Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools. 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”. 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.

The basis is reminiscent of Jedermann but it is a new confrontation with death and the impossibility to bargain with death. View image in fullscreen Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Everyman is forced to face the spiritual consequences of his materialist life. The most extraordinary moment in Norris’s production comes when Ian MacNeil’s design, Paul Anderson’s lighting and Paul Arditti’s sound combine to simulate the effect of a tsunami. This seems a gratuitous stroke in a story that shows precisely where a materialistic individualism has led us. 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.This debauched and decadent scene set to synchronised coke-snorting and techno-music, he is told, will be his last. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009. Milton Court is located within the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and is approximately a 5 minute walk from the Barbican entrance on Silk Street. Although the play takes its roots from the moralist Christian literary tradition, much like Hugo von Hofmannsthal's rendition - Everyman is portrayed in a balanced way and carefully nuanced.

Please note this production contains adult content including strong language, scenes of drug and alcohol use, depictions of vomit and references to self-harm. But in this journey, the characters he encounters become agents and situations that resonate with topical significance and urgency – the fast pace of corporate lifestyle, the dissolution of the nuclear family, and environmental disasters. 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. 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. To take a 15th century morality play and adapt it to a largely secular, wealthy, and liberal modern audience without alienating them, but without taking god out of it?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. Plan your journey and find more route information in ‘ Your Visit’ or book your car parking space in advance. The big achievement of both Duffy and Norris is keep the framework of the original while suiting the content to a secular society. 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. One of the great primal, spiritual myths, Everyman asks whether it is only in death that we can understand our lives.

She won the 1993 Whitbread Award for Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Mean Time.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. While not quite having the instructive edge of the morality play form, this production of Everyman nonetheless does have its didactic elements, arranged in long (and mostly environmentalist) spiels that remind us of a basic lesson: that actions have, often irreversible, consequences. 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.