He Do the Police in Different Voices (the poem’s original title) is the story of a masterpiece assembled by three people: Eliot, Ezra Pound and Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood – all through the eyes of his widow, Valerie. Using the facsimile edition of the poem which Valerie discovered and edited as a guide, it brings to life Pound’s excisions and Vivienne’s suggestions, dramatizing the fascinating process of alteration and refinement, using it to clarify and explain a poem – which will be performed in full – too often regarded as obscure.

But this is also the story of three people – one the maker of the poem, another its editor, the third its guiding spirit – all haunted, to various degrees, by mental illness. Dead Poets Live’s new production tells their story alongside that of The Waste Land – who they were and what happened to them afterwards.