In 1964, Basil Bunting, as old as the century, was living near Newcastle in grinding poverty and obscurity, an extinguished star of the Modernist era who’d barely written a poem in 30 years, now working as a sub-editor on a local paper. What happened next is one of the great stories, and achievements, of English literature: the poem that Bunting set himself to make, Briggflatts, has been compared favourably to Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos by the poet Thom Gunn, among others. It may be the richest, most musical, most wide-ranging and most moving long poem in English of the twentieth century: an unforgiving self-reckoning by a poet in old age, a history of human violence and folly across the centuries, a journey through Northumbria, Italy, the Arctic ocean, Bloomsburyite London and Iran, a love story spanning fifty years, and the autobiography of a man whose life almost defies belief. It’s wise, lyrical, regretful, learnèd, tough, funny, heartbreaking and one of the few truly indispensable poems of our language.

Dead Poets Live’s new show weaves together the story of Bunting’s astonishing life and the poem he wrote in response to it, presenting the work in full. Above all, Briggflatts is a poem whose author intended it to be experienced in performance; to be heard by a live audience. Simon McBurney, one of Britain’s most respected actors and theatre-makers, will explore Bunting’s life and perform, sixty years after its first publication, one of the greatest – and most unjustly neglected – poetic accomplishments in English.