The Elder Poet

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1052, 23 October 1959, Page 20

The Elder Poet

ss NZBS production of T. S. Eliot’s The Elder Statesman (1YC) was my first acquaintance with the play. In a good presentation, marred just slightly for me by the mixture of English and New Zealand accents, the work seemed to me to be the most straightforward and perhaps the most portentous of Eliot’s dramas so far-a morality in which a politician is faced with the personal failures of his life and comes: to @ greater understanding of himself and a selfless love through the mocking

accusations of two figures from his past. There is less poetry here, too, than in the earlier plays, although Eliot’s exploitation .of the formal utterance of English upper-class speech and his controlling rhythms give the dialogue a shape very pleasing to the ear. I should think the work might, in fact, be better on radio than on the stage, because of its static character and the . rather obvious pointing of the moral at the end. Be that as it may, Antony Groser was moving and dominant as Lord Claverton, and Dorothy Munro credible and sympathetic as his daughter. In this context, however, Davina Whitehouse, as the "matron" of the convalescent home was rather too broad, almost as if, in the midst of people doing a stately gavotte, someone were to insist upon dancing an Irish jig.