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ought to be written that the audience is never shocked from its habitual
habits of listening and can receive this playas merely another version
of the drawing-room comedy.
uIsn't it wonderful!"
a friend said to me
as we left the theater,
UIt's poetry but you never know it."
I am simple–
minded enough to think that this must remain a very ambiguous com–
pliment for the author even though he seems to have calculated some
such effect, according to his own explanation of the theory behind the
play:
"The verse should be unnoticeable; the audience should not be conscious
of the difference from prose. The purpose of the verse should be to
operate upon the auditor unconsciously so that he shall think and
feel in the rhythms imposed by the poet without being aware of what
these rhythms are doing. All the time these rhythms should be prepar–
ing the audience for the moments of intensity when the emotion of the
character in the play may be supposed to lift him from his ordinary
discourse-until the audience feels, not that the actors are speaking verse,
but that the characters of the play have been lifted into poetry."
This is very well put, and the strategy sounds good, but does
The Cock–
tail Party
really lift its actors at any point to that level of intense or
moving speech where the poetry is no longer hidden but open? In the
last act, the leading character, the psychiatrist-priest Harcourt-Reilly,
quotes some lines from Shelley, and the effect, to my ears at least, was
like the sudden clear ringing of a bell, in comparison with which the
rest of Eliot's play might very well have been written in prose. The
reading of the play has confirmed this impression: the beat of the
verse is so indefinite and uncertain, at times so limp and flat, that if
one had not seen the play one could scarcely believe that the verse would
sound even as well as it does from the stage. Eliot has been very lucky
indeed to have, in this production by the Sherek Players, a performance
of the play that could scarcely be improved upon, so that one feels
there are no lurking places of drama or symbolism that might be brought
out by any other and different staging. (I suspect that the play's suc–
cess is in good part due to this excellence of performance, and particular–
ly to the pleasure of hearing English well and naturally spoken,-a not
too common experience for American playgoers.) In his earlier frag–
ment
Sweeney Agonistes
Eliot had not sought to transmute the formal
convention of verse into something hardly distinguishable from prose,
but had in fact insisted upon the convention with a starkness of rhythm
and syncopation that makes this work, fragmentary as it is, his greatest
achievement as a dramatic poet. A whole play in the style of
Sweeney
would have been a much more considerable step toward the revival
