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. The big achievement of both Duffy and Norris is keep the framework of the original while suiting the content to a secular society. Everyman’s prime sin also lies not so much in seeing money as solution to any problem as in ignoring ecological reality. It may, at first, seem strange that Rufus Norris has chosen to open his personal account as the National Theatre’s director with a 15th-century morality play.

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. The whole point of the play is that, in 90 minutes, it traces the hero’s progress from ignorance to knowledge and that is something Ejiofor conveys with admirable clarity. 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. 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.He is very touching in the scene where he confronts his scooter-riding young self and owns up to a life of self-gratification. Ev”, our universal protagonist and bad-boy banker, literally falls into the opening scene of his fortieth birthday party (he descends onto the stage, dangling in mid-air). Plan your journey and find more route information in ‘ Your Visit’ or book your car parking space in advance.

Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.

God, as the character herself says, and religion come and go like all ideologies, but this is a lesson for eternity. God is here merged with the figure of Good Deeds and embodied by Kate Duchene as a cleaning-woman with Marigolds and bucket. But Ejiofor is at his best in the play’s closing moments when he acknowledges the miracle of life while accepting the reality of death. 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.

Duffy’s poetry is underscored by William Lyons’s eclectic music and faithfully realised by Norris’s virtuosic production that captures both the frantic dizziness of a money-driven world and the beckoning finality of death. While the religious framework of the morality play may no longer ring true for many in a modern audience, questions of responsibility, duty and conscience, the audience is reminded, still have their place in our secular times. 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. While Ev’s lifestyle is clearly, as the play also demonstrates, not all humankind’s, it does point towards Duffy’s universal enemy: a corporate world that glorifies individualism and risky choices, hones materialistic desires and, most importantly, creates in its inhabitants a complete lack of responsibility. I managed to watch Rufus Norris' exceptional staging of "Everyman" at the National Theatre's streaming service with Chiwetel Ejiofor playing the main role.Deserted by friends, family and goods, he finds solace only in a dosser named Knowledge (Penny Layden) who enables him to face Death with a new-found humility. 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”. 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.

Whether that's putting new work on stages across the world or supporting our outreach and learning programmes, every purchase you make really does make a difference. The basis is reminiscent of Jedermann but it is a new confrontation with death and the impossibility to bargain with death. From a dramaturgical point of view, there is not much to the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman. Even in a version as brilliant as this there is a moment that jars when God/Good Deeds tells us: “Religion is a man-made thing.The play swings between the hyper-spectacular and the poignant, the perfectly choreographed scenes with Ev’s friends and the gold, dazzling, personifications of materialism pitched against moments with his dying parents, and flashbacks to his childhood.