Dead Poets Live
He Do the Police in Different Voices
London
How The Waste Land was made
In the centenary of The Waste Land, Dead Poets Live returns to The Coronet Theatre for three nights to tell the story of how that masterpiece of literary modernism was made. Starring Lindsay Duncan.
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.