The Cocktail Party | Literary Criticism & Book Review

The Cocktail Party Critical Overview

T. S. Eliot is best known today as a poet, even though his production in that area was relatively meager. he wrote less than four thousand lines of poetry, but volumes of groundbreaking literary criticism and seven plays Today, Murder in the Cathedral, his 1935 drama about the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170, is probably his best-known play and the one most often performed. During his lifetime, though, Eliot achieved the most popular success with The Cocktail Party. The play opened at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival in 1949, With Alec Guiness in the role of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly. In America, it opened on Broadway in January 1950 and ran for 325 performances, taking in approximately one million dollars. It won the New York Drama Critics' Award for 1950.

Both the London and New York productions were met with mixed reviews, particularly aimed at Eliot for the...
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