Dead Poets Live – He Do the Police in Different Voices

2022 marks the centenary of one of the greatest achievements of literary Modernism, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Using the facsimile edition of the poem edited by Eliot’s widow Valerie as a guide, He Do The Police In Different Voices (the poem’s original title) tells the story of a masterpiece assembled by three people: Eliot, Ezra Pound and Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Pound’s excisions and Vivienne’s suggestions represent a major contribution to the poem’s final form, and the show will explore the fascinating process of alteration and refinement, using it to clarify and explain a poem – which will be performed in full – too often regarded as obscure. But this is also the story of three people – one the maker of the poem, another its editor, the third its guiding spirit – all haunted, to various degrees, by mental illness. Dead Poets Live’s new production tells their story alongside that of The Waste Land – who they were and what happened to them afterwards.