Dead Poets Live

(This is a past event and is no longer running)

An Evening With Robert Frost and Edward Thomas.

The Print Room is delighted to welcome you to the first in a new series of poetry evenings: Dead Poets Live.

In the course of an hour, led almost entirely by Frost and Thomas’s letters and poems, and brought to life by actors and contemporary poets, the evening will trace their brief but brilliant friendship.

They met in 1913, an encounter pivotal in the life and work of both men. Championed by Thomas, Frost gained literary recognition, with poems such as ‘Home Burial’, ‘Mending Wall’ and ‘The Road Not Taken’, and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times. Without Frost, Thomas may never have taken to verse, the medium in which he finally found artistic fulfillment, and with it unexpected happiness, cut short on the Western Front, where Thomas was killed in action on Easter Monday 1917.

Reading the part of Robert Frost will be Shaun Dooley, who played Frost in Richard Eyre’s The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, staged at the Almeida in 2012, since when he has made memorable appearances in The White Queen, Broadchurch and Cuffs, among other stage and screen projects.

Playing Edward Thomas will be Kyle Soller, fresh from Ivo van Hove’s Hedda Gabler at the National Theatre. He was winner of the Milton Shulman Award for Outstanding Newcomer at the 2011 Evening Standard Awards, given for work at the Young Vic and the Royal Court, and has gone on to play Gaveston in Edward II at the National Theatre and Edmund in Anthony Page’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, for which he was nominated for an Olivier in 2013. Until recently he starred as Francis in the TV Series Poldark.

Compering the evening is two-time Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee, Liam Williams: a stand up, writer and actor and also one third of acclaimed sketch troupe Sheeps. Liam’s 6 part series, Pls Like, was released on BBC3 in February 2017. In early 2017, Liam filmed a stand-up set for Live From the BBC.