THEATER CHRONICLE
DRY LAND, DRY MARTI NI
Among the many questions raised by
T.
S. Eliot's
The
Cocktail Party
the first and most immediate would seem to be how far
. we can separate, even provisionally, the play and its success from the
author and his fame. The audience did not appear to wish such separa–
tion, for one sensed in its enthusiasm a certain self-congratulation that
it was able to enjoy what it felt it
ought
to enjoy, and had feared, com–
ing to the theater, it might not be able to enjoy. The critics simply
made this response articulate: some were enthusiastic by the standards
of Broadway; nearly all were pleased with themselves that they were
not bored by what they had been told in advance was a play in verse;
some seemed to veil their real dissatisfaction with the play for fear of
self-exposure in attacking so great a name. I labor these points at the
start because I have found, in talking with people who have seen the
play, a very curious ambiguity in its reception : on the one hand, the
play seems to have been carried to a critical and commercial success
by the author's name, but on the other hand seems to be finally ap–
proved of by the standards of Broadway, which are hardly those of Eliot.
For my own part, I am unable to separate the play from its author; and,
this being the case, I must assimilate the play by the standards that
Eliot's other work invokes and often satisfies, and measuring by such
standards I find
The Cocktail Party
a disappointing work: thin and un–
convincing as drama and weak as poetry-perhaps the weakest poetry
that Eliot has yet written.
The play, and very largely because of its success, does throw a
new light upon Eliot's old problem, his lifelong obsession with the
possibility of restoring the poetic drama to the modern stage.
Murder in
the Cathedral
was produced here by the WPA,
The Family Reunion,
so far as I know, only by little theater groups, while
The Cocktail Party
is now a Broadway hit! Eliot would seem then to have solved his
problem, at least for practical purposes; but the question is whether he
has not succeeded by so sugar-coating his pill that very little of the
poetic substance remains : whether, in short, he has so compromised with
the formal convention of verse in accordance with which poetic drama
