MR. ELIOT’S COMEDY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 770, 23 April 1954, Page 13

MR. ELIOT’S COMEDY

THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK, by T. S. Eliot; Faber and Faber, English price 10/6. S. ELIOT‘S new verse play was well received on its first appear--ance at the Edinburgh Festival last year. Perhaps there is something in it which can be brought out by good acting, but so fat I have been unable to discover what could have impressed the audience. The story, which could have become farce or melodrama, attempts a middle course and subsides into rather weak comedy. The plot hangs upon two mysteries of parentage. We have to believe that Sir Claude Mulhammer and Ladv Elizabeth, his wife, each had an illegitimate child before their marriage, and that both children were mislaid in mixups with foster parents. Such carelessness, as Lady Bracknell would have said, is quite inexcusable. The resemblance to The Importance of Being Earnest, although confined to problems of parentage, is unfortunate. Oscar Wilde’s wit could sustain a farcical plot without the slightest difficulty. But what is to sustain The Confidential Clerk? No comic character emerges, though the playwright tries hard with Lady Elizabeth, a rather vague woman with an interest in New Thought of the kind that leads to vegetarianism. But remarks which might have been mildly amusing from the stage do not always wear well in print. This is how Lady Elizabeth describes the death of her lover. He was run over. By a rhinoceros-In Tanganyika." And are mixed metaphors an unfailing source of amusement? Eggerson, the discreet and diplomatic clerk, can speak quite plainly when he wants to. Here he is at his worst: He’ll be a power in the City! And he has a heart of gold. But not to beat about the bush, He’s rather a rough diamond, The verse has a_ conversational smoothness and a subdued casualness, but not a single line or phrase stays in the memory. Can poetry be restored to the theatre by making it so unobtrusive (continued on next page)

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(continued from previous page) that one scarcely notices it? Esoteric critics may presently find Greek affinities or sources in this play, and perhaps a symbolism concealed’ from the ignorant. My own conviction is that only Mr. Eliot could have got away with it.

H.