I am a proud T.S. Eliot hater, which you may think would make me too biased to review this play by him (I think his ideas were terrible and stupid, and the older and Christian-er and Tory-er he got and the more ideas of his own he developed instead of pastiching them out of other poets, the commensurately terribler they became – I can go into great detail about this), but like all good haters the force of my hate means I have gone to enormous efforts to understand him in order to hate him better. And this is a play with a lot of complex pretentious terrible Eliot-y ideas which you really need to be able to understand, and I’m not sure everyone in the audience quite had the brainpower to do that at this point in the semester, because some of them left in the interval (tragically).
So hold on and be patient and I’m going to try to explain what I think about it. For those who don’t know, T.S. Eliot was a sad lonely little freak (I’m allowed to be rude because he was probably straight) who is mostly remembered for about eight very important poems, and if we’re being real, two (‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Burnt Norton’). He also pioneered an extremely influential and misguided school of literary criticism, but what people care about less is that he was really into theatre and, after converting to Christianity and becoming a worse person, he increasingly devoted his time to writing plays – which he idealised as the perfect vessel for delivering poetry to the masses. He really really tried to resurrect verse drama (unsuccessfully, like everyone before and after him), and this his first post-war play, The Cocktail Party, was supposed to be the ultimate synthesis of popular entertainment, poetry, and ideology.
ID: Ezequiel Vigo, Clara Curtis, Liza Vasilyeva, Dylan Swain, Ava Cecile Samans, Luke Robinson, and the chaise-longue. Credit: Ellen Rowlett.
Spoiler warning by the way. You walk in and see the immortal chaise-longue, a green chair, and a desk in front of the stage – Reilly’s office, the place of judgment (just go along with it), looming ominously over (under) the entire rest of the play, which takes place on the stage itself. And I am very envious of the furniture here: there’s this lovely long low brown sofa on which Ava Cecile Samans’ Julia (all in blue, exquisite bright blue heels), Clara Curtis’ Celia (all in yellow, perfect yellow dress – it’s exquisite the way it falls when she moves to sit down or stretches out a leg), and Liza Vasilyeva’s Peter (exquisite orange waistcoat layered over an orange shirt and ribbon choker tie thing I don’t know the name of) sit awkwardly to form the Students’ Association colours (I don’t actually know enough about colour theory to make any comment on this beyond the fact that I wish I was as well-dressed as any of them). Dylan Swain’s Edward is in brown, Ezequiel Vigo’s Reilly is in black, and Luke Robinson’s Alex is in green and a kilt (he’s played up as a comic relief character, because being Scottish is strange and funny). When Imogen Griffiths’ Lavinia shows up, she is also in green but more of a brat green and, more excitingly, shiny – a beautiful velvet suit of which I am deeply envious and a silk shirt and a string of pearls.
Your Union is arranged on the sofa looking at the audience, with Reilly off to one side and Alex on the other, and Edward standing silently at the back being a host. Everyone is acting deeply unhappy, because T.S. Eliot couldn’t imagine anyone really enjoying a cocktail party, and because Edward’s wife Lavinia has left him and that old gossip Julia is telling a really boring story. For a little while you think this is just a very strange comedy of manners, except that people keep repeating things and saying stuff that makes no sense, and everyone is positioned so precisely and artificially. Precise artificiality is everything Hannah Savage’s direction is about. The armchair is power. The sofa is weakness. People look in precise directions precisely in time and stand in precise relations to each other, mirrored and developing throughout all the one-on-one conversations in the play. We return again and again to centre-stage looking directly out at the audience and having a revelation. Most of the time people are standing very still talking to one another, and then the moments of intense motion – Celia realising Edward’s soullessness and scrambling up the armchair in disgust away from him as he reaches up to try to touch her (would it be a Dylan Swain performance without an age gap relationship?) – are really startling.
ID: Ezequiel Vigo, Dylan Swain, and Clara Curtis. Credit: Ellen Rowlett.
The sense of the ‘real life’ of the play being fake is absolutely vital to the plot, and I only wish it was made more abstract and emphasised more strongly. The reason Eliot liked the theatre is because plays have an obvious fakeness about them – you are explicitly, in full knowledge, watching actors on a stage projecting their voices and keeping their faces turned to the audience as much as possible. Convincing mimesis, the mirroring or recreation of real life, is just a lot less easy than in other media, and that’s a good thing. For Eliot there’s an automatic doubleness to theatre: there’s the story and there’s the meaning behind it, and the distinction of these is much more tangible than usual to the audience – this is also what for instance Brecht was getting at with his Verfremdungseffekt. Eliot saw popular entertainment and high poetry as basically mutually exclusive concepts, but this double theatre was a way to have entertainment out front for the masses and poetry behind it to satisfy the educated sophisticated (pretentious) T.S. Eliots of the world.
