Fiennes’ performance is poetry in motion
Four Quartets (Harold Pinter Theatre) Verdict: Glimpses of eternity ★★★★★
SOMETIMES a simple, short performance can shake, rouse or even change you. So step away from the mundane rush of earning and spending, leave the gaudy Christmas streets and the scrolling, nagging screens. Sit quietly for 75 minutes while a tall, highbrowed, slightly haggard man reflects on time, eternity and mortality.
Feel with him the ‘still centre of the turning world’, the piercing wonder of those moments when suddenly, something immense fills you, then slips away, uncatchable.
T.S. Eliot wrote these four long poems in the 1930s and 1940s: they are not easy, but their music and images have great power.
Ralph Fiennes spent the two long lockdowns learning them by heart: he had recorded them before, but wanted to get closer to Eliot’s religious and philosophical vision.
It feels, in this performance, that he managed to do so: reaching out (although no human ever quite grasps it) for the meaning of those moments of eternity. They might come in a silent rose garden, beside a crashing sea, in the distant voices of children, or (as in the case of Eliot) while fire watching by night during the Blitz.
As Fiennes learned the poems, it occurred to him — as the lockdowns made time seem either to squeeze or stretch, and exposed our fragility — that the four might be performed physically.
That was genius on his part, because we are carried along by his presence and his movement on stage: sometimes dramatic, sometimes almost playful. It is a simple set, with great revolving grey walls: dark spaces open and close as he wanders between them, drifting from exaltation to despair, and sometimes even amusement.
For Eliot is sometimes lyrically beautiful, often learned, but he also suddenly stops to consider his own baffled inability to express what he glimpses.
Fiennes makes good use of this, sometimes seeming to appeal to us, sometimes alone, deep in meditation. That he has toured this extraordinary show for months may have given it still more depth. It is worth drowning in.