Ralph Fiennes’ Reading Of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” In New York Tonight To Be Livestreamed

Ralph Fiennes, currently starring in a New York production of a new David Hare play about power broker Robert Moses, will visit the 92nd Street Y in New York tonight to read T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, The Waste Land, in honor of its centenary.

The event is being presented by 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center at 7:30 p.m. ET, and will be livestreamed.

The reading will take place on the same stage where Eliot himself reflected on poetry and read from The Waste Land and other works in 1950.

In a 2019 article in The New York Times about Eliot’s 1950 appearance, the poet Billy Collins said The Wasteland “signals, for one thing, the movement of poetry from nature to the city, from the country to the city. The setting for the poem is not the field or the mountain or the woods. It’s the bridge, the street and the building.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and critic Paul Muldoon will introduce Fiennes’ reading.

According to The Shed, where Straight Line Crazy is being performed in New York, “The play presents an imagined retelling of the arc of Moses’s controversial career in two decisive moments: his rise to power in the late 1920s and the public outcry against the corrosive effects of that power in the mid-1950s.”

Touring the U.K. last year with a performance of Eliot’s Four Quartets, Fiennes said Eliot’s poetry is “endlessly mysterious, but I think there are also ways of speaking it that are conversational and accessible. Eliot has not been a focus in the theater for a while. In his writing there is a religiosity, or questions of faith, which perhaps is unfashionable. I love Eliot’s poetry and want to enable it to be heard.”

92NY said Fiennes’ reading tonight will be the first time he “will read the iconic Eliot poem in front of a live audience.”