Dead Poets Live: Briggflatts - Digital Freesheet

BRIGGFLATTS - AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BY BASIL BUNTING

WELCOME TO LONDON’S INTERNATIONAL THEATRE The Coronet Theatre is a reimagined architectural and design jewel, originally built as a grand Victorian Playhouse, now a pioneering home for international, cross-disciplinary arts. Curated

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Centrally situated in London’s Notting Hill, The Coronet has two main spaces: The Auditorium and The Print Room Studio. With the additional performances and exhibitions in the bar, the atmospheric upper rooms, and basements, the whole building is a living global showcase.

Éanna Hardwicke Autumn Journal

DEAD POETS LIVE: BRIGGFLATTS - AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY 19 - 21 Jun

BY BASIL BUNTING STARRING SIMON MCBURNEY 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 selfreckoning 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.

Script and direction: James Lever (also MC) and Oliver Rowse Produced by: Clare Reihill

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.

Figures in Extinction, the culmination of Simon’s four-year, cross-continental collaboration with choreographer Crystal Pite for Nederlands Dans Theater premiered at Aviva Studios, Manchester last year before commencing on a sold-out tour of Europe. This is the first time Simon has created a work for a dance company exclusively.

In 2024 Mnemonic returned at London’s National Theatre to critical acclaim.

Conceived and directed by Simon, its exploration of origins, memory, migration and time remains as strikingly relevant as when it first debuted 25 years ago.

Photo: Ali Wright

As well as writing and creating original works, Simon has brought great plays and adaptations to the stage, including: The Master and Margarita (2012), Beware of Pity (2015) and most recently, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2022). 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).

Simon’s work continually returns to political, social and philosophical questions of the way we live, think and act as a society and he is unafraid of melding the most ancient of theatrical forms with the most recent aspects of modern technology. These aspects of Simon’s work are all present in the award-winning The Encounter (2015), described as ‘one of the most fully-immersive theatre pieces ever created’ by the New York Times. In 2021, he co-directed Fehinti Balogun’s Can I Live?; a vital digital performance about the climate catastrophe which follows Fehinti’s personal journey into the biggest challenge of our times.

His numerous awards include the Berlin Konrad Woolf Prize for Europe’s Outstanding Multi-Disciplinary Artists (2008) and the prestigious Yomiuri Prize in Japan (2009). He was Artiste Associé at the 2012 Avignon Festival and has honorary doctorates at several universities including Lund in Sweden, London Metropolitan University and Cambridge University.

In 2016 his wife, Cassie introduced him to Polly Higgins and the Stop Ecocide campaign which seeks to have Ecocide (unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge there will be widespread or long-term damage to the environment) enshrined in international law. He asks that anyone reading this joins him in supporting this campaign by going to Stop Ecocide.

BASIL BUNTING Basil Bunting (1900-85) was one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain - in 1966, with the publication of Briggflatts, which Cyril Connolly called 'the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

Born in Northumberland in 1900, Bunting lived in Paris in the 20s, where Ezra Pound rescued him from jail and fixed him up with a job on the Transatlantic Review. He later followed Pound to Italy - giving up his job to Hemingway where Yeats knew him as 'one of Pound's more savage disciples'. For the next 30 years he led a sometimes wild and always varied life - in Italy, England, Berlin, Tenerife, America and Persia - as a struggling, penniless writer, a music critic, sea captain, RAF officer, Times correspondent and Chief of Political Intelligence in Tehran. During these years he built up a reputation in America as the best English poet of his generation, at the same time as his poetry was neglected in Britain. In 1954 he returned to Northumberland, and worked for several years as a sub-editor on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. It was not until the publication of Briggflatts that his genius was finally recognised. He died in 1985.

Biog: Bloodaxe Books

Tamsin Greig & Rory Kinnear If This Be Magic

Toby Jones The Haunter

Denise Gough Sylvia Plath

SAFE PASSAGE Dead Poets Live donate all the proceeds from our shows to Safe Passage, a charity which helps unaccompanied child refugees and vulnerable adults in Europe find safe, legal routes to the UK. Safe Passage’s legal team works with families living in the UK who are trying to reunite with relatives that are asylum seekers in Europe and on dangerous journeys. The aim is for refugees to avoid falling into the hands of smugglers or risk life-threatening routes to Britain.

Only half a per cent (0.54%) of the UK’s total population is made up of asylum seekers and refugees, and when accounting for population size, the UK ranks 19th overall in Europe for asylum applications received. Those that do come to the UK do so for various reasons – many make the journey to reach family and friends, because of cultural ties, or through no choice of their own, because of the actions of traffickers. Most of the Ukrainians we have supported at Safe Passage wanted to come to the UK because they saw Britain as a welcoming country that respected human rights. However, the vast majority of even the small number who attempt to reach the UK end up in Calais and Dunkirk with no access to safe routes. Between 2010 and 2020, only 6% of unaccompanied children who received asylum in the UK arrived via a safe route. Since the Government closed the two major safe routes for unaccompanied children, 83% fewer refugees have arrived via a safe route in the 12 months to June 2023 compared to the previous year.

Two years since Kabul fell to the Taliban, and the Government is still failing to honour its commitments to help Afghans reach safety. Through our legal work, we have observed first-hand that the current schemes are too slow and too restrictive.

Many at-risk Afghans have no way to reach safety in the UK, and families who were separated in the evacuation still have no way to reunite with their children and loved ones. Without functioning safe routes, more and more eligible Afghans have been left with no choice but to risk dangerous journeys to reach safety in the UK. To the end of August this year 4,080 Afghans crossed the Channel, compared to just 69 Afghans crossing the Channel in the whole of 2019. Currently, around 1 in 5 of all people crossing the Channel are from Afghanistan.

To urgently prevent further loss of life and to honour these commitments, the Government must act now to provide safe routes and offer welcome and compassion to Afghans in need of safety.

We’re the only organisation working with children at risk on the ground in both the country they find themselves in and the country they wish to reach. This, combined with our high quality casework, is unique and has proven particularly effective at cracking open legal routes.

Our field teams help identify and support child refugees who are eligible for transfer and ensure this happens quickly and safely.

Where there are unexpected delays we reassure the child and make sure they remain out of the hands of smugglers.

Our team attend the arrivals of child refugees we’ve helped reunite with family, to make sure they have a welcoming face when they arrive in their new home and restart their life in the UK. We also have a volunteer Community Mentoring programme that helps refugees settle by helping them register with a GP, sign up for school or other specialist organisations that may assist them with specific problems.’

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