TS Eliot apparently penned The Waste Land in a seaside shelter in Margate while recovering from a nervous breakdown. He wrote staring out over Margate Sands where "I can connect/ Nothing with nothing," ransacking the literary voices of the past to conjure ruined civilisations and crumbled cities. But it is London, a broken place full of ghosts, bones and ashes, that haunts the poem, and no more so than in Deborah Warner's staging in Wilton's Music Hall, still one of the capital's hidden gems.
First seen here in 1997 on the stage where Champagne Charlie toasted the girls, Fiona Shaw's 37-minute recitation of the poem is a perfect meeting of performance and architecture. There are moments when Shaw's turn as the charlatan clairvoyant Madame Sosostris or the drinkers in an East End pub has a sly music hall jollity, but mostly this is a quiet cry of spiritual despair, an eternal search for meaning in a jumbled world without meaning. I was intensely reminded of some of Sarah Kane's work in the dramatic use of a single, multi-voiced consciousness.
Twelve years ago Shaw was the first person to give a live performance here since 1880, and the place smelled of damp and rot. It has since been tidied up a bit – the candy cane pillars no longer look as if they are about to crumble away. Fortunately, nobody has tidied away the ghosts, which still lurk in every corner and in the stark shadows raised by Jean Kalman's lighting. The 37 minutes are more like a sighting than a performance, a collective hallucination in which past, present and future mingle and the living and dead walk hand in hand.
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