A Cocktail Party with T. S. Eliot
The Pastorate partnered with GCF early in Trinity term to invite students and others to 'A Cocktail Party with The Cocktail Party' - an informal, participatory reading of T.S. Eliot's relatively little-known 1949 play, over cocktails in the atmospheric surroundings of Pusey House's Hood Room.
A group of about 15 gathered to join in, or listen in, to an abridged version of this philosophical, strange, and often funny play, which asks the question - how can we escape from self-absorption, and what would it look like to live differently?
Alicia Smith, the Pastorate's Event Administrator and a literature specialist, introduced the play and guided the reading. The Cocktail Party is one of several 'drawing-room plays' by Eliot, which use an often comic dramatic mode common at the time to delve deep into moral and spiritual questions. It starts out at the eponymous party, unwillingly hosted by a dissatisfied husband in the unexpected absence of his wife: guests include his younger lover, her hapless admirer, a gossip, a man-about-town - and an Unidentified Guest who everyone assumes someone else invited. The rest of the story ranges over a psychiatrist's couch, a film set, a sanatorium, and the far-away ground of a startling martyrdom.
Our readers took enthusiastically to some fairly complex material, and some great discussion was had after the reading concluded. Eliot's insights into what separates people from one another, how we justify our own self-centredness, and what a full and real life actually looks like, sparked plenty of questions and thoughts.
If you'd like to hear about similar readings and other cultural events organised by the Pastorate in the future, please email [email protected] to be added to the mailing list.
