William Butler Yeats famously wrote that every man is forced to choose between the ‘perfection of the life, or of the work’. In the latest offering from Dead Poets Live, a series of séance-like staged poetry readings devised by the T.S. Eliot Foundation, these competing obligations are held in a war embrace. Three Ages of Yeats dramatizes the ways in which Yeats’ emotional storms were both the fuel for his art, strenuously ‘hammered […] into unity’ and given shape through poetic form, and also the source of a lifelong sense of restlessness and inner division.
In this spirit, Yeats is embodied by three actors; they symbolise his splintered selfhood and the mercurial, even moon-like, phases of his journey from innocence to experience. Dónal Finn is a bewitched Early Yeats, engulfed by his romantic impulses for a mystery-shrouded Maud Gonne (Aoife Hinds), and fascinated by Irish mythology and the occult for their promises of transcendent wisdom. Middle Yeats is given life by a glowering, increasingly disenchanted Peter McDonald, who is preoccupied with Irish nationhood and is emotionally riven by revolutionary events like the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule. Niamh Cusack embodies Old Yeats, grown prickly and possessed by a sense of the apocalyptic, who speaks with a vinegar tongue, imperiously mocking youthful folly and willed illusion.
Structurally, Three Ages of Yeats makes impressive use of Yeatsian philosophy. Indeed, Yeats conceived of the composition of poetry as a ritualistic – but often infuriatingly meticulous – ‘stitching and unstitching’ of words to articulate ‘sweet sounds’. Directors O. Rowse and J. Lever seize on this technique, deftly knitting together the story of Yeats’ life through aureate lyrical swatches, letters and wry personal recollections. The result is a narrative that brings into conversation chronologically disparate material, yet, taken as a whole, remains as intricately wrought as one of Yeats’ poems.
The production furthermore masterfully evokes a sense of the lyric voice changing as it passes through the chastening weather of time. It opens with star-spangled poetry borne of Pre-Raphaelite influences and Celtic mythology in ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ and ‘He wishes for the cloths of heaven’ before shifting to an austere register forged by elderly cynicism and political warfare, epitomised by poems like ‘Easter, 1916’ and ‘The Coming of Wisdom with Time’. In between these recitations, ghostly audio clips are played, offering poignant, half-remembered nuggets of wisdom from figures like Ezra Pound and Yeats’ father. These, combined with the slow, somnolent movements of the actors and their dream-struck deliveries highlight how they are encloistered in disparate moments in time, and places Three Ages of Yeats in the realm of memory to a haunting effect.
Contributing to this sense of stillness throughout is the bare stage, which is restricted to three chairs curved into a crescent moon, a nod to Yeatsian symbolism. Behind is a screen, onto which is projected occult iconography, from a twirling gyre to a waxing moon. The lighting is also complimentary, kept icily white and lunar for the most part, but occasionally used poetically; for instance, in ‘The Second Coming’, it flushes incarnadine, as if letting loose a ‘blood-dimmed tide’.
Three Ages of Yeats is a real coup de théâtre. Grounded in an impressively deep understanding of Yeats’ complex body of work, the show finds inventive and dramatically effective ways of wresting together the poet’s contradictory selves, styles, philosophies and politics. It rummages around the ‘rag and bone shop’ of Yeats’ heart to present a writer of infinite range, with an enchanter’s ability to transfix intensely private emotions into an enduring, collective voice.
The Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill
Dead Poets Live: Three Ages of Yeats
Adapted and Directed by O. Rowse and J. Lever
Cast includes: Dónal Finn; Peter McDonald; Niamh Cusack; Aoife Hinds.
Running Time: 2 hours including an interval
Dead Poets Live donate all proceeds to Safe Passage
Review by Olivia Hurton
29th June 2025