Review: Bloody Poetry

This production of Bloody Poetry does not add up to more than the sum of its parts. But there were many, many thoroughly enjoyable parts.

In Bloody Poetry, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairemont have lots of sex and write lots of poetry. Arty Bolour Froushan leads the cast as Byron.  He is pure sweating physicality; limping, teeth-picking, and impulsive. Polidori, Byron’s doctor, is played beautifully by Jack Sain as a camp and bird-like vampiric outsider. Yet Polidori is the voice of reason in a play that takes madness as its law. 

Percy Shelley, played by Tim Schneider, delivers his soliloquies rather than speaks them. He is lit by spotlights which cast long shadows, emphatically recalling the group’s earlier staging of Plato’s parable of the cave.  This Shelley is a mere shadow of Hamlet – our other model of young, tortured intellectualism – but Shelley’s lines hint at a taste for perversion that isn’t apparent in the Danish prince. This is a man who thinks his first wife’s ghost is spying on him having sex (a factor unfortunately unrealized in performance).

Photography by Jack Sain

Farcical lines about poetry being shit, as in steaming piles of, were gleefully delivered. Charlie Daniels plays a fantastically melodramatic woman with a face covered in white paint. Amelia Sparling is expressive, intelligent, and vampy as Mary Shelley. Claudia King as Claire Clairemont is energetic but also convincing in defeat.

Sexual tension pings in every direction, not least between Byron and Shelley, who glance at each other’s mouths and groins, and gaze dopily into each other’s eyes. Byron, shouting while raising Shelley semi-aloft, is like a syphilitic Lear carrying his child-bride.
In one scene, Byron takes Shelley to a madhouse. In the darkness, Byron’s body and voice turn into that of a crazed old man, and back again. No warning is given, no commentary is made.

This is the play at its creepy best, and if performance is the play’s subject then here at least it sure as hell delivers.

Bloody Poetry is showing until Saturday at the Keble O’Reilly Theatre.