Tim Lutkin’s lighting and Christopher Shutt’s sound design create subtle, well-crafted effects, too, from the sound of crashing waves at the start of The Dry Salvages (inspired by rocks off the coast of Massachusetts) to the sound of the blitz in East Coker.Įliot hoped to bring serious concerns to the stage in his plays. Fiennes turns them to different angles and they simultaneously look clean and minimalist – a nod to Eliot’s modernism – and resemble the ancient, gnomic slabs of Stonehenge when Fiennes talks about “old stones that cannot be deciphered”.

At the beginning of each poem, Fiennes manipulates Hildegard Bechtler’s set, consisting of two revolving walls.

What we lose in meaning we often gain in atmosphere and effect. Moments of such illuminations feel like fireworks, worth the wait though we want more of them.Įliot said it was not necessary to understand poetry to enjoy it but it is sometimes frustrating to be locked out of the text, which spirals into itself despite Fiennes’ deeply mined efforts. There is a sensational moment in East Coker, written in the midst of the blitz when theatres were forced to close: the stage lights are suddenly switched off, and we sit in darkness, listening to Fiennes’ words. I shall say it again,” he says, chin jutting and almost with a wink. “You say I am repeating something I have said before. “We had the experience but missed the meaning,” he says, and “time is no healer”.Īt his most ingenious, he finds comedy in Eliot’s irony and manages to make us titter. He talks about beginnings and endings, life and death, and the lines contain Eliot’s original trauma – three of the four poems were written during the second world war while he was working as a fire warden, watching London get bombed from rooftops – but they bear fresher echoes of the pandemic, too, and the scramble to find meaning in its aftermath.

The four quartets