The Role of the "Guardians" in T.S. Eliot's Cocktail Party

Abstract

When T.S. Eliot's Cocktail Party had its world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949, the audience was not only deeply impressed with the play, but obviously also deeply puzzled. On 24 August 1949 the Scotsman commented: "it [The Cocktail Party] is bound to be some kind of message to humanity." Yet it could not be stated precisely what the message was about. And after more than thirty years The Cocktail Party still contains some of the enigmas which at that time confused even the most sophisticated critics. In the meantime the European drama has, of course, seen a number of various new theatrical currents: the "Theatre of Despair," a worldwide reception of the plays of Bertolt Brecht, the "New Wave" and the "Second Wave" in the British theatre, the renaissance of the history play, the "Theatre of Cruelty," the "Comedy of Menace," the "Theatre of the Absurd" and the new documentary, to mention only the most important. With the plays of Beckett and Ionesco, however, literature in general seemed to have reached a kind of spiritual dead end. In attempting to find a way out, playwrights tended to employ magic and the occult, striving to restore the original density and strangeness of the world. Looking back now, one realizes that the craving for the more mysterious aspects of reality seems to have been anticipated in Eliot's Cocktail Party with its strong emphasis on ritual magic.