Dead Poets Live
Three Ages of Yeats
Dublin
Anthony Boyle, Olwen Fouéré and Peter McDonald star in Dead Poets Live’s verbatim retelling of Yeats’s poetic evolution.
The poetry of W. B. Yeats came in on the last wave of Romanticism and survived the Modernist backwash. It remained of the moment but out of step, just as the life he lived was intimately of its age and supremely out of time, guided by a mystical (often mystifying) inner life – an intricately personal vision of history, symbol and myth that also inspired his poems – a vision that Yeats enlarged and renewed throughout his life.
Part of this process of renewal was rewriting: not only his poems but the story of his life. Yeats shed styles and convictions as he changed, leaving behind a series of contradictory selves. ‘Three Ages of Yeats’ is a verbatim piece, dramatising those contradictions by separating Yeats’s life into three ages, each age played by a different actor: Early Yeats, the Republican in a velvet jacket, writing dreamy love poetry for Maud Gonne; the more direct lyric poet, Middle Yeats, writing out of heartbreak and public life; and Late Yeats, indecent, unbiddable, never more experimental. In presenting his life and poetry in triptych, Dead Poets Live hope to capture Yeats in his almost infinite variety.
Performers
Olwen is an Irish actress who works internationally in both English and French. Olwen most recently performed opposite Hugo Weaving in The President (Dir. Tom Creed), a co-production between Sydney Theatre Company and The Gate Theatre, Dublin. Recent film work includes The Watchers (Dir. Ishana Night Shyamalan), All You Need is Death (Dir. Paul Duane), Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (Dir: David Yates) as well as playing ‘Sally Hardesty’ in the highly anticipated horror sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and as ‘Ashildur Hofgythja’ in Northman alongside Nicole Kidman and Anya Taylor-Joy (Dir: Robert Eggers). Recent TV credits include The Tourist S2 (BBC/HBO), Derry Girls (Channel 4), The Crown (Netflix), the fantasy series Cursed (Netflix) and S2 of Brassic (Calamity Films) alongside Joseph Gilgun and Michelle Keegan. Further stage credits include The Pentagonal Dream Under Snow and iGirl both at the Abbey Theatre, Blood Wedding (Dir: Yaël Farber) at the Young Vic which received a plethora of positive reviews and with Force Majeure in The Last Season (Dir: Danielle Micich).
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: The Penguin, 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.
