A Lonely Crowd
The Cocktail Party
The New Criterion
Kevin D. Williamson
May, 2010
The disjuncture between the two halves of T.S. Eliot's verse drama The Cocktail Party is so radical and complete that one might very well describe the work as two plays rather than one. There is no obvious solution to the difficulty this presents in staging the play; in Scott Alan Evans's recent production for The Actors' Company Theatre, only the most subtle efforts are made to reconcile the play's irreconcilable differences, and that seems to have been the artistically intelligent choice. Under Mr. Evans's direction, the actors achieved a remarkable continuity of character in characters that are not, in truth, continuous, and maintained the cohesion, such as it is, of a story that begins as a drawing-room comedy and ends in a crucifixion. You'll almost forget Eliot wrote Cats.
But how much there is to enjoy here! The Cocktail Party way struggle as literature, but as a performance is it superb. The small cast is nearly flawless, the sets, staging, and lighting simple and serviceable without being showily austere. And one cannot help being a little bit in awe of the actor's skill in tackling this work, which obliges them to conduct sub-Wildean repartee while speaking modernist verse - and doing so in such a way that the verse resembles normal conversation, its formalities receding into the background of the play's physical and dramatic rhythms. Eliot's stage works can be maddening, but they are maddening because (unlike 99 percent of those in the arts who purport to push the envelopes and test limits) Eliot reached high and far and hard for something ungraspable. His failings are the failings of the great, his errors worth more than the successes of many others.