Dead Poets Live: Briggflatts - An Autobiography
BY Basil Bunting
Starring Simon McBurney
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In 1964, Basil Bunting, as old as the century, was living near Newcastle in grinding poverty and obscurity, an extinguished star of the Modernist era who’d barely written a poem in 30 years, now working as a sub-editor on a local paper. What happened next is one of the great stories, and achievements, of English literature: the poem that Bunting set himself to make, Briggflatts, has been compared favourably to Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos by the poet Thom Gunn, among others. It may be the richest, most musical, most wide-ranging and most moving long poem in English of the twentieth century: an unforgiving self-reckoning by a poet in old age, a history of human violence and folly across the centuries, a journey through Northumbria, Italy, the Arctic ocean, Bloomsburyite London and Iran, a love story spanning fifty years, and the autobiography of a man whose life almost defies belief. It’s wise, lyrical, regretful, learnèd, tough, funny, heartbreaking and one of the few truly indispensable poems of our language.
Dead Poets Live’s new show weaves together the story of Bunting’s astonishing life and the poem he wrote in response to it, presenting the work in full. Above all, Briggflatts is a poem whose author intended it to be experienced in performance; to be heard by a live audience. Simon McBurney, one of Britain’s most respected actors and theatre-makers, will explore Bunting’s life and perform, sixty years after its first publication, one of the greatest – and most unjustly neglected – poetic accomplishments in English.
Dead Poets Live have established a cult following at The Coronet Theatre for their dramatised readings of classic poetry, attracting some of Britain’s finest actors including Rory Kinnear, Patsy Ferran, Lindsay Duncan, Denise Gough, Toby Jones, Eanna Hardwicke and Tom Hiddleston. All proceeds from their evenings go to the charity Safe Passage. Dead Poets Live is devised and supported by The TS Eliot Foundation.
Simon McBurney
Actor, writer and director Simon McBurney is one of the most innovative, mercurial and influential theatre-makers working today. In 1983, he co-founded the company Complicité and since then all his work has been made through a deeply researched and highly collaborative process which fuses a profound belief that all aspects of the theatre should challenge the limits of theatrical form.
His recent work includes: Figures in Extinction, a four-year, cross-continental collaboration with choreographer Crystal Pite for Nederlands Dans Theater, the return of Mnemonic at the National Theatre, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Can I Live? and The Encounter.
He also adapted Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising into a 12-part dramatisation for radio alongside author Robert MacFarlane for BBC World Service in 2022. And this year, he directed Anne Carson’s one-act radio play I Don’t Do Innocents for The Paris Review.
Simon’s opera work includes: A Dog’s Heart (2010), The Magic Flute (2012), The Rake’s Progress (2017), Wozzeck (2020) and Khovanshchina (2025).
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