Dead Poets Live aims to bring poetry to the stage, “creating theatre out of poems and poets”. Over the last ten years, poets from the past from Yeats and Byron to Robert Frost and Stevie Smith have been resurrected in the person of actors such as Rupert Everett, Glenda Jackson, Denise Gough and Monica Dolan.
Patsy Ferran is centre stage tonight as one of America’s greatest poets, Emily Dickinson, a 19th century writer who flirted with modernism before it had a name and engaged fully with the world while remaining reclusive and withdrawn physically from it. Her poems are noted for their odd metre and punctuation – chiefly dashes – while offering playful and perceptive views of melancholia, religion and nature.
Although other stagings of Dead Poets Live have been presented in full sets, the Coronet offers a stripped-down presentation of Emily at her desk, a vase of flowers at her side, and a lectern for MC and narrator James Lever. A screen at the back is occasionally used to show photographs and manuscripts.
The audience is largely made up of poetry devotees, and the show assumes this, with scant explanation of the mechanics of the art. Some biographical information is provided about Dickinson’s early life and education, but the meat of the evening is on detailed discussions of her craft, through her poems and letters.
Lever takes on the character of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a name I recalled from early edited collections of Dickinson’s work, and a devoted correspondent with her in life. He was a mentor who was both encouraging and cautionary, inviting debate but suggesting her work was not acceptable for publication.
We are told in Dead Poets Life that women writing poetry in this period were restricted to the topics of interest to wives and mothers, the flowery language and sentimental ideas of poets such as Sarah Piatt. Dickinson was very different. She had opinions, she stood alone.
In Ferran’s performance, this energy takes time to build, as she grows into the role and the reading. She presents her Dickinson as a little mouse, chafing against the expectations the world lay on her shoulders. She almost smirks as Lever offers moments of praise for her work and words.
If you are not interested in the more academic study of the poet, you may find this mode of presentation – lecture and reading of the work – a little dull. Lever offers significant insights in his script but perhaps assumes more knowledge than some will have, especially on the place of women in 1800s Amherst, Massachusetts and on Dickinson’s health.
There is an excellent choice of poems and letters from Dickinson’s huge oeuvre, taking us from her childlike nips at God through to her deep engagement with topics of love and death. We are even invited to sing one of her more pointed parodies of religious piety.
Less theatrical than I expected, Dead Poets Live is nevertheless an interesting idea and as all money raised goes to the charity Safe Passage, a worthy one too.
Dead Poets Live: Emily Dickinson is at the Coronet Theatre until 8th March 2026. https://deadpoets.live/
Reviewer: Louise Penn
Reviewed: 7th March 2026
North West End UK Rating: