Everyman (Faber Drama)

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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. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. She won the 1993 Whitbread Award for Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Mean Time. Everyman’s prime sin also lies not so much in seeing money as solution to any problem as in ignoring ecological reality.

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.This debauched and decadent scene set to synchronised coke-snorting and techno-music, he is told, will be his last. 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”.

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.But Ejiofor is at his best in the play’s closing moments when he acknowledges the miracle of life while accepting the reality of death. The basis is reminiscent of Jedermann but it is a new confrontation with death and the impossibility to bargain with death. 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? One of the great primal, spiritual myths, Everyman asks whether it is only in death that we can understand our lives.