Interview with Noel Byrne

Some stories refuse to stay buried, and few writers understood that better than Edgar Allan Poe. A Ghost Among the Living breathes thrilling new life into his gothic imagination through Box Tale Soup's signature blend of inventive puppetry, atmospheric storytelling and striking theatrical craftsmanship. Ahead of this year's Edinburgh Fringe, I caught up with the creative team to discuss adapting one of literature's greatest masters of horror, crafting ghost stories for the stage, and why Poe's tales continue to haunt audiences nearly two centuries after they were first written.

I'd love to start at the beginning. What first drew you towards Edgar Allan Poe's work for this production?

Actually, this one came to us rather than the other way round. We were commissioned to create the show by the Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles, who hold a wonderful Poe collection and wanted to see it brought to life on stage. It isn't the first time they've set us a challenge like that either - earlier commissions led us to Gulliver's Travels and The Picture of Dorian Gray. There's something quite fun about being pointed towards a project, as it often takes you down roads you wouldn't have found on your own.

Poe is a fascinating artist to work on, and he wrote about things that will never really go out of fashion - guilt, obsession, grief, fear. His stories are full of amazing gothic imagery for us to dig into as theatre makers.

Poe has written so many iconic stories and poems. How did you decide which ones belonged in A Ghost Among the Living?

There was a lot to get through! Poe wrote an extraordinary range of stories and poems, so the first job was simply reading as many of them as we could and noting down anything that sparked an idea.

We wanted a mix of variety and cohesion - tales with their own distinct atmosphere, so each one could feel like a different theatrical ‘game’, but that would also sit well alongside each other. Once we'd settled on the stories, we began building a connecting narrative around them, inspired by Poe's own life and style. Audiences who know his work well should recognise plenty of familiar moments, but hopefully discover a fresh perspective too.

📷 Evie Harmony Thorz

Puppetry has become synonymous with Box Tale Soup. What can puppetry communicate emotionally that a human performer sometimes can't?

Puppets ask the audience to meet them halfway. A puppet begins as an object, and together the audience and performer bring it to life. There's something incredibly powerful about that shared act of imagination.

Because of that, puppets can heighten things - can transport us to a world not quite our own almost immediately. There is something innately uncanny about them, and they can be genuinely frightening one moment, and then strangely delicate or moving the next. That's incredibly useful with Poe, where so much of the storytelling lives somewhere between reality and imagination.

Horror is incredibly difficult to create on stage. What have been the biggest challenges in making audiences unsettled rather than simply surprised?

It’s a challenge because it has to be fun, somehow. There’s a perverse pleasure, a thrill in being scared that is the reason we love a good ghost story, but it treads a fine line. Too far and it becomes ridiculous, even funny, or perhaps goes the other way and is just upsetting and alienating. We mentioned that we were inspired by the Hammer films, and it’s because they had fun with this kind of heightened gothic fiction - exaggerated and often a little tongue-in-cheek. We’ve worked on horror before of course, adapting Henry James and M.R.James, but Poe is a different beast and we felt his stories needed to be told with relish! 

You make an interesting distinction between unsettled and surprised, because I think you need both for a good ghost story - surprise and unease. A jump scare gets a reaction, but it's a short, physical one, gone as quickly as it arrived. It lands much better if it has come out of a steady, sustained unease, a growing tension that builds over a whole show.

Poe was a master of building tension, he planned his stories carefully and actually had a very detailed philosophy on how to structure his writing. He begins with the very first sentence, and long before anything supernatural actually happens in his stories, you already feel uneasy, like hearing footsteps behind you on an empty street. 

Theatre, especially of the relatively intimate kind you get at the Fringe, is actually a great medium for horror I think. It’s live, you’re right there, occupying the same space as the performers, so you can never feel entirely safe… Puppetry helps enormously too, because there's an ambiguity, a spooky quality to a puppet that keeps an audience slightly off balance in exactly the right way.

📷 Evie Harmony Thorz

Sustainability is becoming increasingly important across theatre. Why was it important that so much of the set, puppets and props were created using recycled materials?

It matters to us for several reasons, not just an environmental one although that’s certainly a big part of it. Financially and practically it makes sense for a small company like ours, but creatively it can be a real gift - working with reclaimed or recycled materials often pushes us towards more interesting, resourceful solutions than we might otherwise have found.

One of our unofficial mottos is ‘don't be wasteful, be creative’, and we try to apply that to everything in our creative process. Audiences seem to really respond to that innovation -  there's something people enjoy not just in seeing a set created from recycling, but then seeing how that set itself transforms and is reused.

Your productions often feel meticulously crafted. How long does the process usually take compared with rehearsals?

The making usually takes far longer than the rehearsals.

We'll spend a long time researching, writing, designing, building puppets, composing music and experimenting with ideas before we ever step into the rehearsal room. By the time rehearsals begin we've already lived with the show for quite a long time.

