The basis is reminiscent of Jedermann but it is a new confrontation with death and the impossibility to bargain with death. Everyman’s prime sin also lies not so much in seeing money as solution to any problem as in ignoring ecological reality. 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. One of the great primal, spiritual myths, Everyman asks whether it is only in death that we can understand our lives. 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.

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. 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.

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.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. While not quite having the instructive edge of the morality play form, this production of Everyman nonetheless does have its didactic elements, arranged in long (and mostly environmentalist) spiels that remind us of a basic lesson: that actions have, often irreversible, consequences. I managed to watch Rufus Norris' exceptional staging of "Everyman" at the National Theatre's streaming service with Chiwetel Ejiofor playing the main role.

This seems a gratuitous stroke in a story that shows precisely where a materialistic individualism has led us. But Ejiofor is at his best in the play’s closing moments when he acknowledges the miracle of life while accepting the reality of death.Ev”, our universal protagonist and bad-boy banker, literally falls into the opening scene of his fortieth birthday party (he descends onto the stage, dangling in mid-air).