Shelley by the shore

SMP director Ted Gooda reports on a magical event overlooking Warnham Millpond

William Gooda, Sam Taylor, and Tom Hounsham in Shelley by the Shore

Three generations of the Shelley family were brought to life on what was once part of the Shelley family estate this week when Shelley by the Shore took place at Warnham Nature Reserve.

Tom Hounsham as Percy Bysshe Shelley

In a collaboration between the Shelley Memorial Project, Lights and Bushels theatre company and Mole Valley Poets, the event dramatised the early life and poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, mixing elements from Kathryn Attwood’s superb 2019 play Mad Shelley, with some lesser known Shelley works read by Sam Taylor of Lights and Bushels, including ‘Verses on a Cat’, his earliest surviving poem, written when the poet was around eight years old; and ‘Letter’ from Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire.

Percy Shelley was played by Tom Hounsham; Willl Gooda took on the role of his father, Timothy Shelley, and the poet’s grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, was played by Barry Syder — just as they were in the original production of the play at Horsham’s Capitol Theatre.

During a very warm night of this summer’s heatwave, the heavy frockcoats must have been hard work for the Shelley actors!

Barry Syder as Sir Bysshe Shelley

Ted Gooda narrated parts of the story to weave the Mad Shelley scenes together and share more of the early life of the poet. Audience members were transported back to the 1790s and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s idyllic country boyhood around the Warnham Millpond, where his days were filled with nature and adventure.

The Lights and Bushels actors captured a sense of the young Shelley as a bit of a wild and wayward boy, following his passions in whatever direction they took him (even if they got him into hot water at times).

Then the audience was invited into the parlour of Arun House in Denne Road, home of his grandfather, Bysshe Shelley, to watch a scene between Bysshe and his grandson in 1810, just as young Percy was after some money to publish his first collection of verse.

Will Gooda as Timothy Shelley

Shortly afterwards, Percy went up to Oxford, where he collaborated with Thomas Jefferson Hogg to write and anonymously publish The Necessity of Atheism the following spring.

The pamphlet was a philosophical treatise which argued that without proof of the existence of God, the only logical conclusion to be drawn is that He cannot exist — the masters at Oxford were unimpressed, as was his father who considered the publication ‘impious’. In a dramatic scene, the audience witnessed Timothy Shelley’s irate response.

Some of the subsequent arguments, threats, recriminations and legal battles over the family’s estates were shown on stage.

It was a situation which caused a rift between Percy and his family that would never be healed. 

Old Sir Bysshe, nearing the end of his life, changed his will so that Percy would receive none of his personal fortune if he continued to refuse to resettle the estates and prolong the entail. It was devastating for the Shelley family: the estates built up over a lifetime, the baronetcy, the glory of the Shelley family name – all resting on a young rebel who wanted nothing to do with any of it. 

Ted Gooda narrating between Mad Shelley scenes

The second half of the evening’s entertainment was led by Tony Earnshaw of Mole Valley Poets. David Hide, Chair of the Shelley Memorial Project, shared the recent good news about the project’s progress and the granting of planning permission, before the open mic poets took to the stage.

Readers included Eugenia Lee, Nathan Hassall, Susan Thomas, Ted Gooda, Kathryn Attwood, Pauline Howley, Heather Shakespeare, Helen Overell, Liz Barton, Sarah Nuttall, Carol Hayton.

Sara Loewenthal and David Hide presented a rousing performance of the final stanzas of The Masque of Anarchy.

Tony Earnshaw concluded the evening with some of his own works from A Love Letter to the Planet.

It was moving, informative and fun, and all took place overlooking the very pond where young Percy once famously sailed his little paper boats, the schoolboy who ‘lay near a pond in a copse’ when the ‘Blackberries just were out of Bloom’ beneath ‘the golden Bloom of the sunny Broom.’

It was a magical evening of poetry and drama all round — and we’re very grateful to the team at Warnham Nature Reserve for allowing us to stage the evening in such a special place.