Everyman, National Theatre, London - review

This is Rufus Norris's first production as artistic director of the National Theatre and he is starting big in every sense. He has reached back into theatrical history and pulled out a 15th-century morality play that assembles God, Death and Everyman on stage within minutes and gets straight to the meaty matter of what we are all doing here. He has propelled it on to the vast Olivier stage and has the main character make his first entrance from the heavens. And he has had poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy write a pungent contemporary version that wrestles with the play's deep concerns but for a more secular age, reframing the question of how we account for the way we live. The result is a searing attack on materialism and, above all, our careless stewardship of the earth.

Does it all work? No. But it does take hold and, by the time Death is casting his beady eye around the audience for his next customer, this vivid staging has turned one man's search for his soul into an urgent and troubling prompt for universal soul-searching.

Everyman, in this case, is Chiwetel Ejiofor, playing a successful individual who looks cool even after his precipitous entrance. Was he flying or falling? The latter, it seems.

God, who moves in mysterious ways - here with a mop and bucket, as an all-seeing cleaning lady (wearily kind Kate Duchene) - tells us that after the boozy, coked-up excesses of his 40th birthday party, Everyman is to be hauled in to explain how he has spent his time on earth. Enter Death, a chilling, drily funny Irishman (Dermot Crowley) who snaps on a pair of rubber gloves and tells Everyman to get busy finding something of real worth in his life. Not an easy task.

The production can't quite disguise the limiting factors of the play's episodic nature and abstract characters (Worldly Goods, Good Deeds) - no gripping plot twists here. And the show sometimes strains for contemporaneity: the coke-fuelled party seems to last an aeon.

But Ejiofor is magnificent, holding the huge stage effortlessly, conveying real mortal terror and, finally, deeply moving humility. Duffy's rich verse, by turns brusque, witty, crude and poignantly lyrical, propels the piece along, and Norris, working with designer Ian MacNeil and sound designer Paul Arditti, creates spectacular and distressing images.

A bold, bracing start from Norris. Amen to that.

nationaltheatre.org.uk

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