TS Eliot’s reputation as a dramatist has long lingered in the doldrums but Michael Grandage’s valuable festival of his plays and poetry offers chances for revaluation. Some judged the Donmar’s revival of The Family Reunion a fusty curio. This staged reading of The Cocktail Party ought win more enthusiasts.
Eliot sets lives of extra-marital frivolity and Christ-like self-sacrifice in reverberative contrast. His drama unfolds in scenes of amusingly brittle cocktail party chatter, existential foreboding and therapeutic analysis. The eye-catching Paul Rhys controls the action as the symbol-loaded Uninvited Party Guest. This priest-like shrink, whom Rhys invests with mystery and austere severity, salvages a marriage beset by illusions.
Jamie Lloyd’s adroit production exploits the comic potential of a play that first imitates the form and mocks the tone of post-war, middle-class drawing-room comedy: Una Stubbs’s amusingly vacuous Julia and Nicky Henson’s pompous Alexander lead the vacuous chat at the home of Edward Chamberlayne, whose wife, Lavinia (Anna Chancellor), has vanished into the blue.
Adultery, favourite pastime in plays of the period, rears an indiscreet head when Alex Jennings’s Edward, absolutely superb in his shuttered anguish, after romancing Rosamund Pike’s Celia, and Chancellor’s Lavinia own up to sexual dallying. The play shifts with mesmerising stealth into terrain of suffering and death.
TS Eliot Festival: The Cocktail Party
Donmar Warehouse
Earlham Street, Seven Dials, WC2H 9LX
