The centrepiece of the current T. S. Eliot Festival at London’s Donmar
Warehouse is a seven-week run of The Family Reunion (1939). Two other plays
are given rehearsed readings and there is much of the poetry, whether staged
(Four Quartets directed by Katie Mitchell) or in the format made familiar by
Josephine Hart (she introduces two evenings of actors reading his verse).
There is more than enough to confirm what eye and ear already know – one of
the multifold strengths of Eliot’s poetry is that much of it is inherently
dramatic – but also to prompt a chastened question: why do most of his plays
fail as drama?
Eliot’s greatness as a critic encompassed finding fault with his own work.
Sadly, as far as his plays were concerned (no miglior fabbro here), he seems
to have done so after he had finished with them. In the essay “Poetry and
Drama” (1951), he makes a number of specific criticisms of The Family
Reunion, but in “The Social Function of Poetry” (1945), he had already
identified the fundamental problem. His description of the form in which he
triumphed also holds good for drama: “poetry has primarily to do with the
expression of feeling and emotion; and . . . feeling and emotion are
particular, whereas thought is general”. The plot of the Reunion, like any
plot, has to be particular, but Eliot’s governing impulses in writing the
play were general. Its philosophical and quasi-religious themes overlap with
the recently finished “Burnt Norton” (a poem which itself may have been
suggested by lines excised from Murder in the Cathedral), but though the
burdens and convolutions of time come to life in the poem, onstage they are
inert.
Harry, Lord Monchesey, returns to the ancestral home, Wishwood, after eight
years’ absence, during which he has murdered – or imagines he has murdered –
his wife. (The play fudges this matter horribly.) As a result – and also,
perhaps (another fudge), because his father once wished to kill his mother –
he is pursued by avenging spirits. Harry calls them, variously, “eyes”,
“they”, “sleepless hunters” and, finally seeing them as benign, “bright
angels”. Eliot, however, tips us the most heavy-lidded of winks in the cast
list: these are “The Eumenides”. Tricking out a country-house drama with
something from the Oresteia – the foundation stone of Western drama – proves
too heavy an indulgence of Eliot’s contention that immature poets imitate
and mature poets steal. (It also recalls Anne Ridler, his secretary at Faber
and Faber, describing how he once returned some poetry submissions she had
given him “with a blank look and the monosyllable ‘Why?’”.) More
importantly, it poses problems for the actor playing Harry and for the
director.
Samuel West, as Harry, is first stricken and then enlightened. (Harry leaves
Wishwood in pursuit of his friendly furies in a car: the top-of-the-range
expiation is chauffeur-driven.) The actor is hard put to escape the
entanglements of the playwright’s puppet-master strings. Jeremy Herrin, who
directs, is twice prompted by the text to expand the stage action. Harry’s
wife died by drowning and on the first appearance of the Eumenides – Harry
throwing back some curtains to reveal them at the window – a woman’s body
flops into the room to screams from the audience. (The textual cue is
Harry’s “Do not the ghosts of the drowned / Return to the land in the
spring?”.) Eliot had problems with the Eumenides from the start – early
drafts established that they would wear evening dress, but not whether this
would be black tie or white – and by 1951 he was suggesting that they “be
visible only to certain of my characters, and not to the audience”. Herrin
makes them boys. The sanction for this is Harry’s memory of the time in his
childhood when he heard of his absent father’s death: “A summer day of
unusual heat, / The day I lost my butterfly net”. The Eumenides – in short
trousers and with superior pudding-basin haircuts – carry butterfly-nets.
The notion of them being emanations of the young Harry is pleasantly
sub-Freudian.
Eliot was a rare, mostly silent presence at rehearsals of his plays. (Gwyneth
Thurburn, who coached the Chorus for two of the plays, described how he
“once came up to me . . . and murmured very confidentially, ‘That should be
a colon, not a semi-colon’. I think this was the only spontaneous remark he
ever made in rehearsals”.) His considered comments on actors (in “The
Possibility of a Poetic Drama”, 1920) were antagonistic: “A struggle, more
or less unconscious, between the creator and the interpreter is almost
inevitable . . . we need, unfortunately, something more than refined
automatons”. Eliot’s writing for the actor is mostly undynamic. Even so, one
of the pleasures of this Reunion is watching actors making the best of
refractory material. Penelope Wilton, as one of Harry’s aunts, gives a
masterclass in listening: this is how – and when – you blink. (She also says
the word “flute” in a way that evokes the bassoon.) Eliot’s explanation of
the play’s failings was bloodless: “. . . an elementary fault in mechanics .
