Everyman (Faber Drama)

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Didn't care for Carol Ann Duffy prior to the play, had to study so much of her poetry in school, but what a clever and unique adaptation. Although the play takes its roots from the moralist Christian literary tradition, much like Hugo von Hofmannsthal's rendition - Everyman is portrayed in a balanced way and carefully nuanced.

One of the great primal, spiritual myths, Everyman asks whether it is only in death that we can understand our lives.The big achievement of both Duffy and Norris is keep the framework of the original while suiting the content to a secular society. Milton Court is located within the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and is approximately a 5 minute walk from the Barbican entrance on Silk Street.

But Ejiofor is at his best in the play’s closing moments when he acknowledges the miracle of life while accepting the reality of death. This seems a gratuitous stroke in a story that shows precisely where a materialistic individualism has led us.The play swings between the hyper-spectacular and the poignant, the perfectly choreographed scenes with Ev’s friends and the gold, dazzling, personifications of materialism pitched against moments with his dying parents, and flashbacks to his childhood. Its setting is thus a rooftop, where the 40-year old hedonistic financier is celebrating his birthday. This takes nothing away from its emotion - it's just as capable of expressing Everyman's anger, confusion, hybris and acceptance of death.

Award-winning poet and playwright Carol Ann Duffy’s thrilling contemporary adaptation of the fifteenth century play The Summoning of Everyman, is directed by Katherine Nesbitt. I managed to watch Rufus Norris' exceptional staging of "Everyman" at the National Theatre's streaming service with Chiwetel Ejiofor playing the main role. The basis is reminiscent of Jedermann but it is a new confrontation with death and the impossibility to bargain with death. This debauched and decadent scene set to synchronised coke-snorting and techno-music, he is told, will be his last. I really enjoyed the speech by Everyman towards the end, during which he muses about his life, including the good and bad things.

National Theater Live subscription 8: This was so directly in my wheelhouse it is the whole damn wheelhouse. God is here merged with the figure of Good Deeds and embodied by Kate Duchene as a cleaning-woman with Marigolds and bucket. He is very touching in the scene where he confronts his scooter-riding young self and owns up to a life of self-gratification. I sense this probably falls in the Noah/Cloud Atlas/The Green Knight/Avatar uncanny valley of being too sincere for the secular and too mystical for the religious, but that's my jam. Duffy’s poetry is underscored by William Lyons’s eclectic music and faithfully realised by Norris’s virtuosic production that captures both the frantic dizziness of a money-driven world and the beckoning finality of death.

It tells a well-known story, of man’s journey from sin to salvation in the face of death; its characters are flat personifications with pre-determined roles to act out. Deserted by friends, family and goods, he finds solace only in a dosser named Knowledge (Penny Layden) who enables him to face Death with a new-found humility. Caledonia, Cymru, East Midlands, North East, Northern Ireland and the South West bring the voices of their regions. A cornerstone of English drama since the 15th century, this new adaptation by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy was presented at the National Theatre, London, in April 2015. While the religious framework of the morality play may no longer ring true for many in a modern audience, questions of responsibility, duty and conscience, the audience is reminded, still have their place in our secular times.

Please note this production contains adult content including strong language, scenes of drug and alcohol use, depictions of vomit and references to self-harm. While Ev’s lifestyle is clearly, as the play also demonstrates, not all humankind’s, it does point towards Duffy’s universal enemy: a corporate world that glorifies individualism and risky choices, hones materialistic desires and, most importantly, creates in its inhabitants a complete lack of responsibility. But in this journey, the characters he encounters become agents and situations that resonate with topical significance and urgency – the fast pace of corporate lifestyle, the dissolution of the nuclear family, and environmental disasters. Everyman is also a sharp-suited figure first seen celebrating his 40th birthday with a hedonistic wingding full of coke, booze and, in Javier De Frutos’s choreography, wild, swirling dance. With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics.