Four Quartets on Film
by T.S.Eliot
Inspired by a childhood memory of an old vinyl recording in the family home, Ralph Fiennes revisited T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets during the 2020 lockdown, wondering if it could be given a theatrical treatment rather than merely recited.
Creative Producer James Dacre got behind Fiennes’s idea. Hildegard Bechtler, Chris Shutt and Tim Lutkin created the set and costume design, sound and stage lighting, with Fiennes directing the production, which toured UK regional theatres and ran at the Pinter Theatre, London, in December 2021.
This film, directed by Ralph’s sister Sophie Fiennes, known for her work with Michael Clark, Grace Jones and les ballets C de la B, was made immediately after the live performances. The set and lighting were transported overnight from the West End and re-rigged in English National Ballet’s production studio. The film was shot on 16mm in three days using one camera by director of photography Mike Eley, preserving the colour and atmosphere of Tim Lutkin’s original design for the theatre.
Eliot’s ambition was to write a poem that would produce the effect of music on the senses. In this performance, Ralph Fiennes’s delivery brings to life what Eliot called the auditory imagination.
Stage Production
Creative Producer: James Dacre
Director: Ralph Fiennes
Designer: Hildegard Bechtler
Lighting Designer: Tim Lutkin
Sound Designer: Christopher Shutt
Physicalist and Expression Coach: Fin Walker
Associate Director: Eva Sampson
Film
Director: Sophie Fiennes
Executive Producers: James Dacre (for Living Productions) and Danny Moar
Producers: Shani Hinton, Peregrine Kitchener-Fellowes, Martin Rosenbaum
“A meditation on time, loss, and connection, and almost a century later, those themes are just as vital as they were when Eliot wrote them.” RogerEbert.com
“Four Quartets is a multi-course feast of concentrated flavors: mesmerizing language, masterly invocation, and the kind of poetic imagery that in the hands of a great actor feels like a direct line from Eliot’s pen to our mind’s landscape”. Los Angeles Times
“Fiennes sings like Gielgud, declaims like Richardson, 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.” Variety
“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.” The Financial Times