`If I Should Die', a memoir of the poet Rupert Brooke, devised and directed by Jane McCulloch, was an evening of bittersweet memories presented through words and music in sepia tones of ochre and brown.

With a few carefully chosen pieces of furniture, the faded splendour of an Edwardian parlour and the sparseness of student digs were recreated on the City Hall stage as a background to the tribute paid to a young poet cut off in his prime. The carefully chosen pieces of music, played by Marcus Andrews, helped evoke a period of innocence, a time and place `for to forget/The lies, and truths and pain' of everyday life.

British actress Gemma Jones portrayed the character of a friend, a composite of a number of people who knew and loved Brooke, who looked back over the life of a complex being, grieving for what might have been.

Her memories, an anthology of excerpts from letters sent and received from Brooke, diary entries and his poetry, were interspersed with vignettes of Brooke's college days, global wanderings and anguished self-examinations delivered by Ed Stoppard portraying the young poet. There was little dramatic action as such; the two characters remained in their own worlds, linked through time and space by thoughts and ideas, which made the evening a rather refined cerebral exercise. The piano selections, many by Elgar, that quintessentially English composer, offered pauses for reflection and underscored the air of melancholy that ran through the presentation.

The account of the brief, intense life of Rupert Brooke begins with his birth in 1887 at Rugby, and continues to the exhilarating days as an undergraduate at Cambridge where all who met him fell under the spell of this `Young Apollo'.

He became a prominent figure in university life, a charming poet and intellectual who proposed the establishment of a national endowment of the arts to ensure the continuation of artistic and literary endeavours, but doubted that such a scheme would ever come to pass. His personal life was a roller coaster of intense emotions, punctuated by frequent spells of illness, and I, for one, began to lose patience with his bouts of self-pity. He seemed to live a life of exquisite agony, confounded by the grubbiness of everyday life. When he was out of love he regretted he wasn't in love, and when in love, he wanted to be out of the country.

The second half of the evening, describing his wanderings through North America, Polynesia and New Zealand, I found more entertaining, enjoying his witty observations of the people he met on his travels. His only uncomplicated relationship was with a young Samoan who devotedly nursed him back to health.

Even his involvement in war he seemed to view in mythic terms, wondering of the enemy, "Do you think they'll meet us on the plains of Troy?"

It is ironic that Brooke is best known as a war poet given that very few of his poems are of war, and his experience of war was limited to a non-combatant role as a witness of the evacuation of refugees in Belgium. He died in a hospital ship off Skyros where he was laid to rest in an olive grove.

He is perhaps best remembered for his poem `The Soldier", from which the title of this production is taken, which expresses the patriotic feelings of the generation at the time of his death. He represents a time of innocence lost in the mud and blood of the trenches and the eternal longings of what might have been.

This production, while not to everyone's taste, was appreciated by an attentive audience who were offered a nostalgic insight into another world where "stands the church clock at ten to three and . there [is honey still for tea".

Jennifer Hind