Publisher's Synopsis
'The Poets' is a scandalous re-invention of the Shelley-Byron myth. Adding several controversial new twists and turns, the play retells the story of the Pisan Circle and the infamous summer they shared in 1819. Revitalised thus, The Poet's plot gives new voice to eternal questions; to wit: is idealism a sickness or a cure? Can humanism and religion ever co-exist? Is God an illusory tyrant or a real redeemer? Is love compatible with romance? How much, if anything, should we sacrifice in the pursuit of truth in human relationships? All this said, it must be admitted that as an historical document The Poets is wildly unreliable, shamelessly replete, as it is, with vivid half-truths and dramatic conjectures. Indeed, alternating moments of acerbic comedy with bleak nihilism, 'The Poets' inflammatory plot incendiarises the tinder-dry facts of history. But The Poets does not purport to be so much a play about Romanticism as an evocation of it. It ruthlessly sacrifices historical detail in the name of imaginative truth. Indeed, in being faithless with the facts the play aims to be true to a deeper, more powerful and poetic reality. Thus, in The Poets Shelley attacks not only religion (he was famously expelled from Oxford for his atheism), but also confronts an Abbess in an Italian priory; he also contributes to the eventual death of his friend, Lord Byron. Likewise, Shelley's wife, Mary, in life highly suspicious of Byron's motives and manners, goes one step further in The Poets and confronts him in a romantically and erotically charged encounter. In writing The Poets, then, it has been our growing conviction that such a myth still has the power to move precisely because it reveals our deeper truths. And then again, of course, when all is said and done, there remains the simple undeniable fact that the Shelley-Byron myth will always be one hell of a story... James Murphy. South Downs, Hampshire, Summer 2014
