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4 - A dramatist and his midwives: Eliot's collaborations in the theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Richard Badenhausen
Affiliation:
Westminster College, Utah
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Summary

Eliot's involvement with the Group Theatre, which he joined officially in 1934, two years after its founding, gave him an association with an artistic community that not only sanctioned collaborative achievement but held it up as an ideal, both in the name of the acting company and in its artistic manifestos. A draft of one of those manifestos proposes that creative success would occur “by continually playing together … work[ing] like a well-trained orchestra.” As in Eliot's many attempts to look to other disciplines for models of artistic success, this approach demanded that the individual suppress his personal needs for the greater good of the whole. The Group's interest in countering what its members believed was a degenerate, commercial theatre through the ideal of an amateur dramatic community that would synthesize the many different elements of theatre – from movement to speech to design – also accorded with Eliot's formal introduction to the theatre through the same route. Productions of The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral, for example, depended in large part on amateur performers of varying talents and backgrounds gathered together in the spirit of fellowship and cooperation to bring off the dramas successfully. This approach represented another significant departure from Eliot's early modernist stance in the criticism, which sought to inflate the status of the literary enterprise by lauding the benefits of its professionalization, despite concurrent calls for a restoration of England's great nineteenth-century amateur tradition.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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