Dead Poets Live: Briggflatts - Digital Freesheet

BRIGGFLATTS - AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BY BASIL BUNTING

The Coronet Theatre is a reimagined architectural and design jewel, originally built as a grand Victorian Playhouse, now a pioneering home for international, cross-disciplinary arts. Curated by Artistic Director Anda Winters, over the past decade it has become a significant cultural landmark.

Known for world and UK premieres, its mission is to bring artists and art forms from around the world, championing work that would not otherwise be seen. The programme enables access for diverse audiences to world-class theatre, dance, music, film and visual arts through co-productions, commissions, and invited works.

Centrally situated in London’s Notting Hill, The Coronet has two main spaces: The Auditorium and The Print Room Studio. With the additional performances and exhibitions in the bar, the atmospheric upper rooms, and basements, the whole building is a living global showcase.

Éanna Hardwicke Autumn Journal

DEAD POETS LIVE: BRIGGFLATTS

- AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

19 - 21 Jun

BY

BASIL BUNTING

STARRING SIMON MCBURNEY

In 1964, Basil Bunting, as old as the century, was living near Newcastle in grinding poverty and obscurity, an extinguished star of the Modernist era who’d barely written a poem in 30 years, now working as a sub-editor on a local paper. What happened next is one of the great stories, and achievements, of English literature: the poem that Bunting set himself to make, Briggflatts, has been compared favourably to Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos by the poet Thom Gunn, among others It may be the richest, most musical, most wide-ranging and most moving long poem in English of the twentieth century: an unforgiving selfreckoning by a poet in old age, a history of human violence and folly across the centuries, a journey through Northumbria, Italy, the Arctic ocean, Bloomsburyite London and Iran, a love story spanning fifty years, and the autobiography of a man whose life almost defies belief. It’s wise, lyrical, regretful, learnèd, tough, funny, heartbreaking and one of the few truly indispensable poems of our language.

Dead Poets Live’s new show weaves together the story of Bunting’s astonishing life and the poem he wrote in response to it, presenting the work in full. Above all, Briggflatts is a poem whose author intended it to be experienced in performance; to be heard by a live audience. Simon McBurney, one of Britain’s most respected actors and theatre-makers, will explore Bunting’s life and perform, sixty years after its first publication, one of the greatest – and most unjustly neglected –poetic accomplishments in English.

SIMON MCBURNEY

Actor, writer and director Simon McBurney is one of the most innovative, mercurial and influential theatre-makers working today. In 1983, he co-founded the company Complicité and since then all his work has been made through a deeply researched and highly collaborative process which fuses a profound belief that all aspects of the theatre should challenge the limits of theatrical form.

Figures in Extinction, the culmination of Simon’s four-year, cross-continental collaboration with choreographer Crystal Pite for Nederlands Dans Theater premiered at Aviva Studios, Manchester last year before commencing on a sold-out tour of Europe.This is the first time Simon has created a work for a dance company exclusively

In 2024 Mnemonic returned at London’s National Theatre to critical acclaim Conceived and directed by Simon, its exploration of origins, memory, migration and time remains as strikingly relevant as when it first debuted 25 years ago.

As well as writing and creating original works, Simon has brought great plays and adaptations to the stage, including: The Master and Margarita (2012), Beware of Pity (2015) and most recently, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2022). He also adapted Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising into a 12-part dramatisation for radio alongside author Robert MacFarlane for BBC World Service in 2022. And this year, he directed Anne Carson’s one-act radio play I Don’t Do Innocents for The Paris Review.

Simon’s opera work includes: A Dog’s Heart (2010), The Magic Flute (2012), The Rake’s Progress (2017), Wozzeck (2020) and Khovanshchina (2025).

Simon’s work continually returns to political, social and philosophical questions of the way we live, think and act as a society and he is unafraid of melding the most ancient of theatrical forms with the most recent aspects of modern technology These aspects of Simon’s work are all present in the award-winning The Encounter (2015), described as ‘ one of the most fully-immersive theatre pieces ever created’ by the New York Times In 2021, he co-directed Fehinti Balogun’s Can I Live?; a vital digital performance about the climate catastrophe which follows Fehinti’s personal journey into the biggest challenge of our times.

His numerous awards include the Berlin Konrad Woolf Prize for Europe’s Outstanding Multi-Disciplinary Artists (2008) and the prestigious Yomiuri Prize in Japan (2009). He was Artiste Associé at the 2012 Avignon Festival and has honorary doctorates at several universities including Lund in Sweden, London Metropolitan University and Cambridge University.

In 2016 his wife, Cassie introduced him to Polly Higgins and the Stop Ecocide campaign which seeks to have Ecocide (unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge there will be widespread or long-term damage to the environment) enshrined in international law. He asks that anyone reading this joins him in supporting this campaign by going to Stop Ecocide.

BASIL BUNTING

Basil Bunting (1900-85) was one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain - in 1966, with the publication of Briggflatts, which Cyril Connolly called 'the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

Born in Northumberland in 1900, Bunting lived in Paris in the 20s, where Ezra Pound rescued him from jail and fixed him up with a job on the Transatlantic Review. He later followed Pound to Italy - giving up his job to Hemingwaywhere Yeats knew him as ' one of Pound's more savage disciples'. For the next 30 years he led a sometimes wild and always varied life - in Italy, England, Berlin,Tenerife, America and Persia - as a struggling, penniless writer, a music critic, sea captain, RAF officer,Times correspondent and Chief of Political Intelligence in Tehran During these years he built up a reputation in America as the best English poet of his generation, at the same time as his poetry was neglected in Britain. In 1954 he returned to Northumberland, and worked for several years as a sub-editor on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. It was not until the publication of Briggflatts that his genius was finally recognised. He died in 1985.

PASSAGE

EXPERIENCE A MESMERISING

INDOOR & OUTDOOR DANCE EVENT

IN THE HEART OF NOTTING HILL

THE CORONET THEATRE TEAM

Artistic Director & CEO

Anda Winters

Audience Experience Manager

Giudi Di Gesaro

Company & Production Coordinator

Emma Smith

Consultant Producer

Hetty Shand

Finance Manager

Andrew Michel

General Manager

Andy McDonald

Lead Technician

Louis Williams

Marketing Manager (Freelance)

Elliot Hall

Poetry Coordinator

Marion Manning

PR Consultant

Sharon Kean

Producer

Daphne Seale

Producing & Marketing Assistant

Esme Bishop

Theatre Administrator / PA to the

Artistic Director

Vihaan Chandy

Box Office Assistant

Ivana Dieli

Duty Managers

Francesca Battinieri, Annabelle

Gardner, Joanna Papanastassiou, Aylin Rodoplu, Hazel Townsend

Front of House Staff

Matilda Badziak, Eugénie Bakker, Aidan Bose-Rosling, Stephanie

Christodoulidou, Merilee Ettia, Katrina Foster, Trey Francis, Thea Gavanski, Hugo Gregg, Li IkokuSmith, Dane Kostic, Emma LairdCraig, Maria Lisberg-Jonasson, Hamza Mullick, Kajsa Wiberg

Norquist, Andreane Rellou

Trustees

Linda Bernhardt, Mike Fisher, Mimi Gilligan, Jane Quinn, Anda Winters, Bill Winters (Chair)

Thank you to our patrons for their generous support:

Club Room

Ros Shelley, Julia Rochester, Tom Glocer, Jane Quinn

Cupola

Mike Fisher, Judith Hooper, Clare Reihill

Honorary Trustee

Mimi Gilligan