Everyman (Faber Drama)

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It may, at first, seem strange that Rufus Norris has chosen to open his personal account as the National Theatre’s director with a 15th-century morality play.

From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T.

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 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.While not quite having the instructive edge of the morality play form, this production of Everyman nonetheless does have its didactic elements, arranged in long (and mostly environmentalist) spiels that remind us of a basic lesson: that actions have, often irreversible, consequences. This debauched and decadent scene set to synchronised coke-snorting and techno-music, he is told, will be his last. 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. 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 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. 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. I saw this play when it was at the NT and found this updated version very powerful-- however, I have always found it to be powerful, no matter the version. Whether that's putting new work on stages across the world or supporting our outreach and learning programmes, every purchase you make really does make a difference.

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. To take a 15th century morality play and adapt it to a largely secular, wealthy, and liberal modern audience without alienating them, but without taking god out of it? From a dramaturgical point of view, there is not much to the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman. 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. 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.

This seems a gratuitous stroke in a story that shows precisely where a materialistic individualism has led us. Plan your journey and find more route information in ‘ Your Visit’ or book your car parking space in advance. There is a potential problem in seeing a rich tosser in the high-income bracket as a modern Everyman but Duffy solves it by suggesting he symbolises our indifference to the future of the planet.

National Theater Live subscription 8: This was so directly in my wheelhouse it is the whole damn wheelhouse. While nothing can match the horror of the actual event, the audience is given a salutary jolt and reminded that we share Everyman’s purblind folly when he ruefully says: “I thought the Earth was mine to spend, a coin in space.