The Way of Mr. Eliot

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 894, 21 September 1956, Page 19

The Way of Mr. Eliot

"HE COCKTAIL PARTY makes a neat counterpoint with The Vanishing Island because its subject matter is the same. Suffering, atonement, grace and The Way are its substance, dealt with in the highly defined style of one of the great literary masters of this century. Am I being fanciful in detecting in the recorded version of the New York cast, a striking resemblance to The Importance of Being Earnest? As Cathleen Nesbit played Julia Shuttlethwaite, the gossiping busybody who is also a guar-

dian of other people’s destinies, I caught | echoes of Lady Bracknell, and surely Lavinia’s ailing and imaginary aunt, Edward’s excuse for Lavinia’s absence, is blood sister to Algernon’s Mr. Bunbury? And it seemed to me, listening to Elict’s dazzling first act, that he was contriving to make the same explosions in the moral and religious fields, that Wilde managed to provoke in the social and political world. And as much as The Importance, The Cocktail Party depends on style. The New York cast, all English, headed by Alec Guinness and Irene Worth, showed themselves superbly aware of style. The first and second acts, beautifully: paced, crackled with brilliance; the third, which I find somewhat portentous, escaped heaviness through the understanding of the wholly admirable cast. Eliot has made one howler, a sharp descent into Tennysonian bathos, Which I must maliciously record: Celia says, after breaking with her lover, Edward, sombrely: "I shall never go into

‘vour kitchen again!"

B.E.G.

M.