So in The Cocktail Party there is a double plot. On the surface, Edward and Lavinia are in a loveless marriage and have been cheating on each other with Celia and Peter, but that’s all ruined when Peter falls in love with Celia. Underneath and increasingly brought to the surface is a battle for religion and identity, as the ‘Guardians’ Julia, Alex, and Reilly mystically steer the other characters towards their fates: Edward and Lavinia, incapable of consideration of others, gain at least self-knowledge and learn to satisfy themselves in Hell with the miserable rituals of their marriage; Peter, vain and tasteless, goes to Hollywood (a different sort of Hell); Celia, endlessly questioning herself and thinking of others, and seeing through the great Sins of society, becomes a Saint and then a Martyr, escaping the Hell or at least Purgatory of This World. If this all sounds completely insane to you – that’s because it is. There are plenty of other things to talk about in this play – in various ways it’s a reworking of Euripides’ Alcestis – but they don’t make it make any more sense.
Edward is ostensibly the protagonist, and at the beginning you feel a little sorry for him – Dylan, baffled behind a pair of glasses, looks a bit like the fuzzy teddy bear I keep on my bedside table – but his facade of seriousness soon dissolves into childish vanity, and the only relatable trait he maintains in the rest of the show is his constant pathetic reaching out to attractive women for comfort and his plea to (the self-described as ‘kinky’) Celia to ‘tread on me’. Imogen’s Lavinia is even more petulant in a kind of iconic way – I love her exacting expectations of compliments, and the way she gets Edward to adjust a painting without ever looking at it. Liza really shines as Peter, with constant perfectly timed ums and grimaces and totally unconvincing efforts at seeming intelligent and in control. Peter thinks he’s so cool and clever and important saying the names of random actors and producers no-one cares about and explaining that actually he does know a lot about literature and has good taste – I don’t think I’ve ever related to a character more. If only they’d lazily gender-swapped him (Petra? Petal?) without changing anything else about the character so I could pretend to be excited about potential ostensibly gay relationships. Clara stands out not just for her exquisite dresses but also for the exact perfection of all her movements and her posture. Of all the actors she is the one who most brings out the rhythms of the verse (something I occasionally forget is part of the play): Celia is all sudden intense motions in time with each line break, moving from sharp profiles to full-face looking at the audience as she contemplates what to do. She really spends very little time looking at the people she’s talking to, because she’s so far above any of the other characters.
Ava and Luke both have enormous fun dancing around these serious characters, with Luke charging back and forth with his connections and terrible cooking, and Ava constantly in some sort of motion wobbling around making absurd pronouncements. Ezequiel’s Reilly is slow and deliberate and ominous, as befits the person who initially seems like the centre of absolute power. For most of the play I was feeling annoyed at this straight man making all these all-knowing moral pronouncements, but by the denouement these characters are flipped upside down a little I realised the annoying straight man I should have been being annoyed at was Eliot. You see, I think Eliot sees himself and perhaps his imagined intelligent audience neither as the impossibly perfect Madonna Celia nor as the unsavable selfish Whore Lavinia (and yes, I really do believe this is how he viewed his female characters), but rather as the Guardians watching on, with a higher level of awareness than the other characters trapped on their simplistic paths, but still themselves simply acting out predetermined roles, uncertain of their real usefulness, and, most importantly, in fact envious of those who know less than them.
ID: Ezequiel Vigo and Dylan Swain. Credit: Ellen Rowlett.
This is a deliberately baffling very mystical play whose message only really makes any sense if you are the particular flavour of fucked-up ultra-intellectual Christian that Eliot himself was. I was asked after the show ‘the acting and the set and costumes are all very good, but how could someone get invested enough in the themes of this play to go to the effort of proposing it and putting it on?’ and that’s been rolling through my mind ever since. Why here and now – why in this town?
This theatre scene is really quite T.S. Eliot; really quite Cocktail Party – we keep writing and putting on shows about terrible posh Tories having cocktail parties over and over again, and keep trying to extract new meaning out of their terribleness, and comforting ourselves that we’re all very good and self-aware because of the token recognition we make of that terribleness. Does that really make us good and self-aware? Prominent in the marketing of the production of Arcadia earlier this semester was a quote from the (exquisite, and very fitting for Arcadia) stanza of ‘Burnt Norton’ famously beginning ‘At the still point of the turning world.’ – but the vitally important symmetrical syntax of that stanza, with its centrally-placed caesuras, was completely lost in the Instagram post, giving it a startling lack of rhythm which randomly made a profound impression on me. That same production of Arcadia pushed against the comparative seriousness of its source material (maybe I hate Tom Stoppard even more than I hate T.S. Eliot) towards a comic absurdity that now strikes me as being tonally very like this play. That made me think that, as long as you ignore T.S. Eliot and all his religious nonsense, what the The Cocktail Party can be is a rejection of cocktail parties and the people who put them on and every worn-out stupid romance drama that goes on between them. Maybe that’s what this production is doing. Or maybe not!
I’m not sure if my conclusion just now made any sense (it’s 4am) but hopefully it’s vaguely thought-provoking. That’s why I keep coming back to T.S. Eliot even though I hate him – each individual line of poetry feels infinitely profound as you hold it in your mind, and then it doesn’t matter if you think the poem as a whole makes any sense.
X
other erin