Under Sedation at The Street Theatre brings Canberra poetry to the stage in a novel way. Neither a reading nor a poetry slam, it's billed as a fully staged show performed bv actors Ben Drysdale and Ruth Pieloor with music, lighting and sound. It features published and unpublished poetry and songs by 32 poets and bands edited into a thematically cohesive whole.

Its deviser and director, Adele Chynoweth, says Under Sedation takes its title and theme from Cooma-born poet A.D. Hope's poem of the same name, itself inspired by Goya's painting Saturn Devouring His Son, showing what is awful about civilisation.

The poem, she says, is about how we sedate ourselves - through hope, through habits, through illusions - "to cover up what we can't face".

Chyonweth says, "I've always liked poetry."

She did her honours degree in the performance of poetry of Bertolt Brecht and went on to study theatre directing. When she came to Canberra more than 10 years ago she went to bookshops to peruse their local poetry sections, finding them gratifying large for a relatively small city, and soon discovered there were many poets in and around the national capital.

"A lot of really famous and highly regarded poets lived in Canberra or retired to Canberra - for example, Judith Wright retired to Captains Flat."

Chynoweth was commissioned by The Street Theatre to work on the project in 2016 and spent a long time reading poems, listening to music and also talking to the poetry community in Canberra to find high-quality unpublished poetry in order to arrive at her final selection of 27 poems and 10 songs by 32 writers.

New to her were the never-published poets Bela Farkas and Malcolm Coller, whom she found after spending time going to events and talking to people.

"People start telling you about the poets who are important to them - you get into the poetry community and hear about emerging poets who have been marginalised."

Among the other writers whose works she finally used are Subhash Jaireth, Sandra Renew, Andrew Galan. Melinda Smith, Geoff Page, Dorothy Green, Omar Musa, Tim Rogers, Sarah Rice and bands Coda Conduct and Cracked Actor - their work edited and juxtaposed in various ways as Under Sedation progresses.

"Clusters of themes emerged - war, government, relationships, loneliness, cultural diversity," Chyonweth says.

Ben Drysdale, who is one of the two actors in Under Sedation along with Ruth Pieloor, says Under Sedation "is very much a theatre show with poetry as text ... We're acting rather than just reciting."

Drysdale has worked professionally in theatre since 2007. This will be the first time he has acted onstage with Pieloor though he says they've been backstage together in Short + Sweet a lot, just not working together.

Under Sedation, he says, can refer in a literal sense to drugs or alcohol as well as the more figurative sense of routine or other ways of hiding from unpleasantness.

As well as the themes named by Chynoweth, he cites the environment, relationship breakdowns and childhood trauma as other ideas raised during the show. Not that it's unrelievedly dark.

"Some of the poems are quite funny," he says. Using humour as a way to address something serious is often useful so people have an easier way in and there are some lighter points among the darkness of the drama, he says.

Coming into the show, Drysdale says he knew a few of the songs - "being a musician, I played alongside some of the musicians" - but apart from Musa he was unfamiliar with the poets and their works.

"I didn't spend a lot of time reading poetry as part of my English degree at ANU."