The Ambivalence of The Cocktail Party

THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE COCKTAIL PARTY I would ... say, that it is not so much that the Christian faith needs the drama (for its evangelising possibilities) but that the drama needs the Christian faith. T. S. ELIOT· (1938) I IF ELIOT'S AIM WAS TO revitalise the theatre by bringing back religious values into it, and his strategy for poetic drama in our times to enter "into overt competition with prose drama," The Cocktail Party must be deemed an unqualified success. It was an immediate hit on Shaftsbury Avenue and Broadway and while starting with the world of cocktails and social scandal of drawing-room comedy, managed to graduate to the theme of sin and expiation. But the very extent of the critique that grows up around a popular work may be symptomatic of an ambivalence, and that of The Cocktail Party (surely the largest for any Eliot play) helps to remind us of a certain unsatisfactoriness at the heart of its success. One can detect the ghost of an 'if' or a 'but' in the most enthusiastic first reviews, and the vast body of critical essays that has grown up since has tried to account for the defect from every possible view-point. More often than not critics of The Cocktail Party have fastened on Eliot's view of human experience, his kind of religiosity, to explain their dissatisfaction. Oddly enough, the self-same outlook went into the making of Murder In the Cathedral without occasioning similar difficulties. If form and substance are in the last analysis not really separable, is it not possible that this seeming defect of vision in Eliot's first comedy may arise from one of form and the play's idiosyncrasy of structure account for the perversion of its 'message'? The opening situation of The Cocktail Party seems conventional enough. Instead of the stock triangle of lovers, we have a square: Peter seeking Celia, Celia pursuing Edward, Edward wanting back his wife, Lavinia, who, as we learn, has deserted him in frustration over Peter. But while a comedy would, traditionally, have gone on to work up the conflicts and complications possible to such a situation, Eliot attempts nothing of the sort. He resolutely sets about to disentangle his protagonists, and this so successfully that even before the first act has ended they have all been irrevocably separated from 392 1972 AMBIVALENCE IN The Cocktail Party 393 one another. Peter decides to forget Celia and goes off to Hollywood; Celia bids both him and the Chamberlaynes a last farewell; and the latter, being married and so making a single destiny, are left to cling to each other even if it means clawing. Each moves off in a different direction and though the final act brings them all together (Celia too is in a sense present), the reunion only serves to underline the gulf that has grown up between them as a consequence. Instead of a structure of complication, of inter-action, The Cocktail Party thus substitutes one of separation and progressive divergence . Considering the head-on collision of levels that so bedevilled The Family Reunion7 the method had obvious advantages for Eliot. But it is a-typical of the drama nonetheless, and when one stops to consider the many problems peculiar to it, one is scarcely surprised it should be so. Eliot, it is true, displays a remarkable ingenuity in overcoming them, but his solutions are of the nature of improvisations which may at times rebound on their own inventor. At the most obvious level perhaps there is the difficulty of dramatising character in a work in which the protagonists, after the first scene or two, scarce come together in a common action. Unable to illumine each other's course of development, the only way we may learn of it is from each protagonist himself. Viewed from this angle, the introduction of the psychiatric consultations in Act II is a masterly stroke, enabling Celia and the Chamberlaynes to explain their inner state at some length. If one wanted proof of Eliot's theatrical resourcefulness , what more could one ask for? Yet while the solution is perfect in its own way, we do begin to edge...