THEATER
NEW PLAY IN EDINBURGH
9/5/49

Sitting in Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theater last week, Nobel prizewinner T.S. Eliot took notes during rehearsals of his latest play, "The Cocktail Party". His main problem: "To get a form of verse that would not falsify contemporary speech ... I can write verse better than prose."

Set in a London flat and a psychiatrist's office, the play contains social chitchat, a bawdy ballad and a couple of interlocking triangles. But, true to form, devout Anglo-Catholic Eliot underlines his comedy with sober Christian didactic. Said the Times: "In lucid, unelusive verse ... he presents in the shape of a fashionable West End comedy a story highly ingenious in its construction, witty in its repartee and impregnated with Christian feeling."

By week's end, it seemed a good bet that West End and Broadway audiences would also soon get a chance to laugh at-and puzzle over-"The Cocktail Party".