There is still no better companion for indulging in misery and finding consolation than a copy of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a series of 133 cantos charting the poet’s response to the early death of his university friend, Arthur Hallam, on 15th September 1833. Read with near-religious fervour by a heartbroken Queen Victoria—‘Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort,’ she averred after losing Prince Albert—the extended elegy fuelled the Victorian era’s morbid obsession with mourning. Tennyson was catapulted into the spotlight, awarded a peerage and appointed as the nation’s Poet Laureate. This is the story brought to life in the new Dead Poets Live production of The Death of Arthur, a dramatized literary biography which interleaves spells of depression with sporadic outbursts of verse, faithfully replicating the way Tennyson used poetry to work through his grief.
The production takes place in the Tennyson family home in Lincolnshire. Here the pace of life is slow and free of distractions, making it conducive to unhealthy wallowing in sadness. In this spectral sphere, Tom Mothersdale’s Tennyson is a lugubrious presence, existing in his own psychic space. During the show, he raises his hood and curls up on the sofa like a stroppy teenager, refusing to move or engage with passing time. In conversation with his dutiful sister Emilia (Honor Swinton Byrne) or concerned friends Edward Fitzgerald (Shubham Saraf) and Edmund Lushington (Edward Bluemel), he feels misunderstood despite their attempts to coax him out of depression. At one point he is likened to St Augustine, condemned to sadness for loving what is destined to die as if it were immortal. Fitzgerald, at his wit’s end, offers a less romanticised diagnosis: ‘He’s a poet. He’s melancholic. He needs to get a job’.
Yet Tennyson’s anguished emotional life is the source of artistic employment. Quatrains, like tears, well and fall. The seemingly endless scattered writings are stepping stones to a greatness that the poet seems to have intuited was soon to come. Indeed, Tennyson is never without his notebook, scribbling away at some new canto which, while refracted through personal loss, prompts a wider questioning of emergent Victorian ideas about geology, evolution, the composition of the universe, or theological concerns regarding the material and temporal body. How, the production asks, are we to find light and faith in a disenchanted universe? A question with contemporary resonance, as director James Lever implies by opting to keep his cast in modern casual wear and set the play in a world where grief is relayed by voicemails.
Contributing to the play’s sense of introversion and alienation is effective lighting design. When reciting passages from In Memoriam, Mothersdale is engulfed by a glacial wash of blue light symbolically conveying his despair. Furthermore, the frequent use of the spotlight resigns Tennyson’s loved ones to the shadows and shows his increasing self-involvement and withdrawal.
Dead Poets Live manages to offer analytical literary insight with crowd-pleasing entertainment. In doing so, it brings challenging texts of historical importance to new audiences. Tennyson may come off as a bit of an old curmudgeon (not exactly someone you’d want to take to the pub). If this show is anything to go on, he’s a romantic solipsist, more in love with ideas and emotions than physical realities. Yet the best moments arise when desolation—that core of emptiness deep within—is filled with the salve of words. ‘Loved deeplier, darklier understood’—a line only Tennyson could have written, and which encapsulates my regard for In Memoriam, a poem that is a fond friend for surviving loss, but, for all its intimacy, refuses to relinquish its mysteries.
The Death of Arthur: Tennyson and In Memoriam
By Oliver Rowse
Director: James Lever
Cast includes: Tom Mothersdale; Honor Swinton Byrne; Shubham Saraf; Marli Sui; Edward Bluemel.
Until: Thursday 4th December
Running Time: 1 hour and 15 minutes, no interval
Review by Olivia Hurton