I managed to watch Rufus Norris' exceptional staging of "Everyman" at the National Theatre's streaming service with Chiwetel Ejiofor playing the main role.

Milton Court is located within the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and is approximately a 5 minute walk from the Barbican entrance on Silk Street. I really enjoyed the speech by Everyman towards the end, during which he muses about his life, including the good and bad things. The most extraordinary moment in Norris’s production comes when Ian MacNeil’s design, Paul Anderson’s lighting and Paul Arditti’s sound combine to simulate the effect of a tsunami. From a dramaturgical point of view, there is not much to the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman. This debauched and decadent scene set to synchronised coke-snorting and techno-music, he is told, will be his last.God, as the character herself says, and religion come and go like all ideologies, but this is a lesson for eternity. 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. 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. 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.

Didn't care for Carol Ann Duffy prior to the play, had to study so much of her poetry in school, but what a clever and unique adaptation. I sense this probably falls in the Noah/Cloud Atlas/The Green Knight/Avatar uncanny valley of being too sincere for the secular and too mystical for the religious, but that's my jam.

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. Everyman is also a sharp-suited figure first seen celebrating his 40th birthday with a hedonistic wingding full of coke, booze and, in Javier De Frutos’s choreography, wild, swirling dance.

Plan your journey and find more route information in ‘ Your Visit’ or book your car parking space in advance. Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools. A cornerstone of English drama since the 15th century, this new adaptation by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy was presented at the National Theatre, London, in April 2015. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. Yet another project inspired by this play, which I will get back to when I have more time (and life experience?

It tells a well-known story, of man’s journey from sin to salvation in the face of death; its characters are flat personifications with pre-determined roles to act out.

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. 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. Please note this production contains adult content including strong language, scenes of drug and alcohol use, depictions of vomit and references to self-harm. I saw this play when it was at the NT and found this updated version very powerful-- however, I have always found it to be powerful, no matter the version.

Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. Otherwise Duffy has given us a rich text full of haunting lines such as the sudden recollection of “the mad joy of a school playground”. 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. Caledonia, Cymru, East Midlands, North East, Northern Ireland and the South West bring the voices of their regions.