Alfred Tennyson was twenty-four when he heard the news that Arthur Hallam had died, suddenly, on 15 September 1833. The news produced a surge of elegy: among the many poems Tennyson drafted that autumn were Tithonus, Ulysses, and the earliest sections of a sequence, dedicated to Hallam, that kept on growing and changing until finally, after seventeen years, when Tennyson was forty, it was published, anonymously, as In Memoriam. It became an instant classic, ran to many editions, made Tennyson’s name, and earned him the position of Poet Laureate. But twenty years and twenty editions later he was still tinkering: in 1870, aged 61, he added a new section.

Dead Poets Live return to The Coronet Theatre with a new version of In Memoriam: to present it, not in the order its sections were finally published, but in the order they were first composed; to set the story of how this classic poem came to be against the story of Tennyson’s 20s and 30s, retracing the many scruples and crises that produced this founding study in grief.