The Stage

Bloody Poetry

Published Monday 6 February 2012 at 11:25 by Natasha Tripney

Howard Brenton’s play about the lives and loves of Shelley and his circle is as much about failed utopianism as it is about poetry. There’s a lot of talk of revolution, free love and new modes of living, but there’s a degree of selectivity to how these ideals are applied.

Rhiannon Sommers (Mary Shelley), Joe Bannister (Shelley), Joanna Christie (Claire Clairemont), Bloody Poetry at Jermyn Street Theatre Photo: Robert Workman

Brenton’s 1984 play recreates the near-mythic Lake Geneva meeting of Byron, Shelley, his wife-to-be, Mary Godwin, and her half-sister Claire Clairmont, the lover of both men. It is sometimes lyrical in its language, sometimes intentionally jarringly brusque and anachronistic. The play fizzes with revolutionary energy but it also makes apparent that both Shelley and Byron were capable of great callousness, leaving an alarming trail of dead lovers and children in their wake.

Though it often makes the intimate space work to its advantage, Tom Littler’s revival is rather uneven in tone - it is, however, given a wonderful boost by David Sturzaker’s swaggering performance as the wild and charismatic Byron. Joe Bannister is, in comparison, rather puppyish as “Bysshe”, never completely conveying the man’s evident magnetism and complexity. Rhiannon Sommers plays Mary with intelligence, dignity and a real sense of fire, while Nick Trumble is fittingly priggish as Polidori, carping about the antics of these “atheistical perverts” as he makes his way through the audience to the stage.