Dead Poets Live
Sylvia Plath
Heptonstall
Bradford Literature Festival
Denise Gough returned with Sylvia Plath – ‘a stellar performance’ (Times Literary Supplement) – as Dead Poets Live came to St Thomas the Apostle, Heptonstall, the church where Sylvia Plath is buried, for the final night of the Bradford Literature Festival.
Plath was just 30 when she died and yet in her brief career she produced some of the greatest and most electrifying poetry of the 20th century. Her best-known poems, including ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’, and ‘Tulips’, arrived in an extraordinary torrent of creativity unleashed in her final months, and were posthumously collected in Ariel.
60 years on, in Heptonstall – where Plath is buried and where she spent several months between 1956 and 1959 – Dead Poets Live retraced her exhilarating and nail-biting poetic journey as she raced towards the definitive voice of those final poems.
Performers
Denise Gough 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 reprises the role of Sylvia Plath, having played the part – sensationally – in 2018, and earlier in 2023, first at Wilton’s Music Hall, then at the Gate Theatre, Dublin.
Photography © Tara Rowse
