This brilliant staging of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland began not with a whimper but a bang: a staccato percussive bang, which conductor John Harle allowed to reverberate in the air, accompanied by soft bells and industrial clinkings, before we entered the shifting world of the poem. What followed was, in the words of director Adrian Dunbar, a series of sibylline fragments and falling leaves: Eliot’s 1922 masterwork is, in its own description, “only a heap of broken images”, but what a picture they make.

Brought vividly to life by four soaringly talented voice actors, this poem lands on the listener as a chaotic, dark, yet sometimes very funny, rumination on life and death in London after the First World War. Littered with literary references, from Hamlet (‘goodnight sweet ladies’) to Baudelaire (‘unreal city’), the poem dances between languages, registers, and characters, never settling anywhere long enough to lose its inherently mercurial nature.

First performed by this team in 2015 at the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival, with quicksilver compositions for jazz quintet by Nick Roth, this evening marked the first expansion of the score to a full orchestra, boldly taken up by the shimmering Guildhall Session Orchestra, also marking the first time an Irish ensemble has headlined the EFG London Jazz Festival. The music and poem danced beautifully together, the five ‘acts’ woven together with haunting musical interludes, accompanied on screen by the earliest colour footage of 1920s London, and an organic German jazz-era colour animation.

Emerging out into a crisp London evening on the Southbank, we could not help but think of Eliot’s invocation of the still-sparkling river: “sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song”. What a perfect setting in which to bring this 100 year old poem back to life, in all its lilting, melancholy beauty.

Part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. The 2025 festival runs 14-23 November — explore full listings here. Photo by Sisi Burn.