The most extraordinary moment in Norris’s production comes when Ian MacNeil’s design, Paul Anderson’s lighting and Paul Arditti’s sound combine to simulate the effect of a tsunami. 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. This seems a gratuitous stroke in a story that shows precisely where a materialistic individualism has led us.

This takes nothing away from its emotion - it's just as capable of expressing Everyman's anger, confusion, hybris and acceptance of death.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.

With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. This debauched and decadent scene set to synchronised coke-snorting and techno-music, he is told, will be his last.One of the great primal, spiritual myths, Everyman asks whether it is only in death that we can understand our lives. Even in a version as brilliant as this there is a moment that jars when God/Good Deeds tells us: “Religion is a man-made thing. While nothing can match the horror of the actual event, the audience is given a salutary jolt and reminded that we share Everyman’s purblind folly when he ruefully says: “I thought the Earth was mine to spend, a coin in space. View image in fullscreen Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Everyman is forced to face the spiritual consequences of his materialist life.

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 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. But in this journey, the characters he encounters become agents and situations that resonate with topical significance and urgency – the fast pace of corporate lifestyle, the dissolution of the nuclear family, and environmental disasters. 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.She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009. 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. But what was originally church propaganda has been turned, in Carol Ann Duffy’s stunning adaptation, into a scathing assault on the myopic materialism of the modern age and a reminder of our own mortality.

The basis is reminiscent of Jedermann but it is a new confrontation with death and the impossibility to bargain with death. 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. 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. Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools. I sense this probably falls in the Noah/Cloud Atlas/The Green Knight/Avatar uncanny valley of being too sincere for the secular and too mystical for the religious, but that's my jam.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Chiwetel Ejiofor in Everyman, adapted by Carol Ann Duffy, on the National’s Olivier stage. God, as the character herself says, and religion come and go like all ideologies, but this is a lesson for eternity. Deserted by friends, family and goods, he finds solace only in a dosser named Knowledge (Penny Layden) who enables him to face Death with a new-found humility. Caledonia, Cymru, East Midlands, North East, Northern Ireland and the South West bring the voices of their regions. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.