Patrick Comerford
I have been part of the Stony Stratford Playreaders group for about two years now, and we are now rehearsing our contributions to the Stony Words Festival next January.
Last night, on my suggestion, we also read The Cocktail Party, a three-act verse drama written by TS Eliot in 1948 that focuses on the themes of modern existence, identity and spiritual yearning, told through intricate dialogue and drama.
The Cocktail Party tells of a troubled married couple who, through the intervention of a mysterious stranger, settle their problems and move on with their lives. The play was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949 and first published in 1950. It was the most popular of Eliot’s seven plays in his lifetime, although his 1935 play, Murder in the Cathedral, is better remembered today.
The Cocktail Party was written while Eliot was a visiting scholar in Princeto, where he received word that he had reveived that year’s Nobel Prize for literature. The play went on to have successful runs in theatres in London and New York in 1950, with the Broadway production receiving the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play.
At its debut in Edinburgh: critics acclaimed the play as ‘the most advanced and original point yet reached in Mr Eliot’s dramatic writing.’ Reviewers delighted in the subtlety of Eliot’s verse, and the ‘spirit of early Shaw’ which elicited a ‘high-pitched intellectual giggle … frequently drowned by the full-throated roar’. Some reviewers, however, found the play ‘insufficiently poetic’ and ‘perhaps the weakest poetry that Eliot has yet written.’
The Cocktail Party draws on the play Alcestis by Euripides and the Orpheus and Eurydice legend, and it has been described as ‘a play on two planes’: the level of the divine, and a drawing-room comedy.
The characters are: Edward Chamberlayne, Lavinia Chamberlayne, Celia Coplestone, with whom Edward has had an affair, Peter Quilpe, who yearns for Celia, Julia Shuttlethwaite, Alexander MacColgie Gibbs, an Unidentified Guest, later identified as Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, a Nurse-Secretary, who is secretary to Sir Henry, and two caterer’s men.
The characters Reilly, Julia, and Alexender are not, in fact, humans but angelic beings dedicated to the transhumanisation of the human soul. Two paths lie open to humans: the first is the way of companionable self-deception (‘the hearth’) embraced by the vast majority – as epitomised in the relationship between Edward and Lavinia; and the second is that of the saint, embraced by a few.
The drama of the first act revolves around Edward Chamberlayne, who is hosting a cocktail party, all the while disguising the fact that his wife Lavinia has left him.
In the course of the play a mysterious guest, originally played by Alec Guinness, turns out to be a Harley Street psychologist, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly. He returns Lavinia to Edward, and teaches the two that their lives are better together, though superficial.
Simultaneous to the main drama of the play is the story of Edward’s mistress, Celia, who has been described as ‘Eliot’s most moving character’. She journeys beyond the drawing room and leaves to become a missionary in the East. At a second cocktail party, two years later, it is revealed that she died horribly, crucified in the service of God and eaten by ants on a cross in a far-off land.
Eliot may have based the character of Julia on a woman who was born in Stony Stratford and who helped Eliot when he was writing the play. Mary Trevelyan (1897-1983), who was born in Stony Stratford, was the eldest of six children of the Revd George Philip Trevelyan (1858-1937), Vicar of Saint Mary’s, Wolverton (1885-1897).
They had first met in Swanwick, Derbyshire, at a conference of the Student Christian Movement (SCM). She helped Eliot to transcribe the song ‘One-eyed Reilly’, a song he had heard in his youth. Eliot sometimes referred to Mary as Jullia, and it is said he modelled the character Julia in The Cocktail Party on her.
The name of Celia Coplestone seems to be Eliot’s homage to Father Frederick Coplestone (1907-1994), the Jesuit philosopher who had recently referred to Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in a celebrated BBC broadcast debate with Bertrand Russell on the existence of God. Celia’s choice of a missionary life may be an oblique reference to Copleston’s two uncles who were SPG-supported Anglican missionaries: Reginald Stephen Copleston, who was Bishop of Calcutta and Ernest Copleston, was Bishop of Colombo.
Celia’s choice of missionary destination, Kinkanja, may also refer to Mary Trevelyan’s work in North Borneo (today’s Sabah), with a terrifying description of the indigenous culture that was still circulating at the time in England.
In The Cocktail Party, Eliot reconciles the drawing room and divinity, bringing the play its most praise, with one review describing Eliot as both ‘a literary craftsman and a moral prophet.’
There is a sense too in which Eliot seems to have used the play to exorcise his own personal demons, including his own questioning of his ability and recognition as a poet. The way Edward and Lavinia sett;e for a passionless coexistence, their marital spats and Edward’s guilty remorse echo Eliot’s anguished relationship with his wife Vivienne, who had died in 1947. In addition to exploring his private hell, Eliot suggests that the only alternative to the bleak materialism of the post-war world is some form of ecstatic sacrifice.
I was intrigued many years ago by the way a production of the play was part of the assessment of a module at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and thought at one time (albeit momentarily) of borrowing the idea in one module I taught at the Church of Ireland Theological College.
Barry Spurr, in Anglo-Catholic in Religion: TS Eliot and Christianity, recalls that when an Episcopalian priest suggested to Eliot that The Cocktail Party was ‘covertly all about the Mass, Eliot responded: ‘I really wanted to write a damn good play, and I hope I did.’
One critic summarised the play succinctly: ‘know yourself; choose, come to terms with your insignificance, or, if you happen to be one of the saintly few, face the full consequences of your choice.’
‘The best of a bad job is all any of us make of it’, Sir Henry says in his final lines, ‘Except of course, the saints.’
