Ejiofor makes a poetic everyman

By Isabel Lloyd

What’s the point? Why are we alive? Does God exist, and does He care about us? The biggest questions of them all are posed repeatedly in the original “Everyman”, a medieval parable of a man trying to dodge death and account for his deeds. In the poet Carol Ann Duffy’s new adaptation, which opened last night at the National Theatre in London, at least one of those questions is turned upside down: as the show begins, God, a weary but patient Mrs Mop (Kate Duchêne), takes a break from the eternal job of cleaning up after humanity to ask why it is that man seems to care so little for Her.

It’s a typically fresh approach from Duffy, whose reworking of the original might be in verse but still has plenty of room for the demotic as well as the demonic: “Did your man just call me a cunt?” Dermot Crowley’s Irish-accented Death asks the audience, disbelievingly. And it gives Rufus Norris, now deep into his first season as the new head of the National, just the kind of loose, poetic, rhythmic material he likes. As directed by him, the first ten minutes were some of the most visceral I’ve seen at the theatre. A huge screen crackled with images of life lived; Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Everyman, undulating in a shiny petrol-blue suit, fell in heartbreaking slow motion from the full height of the flies into a pit at the back of the stage; then, as dance music thundered and drummed, a gang of masked grotesques, sharply choreographed by Javier de Frutos, pantomimed a coke-sniffing, tequila-slamming 21st-century debauch. It was adrenaline-pumping stuff; a moment when you got an exciting glimpse of where Norris’s National might be heading.