Events

This special Oxford Pastorate & GCF joint event will be drinks with a difference: come and join in with an informal group reading of T.S. Eliot's play The Cocktail Party, a unique, thought-provoking, and occasionally very strange exploration of what it means to live a good life, or live at all.

Eliot is probably best known for the way his early poetry, like ‘The Waste Land’, expressed the despair and fragmentation of the early twentieth-century West; but after his mid-life conversion to Christianity, his work started to go deeper into how a theological outlook could bring meaning and a clear-sighted, though never comfortable, way of living in the world. The Cocktail Party is an offbeat, sly, unpredictable entry in that conversation and it can be startling in the way it speaks today.

We'll meet at the regular GCF time and place (7:30pm at Pusey House, this week in the Hood Room), have a cocktail together, and read aloud an abridged version of the play, with a brief introduction and guidance from Dr Alicia Smith, who has published research on Eliot's work. If time allows, we'll then spend some time discussing our reactions to and experiences of the play.

Please sign up via this link to help us get an idea of numbers, and get in touch at [email protected] if you're interested in reading a part on the night. Seven roles are available of varying sizes; some could also be shared. It's also fine to come along just to listen in and join the discussion.