Theatre by the Lake, Keswick
Nicholas Pierpan’s ambitious drama explores a dark year in the poet’s life
On the one hand there is the wonder of a mind that makes the world anew with words; on the other is the everyday struggle with the realities of life and relationships. How to balance the two? Nicholas Pierpan’s new play freely imagines a year in the life of the poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850). The opening image perfectly encapsulates the theme. A man stands with his back to the audience, gazing on a panorama of colour; his attitude mirrors the subject of Caspar David Friedrich’s celebrated painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. A seemingly iron fretwork descends, separating man from view; skeleton shapes suggest both house and prison bars. A dark cloth unfurls – nature disappears. Wordsworth sits, enclosed, at his desk. A child runs, hooting like an owl. The household bustles.
It is 14 years since the publication of Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth’s income from writing scarcely sustains his Grasmere household: sister Dorothy; sister-in-law Sara; wife Mary (who never appears) and their five children. Smoking chimneys and cold rooms are not merely inconveniences, they are dangers to health. Two of the children die. The year is 1812 and wider dreams of new worlds seem also dimmed: democratic hopes that the French Revolution would overthrow Europe’s monarchies apparently crushed. Pierpan plays these two aspects of personal and political freedom against one another via Wordsworth’s relationship to his potential patron, Lord Lonsdale, and to his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
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