T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets

Ralph Fiennes’s exquisite performance of T. S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece is dynamically translated from stage to screen by director Sophie Fiennes. During the early days of COVID, the Oscar nominee set himself the challenge of committing the Four Quartets to memory, and in 2021 he brought it to the London stage followed by a tour of theaters across the UK. Written by Nobel Prize winner Eliot in the shadow of the Second World War, the poem is a searching examination of who and what ‚ we are. This celebrated meditation on human experience, time, and the divine offers up questions, imagery, and emotions that bear a powerful relevance to our present day.

“In his beautifully grave way… Fiennes delivers the Four Quartets as if the entire 16-poem suite were a single fractured Shakespearean monologue, lucid and searching, scorching and incantatory, all revolving around the desire to know. Fiennes sings like Gielgud, roils like Olivier, lends lines a mocking undercurrent like Ben Kingsley, and imbues it all with a world-weary grandeur that is very Ralph Fiennes. He recites Eliot’s poem as the music it is, and you feel that Eliot, through the drama of Fiennes’ presentation, comes across as nothing less than the 20th-century Shakespeare, reaching for the cosmos but driven by a deconstructive impulse, a need to take apart the forces that shape the very questions he’s asking.” Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Fiennes brings the fire.

Teo Bugbee, The New York Times

The hypnotising, affecting performance that Fiennes extracts from this thicket of uncertain meanings and recondite references is a beautiful testament to what Eliot himself once said: “Genuine poetry communicates before it’s understood.

Dan Einav, Financial Times