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Four Quartets, Barbican, review: TS Eliot’s late masterpiece turned into a chilly, intellectual, beautiful show

Four Quartets Dance created by Pam Tanowitz/Kaija Saariaho/Brice Marden. - amx
Four Quartets Dance created by Pam Tanowitz/Kaija Saariaho/Brice Marden. - amx

In 1938, TS Eliot was approached by a choreographer who was wanted to turn his poem The Waste Land into a ballet. He was aghast at the idea, and wrote to his US publishers urging them to prevent it.

That might explain why it is only now, five decades after his death, that Eliot’s estate have granted permission for a dance version of his late masterpiece Four Quartets – an abstract philosophical meditation on time and faith that is, in some ways, even less suited to the stage than The Waste Land, which at least has characters, concrete locations and events.

Partly inspired by Beethoven’s late string quartets, Eliot’s Four Quartets – published in instalments, then together in 1943 – describe music and movement, but as Platonic ideals beyond human experience. Could any composer capture the “music heard so deeply/ that it is not heard at all”? Eliot’s “still point of the turning world” gives dancers an equally impossible remit: “Neither flesh nor fleshless/ Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.” Try doing that in ballet shoes.

It was with a sinking feeling, then, that I went into US choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s new adaptation, despite the wild acclaim it received on its New York premiere last year. I was bracing myself for cod-Beethoven and twirling. But to borrow a line from Eliot: “It was not (to start again) what one had expected.”

Tanowitz’s Four Quartets attains a stark purity that captures the spirit of Eliot’s work, by avoiding every obvious choice. Her stripped-back approach feels at once distant and intimate. Rather than represent the poetry through music, here the poetry is the music. Seated in front of the stage, Broadway veteran Kathleen Chalfant recites Eliot’s Four Quartets in their entirety. It is a magnificent reading, capturing every shift in tone – from visionary to pedantic, from solemn to self-deprecating – and worth the ticket price on its own.

Four Quartets at the Barbican Theatre - Credit: Alastair Muir/ amx
Four Quartets at the Barbican Theatre Credit: Alastair Muir/ amx

Minimalist painter Brice Marden’s sets deal only obliquely with each poem’s setting. Coloured Tetris-block flats suggest the “deep lane/ Shuttered with branches” in East Coker; for the wild seascapes of The Dry Salvages, everything is whisked away to reveal the theatre’s bare back wall; a pale backdrop, half frozen lake, half blueprint, looms behind the dancers for the wintery Little Gidding.

The anxious strings of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s sparse score rise as interludes between each Quartet, and fill brief pauses between the five sections that make up each poem. But for much of the evening the only sounds are Chalfant’s voice and the patter of the dancers’ feet.

The ensemble move like abstract ideas, like atoms, not people. A figure running on the spot, besieged by life’s distractions, is mankind, rather than a man. If that all sounds rather chilly and intellectual, for the most part, it is – and beautiful, too. At one point, a pair of dancers pursue each other through darkness, before settling down hand-in-hand at the foot of the stage to stare Chalfant straight in the eye. Like us, they are hanging on every word.

Until Sat. Tickets: 0845 120 7511