POETIC DRAMA

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 143, 18 June 1937, Page 24

POETIC DRAMA

PLAYS OF T. S. ELIOT

Speaking to the literature class of the W.E.A. at the Trades Hall at its last meeting, the tutor (Mr. W. J. Scott, M.A.) said that of the three dramatic works so far written by T. S. Eliot^"Sweeney Agonistes," "The Rock," and "Murder in the Cathedral"—only the last could stand fair and square on its .own feet as a play, but the others were of extreme interest as experiments -in a new type of poetic drama. Always specially interested in the theatre, Eliot had now turned his attention, for the present, exclusively to it. . His and Auden's entry into the theatre was an event of considerable importance.

"The Elizabethan Drama," Eliot had written in "The Sacred Wood," "was aimed at a public which wanted entertainment of a crude sort, but would stand a good deal of poetry; our problem should be to take a form of entertainment, and subject it to the process which would leave it a form of art. Perhaps the music-hall comedian is the best material." . With this comment in mind, it was interesting to find that both Eliot and Audeu began their careers as playwrights by writing plays in which the slick and snappy rhythms of the music-hall stage were used to get ironical effects. "Sweeney Agonistes," Eliot's sardonic comment on modern civilisation, was written in this manner; so was Auden's "The Dance of Death." "The Rock" (1934), said Mi*. .Scott, was a religious pageant play written for performance at the Sadler's Wells Theatre on behalf of the Forty-five Churches' Fund of the Diocese of London. It achieved a considerable measure of success, but this was perhaps partly due to the fact that here was a poet with a formidable reputation, a writer of "unpleasant," obscure poetry who had become respectable and clear at the same time. The verse, though good at times, was frequently rather scrawny, and not rhythmically so fine as usual. "Murder in the Cathedral' was a much better play, more original and dramatically much more effective. It, was a dramatisation of the return to Canterbury of Thomas a'Beckett and his murder by the four knights, a chorus of Canterbury women providing the commentary on the action. _ The play, said the lecturer in conclusion, after readings from it had been given, was a distinguished one, by a distinguished writer, who was at the height of his powers and from whom more and better was still to be expected.

HOCKEY