RALPH FIENNES will direct and star in a theater adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” The Guardian reported.

A co-production by Theater Royal Bath and the Royal & Derngate in Northampton, “Four Quartets” will be staged first at those venues in May and June, then visit Oxford Playhouse and Cambridge Arts Theater and other destinations.

“Four Quartets” is a set of four poems written by Eliot that were published over a six-year period. The first poem, “Burnt Norton,” was published with a collection of his early works. After a few years, Eliot composed the other three poems, “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages” and “Little Gidding,” which were written during World War II and the air-raids on Britain.

They were first published as a series in Britain between 1940 and 1942 towards the end of Eliot’s poetic career. The poems were not collected until Eliot’s New York publisher printed them together in 1943.

The four poems range across themes of time, nature, faith, spirituality, war and mortality.

Fiennes, who starred in the “Harry Potter” series and recently played archaeologist Basil Brown in the BAFTA-nominated Sutton Hoo drama “The Dig,” was last on stage in “Beat the Devil” at the Bridge Theater in London in 2020. He portrayed the playwright David Hare in a monologue detailing Hare’s experience of contracting coronavirus and the government’s response to the pandemic.(SD-Agencies)