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. 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.

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.Everyman is brilliantly portrayed by 12 years a Slave’s Chiwetel Ejiofor, a bold if welcome and excellent choice; Kate Duchenne as God is an invisible (and hence omnipresent) sweeper and woman. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Chiwetel Ejiofor in Everyman, adapted by Carol Ann Duffy, on the National’s Olivier stage. Award-winning poet and playwright Carol Ann Duffy’s thrilling contemporary adaptation of the fifteenth century play The Summoning of Everyman, is directed by Katherine Nesbitt.

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.Everyman’s prime sin also lies not so much in seeing money as solution to any problem as in ignoring ecological reality. 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). Sex, drugs, walking piles of garbage, and neglected parents make up the urban twenty-first century landscape of the Poet Laureate’s modern, but still rhyming, script.

But what was originally church propaganda has been turned, in Carol Ann Duffy’s stunning adaptation, into a scathing assault on the myopic materialism of the modern age and a reminder of our own mortality. 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 managed to watch Rufus Norris' exceptional staging of "Everyman" at the National Theatre's streaming service with Chiwetel Ejiofor playing the main role. This debauched and decadent scene set to synchronised coke-snorting and techno-music, he is told, will be his last. Caledonia, Cymru, East Midlands, North East, Northern Ireland and the South West bring the voices of their regions. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009.

Its setting is thus a rooftop, where the 40-year old hedonistic financier is celebrating his birthday. But Ejiofor is at his best in the play’s closing moments when he acknowledges the miracle of life while accepting the reality of death. 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.

From a dramaturgical point of view, there is not much to the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman.