The Elder Statesman

I have a google alert running for "T.S. Eliot" and "play." It paid off lately when I discovered that the Washington Stage Guild was performing The Elder Statesman. Eliot's plays are so rarely preformed that Hopkins, Stearns, and I took a trip to NYC when The Cocktail Party was in the theater there.

So we reassembled our little Eliot fan club and added Francisco and NK and EL to the group. Our friends, plus some of Hopkins' friends that she ran into at the play, were the only audience members under 60. Plus, we comprised a quarter of the audience.

I can't give it a rave review--It wasn't a great performance, due to a lack of chemistry among the characters and one character's bad British accent (why oh why do people fake that?).  And it wasn't a great play--I think that The Cocktail Party or Murder in the Cathedral is considered to be his best, and The Elder Statesman certainly didn't come close to those.

However, I wouldn't have missed it, if only to notice what the difficulties are in performing Eliot's plays. This play, even more than the others, was overtly pedantic. It punched you in the face with its preachiness and meaningfulness. And of course I had to see it because I'm obsessed with Eliot, and it's just of general interest to me to know his whole body of work.

Eliot's plays are, for the most part, interpretations and reworkings of classical plays. This one is based on Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. The Greek elements of the play come out in the characters that represent the ghosts of the elder statesman's past. They are like metaphorical furies chasing him (both similar to and different from the actual furies chasing one of the characters in The Family Reunion). There is also a lot of fate in the play--the fate is worked through some of the play's quirkiest characters--Masie and Federico. (In The Cocktail Party, it was the psychologist and Julia.)

Naming is one of the big themes of the play--all the characters change their names multiple times, constantly reinventing themselves. The play pushes honesty as a necessary prerequisite for real love, and honesty is hard to achieve in a world aimed at public achievement and encouraging hidden pasts.

It felt fitting that this was his last work--it's about an old man facing his past and preparing to die in peace. It also felt somehow like it must be autobiographical, but it isn't clear to me exactly how. Is Eliot himself the old man? Who, then, is his devoted daughter? Is it Valerie, his much younger wife? Is Masie, the flamboyant love affair from his youth, Vivienne? Who knows, and perhaps it's useless to speculate.