Dead Poets Live
The Haunter
London
Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy and Florence Hardy
Dead Poets Live returned to Wilton’s Music Hall for the life and poems of Thomas Hardy.
Every bereavement is a kind of ghost story. When Thomas Hardy’s wife Emma died unexpectedly in 1912, her loss unstoppered a flood of poetry in Hardy. Taken together, his poems about Emma constitute one of the greatest series of elegies in English, a complex exploration of nostalgia, regret, self-recrimination, self-mythologising, bitterness and yearning. They are the record of a haunting. Which all came as a most unpleasant irony to the second Mrs Hardy …
Working with the poet Mark Ford, whose book examining Hardy’s Emma poems, Women Much Missed, is published by OUP this July, Dead Poets Live returned to Wilton’s in November with a ghost story which is also a love story – a dramatization of a poet haunted into his greatest work.
Performers
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Toby Jones OBE has amassed a varied and distinguished body of work in theatre, television and film. In the theatre, he won an Olivier award for his work in The Play What I Wrote and was nominated for one for his Vanya in Uncle Vanya (2020). Among his television work, his portrayal of Alfred Hitchcock in The Girl earned him Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. He was nominated for a BAFTA for his work on Marvellous, and won one for his lead role in Detectorists. He co-created and co-wrote BBC2’s Don’t Forget the Driver, in which he also starred.
On film, particularly notable work includes his Truman Capote in Infamous, for which he won the London Film Critics’ Circle Best Actor award, as he did for his lead role in Berberian Sound Studio (2012). Other notable performances include The Painted Veil, Frost/Nixon, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and in 2020, First Cow. Recent work includes The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Clare Foy, The Wonder, Empire of Light and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
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Lesley Sharp is a British actress, who can currently be seen reprising her role as lead Detective Inspector Hannah Laing in series 2 of Channel 4 British remake of cult Swedish drama Before We Die; and on the Disney+ revival of award-winning The Full Monty, where she returns as Jean. She has just wrapped on a 6 part thriller for ITV called Red Eye, opposite Richard Armitage and Jing Lusi. Other recent work includes Lena Dunham’s feature adaptation of Catherine Called Birdy for Amazon and Working Title, and as the title character Philoctetes in Kae Tempest’s powerful version of the Greek tragedy, Paradise, for the National Theatre.
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Rosie Sheehy’s work in theatre includes playing Young Woman in Machinal (Theatre Royal Bath); Julie in Romeo and Julie (The National Theatre), Richard III and All’s Well That Ends Well (RSC), Oleanna (Bath Theatre Royal & The Arts Theatre West End), King John** (RSC), Anna X (The Vaults), The Wolves (Theatre Royal Stratford East), The Whale (Theatre Royal Bath), Uncle Vanya* (Theatre Clwyd/Sheffield Theatres) for which she won the ‘Best Female Performance in the English Language’ award at the Wales Theatre Awards 2018, Escape the Scaffold (Theatre 503), Strife (Chichester Festival Theatre), Bird (Royal Exchange Manchester), The Hairy Ape (The Old Vic) and Chicken (Paines Plough)
Her screen credits include The Red King, A Violent Man (Ascendent Films), Steeltown Murders (BBC1), Call The Midwife (BBC1, Neal Street Productions), Wild Bill (42, Anonymous) and Chernobyl (HBO/Sky).
** Nominated for South Bank Sky Arts Breakthrough Award and The Ian Charleson Award
* Won ‘Best female performance in the English Language’ Award’, Wales Theatre Awards 2018.
Photos of the event
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Credit: Bobo Zeng