New Play in Edinburgh

T. S. Eliot had already published three plays, but the Nobel Prizewinning poet and critic has always been more at home with his publishers than with theater people. The Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939) all got into print without the test of a stage tryout--a process which prompts most dramatists to fresh visions and revisions.

Last week, for The Cocktail Party, his new blank-verse comedy, Playwright Eliot appeared in a new role: the harried craftsman who jots notes in the balcony while the actor runs through the dress rehearsal. For four weeks in Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theater, Eliot had watched rehearsals, chatted with the actors over gin an water, and penciled his unpublished script with cuts and corrections.

Eliot's main problem: "To get a form of verse that would not falsify contemporary speech." Why not write it in prose? Explained Eliot: "There are lots of things you can't say in prose. I can write verse better than prose. When it is colloquially spoken, the very rhythm gets under people's skins and has a kind of atmospheric effect . . . The effect of first-rate verse should be to make us believe that there are moments in life when poetry is the natural form of expression of ordinary men and women."

The play itself (which Eliot charted last year with complex blackboard diagrams at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study) marked his departure from Greek myth and medieval legend. Set in a modern London flat and a psychiatrist's Harley Street office, it contained social chitchat, a bawdy ballad and a couple of interlocking triangles. But, true to form, devout Anglo-Catholic Eliot had underlaid his comedy with sober Christian dialectic. First-nighters at the Edinburgh Festival could note that Eliot's psychiatrist and patients acted and talked more like a parson and his parishioners.

Said the London Daily Telegraph: "One of the finest dramatic achievements of our times." Echoed the Times: "In lucid, unallusive verse ... he presents in the shape of a fashionable West End comedy a story highly ingenious in its construction, witty in its repartee and impregnated with Christian feeling."

But there was also an old complaint. Said the Daily Mail: "A bewildering muddle of a play." The Daily Express agreed: "[The playgoers] were . . . absorbed in laughing at his agile wit and trying to puzzle out just what he was getting at. The cast shared their bewilderment. At the end of the dress rehearsal, some of them were saying: 'Beautiful words, but what do some of them mean?'" By week's end, it seemed a good bet that West End and Broadway audiences would also soon get a chance to laugh--and puzzle over--The Cocktail Party.

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