Bloody Poetry

The meeting of great minds and fallible bodies on Lake Geneva in 1816 is one of the most delicious episodes in English literary biography, and Howard Brenton's 1984 play, smartly directed here by Tom Littler, has good fun with it.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his common-law wife Mary and her siren stepsister Claire show up, in flight from stodgy English morality and in pursuit of Claire's sometime lover Lord Byron. This unholy quartet will give birth to enduring works of art and fragile illegitimate children; they will cavort and suffer, while Byron's doctor, Polidori, a Salieri to Shelley's Mozart, takes notes for posterity.

The pickings are rich - no wonder Brenton felt impelled to anachronistically insert both communism and the Daily Mail into his torrid story - and the price of free love high: Rhiannon Sommers, as Mary, counts it out movingly.

It's a pity that neither Shelley nor Byron feel quite mad and bad enough to be the cause of all this trouble, but Nick Trumble's rat-like Polidori is creepily convincing, as is the subtle, poignant backdrop of projected waves, which whisper of exile, mock the Romantic project (although not as cruelly as Byron, calling for war so poets can be of some use) and presage Shelley's watery death.