Dead Poets Live
Emily Dickinson
London
Dead Poets Live‘s sell-out Emily Dickinson show returned to The Coronet Theatre, starring Patsy Ferran.
‘Though I read and teach Emily Dickinson constantly, I remain a bewildered idolator, struggling to understand her enigmatic sublimities … At her strongest, she has something in her lyrics that recalls the swiftness and compression of Shakespeare’s mind.’ Harold Bloom
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) wrote nearly 1,800 poems – epigrammatic, metaphysical, tragic, playful, intimate, and unsettling. Her work resists easy interpretation, condensing vast emotional and philosophical worlds into lines of startling precision and power.
Drawing on poems, letters, and critical insight, Dead Poets Live brings Dickinson’s life and work vividly to the stage, exploring the mind of a writer who remains at once deeply personal and profoundly unknowable. This dramatised reading invites audiences into the wit, intensity, and radical originality of one of America’s greatest poets.
Performers
In 2023, Patsy won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress and the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Best Actress for her Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida and the Phoenix, also being nominated for an Olivier Award. Also at the Almeida, she was Olga in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and starred in Summer and Smoke, for which she won both the 2019 Olivier Award for Best Actress and the Critics’ Circle Award for Best Actress. Other theatre work includes: Camp Siegfried (The Old Vic); A Christmas Carol (Bridge Theatre); 15 Heroines: The Labyrinth (Jermyn Street Theatre); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Broadway); My Mum’s A Twat (Royal Court); Speech and Debate (Trafalgar Studios); As You Like It, Treasure Island (National Theatre); The Merchant Of Venice (RSC); The Angry Brigade (Paines Plough); Blithe Spirit (also West End). For Dead Poets Live at The Coronet, Patsy played Elizabeth Bishop opposite Juliet Stevenson’s Marianne Moore.
Patsy won the Most Promising Newcomer in 2014 and was nominated for an Emerging Talent Award at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards in 2015. She was a Screen International Star of Tomorrow in 2018.
Film includes: Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly; Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk; Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 (all 2025) and Living; White Bird; Mothering Sunday; Tom and Jerry; How to Build a Girl; Darkest Hour; God’s Own Country; Tulip Fever; The National Phobia Association’s Day Out.
Television includes: Jane Austen in Miss Austen; Black Mirror; Will; Guerrilla; Jamestown; Black Narcissus; Life After Life.
Poems read
‘It was given to me by the Gods’
‘Far from love’
‘Diagnosis of the Bible, By a Boy’
‘It sounded as if the Streets were running’
‘What Soft Cherubic Creatures These Gentlewomen Are’
‘She rose to His Requirement—dropt’
‘I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—’
‘I taste a liquor never brewed – ‘
‘This is my letter to the world’
‘I’m ceded—I’ve stopped being Theirs—’
‘Suddenly—my riches shrank’
‘A Visitor in Marl’
‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’
‘The spider holds a Silver Ball’
‘Four Trees—upon a solitary Acre—’
‘I heard a Fly buzz’
‘My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —’
‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’
‘I felt a cleaving in my mind’
‘It was not death, for I stood up’
‘The first Day’s Night had come’
‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’
‘I measure every Grief I meet’
‘As imperceptibly as Grief’
‘Because I could not stop for Death’
‘There is a solitude of space’
‘I meant to find her when I came’
