alcoholism. Tickets are £15, with a £12 concession, available via Camden Fringe.

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