New course for Coleridge's Mariner as Fiona Shaw sets sail
Samuel Taylor Coleridge as performance poetry? Well, why not? There’s a chance to find out whether or not it works when Fiona Shaw and dancer Daniel Hay-Gordon perform The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in London next month. The production is at the Old Vic Tunnels from 4-13 January. It’s directed by Phyllida Lloyd, whose previous work includes the film and West End version of Mamma Mia!, and is choreographed by Kim Brandstrup.
Shaw has experience in committing a long poem to memory. In 1997, she gave a 37-minute recital of TS Eliot's The Waste Land at Wilton's Music Hall; it was revived in 2010 under the direction of her long-term collaborator Deborah Warner. The pair also linked up for last summer’s Peace Camp, a travelling installation of love poems for which Shaw recorded WB Yeats' When You Are Old with novelist Edna O'Brien. More Ancient Mariner details
Anthony Emmerson
Tue 4th Dec 2012 00:01
Sounds like a good idea to me, however, if poetry is to ever fully meet its public it requires imagination, heavy promotion and prime-time exposure. No doubt the talented and seemingly committed Ms Shaw will do STC justice, but I would suggest that The Old Vic Tunnels could hardly be considered a mainstream venue.