God, as the character herself says, and religion come and go like all ideologies, but this is a lesson for eternity.

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. God is here merged with the figure of Good Deeds and embodied by Kate Duchene as a cleaning-woman with Marigolds and bucket.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. 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 debauched and decadent scene set to synchronised coke-snorting and techno-music, he is told, will be his last.

Everyman is brilliantly portrayed by 12 years a Slave’s Chiwetel Ejiofor, a bold if welcome and excellent choice; Kate Duchenne as God is an invisible (and hence omnipresent) sweeper and woman. The big achievement of both Duffy and Norris is keep the framework of the original while suiting the content to a secular society. The play swings between the hyper-spectacular and the poignant, the perfectly choreographed scenes with Ev’s friends and the gold, dazzling, personifications of materialism pitched against moments with his dying parents, and flashbacks to his childhood. 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. It may, at first, seem strange that Rufus Norris has chosen to open his personal account as the National Theatre’s director with a 15th-century morality play.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. 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. The whole point of the play is that, in 90 minutes, it traces the hero’s progress from ignorance to knowledge and that is something Ejiofor conveys with admirable clarity. Caledonia, Cymru, East Midlands, North East, Northern Ireland and the South West bring the voices of their regions. 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.