Edinburgh Festivals

Fringe 2001

The Cocktail Party
West 10 Productions

This was a rare opportunity to see the uncovering of an underrated side of T S Eliot's genius, faithfully performed with a strong cast.

'Whatever you find in it,' said TS Eliot fifty years ago of his play The Cocktail Party, 'depends on what you bring to it'. Unfortunately, at the particular performance of his play that I witnessed at the Edinburgh Festival, the audience brought mobile phones that were receiving text messages every five minutes throughout the performance, and fidgety kids who managed to find a remarkable number of ways to distract the rest of the audience from the performance. This was aggravated by the large pillars either side of the stage that meant that unrestricted seats were for the privileged few.

This is a shame because West 10 Productions have uncovered a forgotten classic. Eliot's script brims with remarkable insight, existential angst, humour and richly painted characters. The play revolves around the relationships between a rowing married couple, effectively portrayed by the beautiful Elodie Harper (Lavinia) and Andrew Dawson (Edward). The pair are eventually reunited after a series of events introducing us to, amongst others, TS Eliot's 'Saint' Celia, played by Alana Baily who, sadly, does not seem to empathise sufficiently with the character to offer a convincing representation.

When the play was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949, it was heavily criticised for use of a surreal triumvirate of advisory 'guardians', who guide the other characters in their lives. West 10 believes that they may now be seen as a 'potent theatrical force'. While it is certainly true that modern audiences are not obsessive about realism in plays, there is still something quite sloppy about Eliot's use of these characters, who are given no real introduction or explanation.

Eliot's comment about the audience finding in the play what they bring to it is timely, when fifty years on directors at the fringe seem to feel obliged to modernise the classics in an attempt to please the audience and make them seem relevant to modern times. To West 10's credit, there is no attempt to modernise The Cocktail Party, and quite rightly so: one should not do this any more than one should paint jeans and t-shirt on the Mona Lisa to make modern spectators find her more accessible. The fact that The Cocktail Party has stood the test of time so well should force its critics to recognise at last its status as a classic.