Four Quartets review, Oxford Playhouse: Ralph Fiennes is brilliant in this profound one-man production

Taking on T S Eliot’s famous poem, the English actor gives a grounded, conversational performance, seeming somehow both elderly and childlike

Innate gravitas: Ralph Fiennes brings Eliot’s finest poem to the stage (Matt Humphrey)

For the first 30 seconds or so of Four Quartets, the house lights still up, Ralph Fiennes stares out into the audience as if he’s disappointed in each and every one of us. In himself, too. There is a hangdog quality to the veteran English actor that has only grown over the years; he plays into it at just the right moments of this profound, demanding one-man performance of T S Eliot’s famous poem.

Here’s the thing about Four Quartets: don’t even try to understand it. Not in any literal way, at least. Even Eliot himself said that “it is not exhausted by any explanation”. He wrote most of this set of four poems during the Second World War, when all the theatres were closed (sound familiar?) and his work as a playwright had been interrupted, and he was clearly in an existential mood.

There is no plot or narrative to speak of, nor any concrete sense to be gleaned – it is all mystical, paradoxical, playful ponderings. At heart about a poet trying to make sense of himself and the world around him, it’s also allusive and elusive.

A lot of it is about time – an attempt to collapse it in on itself and expose the meaninglessness of it all. “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,” goes the famous opening line. “And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable.”

If that all seems frustratingly lofty, Fiennes does a brilliant job of making sense of it. Barefoot, dressed in a grey shirt that he swiftly sweats through, he gives a grounded, conversational performance, seeming somehow both elderly and childlike. The 58-year-old deploys his innate gravitas only when it’s really needed; when there is an opportunity to undercut the wordy abstractness of it all, he seizes it. At one point, just as the poem has escalated into big, bewildering dramatics, he stops, shrugs, and says slowly: “Well, that was a way of putting it. Not very satisfactory.”

This is far from just a dramatic reading plonked onto a stage. At one point, we are plunged into pitch black as Fiennes describes the strange terror of a Tube stopping for too long between stations. It is a powerful moment of theatrical disorientation. At other points, it becomes musical, with Fiennes breaking into gentle song – a fitting interpretation, since Eliot himself once said that a poem “may tend to realise itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words”.

The set, designed by Hildegard Bechtler, is simple and bare. Words like these don’t need much decoration. There are two wooden chairs, a table, a microphone and a glass of water that is probably there for practical purposes – it must be hard on the throat to talk non-stop for 80 minutes. Behind Fiennes are two looming grey slabs, about 10 metres high. They have the look of neolithic stones, but with the sharp edges of something more modern – yet another suggestion of the merging and collapsing of time. They resemble gravestones, which makes sense for a poem so obsessed with death. “That which is only living can only die.”

At times in Four Quartets, I found myself completely lost. But even then, there is joy to be found in letting the words wash over you. Even the poem itself declares at one point, “the poetry does not matter”. What matters is that it makes you feel something – and it certainly does.