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? Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools. 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. View image in fullscreen Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Everyman is forced to face the spiritual consequences of his materialist life. Didn't care for Carol Ann Duffy prior to the play, had to study so much of her poetry in school, but what a clever and unique adaptation.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Chiwetel Ejiofor in Everyman, adapted by Carol Ann Duffy, on the National’s Olivier stage. The basis is reminiscent of Jedermann but it is a new confrontation with death and the impossibility to bargain with death. A cornerstone of English drama since the 15th century, this new adaptation by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy was presented at the National Theatre, London, in April 2015. I saw this play when it was at the NT and found this updated version very powerful-- however, I have always found it to be powerful, no matter the version. It tells a well-known story, of man’s journey from sin to salvation in the face of death; its characters are flat personifications with pre-determined roles to act out.God is here merged with the figure of Good Deeds and embodied by Kate Duchene as a cleaning-woman with Marigolds and bucket. From a dramaturgical point of view, there is not much to the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman. This takes nothing away from its emotion - it's just as capable of expressing Everyman's anger, confusion, hybris and acceptance of death. She won the 1993 Whitbread Award for Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Mean Time. Its setting is thus a rooftop, where the 40-year old hedonistic financier is celebrating his birthday.

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. One of the great primal, spiritual myths, Everyman asks whether it is only in death that we can understand our lives. Duffy’s poetry is underscored by William Lyons’s eclectic music and faithfully realised by Norris’s virtuosic production that captures both the frantic dizziness of a money-driven world and the beckoning finality of death. 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.Sex, drugs, walking piles of garbage, and neglected parents make up the urban twenty-first century landscape of the Poet Laureate’s modern, but still rhyming, script. Award-winning poet and playwright Carol Ann Duffy’s thrilling contemporary adaptation of the fifteenth century play The Summoning of Everyman, is directed by Katherine Nesbitt. 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.

National Theater Live subscription 8: This was so directly in my wheelhouse it is the whole damn wheelhouse. He is very touching in the scene where he confronts his scooter-riding young self and owns up to a life of self-gratification. Everyman is also a sharp-suited figure first seen celebrating his 40th birthday with a hedonistic wingding full of coke, booze and, in Javier De Frutos’s choreography, wild, swirling dance.Ev”, our universal protagonist and bad-boy banker, literally falls into the opening scene of his fortieth birthday party (he descends onto the stage, dangling in mid-air). Please note this production contains adult content including strong language, scenes of drug and alcohol use, depictions of vomit and references to self-harm.