Dead Poets Live – Wilton’s Music Hall, London

A review of Dead Poets Live at Wilton’s Music Hall. An unexpectedly delightful evening exploring the connection between poet T. S. Eliot and music hall star Marie Lloyd, on the centenary of The Wasteland.

Dead Poets Live

I really highly recommend going to something every now and then without knowing anything about it. Sometimes it won’t pay off at all and you will be cursing my name. But sometimes it will be unexpectedly delightful! Such was my recent evening at Wilton’s Music Hall, to see Dead Poets Live: Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight! I had seen it on the Wilton’s calendar, read enough about it in the synopsis to find it interesting and had book my spot accordingly. To be honest, I think the draw for me was that it had Luke Thallon in it, and I think he’s an excellent actor.

So I showed up on the appointed evening, and sat in my seat ready for something that I knew had to do with T.S. Eliot, a music hall star, and that was about all I recalled. I hadn’t even realised that Dead Poets Live was a recurring thing. But such it is. The premise is about bringing poetry to life as theatre. This can be a poet solo, poets in conversation or, as here, a poet and an important figure in their life or work.

The pairing of T.S. Eliot and Marie Lloyd is an interesting one. You may never have heard of Marie Lloyd, but she was one of the most famous women of the Victorian age. A music hall performer, she could play half a dozen venues a night to adoring crowds. She was a master of innuendo, a key part of music hall humour. And had a difficult personal life which kept her in the spotlight until her death in the 1920s.

By contrast you have most likely heard of T. S. Eliot. The evening here focuses on Eliot as the preeminent modernist poet. It’s 100 years, after all, since the publication of his poem The Wasteland, a key modernist work. They don’t sound likely to overlap in many Venn diagrams, and yet Lloyd was an important figure to Eliot. He called her death “a significant moment in English history”, after all.

T. S. Eliot And Marie Lloyd

So how to explore the connection between two such disparate figures? Well, Dead Poets Live has hit on rather a good formula. They do it, as the title suggests, by sort of bringing the dead figures back to life. So Eliot is played by Luke Thallon who I mentioned before. And Lloyd is played by Jenna Russell. Tom Hanson is there playing Lloyd’s no-good husband/Eliot’s character Sweeney. I believe script co-author James Lever was also on stage…? The format is really fascinating – it’s kind of a lecture, but rather than dramatic readings of a few poems, the subjects interject directly. Marie Lloyd corrects the pronunciation of her name. There are a few points where T. S. Eliot can’t help jumping in. Very much more animated and lively than a lecture.

And there were some really great bits in there. Not everything landed for me, but there was one jazzy kind of set piece conversation between the two of them which suddenly illuminated a purpose of all those high-end literary magazines and small print runs in the early 20th Century: scarcity value (“art debased into a commodity.”) That is something I will be mulling over for a while. And Russell and Thallon were both really great. Thallon was so animated as Eliot, you could see his every thought. And Russell does a great music hall number, crossing over from cheeky innuendo to heartfelt sorrow over the course of the evening.

This edition of Dead Poets Live was only on for two nights, so you will have to wait to see what they do next. But I really enjoyed this, perhaps even more so because for me it was very unexpected, but I think I would have loved its sheer creativity and charismatic energy either way. If you’re looking for something engaging, fun and educational to boot, look no further.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 4/5