Ralph Fiennes is one of our best British actors remembered by a wide public for his betrayal of Voldemort in the Harry Potter Films and M in several Bond films. I shall forever remember him for his reading of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis at Reading Gaol, a marathon effort that held us spellbound and enthralled for four hours in front of just the cell door of Wilde’s prison cell. His latest stage appearance is in TS Eliot’s poems Four Quartet which started life at the Theatre Royal in Bath and is heading for the Harold Pinter Theatre in London from the 18th November.
Fiennes directs himself in the powerful and physical recitation of the four poems as he prowls around the stage with two large grey monoliths and two old wooden chairs and a table as his only aids. Eliot’s poems were written between 1935 and 1941 and there is a helpful glossary in the programme of around twenty-five words used that may be less familiar to a modern audience and some interesting articles to provide some context for the work. However, I was left feeling intellectually inadequate as I struggled to make sense during the show of the frustrating contradictory paradoxes used throughout. In lesser hands, it would have become uninteresting, but Fiennes breathes life into the words and convinces that he understands the meaning. Every P and T is accentuated in his delivery in a masterclass of pronunciation and elocution so that not a word is lost. If the aim is to provoke thought, discussion, and reflection it works a treat, but I would have liked more visual aids to provide more immediate in show understanding.
