The feedback forms distributed at the end of Giles Abbott’s Alexander Pope: A Search for Perfection asked, among other things, whether the audience felt that Pope’s life was relevant to modern society. I’ve been asked this question, or variants thereof, several times over the last couple of weeks, particularly with a view to what Pope and his friends would have thought of Britain’s current state of political, financial and cultural uncertainty. I’m starting to think that it’s not a very good question, or at least not a helpful one. Of course Pope would have had a view – a thoroughly apocalyptic one, I suspect, far removed from the fears, hopes and basic assumptions that define much of our current politics. Is it worth digging through all the hypotheticals to arrive at some vague understanding of what the twenty-first century would have meant to the eighteenth? Should relevance – the relevance of Pope’s symmetries to us, or the relevance of our anxieties to him – really be the central consideration in deciding the value of literature, or of history? I enjoyed Abbott’s performance very much, but not chiefly for the ways it spoke to modernity. The process of excavating the past, and hearing or telling stories about it, will always impart lessons that cannot be summed up in a neat equivalence, and perhaps shouldn’t need to be explained at all.

Abbott’s website describes him as the UK’s only professional blind storyteller; he took up storytelling in 1999 after suddenly losing most of his sight. He has a sonorous, thoughtful voice and the ability to captivate an audience. His repertoire, delivered both to child and adult audiences, includes myths and folktales, original fiction, and now this introduction to the life of Alexander Pope, built on the opposing themes of the poet’s physical suffering and his endeavour for artistic perfection. The work was commissioned by the Pope’s Grotto Preservation Trust, and was performed twice in June of this year in the remains of the grotto itself (now on the grounds of Radnor House School, Twickenham). The performance I attended, in early July, was at Twickenham Library – a less resonant site, certainly, but it’s for the best that a work like this, conceived as site-specific, can demonstrate its worth away from the location that gave rise to it.

Abbott does not use props and has no set to speak of. The performance is almost entirely grounded in his voice and his evident enthusiasm for the subject matter. It begins in the second person, Abbott situating the audience in 1739, guiding us from a coffeehouse conversation to Pope’s villa, gardens and grotto at Twickenham. Here we come face-to-face with the poet himself. Abbott moves into physical performance for a moment so as to convey the painful contortion of Pope’s body, the hunched back and stunted growth that resulted from his childhood contraction of Pott’s Disease (a form of tuberculosis). It is to Abbott’s credit that this episode of mime not only emphasises the everyday discomfort that Pope experienced, but also recreates the social awkwardness he must have inspired. It prompts in us, the blundering eighteenth-century tourists, a sense of guilt and embarrassment that cuts against the potential leisureliness of the event. Time travel of the kind we are engaged in should have a cost and a moral weight to it; Abbott seems to understand this implicitly.

If I have one objection to the characterisation of Pope at this early stage of the performance it’s that he is made to seem a little too eccentric, slightly more isolated than he really was, even at this late stage of his career. There is something almost suggestive of Beauty and the Beast or of Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo in the way we encounter the deformed outcast. The sociable Pope – the Pope who was friends to royals and aristocrats and whose works were themselves tools of sociability, widely quoted standards of taste and refinement – this Pope is less consistently represented in Abbott’s performance. A similar point can be made regarding Abbott’s description of the poet’s home and his emphasis on its stylistic innovations. It’s understandable, given the provenance of this production, that much should be made of Pope’s ground-breaking decisions in architectural design and gardening. However, he was far from the first or most notable figure to apply Palladian ideals to British buildings; likewise, by 1739, even the grotto itself was likely to be seen less as a one-of-a-kind venture, and instead as part of a trend encompassing projects such as Queen Caroline’s Hermitage and Merlin’s Cave (both situated at nearby Richmond until their destruction later in the century).

As Abbott moves from his opening scene into a precis of Pope’s career and his achievements, there are a few more occasions at which storytelling convenience gets in the way of historical accuracy. I don’t mind this too much. It is the prerogative of the storyteller. However, I do wonder sometimes if Pope’s actual life was more interesting than the version described here. I take issue with Abbott’s assertion that the grotto was Pope’s “greatest legacy”. It’s a difficult claim to defend when one is confronted by the sheer richness of Pope’s literary output, and indeed Abbott’s own website points out that he is the most frequently quoted English poet after Shakespeare and Tennyson. Abbott also sticks to a fairly old-fashioned view of Pope’s creative journey, which sees everything from The Dunciad (1728) onwards as tarnished by bitterness. While there is an element of truth in this, it’s arguably a mistake to view bitterness as a fault in Pope’s poetic philosophy. In order to make the narrative work, you also have to ignore the great, humane generosity of the Essay on Man (1733–4), a poem derided in its own day not for cynicism, but for spiritual naiveté.

These are some of the objections that I would level at Abbott if he were writing a biographical account or a work of literary criticism. He is not. While I don’t feel his performance should be judged solely on whether he has made Pope ‘relevant’ for us, neither should it be assessed by strict scholarly criteria and according to the hobbyhorses of individual academics. (Okay, I admit it: I love the Essay on Man). For redirecting public attention to Pope and for capturing at least some of the pathos and complexity of his life story, this performance deserves considerable acclaim.

Giles Abbott’s Alexander Pope: A Search for Perfection was performed at locations in Twickenham between April and July 2016. It will next be performed at the Old Sorting Office Arts Centre, Barnes on 13th October.