Body and soul
Theatrical performance of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – his polyglot, polyphonic meditations on time, history and faith – doubly makes sense.
Four Quartets
Royal &?derngate, Northampton, and UK Tour
Theatrical performance of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – his polyglot, polyphonic meditations on time, history and faith – doubly makes sense. He was a prolific dramatist, whose best drama, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), contains early sketches for lines and ideas in these poems, started soon afterwards. Perhaps, though, the Quartets really call for a concert platform: their structure is symphonic (though in five sections), with recognisable thematic reiterations, and changes of pace and rhythm, which reveal meaning.
The solution is an actor with an orchestral voice. Paul Scofield filled and shook the air-waves with a much-repeated and CD-ed BBC Radio recording, which Ralph Fiennes now equals, holding the Royal &?Derngate, Northampton (and venues to come), in rapt, attentive silence for 80 minutes. Minimal light and sound effects differentiate poems named for significant places in the writer’s life.
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