RADIO

Living and Partly Living

WHAT about Murder in the Cathedral? I was myself out of Britain in the 'thirties, so that the Third Programme's current series* is for me largely an opening of windows rather than cupboard doors, but either way these are not programmes one willingly misses and I can only hope they will all be broadcast again, as the late T. S. Eliot's play was on Sunday.

Unlike The Dog Beneath the Skin. which was also broadcast in the series and which has re-

• The Thirties in Britain.

mained embedded in its own period, Murder in the Cathedral soldiers on amongst our con- temporary cultural furniture; it demands re- assessment, if only because a recent critic called it a masterpiece, and an accolade like that ought to be bestowed judiciously, or it will lose its value. Certainly the hands of many masters are evident in this piece; which is no criticism in itself, for all poets are jackdaws, but the question remains, have they here been successfully assimilated and is the total amalgam a great or even a good play? This particular production, by the way, was unexceptionable, if rather bald— the Chorus was definitely debilitating, but Michael Hordern gave a strong performance as Becket.

There are some fine lines: 'No sons, no empire, he bites broken teeth,' there are felicitous runs, but, in the main, on re-acquaintance. I found this play an indigestible and unwelcome offering, a large helping of cold waffle. The fail- ure is one. first, of emotion. If Eliot's mind was developed beyond the reach of most men's, his emotional development, to judge by his work, was exceptionally retarded. '0 for a life of Sen- T. S. Eliot sations rather than of Thoughts,' wrote Keats. The lesson applies to dramatist as much as to poet. Are we to be anyway moved by the life or death , of an Archbishop, whose first words when confronted by his murderers are:

However certain our expectation The moment foreseen may be unexpected When it arrives. It comes when we are Engrossed with matters of other urgency.

His opening speech in the play is a whole out- tray of mandarin pomposity: They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer.

They know and do not know, what aotion is suffering.

And suffering is aotion. Etcetera.

We've nothing to hope from a fellow like this, not a turbulent but a prating priest. What of the Chorus -these expatriates from Argos un- accountably assuring us at the end of the play 'we acknowledge ourselves as the type of the com- mon man.' when their way of telling us earlier how bloodily they'd been treated was: 'We have suffered various oppression'? Elsewhere they are at pains to put before us a whole bestiary of fears and forebodings, including a rather kinky distaste for shellfish :

I have eaten

Smooth creatures still living, with the strong salt taste of living things under the sea.

The point -is that these elaborate images arc altogether cerebral. they are standing in as

symbols for fear and evil; whereas a Greek Chorus responds to fear and evil directly, emo- tionally, the images they use calling up palpably before us the powers of doom and darkness. When Becket says: `the hungry hawk/Will only soar and hover, circling lower,' the words carry no picture, they bounce off the mind; the playwright is using them as rhetorid, not con- veying what his character feels.

Behind the cold dispassion of the language— and however necessary it may be for your dramatist to be dispassionate, it is instant death to his characters to be so—the play's structure itself is fatally, flawed. Eliot has borrowed its components from Greek tragedy and mediaeval moralities. Curiously, but I suppose inevitably, given his view of the story, he has left it to his Women of Canterbury—those very suburban, very Church of England ladies (poor they may be, but definitely genteel)—to proclaim impend- ing doom in the Greek manner; while his tragic hero is stuck with the role of Everyman or Every Civil Servant. With the result that Becket's Christian acceptance of martyrdom readily takes the sting out of• death quite early in the play, while the ladies' lengthy 'presages' of doom rage on unchecked without any doom left to come. It is unsatisfactory, to say the least.

The other characters, the Priests, Knights and Tempters, are mere stick-men of the most in- tangible kind, talking officialese like everyone else, though the Knights certainly improve in their prose passages at the end, as the actors couldn't help underlining with the relief in their voices. As for the Sermon, it would not be out of place in any present-day church, but that is no great compliment either to its matter or its manner.

At the time of its first performances this play must have seemed a brave and even success- ful attempt to breathe life into a paralysed theatre; if we are now ready to shut it back in its cupboard, that is perhaps a backhanded com- pliment to the Third Programme's first-rate re- appraisal of a decade we are grateful to be looking back on.

HENRY TUBE