. . a failure of adjustment between the Greek story and the modern
situation”. The engineer traces the problem back to the blueprint. An early
scenario, from around 1937, introduces Mary (a possible sweetheart for
Harry): “She enters and soliloquises, about 5 inches, arranging flowers”.
There is an actuarial dryness to that “about 5 inches”; in the play, the
scene’s emotion is stillborn. Though the final text does not specify what
kind of flowers, Eliot did so for the first production: hyacinths.
When the knights who are to kill him first approach Thomas Becket in Murder in
the Cathedral, he is alone and he challenges them to accuse him in public.
They refuse – “No! here and now!” – and close in, but step back as Thomas’s
priests enter. Becket then challenges the knights again – “Now and here!”.
It is a frequent paradox that rehearsed readings can generate more power –
more here and now – than full-dress productions and that is the case with
the Donmar reading, excellently directed by Douglas Hodge. Free of the
clutter of costume, set and props, actors and audience meet through the
voiced word. This play stands or falls on two things: the actor playing
Thomas and the work of the chorus, the Women of Canterbury. The six women
here are individually compelling and collectively superb. Not only do they
retain the timbre and elasticity of individual speech when speaking in
unison (avoiding the dread chant of voices bound together in lock step),
they are also intelligible when speaking over each other, topping and
tailing their solo lines or – as the emotional pitch rises – speaking the
same line fractionally out-of-sync with each other, a thrilling effect like
a multiple catch in the throat.
The play’s midpoint is marked by the “Interlude” of Thomas’s Christmas Day
sermon. At the beginning of this, Dominic West coughs to clear his throat:
actor and archbishop seem one. However, for the first half of the sermon
West paces the stage, gestures, speaks as if the words are coming to him
piecemeal (actorly shorthand for authenticity) and the combined effect is of
lack of authority. Then (around the mention of “Our Lord’s . . . first
martyr, the Blessed Stephen . . .”), he stands still and speaks quietly, to
us. The closeness of Becket’s own martyrdom and his self-possession in the
face of it are matched by the actor becoming one with his role. Imminence
and immanence overlap. The audience is in the same space not just with the
actor, but with the character and the action. All share the here and now.
Charles Dance – who joins Eileen Atkins and Edward Fox in one of the readings
– is also prone to unnecessary pacing and gesturing. Launching straight into
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” – a pretty daunting
overture – he seems to scoot along ahead of the verse and then, at the lines
“To have squeezed the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some
overwhelming question . . .”, he clenches a hand prior to an underarm
bowling action. All quite redundant. The words require no fleshing out
(indeed, working metaphorically, they have fleshing out of their own to do).
Eliot’s own reading style was notorious. F. R. Leavis thought the voice
“disconcertingly lacking in body” and his performance “astonishingly
inadequate”. For Leavis, the “marvellously exact” rhythms of the verse were
clear from the printed page. Orwell’s stipulation that good writing be like
a clear pane of glass suggests a parallel for those reading Eliot aloud: the
main part of the job is to stand aside and let the poetry do its own work.
The highlight of the evening comes when the three actors sit together to
perform part of “Fragment of an Agon” from Sweeney Agonistes (1931). This
proto-play (included in the Collected Poems rather than Plays) is the Great
Road Not Taken in Eliot’s work. Language as aggression, ditties, demotic
philosophizing, sex, violence and pratfalls: it could be a charm to lure
Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter into the limelight.
T. S. Eliot
THE FAMILY REUNION
MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
Donmar Warehouse
Oliver Reynolds is the author of four volumes of poetry including The
Oslo Tram, 1991, and, most recently, Almost, 1999.
