A dark-suited, woollen-scarved man with startling eyes stands on the bare stage and looks into the distance. Stephen Dillane speaks to us in a voice of meditative calm, all extraneous emotion drained from it. He rarely moves. His hands weave no distracting patterns, make no flamboyant gestures.

In this extraordinary performance, during which Dillane speaks from capacious memory TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, he holds the audience in rapt silence. It is a performance of riveting purity, under Katie Mitchell’s inspired direction, which ought to restore the lost art of speaking poetry in public to a proper eminence.

Dillane transmits poetry without making you irritatingly aware of his emotional reactions to it. He allows the philosophical ideas and lyrical beauties of The Four Quartets to speak for themselves.

Admittedly, Eliot, who matched the poem’s form to Beethoven’s late quartets and Opus 132 in particular, writes in terms very difficult to grasp. Yet these four poems — inspired by faith, by the history of places personal to Eliot, by the seasons of the year, by each of the four elements and the busy flux of time past and time present — arrest the emotions with their visionary strangenesses.Who ever forgets the Journey In Burnt Norton “towards the door we never opened into the rose garden”, or the “midwinter spring” that blooms in Little Gidding during the inferno-like portrayal of the World War II bombing in London. Dillane conveyed Eliot’s hallucinatory sequences with luminous, intense, invigorating calm.

He was followed by soloists of the Philharmonia playing Beethoven’s glorious Opus 132, under a single pool of lamplight. The other side of the stage was illuminated by a single shaft of simulated sunlight, as in Burnt Norton. Exquisite.
Until tomorrow (0870 060 6624).