The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Jan. 30, 1950

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The Cocktail Party (by T. S. Eliot; produced by Gilbert Miller) is not a complete success as a play. But it is a major event in the theater. Not only is most of it a very remarkable piece of writing, but it is of a different order and it operates at a different level from any new play that Broadway has offered in years.

It is a long, religious, didactic play, in verse. Yet it has the character of a psychological study, of drawing-room comedy, of domestic drama. It begins significantly with a cocktail party, emblem of all that is frivolous, ephemeral and heterogeneous in modern life. Characteristically, one guest is a stranger even to the host. The hostess is absent—called, her husband explains, to the sickbed of an aunt.

Actually, Lavinia Chamberlayne has left her husband. After five years of marriage she and Edward (Eileen Peel and Robert Flemyng) are neither happy nor faithful. Yet when the unknown guest agrees to bring Lavinia back, Edward is curiously glad; and though he has had a much sounder relation with Celia Coplestone (Irene Worth), he now doesn't want her. When Lavinia does come back, she and Edward neurotically taunt each other.

They go for advice to a Harley Street specialist, who turns out to be the stranger at the cocktail party. They both lay their cards on the table face down. The specialist admonishes them for dramatizing themselves and trying to glorify their plight; they are, he says, mere self-deceivers. Actually Edward, who can love nobody, and Lavinia, whom nobody can love, share a common bond of isolation, and will be far happier together than apart. Celia Coplestone comes to the specialist, too, but with a sense of sin and a capacity for humility and atonement: for her, salvation, no matter how arduous, will be necessary. The play ends two years later with another cocktail party, showing the Chamberlaynes adjusted and telling of Celia's death by crucifixion while working among heathen savages.

For Playwright Eliot, the modern world has still the look of a wasteland where drinks and tidbits are served. But his own stony The Waste Land lies now a long way off, for he himself has seen a hopeful way out. His Harley Street specialist is preaching Christian faith as well as Freud, concerned with love as well as sex; and is indeed more spiritual adviser than psychiatrist. After his perplexed visitors have left, he and his assistants drink a libation of red wine—in telling contrast to a frivolous champagne toasting at the cocktail party—and chant for Celia:

Watch over her in the desert Watch over her in the mountain Watch over her in the labyrinth Watch over her by the quicksand.

Up to this peak point of the play, The Cocktail Party, however didactic, is exceedingly effective. The final scene, however, badly overlengthens and considerably flattens and weakens the play; robs it, for all its substance, of the right, full-bodied effect. Dramatically, The Cocktail Party is a number of shining pieces rather than a satisfactory whole.