That said, rehearsals are where everything is really tested. It doesn’t matter how long or how hard we have worked on making something, it still has to prove its worth once actors, puppets, music and design all come together in the same room.

Music plays a huge role in Box Tale Soup shows. How early in the creative process does the score begin to emerge?

Very early, actually. We'll usually talk to Dan Melrose, our composer, right at the start, even before we've properly settled the shape of the story, just to share initial thoughts and influences. He's been working with us for years now, so there's a shorthand there that makes those early conversations really productive. Then it’s very back and forth, and there are often ideas in the show that began with the music first.

For this show we knew we needed tension, something spooky, and a creepy kind of vibe, but we always like to surprise the audience too, so we try to stay away from the obvious. Dan is a very versatile musician, so he’s great at taking things in an unusual direction!

📷 Evie Harmony Thorz

Edgar Allan Poe's stories are full of psychological tension. How did you make sure the emotional journey remained just as important as the visual spectacle?

I actually don’t feel like we approached this work any differently in that respect. Spectacle for spectacle’s sake, style over substance is something we have always tried to avoid. Of course you’d have to ask our audience if we have succeeded, but we’re always conscious of it.

There are two questions we always go back to when making any show - Does this serve the story? What do we want the audience to feel? It doesn’t matter how much we might love an idea visually, if it doesn’t work for the story, if it just doesn’t fit, then we have to be prepared to lose it.

With this show, because we are covering several of Poe’s tales, a major concern was making our connecting story feel right. We wanted it to feel appropriate, satisfying, not just something that was stitching the stories together for convenience. The puppetry, the design, the transformations, hopefully all contribute to heighten what’s happening and bring it all together. 

You've now become Fringe veterans. Looking back over the years, how has your approach to creating theatre changed?

I think the biggest shift has been confidence — understanding what a Box Tale Soup show actually is, and trusting that instinct rather than second-guessing it. Our puppetry and design have both become more ambitious over the years, but they've also become more refined; we know what we're reaching for now in a way we perhaps didn't when we started.

We've also built an audience who trust us, people who'll come and see a new show without knowing anything about it, just because they know the care will be there. That's an enormous privilege, but it also raises the bar, we don't want to let them down! This show was a huge challenge and definitely the most technically demanding we've made, which I think reflects that growth.

Is there anything you discovered about Poe during your research that genuinely surprised you?

Yes, definitely. We were given access to some of Poe's original manuscripts and letters as part of the research for this show, and it was fascinating to see. People tend to picture Poe as this wild, tormented figure, and there's truth in that, his life really was difficult, but his handwriting is incredibly precise and careful. Every word looks considered.

It was a good reminder that behind all that wildness in the stories was someone extremely meticulous, engineering every effect very deliberately. That contrast certainly influenced how we constructed the show.

Also, although he’s well known for horror, it was also interesting to discover the many other styles and genres he wrote in, work I wasn’t really aware of at all. We can’t include all of that of course, but there are a few nods and easter eggs in there for the real aficionados!

What do you think audiences who have never experienced a Box Tale Soup show before will be most surprised by?

I’d like to think they would be impressed by the inventiveness, the creativity, perhaps how much we manage to create with relatively simple ingredients. People often tell us they've never seen anything quite like our work, and that is a great point of pride for me - I feel we have truly developed our own style and we still try to push and challenge ourselves with every new piece.

For this show specifically, I hope first-timers will also enjoy the range — each story has its own distinct style, so the picture keeps shifting even within a single hour.

Finally, if someone is deciding what to see at this year's Edinburgh Fringe, why should A Ghost Among the Living be at the very top of their list?

If you like inventive, imaginative theatre, great puppetry and ghost stories, or just fancy feeling pleasantly creeped out for an hour, I think you'll have a great time!

Importantly, you don’t need to know Edgar Allan Poe at all… If you are a Poe fan, then I think you'll absolutely love this show, but we’ve also been very careful to make things accessible, and there's a huge amount to enjoy whether you know the work or not.

After 13 years at the Fringe we’ve got a fantastic track record of sell out shows and glowing reviews from both audience and press, and we’ve put the same care, love and attention into this show as we do for every production. So I hope that once again people will be amazed by the design and storytelling, and blown away by the creativity on display!

Whether you're already a devoted Poe enthusiast or simply enjoy inventive theatre that pushes the boundaries of storytelling. Blending beautifully crafted puppetry, spine-tingling suspense and the kind of imaginative stagecraft that has become synonymous with Box Tale Soup, this latest production looks set to prove once again why they're one of the festival's most consistently exciting companies. A Ghost Among the Living is at the Edinburgh Fringe at Pleasance Dome, Queen Dome, 5 – 31 Aug 2026 (not 19), 12:25 (13:35) . Ticket information here: A Ghost Among the Living | Edinburgh Festival Fringe