Dead Poets Live
Hopkins
London
Dead Poets Live returned to Wilton’s Music Hall for the story of Gerard Manley Hopkins, played by Joshua James, as told by his best friend, Robert Bridges, played by Peter McDonald.
The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins were published, apologetically, in 1918. Over the next decade they were anthologised alongside T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and championed by the same critics who defined literary modernism. Their influence grew with the generation that followed – the generation of W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Bishop – to whom their wildly idiosyncratic style seemed, more than ever, ‘contemporary’. And yet they were written by a Victorian priest who had died in 1889, unable to convince himself, let alone his best friends, of their worth.
Dead Poets Live – ‘an occasional, but unmissable ongoing series of plays’ Daily Telegraph – returned to Wilton’s for three nights to tell the story of Hopkins’s relationship with poetry, and poetry’s relationship with Hopkins: how his extraordinary spiritual life led him to write – and then not to write – as he did, how his poems were destroyed, how they survived, how they were misunderstood, and how, ultimately, their influence triumphed. It is the story of a radical and passionate style and the radical, passionate spirit that it continues to communicate.
Performers
Joshua James’s recent theatre credits include: The Vortex (Chichester Festival Theatre), The Glass Menagerie (Royal Exchange), Yellowfin (Southwark Playhouse), Wife (Kiln), Lady Windermere’s Fan (Vaudeville Theatre), Life Of Galileo (Young Vic), Platonov, The Seagull, Here We Go, Light Shining In Buckinghamshire, Treasure Island (National Theatre), King Lear, The Tempest (Shakespeare’s Globe), Fathers And Sons (Donmar Warehouse), The Ritual Slaughter Of Gorge Mastromas, No Quarter, Love And Information (Royal Court) and Wolf Hall/Bring Up The Bodies (RSC).
TV credits include: The New Look (AppleTV+), Andor (Disney+), Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (Britbox/ITV), The Ipcress File (ITV), I Hate Suzie (Sky), Life (BBC), Industry (HBO), Black Mirror (Netflix), The Chelsea Detective (Acorn/Amazon Prime), Absentia (Amazon Prime), McMafia (BBC) and Raised By Wolves (TNT).
Film credits include: Cyrano (Working Title/MGM), Darkest Hour (Working Title) and Criminal (Millennium Films).
Peter McDonald is an Irish Oscar-nominated stage and screen actor and director.
Recent theatre credits include: Three Sisters (Almeida); Travesties (Apollo Theatre); The Weir (Donmar Theatre, London); The Days of Wines and Roses (Donmar); The Caretaker (Trafalgar Studios); Glengarry Glen Ross (Apollo Theatre); The Veil, Greenland, Exiles, The Aristocrats (National).
Recent film credits include: Woken; The Batman; Fanny Lye Deliver’d; The Dig; Bagman; England is Mine; The Stag, which he co-wrote; Wreckers, The Damned United, Nora, Saltwater
Television credits include: This Town; Mandy; Dublin Murders; The Last Kingdom; Thirteen; Virtuoso; Murder; No Offence; May Day: Moone Boy.
He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for his short film Pentecost.