Encompassing Geoffrey Chaucer and Michael Rosen, and taking in Ancient Greece and the shops of Oxford High Street along the way, Live Canon really impressed at the Oxford Playhouse on Friday. They performed Oxford Poets, poetry and the occasional song by men and women with some connection (however slight) to Oxford.
The initial thought of going to a poetry recital made me slightly nervous. In my mind I had images of people draped in black, a fog of cigarette smoke, maybe the odd beret and a set of bongos in the background. Live Canon are nothing like this (though I do mourn the lack of a bongo player). The three of them are young, energetic, and wonderfully engaged with each other and the poetry, and therefore with the audience.
It is an increasingly rare thing to be able to hear classic and modern poetry performed, and I am a new convert to its joys when it is done well. It does take work from the audience, but the rewards are great. Listening to poetry takes a different type of concentration, and it did take me a good ten minutes to tune my brain into the rhythms in order to understand, well, anything to be honest, but once I managed that it was a really special experience. Lines that could have seemed indecipherable on a page came to life when spoken aloud.
Massive congratulations to Live Canon for delivering a lovely performance, and managing to seamlessly move between themes of education, war, love, even existence itself, with barely a pause. I will certainly be looking out for their work in the future. Despite the lack of bongos.
[For fear that I am not obeying my terms and conditions, the original of this review is here. All of my other theatre reviews are at dailyinfo.co.uk too. I don't think there are many of you reading this that I wouldn't have directed to dailyinfo first anyway, so I can't imagine I need to worry about copywright issues. But we can pretend that this is proper, can't we?]
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