A recitation from memory of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, performed by actor and poet John Farrell

August 16-Blue Hill  

 August 12-Camden   September 28-29 Damariscotta

Presenting a rare opportunity to hear the entirety of T.S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece, Four Quartets, spoken live by actor and poet John Farrell, artistic director and co-founder of Figures of Speech Theatre.  In 2011, with special permission from the Eliot Estate, Farrell premiered a one-man recitation of Four Quartets, Eliot’s complex, deeply moving meditation on the human spirit, time and memory. Farrell has since toured the performance to theaters and other venues in the US and Canada.

Farrell’s delivery of Four Quartets is as natural, deep, and illuminating as Kenneth Branagh doing Shakespeare. His presentation here was utterly magical. It’s really extraordinary how, instead of parading the poem, Farrell inhabits it from the inside out, creating a rich, subtle, meditative experience, in which Eliot’s words hover & resonate, provoke & delight. I receive a good many clips of poets and actors reciting ‘the greats,’ and yet had never before been tempted in the least to host any of them at Smith—but, mere minutes into a video of Farrell’s recitation of Four Quartets, I was hooked.
                         --Ellen Doré Watson, Director, The Poetry Center at Smith College

“It was a community coming together to spend an evening with… one of the major literary works of all time, coming together to think about our lives, what gives them meaning, what makes them sacred."-Mary Dowd, Merrill Memorial Library