Friday 29th January; 5pm

Oxford Playhouse

“I came away from this production feeling enlightened and entertained – quite an achievement when you consider the subject matter!” Madeline Wright ★★★★★

Live Canon: War Poets ★★★★★

Review by Madeline Wright

“There’s no getting around it: the Live Canon experience is, frankly, a bizarre one. The setup is deceptively simple: one stage, one hour, three performers, and thirty-seven war poems ranging from old stalwarts like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon to newer offerings from modern poets. So far, so good, but the weirdness kicks in when the performers suddenly break into song. It’s an interesting idea; sometimes successful, but undeniably disconcerting and often incongruous, particularly when the words are muffled – I couldn’t help thinking that Sassoon’s “Flanders Fields” in particular was incomprehensible and thrown away.

As with any poetry-based performance, much depends on the choice of material and sensitive matching of voice to each poem, as well as the performers’ ability to draw you in without resorting to actually acting out each poem. After a somewhat abrupt start (the first speaker began reciting almost as soon as the lights went down, leading to some audience shuffling obscuring his words a little), Live Canon settled in and managed to get pretty much everything right. There were a couple of bum notes such as Eva Dobell’s ponderous “Night Duty” and Ted Hughes’s “Out”, which seemed to take forever to say, well, not very much at all, but generally, the material was well-judged and beautifully performed.

There were moments of brilliance such as “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, which was quite possibly the high point of the hour. Delivered with power and driving momentum, it barely gave the audience time to draw breath before launching back into another ferocious attack. The performers were unafraid to mix the more substantial poems with slighter verses such as May Herschel Clarke’s “Nothing to Report”. With its two simple lines and well-judged offhand delivery, it packed much more of a punch than many of the longer pieces and cast an uneasy spell over the audience. The most successful song was, unsurprisingly, an actual World War 2 ditty, “Goodbye Dolly”, which allowed the three performers to make use of the whole stage to create a rhythmic foot-stamping spectacle entirely in harmony with the eclectic atmosphere of the evening.

Most of the success of the show is down to the three performers, Simon Muller, Alice Barclay and Curtis Jordan, and the energy and passion they managed to sustain over the whole performance. There wasn’t a single moment of dryness, inaccessibility or preachiness and I came away from this production feeling enlightened and entertained – quite an achievement when you consider the subject matter! Yes, the combination of poetry and sudden bursts of song is a strange concept, but if you can ignore the incongruity of the songs (and the couple of rambling poems) you’ll find much to like in this accessible, engaging and very sincere performance.”