There is a minefield for 'performed poetry' in which dead bodies and explosives are spaced, unpredictably. 'Being Alive' somehow crashes through it to a second half where it dances, at last, among the dangers. But for the first half it stumbles - performers drawn into exaggerated delivery, into acting without character, into experience-less expression. Here is the contradiction: actors playing not the experience, but the struggling for the memory of it that we know they do not have. What manifests is the absence of the poet. Certain multi-media tropes are pushed too hard and fall through into Blue Peter. What else can the actors play but enthusiasm?

But this lifts in the second half - the sometimes over-bearing, sometimes submerging soundtrack recedes, the over-enthusiastic direction dissipates and the actors step forward, now more subtly, ordinarily, they begin to own the verse, to speak as if they know, as if it comes from them, poems eighty years old feel contemporary again. Ayo El-Haddad speaks C. Day Lewis's 'Walking Away' with a restraint that touches deeply. At last the set design pays off. Gem Ahmet finds a suitably melodramatic poem to ride and does! Wendy Cope's 'Bloody Men' is dueted beautifully by Ahmet and El-Haddad. El-Haddad's rendition of Eva Salzman's 'Spells' is hard and generous too; her poise and knowingness play bitterly against a neon cityscape - a word-place of electric dreams, of realness and bright lights, and for once the music, Hammet-movie-like, matches and adds. Lewis Harwood finds a testing in a factory. And then 'Glad Of These Times' El-Haddad speaks one of Helen Dunmore's words - "glad" - as if it were a grateful sigh, a sigh of cost as well as gain, a word worth the whole evening: experience is coming through. Bodes well for this production team's forthcoming show.

Download review as word document (28K)