Everyman (Faber Drama)
- Brand: Unbranded
Description
One of the great primal, spiritual myths, Everyman asks whether it is only in death that we can understand our lives. Even in a version as brilliant as this there is a moment that jars when God/Good Deeds tells us: “Religion is a man-made thing. 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. I really enjoyed the speech by Everyman towards the end, during which he muses about his life, including the good and bad things. 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?
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. 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. This debauched and decadent scene set to synchronised coke-snorting and techno-music, he is told, will be his last. This seems a gratuitous stroke in a story that shows precisely where a materialistic individualism has led us.Duffy’s poetry is underscored by William Lyons’s eclectic music and faithfully realised by Norris’s virtuosic production that captures both the frantic dizziness of a money-driven world and the beckoning finality of death.
Yet another project inspired by this play, which I will get back to when I have more time (and life experience?Ev”, our universal protagonist and bad-boy banker, literally falls into the opening scene of his fortieth birthday party (he descends onto the stage, dangling in mid-air). Its setting is thus a rooftop, where the 40-year old hedonistic financier is celebrating his birthday. Caledonia, Cymru, East Midlands, North East, Northern Ireland and the South West bring the voices of their regions.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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