The Cocktail Party (1949, 1950)

Summary

*Desmond Shaw-Taylor.

"The Edinburgh

Festival—I."

New Statesman 38

(3 September 1949), 243.

[ … ]

The Cocktail Party, unlike Mr. Eliot's two earlier plays, is on the surface a specimen of contemporary dramatic style, as it is understood in Shaftesbury Avenue. The curtain rises on the usual stylish flat, with a white telephone, a Marie Laurencin, and a group of rather exasperated people determined to make the party go. The host, we begin to perceive, is also anxious to make the party go—in another sense; but when at last they depart, he persuades one of them to stay, a stranger to whom he can blurt out the embarrassing truth which he has tried to conceal from the rest: his wife has left him, and the guests we have seen are merely those who couldn't be reached and put off. A first-rate situation, and what follows is better still. The hitherto obscure and taciturn guest comes to life with a bang, takes command of the situation, and pours out a stream of sardonic and paradoxical home-truths to the egotistical husband; finally, […] he bursts into song. The spirit of early Shaw hovers deliciously in the air; the wit sparkles and we begin to feel pleasantly sure that everything will be turned inside out and upside down in the second act.

So it is. The obscure guest is revealed as the eminent Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, of Harley Street; the two most tiresome of the guests turn out to be his assistants, almost his spies.