Chocolate is one for most people; long, scented hot baths another. But who can put their hand on their heart and say that the plays of TS Eliot are a guilty pleasure. On the contrary, The Cocktail Party is one of the nastiest plays ever written. But then maybe wallowing in misery is a guilty pleasure.
Here, theatre company Imitating the Dog take Eliot's 1939 country house drama, The Family Reunion, and give it a video once-over. The evening's inspiration may be the haunted Harry's line: "Oh, there must be other ways of talking that would get us somewhere," but Imitating the Dog don't succeed in taking us either to unexplored emotional country or one of innovative theatrical practice. This feels like student work, good quality student work, but nonetheless derivative and lacking an original spark or even an original way of looking at the world.
Eliot's play concerns the homecoming of Lord Harry Monchensy to his northern family home after an absence of eight years and the drowning of his young wife that leaves him guilt-stricken. The house is ruled over by his domineering mother and is full of dependent relatives. In the course of the evening Harry faces up to the expectations of his family and in rejecting them is released from guilt and ghosts. He heads off into the dawn in search of "the bright angels".
Imitating the Dog speak Eliot's lines into microphones and intercut them with snippets from the 1965 recording of the play with Flora Robson and Paul Schofield. Pretty soon the stilted, dated dialogue ("a very few cocktails went a very long way with m'lady,") becomes quite the most interesting thing about a production that goes from bad to worse as the cast sing Neil Diamond songs, vomit and stuff heads down the toilet. This is more bathroom sink than kitchen sink drama.
All the time in the foreground of the stage a video screen takes us on a very long car journey. The headlights eat up the miles as night turns into the grey of early morning and then the promise of a bright new dawn. Regrettably, by this time the young company had lost their way in the dark so completely that I longed for the RSC to appear in their cocktail frocks and give us their recent production of the play. There is something very wrong with new theatre when it starts making you think of the old and creaky rather fondly. The real trouble with work such as this is that it has become as cliched in its own way as the traditional theatre and sensibility that it mocks. Guilty Pleasures is as much a dodo as The Family Reunion.
