T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets

A meditation on time, loss, and connection, and almost a century later, those themes are just as vital as they were when Eliot wrote them.

Four Quartets is a multi-course feast of concentrated flavors: mesmerizing language, masterly invocation, and the kind of poetic imagery that in the hands of a great actor feels like a direct line from Eliot’s pen to our mind’s landscape.

Fiennes brings the fire, yet the air around him remains unmoved, even by his embers.

Fiennes sings like Gielgud, declaims like Richardson, roils like Olivier, lends lines a mocking undercurrent like Ben Kingsley, and imbues it all with a world-weary grandeur that is very Ralph Fiennes.

The hypnotising, affecting performance that Fiennes extracts from this thicket of uncertain meanings and recondite references is a beautiful testament to what Eliot himself once said: “Genuine poetry communicates before it’s understood.”

Four Quartets is neither live theatre capture nor a full adaptation of the play. Instead, Fiennes remarkably documents the theatre production on screen, maintaining all the original lighting and blocking.

It's really engrossing if poetry read on stage is your thing.

For those who can gather the patience, it is a reminder of the wisdom Eliot so treasured, with all its overt Christian inspiration, birthed with such difficulty in the fires of war.

A decidedly worthwhile artifact of this precarious time.

A smashing good one-man performance.