Dead Poets Live
Wallace Stevens
London
Dead Poets Live return to Wiltons for two nights of an all-time great: Wallace Stevens.
Wallace Stevens was born in Pennsylvania in 1879, married once, had one child, lived most of his life in the same place, where he worked as a lawyer in the same insurance firm. He died in 1955. His biography, compared to the lives of other poets, is supremely prosaic. His poetry, by contrast, is abstract, fantastical, speculative, artificial, strange and preoccupied, self-referentially, with its own medium. And yet no poet of the twentieth century made a more brilliant case for abstraction, fantasy, speculation, artifice, strangeness and above all poetry as the medium in which we really exist. For Stevens more than almost any other poet, poetry was, quite literally, life.
‘The poem’, according to Stevens, ‘must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully’. In the spirit of that ‘almost’, Dead Poets Live return to Wilton’s to help Stevens’s great poems yield up some of their beautiful mystery, and in so doing present the case for ‘the best and most representative poet of our time’ (Harold Bloom), author of ‘the greatest American poem of the twentieth century’ (Yvor Winters), a phrasemaker, an astonishing observer of scene and landscape, a passionate poet of many moods, whimsical, austere, comical, bleak, always delightful and, when least expected, profoundly moving.
Performers
Rory Kinnear is an actor who has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre and has recently enjoyed success in recent films such as Bank of Dave, Men and Peterloo, further to roles in Skyfall and Broken, for which he won Best Supporting Actor at the British Independent Film Awards. In 2010 Rory played Angelo in Measure For Measure at the Almeida Theatre and later went on to play Hamlet at the National Theatre. The two roles won him the best actor award in the Evening Standard drama awards. He also achieved recognition as the outrageous Sir Fopling Flutter in The Man of Mode at the National Theatre, winning a Laurence Olivier Award and Ian Charleson Award. Other notable theatre work includes the parts of Iago, for which he was also received the Evening Standard Best Actor award, and Macbeth, the lead in Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, Gorky’s Philistines and the role of Mitia in a stage adaptation of the Nikita Mikhalkov film Burnt by the Sun, all for the National Theatre.
Rory has also appeared in numerous television dramas including Loving Miss Hatto, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Black Mirror: National Anthem, Richard II, Cranford, Years And Years and, most recently, Ridley Road. The Herd, Rory’s debut play, premiered at the Bush Theatre in 2013 and transferred to Steppenwolf Theatre in the USA in 2015.
