Eliot's "Elder Statesman"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1049, 2 October 1959, Page 4

Eliot's "Elder Statesman"

"] HE young world-weary T. S. Eliot '" cwrote of a dead world inhabited by the hollow men, but with age and a recent happier marriage he has seen the Possibility of the hollow men finding fulfilment, or at least content. In his latest play, The Elder Statesman, first seen at the Edinburgh Festival last year, the haunted hollow man is permitted to exorcise his ghosts not with tragic destruction but through the recognition of the power of love. The elder statesman is Lord Claverton, who has been forced into retirement by a stroke, and is about to enter a nursing home. In the face of death, he has at last to come to terms with his life; in which he has cloaked his shabby personal failures with public success. Now the inward misgivings that have eaten him out to little more than a shell are given an urgent reality by the appearance of two figures from his past, both

involved in his moral weaknesses, both his victims, although they are now more prosperous and more at peace than he. Claverton is forced to accept his real past, and in this acceptance of himself and others as they are finds some redemption. His helpless dependence upon his daughter turns to a less selfish love, and he comes to see that "ifja man has one person to whom he is willing to confess everything, then he loves that person, and his love will save him." He meets his death with serenity, in that "peace which ensues upon contrition when contrition ensues upon knowledge of the truth." There is no special sense of time or place in the play; the characters are stock types which represent human dilemmas rather than actual people; Mr Eliot has used them to speak of the ultimates of the human situation-of sin, loneliness, despair, failure and death. He has written of the use he has made of the verse form of the morality play, Everyman, but here is the structure as well as the versification. He is writing a morality play, in the idiom of his time but about eternal values. The poetry is as bare as the theme. T. S. Eliot has said that since "we should aim at a form of verse in which everything can be said that has to be said . .. it follows that it will not be poetry all the time." It will only be poetry when the dramatic situation has reached such a point of intensity that poetry becomes the natural dramatic utterance. In this play there are no striking images, the memorable lines are all epigrammatic or aphoristic. The Elder Statesman will be heard from all YCs on Friday, October 9. The part of Lord Claverton will be played by Antony Groser, and Colin Meldrum and Lynda Hastings play the visitors from the past, while Dorothy Munro is his daughter} Monica. The play was produced by William Austin.