Through a Cocktail Glass Darkly

Through a Cocktail Glass Darkly LESLEY CHAMBERLAIN The Cocktail Party is a testament to T.S. Eliot's improbable dramatic aspirations, as John Dexter's admirable 1986 production at London's Phoenix theatre showed. The piece has moved further away from realising its chief aim than when it was fITSt staged at the 1949Edinburgh festival, with Alec Guinness as the tyrannically compassionate Christian psychoanalyst Sir Henry HarcourtReilly . It has never truly been suited to pleasing a wide audience. The fact that the Edinburgh occasion drew crowds, and the production moved profitably to London and was followed by a successful season on Broadway, was surely deceptive. All three occasions owed the excess of their popularity to Eliot's living celebrity as poet and nobel laureate. In 1986, now Eliot's name has entered the museum for "difficult" poetry on A-level syllabuses, it was hard to fill more than a few front rows in the stalls, even with the most intelligent acting and attractive staging, and cut-price seats. The Cocktail Party uneasily mixes drawing-room comedy with a rigourous classical trial ofunsuitable passions;it reflects the mixture ofSheridan and John Wesley which Northrop Frye suggested might finally be Eliot's place in the English Romantic tradition. A few human specimens are arrested for questioning with their glasses in mid-air; they are taken outside society for trial in order that they may be more satisfactorily replaced within it, or, in the odd case of greatness, found too good to return. Daily drama critics divided in 1986, as they did in 1949, between those who found the play rich and boldly innovative for the commercial stage, and those who lamented the vulgarity of an elevated poet addressing the crowd. Those who thought Prufrock and The Waste Land should not be messages for the people objected to the mixture of ascetic metaphysics with sub-Wildean or Cowardian silly jokes, while apologists felt inadequate and went home and read the play again. The Phoenix rose valiantly to the challenge by pasting up Through a Cocktail Glass Darkly 513 negative and positive reviews side by side in large letters outside the theatre, but the unassuming theatre public, unsure whether to look for entertainment or meaning, ended up bewildered and deterred. The play is, for all Eliot's ambitions on behalf of staged verse drama, probably best suited to arm-chairreading and slow digestion. On stage it fails to convey simultaneous natural and supernatural experience;and it fails to make a dynamic show of the continuity between those two worlds. The drama is too deeply embedded in the verse to convey sufficient external action or development. Lack of action combines with density of symbolic meaning to make its pretensions to a token naturalism - the depiction of men and women meeting for drinks - seem quite tedious and absurd. And anyway all the tokens are symbolic! The verse, though Eliot wanted it to be inconspicuous, regulates the delivery of apparently light-hearted remarks, and to preserve rhythms demands a pace in the dialogue which makes grasp ofthe densely-packed, often abstract or metaphorical content all the more difficult. In fact Eliot's two conditions set out in the 1951 essay On Poetry and Drama, that the verse be unobtrusive and at the same time dramatically necessary, work against each other. By its dramatic weaving of leitmotifs the verse achieves a quasiWagnerian musicality at the expense of linear movement. Eliot's plays though continue the main themes of his poetry in a more mundane and humane context, which is potentially illuminating. Dexter's production emphasised the element of self-parody in the second act scenes in Sir Henry's consulting room by exploiting Eliot's friendlyish jibes at psychoanalysis; and brought out the warmth and certainty of the friendships among the Guardians, particularly between Sir Henry and Julia Shuttlethwaite, because oftheir sense ofbeing united in a common cause. His staging brought a softer, human touch to features ofEliot we are more accustomed to finding in an austere setting. We might otherwise have only the stark image of a . contemplative community supplied by Little Gidding or a memory of the unheroic world as The Waste Land's brownish, fading...