This was the best thing I've seen on the BBC for a long time. 'Crispy' Ralph Fiennes' performance, and the thoughtful direction by his sister Sophie, really brings new life and power to TS Eliot's lesser-known major work. However, I'm not convinced that such a staging, all in one go, is the right medium for it. Incredibly dense, intricate, and rich in metaphor, it's surely too long for anyone to concentrate fully - certainly too long for me. It's a it like listening to, not a Shakespeare play, but a very long monologue - same difficult language, but no story or characters to help you find your way. The only reason for performing it in one go seems to be to show off the fact that Fiennes had memorised it (and even that is, of course, lost on TV). For the audience, it would have been better in four parts.
(Edit: there are a couple of good readings of this poem on Youtube, and they are only an hour long. So at an hour and a half, the running time of this version is extended 50% by flim-flam - too much by any standard.)
Certainly Four Quartets seems to have been too much for R3's Georgia Mann, introducing it. It seems incredible that she could manage to ignore the very obvious and specifically Christian content of the poem, instead calling it 'a poem about being human'. Well, in one sense you could say that about anything couldn't you? Possibly she had lifted this comment from the preceding documentary, it wouldn't surprise me if she had never actually read the poem. But in another sense, 'being human' is exactly what Four Quartets is *not* about: it's a poem about *transcending* humanity. The BBC, one is forced to conclude, either don't understand it, or don't want to. Which? My bet is, they don't understand it, but if they did they wouldn't like it.
