Four Quartets, Theatre Royal Bath, review: Ralph Fiennes illuminates TS Eliot’s Christian vision

It’s almost 30 years since Ralph Fiennes came to international prominence by portraying, with devilish good looks and chilling savagery, the concentration-camp commandant Amon G?th in Schindler’s List (1993). Many films, much stage-work and consistent acclaim followed; the most recent triumph was Netflix’s The Dig.

Now here he stands, alone on stage at Theatre Royal Bath, in a solo rendition of TS Eliot’s poetic sequence Four Quartets, a painstaking excavation of the human condition. It’s a siren call to audiences to return to regional theatres, and a quiet blast from the past – the four poems were published amid the rising horror of Nazism, between 1936 and 1942 (collected in 1943).

There are only glancing allusions to Eliot’s wartime experiences in London, where he volunteered as an air-raid warden during the Blitz. Yet given the poems’ sense of being riveted to a moment in time (“History is now and England”), linking past, present and future in a coterminous mystery, the implicit backdrop is a period in which civilisation hung in the balance. And as Fiennes, 58, has said in interviews, it’s impossible not to bring to these meditations – evoking a lostness in both individual man and mankind – an interest sharpened by the pandemic.

What, all the same, does his performative prowess lend Eliot’s poetry that we couldn’t get at home, studying the page? Above all, Fiennes conjures an air of communal exploration. Upon arriving barefoot on stage, he sits, he gets pensively in the zone, and he looks out at the audience as he formulates the first of many abstractions.

But Fiennes, who cuts a pale, bony, even beaky figure, isn’t giving us actorly oration. His tone is conversational without being casual, and a world removed from the clipped and erudite articulation that was Eliot’s signature style (hypnotic though it was). The delivery is magnetic: slow enough to allow words to be apprehended, as if Fiennes were thinking aloud, groping after the ineffable: “Only through time time is conquered”.

Four Quartets is sometimes compared unfavourably to Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Waste Land, which made his name 20 years earlier; it abounds with the religiosity he had since acquired, having been received into the Church of England in 1927. Inevitably, there’s a touch of the pulpit to this language of purgation, salvation and generalisation – shades of Thought for the Day.

But Fiennes wins musicality from the lines, by turns world-weary then tender, hushed then fire-and-brimstone. Unshowy gestures and movements – he has passing recourse to a desk and two chairs – offer fleeting vignettes: a man at prayer, a country dance, some eternal waiting-room. At one point (“O dark dark dark”), it’s just his voice in pitiless blackness. At the start of The Dry Salvages, with its opining about the nature of rivers, he conjures an old reminiscing sea-dog through tight lips and hands planted on knees.

Fiennes is dwarfed by two panels, designed by Hildegard Bechtler, that can shift in colour according to Tim Lutkin’s lighting and be spun on their axes between segments – suggesting gateways to other times and realms. That set enshrines the vision of a solitary soul contending with vast imponderables, but the hour would have worked equally well on an austerity budget: just Fiennes’s voice, Eliot’s words and us, receptive and rapt, in the audience.

Until June 5. Tickets: 01225 448844; theatreroyal.org.uk