Interpreting Eliot

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 795, 15 October 1954, Page 10

Interpreting Eliot

OME people prefer the performance of Robert Donat as Becket in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (now available on recordings) to any other. But, for me, the part will always be associated with the voice of Robert Speaight, who seemed to bring to it, as he has to many other roles since, a particularly penetrating intelligence and dramatic nous of a high order. As original player of Eliot roles, friend of the poet, and also as a critic and biographer with a widening reputation, Speaight is especially well equipped to discuss Eliot and his achievement. His finely-deliv-ered 1YC talk was less an appraisal of Eliot’s work than an analysis of his personality and of his particular poetic (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) mood which has been so widely imitated but never quite reproduced. It is fashionable in some quarters now to try to deprecate Eliot, usually on grounds which have nothing to do with poetry. Robert Speaight was squarely in the poet’s corner, and by what I thought a subtle and sensitive discussion of Eliot’s "respectability ’ went a good way towards explaining the curious flavour of a poet who has given at once more and less of himself than has any of his contemporaries.