It has just been announced that Simon McBurney (LI 1971-75) will be performing, as part of Dead Poets Live this June, reading Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts at the Coronet Theatre in London between 19-21 June 2026.

Weaving together the story of Bunting’s astonishing life and the poem he wrote in response to it, this new show will present Briggflatts how Bunting intended it to be experienced; in performance, heard by a live audience.

Sixty years after its first publication, this is a rare opportunity to hear one of the greatest – and most unjustly neglected – poetic accomplishments in English.

Tickets can be booked here.

Simon McBurney, actor, writer and director is one of the most innovative, mercurial and influential theatre-makers working today. In 1983, he co-founded the company Complicité and since then all his work has been made through a deeply researched and highly collaborative process which fuses a profound belief that all aspects of the theatre should challenge the limits of theatrical form.

As well as writing and creating original works, Simon has brought great plays and adaptations to the stage, including: The Master and Margarita (2012), Beware of Pity (2015) and most recently, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2022). He also adapted Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising into a 12-part dramatisation for radio alongside author Robert MacFarlane for BBC World Service in 2022. And this year, he directed Anne Carson’s one-act radio play I Don’t Do Innocents for The Paris Review. Simon’s opera work includes: A Dog’s Heart (2010), The Magic Flute (2012), The Rake’s Progress (2017), Wozzeck (2020) and Khovanshchina (2025).

Simon’s work continually returns to political, social and philosophical questions of the way we live, think and act as a society and he is unafraid of melding the most ancient of theatrical forms with the most recent aspects of modern technology.