Four Quartets

Theatre Royal, Bath 1hr 20mins Touring until July 31

The last person to record these poems for the BBC was Jeremy Irons, who droned on like a depressed undertaker. Now, hooray, Ralph Fiennes (right) really lets rip live on stage, in bare feet, not over-acting but theatrical enough to make you feel the terrific undertow of these late poems by T. S. Eliot.

Old Possum, as Eliot was nicknamed, was a colossal brainbox who read dictionaries for fun. These enigmatic, deeply spiritual poems, written partly during the Second World War, embrace man, God and a civilisation on the very brink.

I have to say their complex dilations about the circularity of time mostly zoomed over my head. The trick is to grab what you can. Fiennes is your sonorous pilot. He inhabits the poems as he delivers them – whisking us from Hampstead to the Mississippi to the subcontinent – in a dazzling feat of memory.

The quartets are full of lived emotions, such as love untried (‘The passage not taken, the door never opened’) in the first poem, Burnt Norton. The need to ‘lean against a bank while a van passes’ makes vivid the deep lanes of the Somerset poem East Coker. The Dry Salvages is a moving, maritime prayer for women who see sons and husbands ‘setting forth and not returning’. And you can taste the ‘dust in the air suspended’ of a bombed-out London evoked in the beautiful, patriotic poem Little Gidding, written while Eliot did duty on a rooftop as a fire-watcher in the Blitz.

Two movable, upright slabs (set design is by Hildegard Bechtler) struck me as unnecessarily cryptic, as if the poems weren’t elusive enough. But I came out of the theatre reverberating with the gorgeous cascade of words, injected like a healing serum by Fiennes on flying form.