It takes its name from the village in Somerset, England, that was the home of Eliot’s first forebear to leave for America in the 17 th century. Fiennes’s encounter with Eliot is unique. Four Quartets: East Coker Summary This, the second of the Quartets, appeared in 1940. As the poet Daljit Nagra suggests in the programme, each person must seek their own Eliot. One instance: the way Fiennes (director and actor) transposes Eliot’s verbal textual allusiveness into physicalised theatrical layerings – of Shakespeare soliloquies, of wartime broadcasts, of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring (this last, the closest the production comes, for me, to a sense of transcendence, as the narrator figure recounts the movements his body mirrors while he watches a medieval rustic courtship dance). 1 by Daniel Rowland, Maja Bogdanovi & Alberto Mesirca on Apple Music.

If I have a hesitation about the conceptualisation, this is still a brilliant – really brilliant – piece of work. Listen to Paganini: Complete Quartets for String Trio and Guitar Vol. Little Gidding is written in five sections in strong-stress metre it concludes Eliot’s study of human experience, Christian faith, and the nature of time and history. Implicit visual allusions, perhaps, to the fact that Four Quartets was published, as war still raged, also setting off resonances with the darker aspects of our own world today. The next year, it was published in a volume with the previous three poems of The Four Quartets. In this work Eliot has achieved consummate artistic beauty. But the poem has been admired for its universality which goes beyond any rigid religion.

It derives its them, symbolism, and resolution from religion. Tonal contrasts between dark and light are given spatial quality through architectural, chiaroscuro lighting by Tim Lutkin (both used together to coup-de-théâtre effect). Four Quartets is a landmark in twentieth century English poetry. An overall sense of sombreness is intensified by Hildegard Bechtler’s set of soaring, grey slabs slanted to open on to a changing-colour suffused cyclorama.

The 4 quartets