Ralph Fiennes is in fluent, fluty form for a reading and discussion of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets – arguably the poet’s last great work – at the Abbey on Sunday evening, for the 2024 instalment of the national theatre’s annual TS Eliot Lecture, conceived in memory of Eliot delivering a talk on WB Yeats at the old Abbey space in 1940. It also coincides with the 80th anniversary of The Four Quartets’ first publication in a single volume.
Fiennes, in conversation with the actor Ingrid Craigie, explains that he first heard Four Quartets read “with very little inflection” by the poet on a vinyl album and that he later decided, when preparing an acclaimed stage interpretation, that the verse “had to be inside you like a piece of music”. For that one-man-show, developed during the lockdown period, he memorised the entire poem – about 100 lines.
Billing Sunday’s event as a “lecture” is not entirely misleading. It could also fairly be described as a performance. Large parts of the electrifying reading – afterwards he jokes that, some time out from the memorised show, he now needs the text for reassurance – suggest a sermon as Eliot, through his 21st-century interpreter, puzzles again and again over the quandary of living poised between “time present and time past”.
Elsewhere, Fiennes the actor takes over. Describing apparent pagan rites in the East Coker section – “Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth” – he appears on the point of stamping out his own prehistoric dance. Elsewhere there is a sense of him incanting in the manner of a possessed acolyte. But the piece, sometimes spoken at a lectern, sometimes delivered while pacing, always returns to a pedagogical style that suggests the speaker has a clear and plain idea to impart.
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Few readers have, however, found the dense, convoluted Four Quartets, parts of which relate Eliot’s impressions of the Blitz, in the least bit clear or plain. After the reading, the actor, who was raised partly in Ireland, discusses how the poem – like so many great poems – can engage the reader even before he or she grasps the meaning.
Fiennes had, he explains, “time on my hands” during lockdown and set to engaging with the tetralogy’s “many corners and complicated arguments”. What he ended up with in the stage production – and with the reading at the Abbey – is a subjective interpretation. “When you play Hamlet you have to make it yours,” he explains. The result is moving even if you aren’t always certain which emotions are being evoked and why.
Fiennes, acclaimed among the best actors of his generation, looks likely to receive his third Oscar nomination for his turn as a cardinal supervising a papal election in Edward Berger’s gripping Conclave. Prompted by Craigie, he sees some connection between Four Quartets, much concerned with the author’s Christian faith, and “the speech in Conclave about doubt and certainty being the enemy”. He smiles wryly as he continues that this today “resonates with a lot of leaders being very certain”. Too many potential candidates spring to mind.
