BWW Reviews: BLOODY POETRY, Jermyn Street Theatre, February 2 2012

Yes, it's Shelley and Byron (and seldom does Paxman get through a whole University Challenge without one of those two cropping up) and yes, there's a lot of talk about radical politics and high art and yes, everyone's beautifully turned out in late Georgian finery, but there's also plenty of one of Big Brother's standard set-ups in Howard Brenton's 1984 (natch) Bloody Poetry (at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 25 February).  

Bysshe (Shelley), Mary Shelley and Claire Clairemont travel in a menage-a-trois to Italy to meet Lord Byron - foremost poet of the day - and soon he's with her, or is it her? No, can't be - she's with him. Him? But wouldn't he rather be with him? Oh no, he can't be, because he's only interested in her - or, at a push, her. Observing and commenting on the bed-hopping is Dr Polidori, just a deadpan geordie accent light of completing the reality TV analogy. And lurking, Jade Goodyesquely (literally a ghost at the feast), is Shelley's first wife, Harriet, drowned by her own hand in The Serpentine and resurrected to remind us that love described as free usually exacts a heavy price on somebody and that somebody is usually poor, ill-educated and female. 

Joe Bannister's Shelley is dreamily wet, unfathomably magnetic to Mary and Claire, until he is roused by politics and his realisation that his children will go to Harriet's family on her demise and shows some mettle. Nick Trumble is egregiously comic as the oily gossip-monger / narrator Polidori, writing an account of the poets' outrageous behaviour for cash back home. David Sturzaker's Byron is a mid-80s David Lee Roth with even less enlightened gender politics (if rather better verses) and just as loud. The women steal the show. Emily Glenister (Harriet) is a potent presence of the cost paid by poor women for rich men's indulgences; and clever Claire (Joanna Christie) and even cleverer Mary (Rhiannon Sommers) soon find out that brains, beauty and money are no defence against selfish mysoginy dressed up as romantic roistering and shagging shenanigans.

It all ends in tears, of course, but under Tom Littler's sure direction in the intimate space of the Jermyn Street Theatre, there's a guilty voyeuristic pleasure in watching very bright people leave an indelible mark on the literature of the English language, all the while in thrall to the same emotions and same high-minded principles of freedom of expression articulated infinitely more clumsily two hundred years on by the inhabitants of Channel Five's tired old house with the cameras. I don't suppose Howard Brenton quite saw it that way 28 years ago - but time changes all art.

 

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