The Verge of Strife

It may be a period drama but this perfunctory, rambling play about the life and loves of First World War poet Rupert Brooke feels downright dated. Dully stilted staging, a self-consciously heightened poetic register throughout, and acting with a capital “A” ensure that we never see beneath the surface of Brooke or any of the women and men whose hearts the prolific lover and wordsmith broke before setting off for war.

Jonny Labey does his best with the role, managing to capture something of the volatile, magnetic charisma that those around him fall for helplessly, and Emma Barclay injects some welcome emotional truth as scorned mistress Ka Cox. But it’s a struggle for any of the actors to deliver Nick Baldock’s lines—which are full of characters being hurled from Scylla to Charybdis, and falling prey into their insatiable desires—with much credible sincerity.

Baldock flags up a number of problematic tropes that, with a failure to properly unpick, he ends up reinforcing; there’s an awful lot of musing about the man as poet and woman as muse, for example, which the play only seems to condone through its own fascinated focus on a tortured male artist.

Emeline Beroud’s design allows for some satisfying stage business, as the cosy domesticity is rolled up and moved out to make way for the trenches, but there’s little else to hang onto in this dramatically impotent look back on the English poetry canon and the build-up to the great war.