Dead Poets Live
Sylvia Plath
Dublin
60 years later
The Gate Theatre welcomed Dead Poets Live and two-time Olivier Award winner Denise Gough – ‘a stellar performance’ (Times Literary Supplement) – as part of its Gatecrashes strand.
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932 and died in London in 1963, aged 30. In her brief career she produced some of the most riveting poetry of the 20th century. The best-known of her poems – among them ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’, ‘The Applicant’, ‘Tulips’ – arrived in the extraordinary torrent of creativity unleashed in her final months, posthumously collected in Ariel.
Sixty years on from her death, Dead Poets Live retraced the exhilarating, breath-taking, nail-biting ascent that Plath made, by various poetic turns, to the voice, the unique and definitive voice, of those final poems.
Performers
Denise Gough, returning to Dublin following her Irish Times Theatre Awards nomination for Best Actress in Portia Coughlan, astonished audiences and critics in London and New York with her performance in People, Places & Things, for which she was awarded the Olivier Award for Best Actress in 2016 and the Obie Award in 2018. She returned to the National Theatre in 2017, and won the Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actress in the revival of Angels in America.
TV work includes, most recently, a leading role in Star Wars: Andor, directed by Tony Gilroy, besides starring roles in Under the Banner of Heaven, Too Close, opposite Emily Watson, and the title role in Conor McPherson’s mini-series, Paula. Film work includes Colette, Monday and Steel Country.
Denise reprised the role of Sylvia Plath, having played the part – sensationally – in 2018, and earlier in 2023 at Wilton’s Music Hall.
Photography © Tara Rowse