Fiona Shaw returns to The Waste Land

The British Library holds an impressive archive of recordings of great writers reading their work. The collection includes Joyce, Woolf, and even Tennyson. But to anyone who feels passionately about The Waste Land, TS Eliot's reading of his own masterpiece will pale in comparison to Fiona Shaw's unforgettable theatrical rendering of the poem, now playing at Wilton's Music Hall in London's east end.

The production, directed by Deborah Warner, was originally performed at New York's Liberty Theater back in 1996, and then transferred for a sell-out run at Wilton's in 1997. Now, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Wilton's, Shaw and Warner have returned to the east end for a limited run.

First published in 1922, and arguably the 20th century's most influential poem, the text lends itself to limitless interpretations, which makes it both endlessly absorbing and, one would imagine, utterly impossible to perform—particularly as a monologue.

Yet if there was one actor alive today who could best satisfy the Eliot connoisseur, who has heard its myriad voices so many times in countless different ways, it would be Fiona Shaw. Her innate magnetism has electrified so many of the roles she has taken on over the years (she is currently also starring in Brecht’s "Mother Courage" at the National); but her somewhat androgynous versatility seems to match this piece of work particularly well. She executes the Young Man Carbuncular, Madame Sosostris, Lil and Albert and the countless other nameless voices Eliot conjures seamlessly, sometimes switching between them half sentence by half sentence or even word by word as the poem demands. The extraordinary effect is to make it seem as though the piece—far from being deliberately dense, impenetrable and confusing—was in fact written for the stage.



Perhaps best of all, Shaw gives this fragmented poem a subtle narrative arc. It's true that the suggestion of a journey, of some sort of progression, is in the original text—"these fragments I have shored against my ruin," wrote Eliot in its final moments. But what Shaw manages to do, without adding to or subverting the original, is to tease out and reconstitute those fragments into something that, in the hushed, low-lit silence of this beautiful, ancient music hall, makes you see all 434 lines of this modernist classic in a dazzling new light.

The Waste Land runs at Wilton's Music Hall until 10th January. For more information on this, other productions and special events marking the 150th anniversary of Wilton's Music Hall click here.