An interactive theatre experience is coming to Llandrindod Wells in August, with audience members being able to choose which Edgar Allen Poe tales of terror are performed.

The Albert Hall, in Llandrindod Wells, invite ‘horror buffs, literature lovers, and anyone looking for a uniquely dark night out’ to choose their own nightmare on the 27th August.

A Pandemonium of Poe, staged by Jonathan Goodwin’s Don’t Go Into The Cellar! Theatre Company, will allow a live vote that will decide which plays will be performed, including The Black Cat or The Fall of the House of Usher. No two performances will ever be the same. Full-blooded gothic melodrama brought to life by Jonathan Goodwin in a show scripted by himself, and directed by Gary Archer.

Don’t Go Into The Cellar! are the UK’s leading performers of theatrical Victoriana with a macabre twist, based in the West Midlands—a region tied to major Victorian and Edwardian genre writers, including Arthur Conan Doyle, who began writing while practising medicine in Birmingham, and Sax Rohmer, creator of Fu Manchu, who was born there. Washington Irving wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow during his time in the city, and Charles Dickens frequently performed at Birmingham Town Hall, giving the first public reading of A Christmas Carol there in 1853. Humourist Jerome K. Jerome, born in nearby Walsall, also shared Dickens’s flair for the macabre when the mood struck, and the spirits of all these nineteenth‑century greats linger in the company’s stage work. They were founded in 2010.

Jonathan Goodwin has been enthralled by the Victorian and Edwardian eras since childhood, devouring Conan Doyle, Stoker, Stevenson and M. R. James, and discovering The Hound of the Baskervilles at around six. He grew up watching classic Sherlock Holmes films, horrors and early Hammer productions. As a teenager he even exchanged letters with Peter Cushing, whose Holmes—along with Basil Rathbone’s and later Jeremy Brett’s—became a lasting favourite. A voracious reader with shelves full of nineteenth‑century crime and popular fiction, he writes scripts with a free‑ranging imagination, believing that artistic licence is essential when crafting entertainment, however dark the subject.