Greek Myth în T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party

The Cocktail Party

In 1949 T.S.Eliot published his first post-war play, The Cocktail Party, which was produced at the Edinburgh Festival in August of that year and then ran for more than two years in the West End.

Somewhat influenced by Euripides according to the author himself, in 1950 the play ’The Cocktail Party’ by Thomas S. Eliot interpreted the myth in a contemporary

psychological way.

Lord Samuel discussed Eliot's plays in the course of his Presidential Address to the Classical Association. On this topic he remarked:

"Mr. Eliot tells us, in his published lecture on Poetry and Drama, that his play ’The Cocktail Party’ [ was founded] on the Alcestis of Euripides... For all its literary skill and dramatic interest, the play leave a feeling of disappointment. The climaxes do not grip. The Greeks were genuinely interested in the Eumenides, Ananke, and the like; but we are not ready to believe they have anything to do with what may be going on today at a lively cocktail party in London.”

Eliot himself stated, in one of his letters to Lord Samuel that:”The method that has appealed to me has been rather to take merely the situation of a Greek play as a starting point, with wholly modern characters, and develop it according to the workings of my own mind. For this reason, no one seems to have found the basis of The Cocktail Party in Euripides till I pointed it out."

The play starts out seeming to be a light satire of the traditional British drawing room comedy. As it progresses, however, the work becomes a darker philosophical treatment of human relations. As in many of Eliot's works, the play uses absurdist elements to expose the isolation of the human condition.

The first act of ’The Cocktail Party’ is the only one divided into three separate scenes. The first scene opens on a party in the drawing room of the Chamberlayne home in London with all of the play’s major characters — Edward, Julia, Celia, Peter, Alex, and the Unidentified Guest — present. There is witty bantering about people not present, making this seem like many British drawing-room comedies. Lavinia Chamberlayne is missing, and her husband, Edward, a lawyer, makes up a feeble excuse for the absence of his wife, who has invited the guests. He tells them that she has gone to visit an aunt in the country, but most of the party guests are skeptical. They all leave except for the Unidentified Guest, whom Edward asks to stay and talk with him.

Edward tells the stranger that Lavinia left him the day before, and that he tried to cancel the party but could not reach the people who did attend. During the conversation, he expresses his concern over what his life will be like without her, and the stranger tells him that he will arrange for Lavinia to return the following day.

Julia and Peter return to the apartment with the excuse that Julia has lost her glasses. Julia leaves by herself, but Peter stays and asks Edward’s advice about starting a romance with Celia. They are interrupted by Alex, who has come to make sure Edward has a dinner. While Peter discusses Celia with Edward, Alex goes into the kitchen to cook, interrupting sporadically to ask where things are kept. Alex and Peter leave together, and Edward phones Celia’s house at the end of scene 1.

Scene 2 takes place in the same room, fifteen minutes later. Celia enters, and it soon becomes apparent that Edward and Celia have been having an affair. She thinks that Lavinia’s departure has opened the door to their getting together, but he tells her that he has agreed to let the stranger arrange for Lavinia to come back. Alex phones, reminding Edward that he has left dinner on the stove for him, and when Celia goes to check on it, Julia shows up at the door. She assumes that Celia returned for the same reason she did: to make dinner for Edward. While Julia is out of the room, Edward explains to Celia that their affair is over. She says that she realized, as soon as she heard that Lavinia had gone, that it was not what she had wanted anyway.

Scene 3 takes place in the same room the following afternoon. The Unidentified Guest returns to see if Edward still wants Lavinia back. When he says that he has been tempted to change his mind, just to show that he is free to do so, the stranger tells him,

You will change your mind, but you are not free. Your moment of freedom was yesterday. You made a decision. You set in motion forces in your life and in the lives of others which cannot be reversed.

After the Unidentified Guest leaves, Peter, Celia, Julia, and Alex enter separately, saying that they have been invited by telegrams from Lavinia. Lavinia says when she arrives that she knows nothing about the telegrams. All of the party guests then exit together, leaving Edward and Lavinia alone. He tells her about the story that he concocted at the party the night before, and she says he should not have bothered, that it would not have fooled anyone. After a few minutes of their talking, exposing each other’s weaknesses, Edward decides that he regrets his decision to have Lavinia come back and feels like he is having a nervous breakdown. Lavinia goes about taking care of common household chores.

Act 2 takes place in the consulting room of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, a psychiatrist; he is the Unidentified Guest of the previous act. He goes over his instructions with his nurse, telling her to send in the first patient, then to wait until he rings the buzzer three times before sending in the second, then send the third patient in when the other two have left. Before he starts seeing patients, Alex enters and says that he was the one who arranged for Edward to see the doctor. He leaves by a back door, then Edward enters.

Edward immediately suspects, upon seeing the familiar face, that this meeting and Harcourt-Reilly’s presence at the party were arranged by Lavinia. Harcourt-Reilly explains that there is probably nothing wrong with him, psychologically, and that it would not be worth being resentful because his marriage would have turned out the same whether Harcourt-Reilly had interfered or not. While Edward wants to be put into a sanatorium, so that he can have some time alone, Harcourt-Reilly does not believe that he needs such drastic treatment. He says that Edward needs to talk with another patient of his, a similar case, and he has the nurse send in Lavinia.

Lavinia is under the impression that Harcourt-Reilly had sent her to a sanatorium during the time that she was away, but he explains that it was actually a hotel. When Edward and Lavinia start bickering with each other about who is more mentally distressed, Harcourt-Reilly corrects them for both being dishonest with him. He mentions Edward’s relationship with Celia and then discloses the fact that Lavinia was having an affair with Peter. He determines that they are perfectly matched.