The Family Reunion

The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh

Source: Evelyn Waugh, diary entry for 10 December 1946, in Michael Davie (ed.), The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), p. 666

Text: Laura returned from retreat. I went to confession, lunched at the Holland Park to see T.S. Eliot’s new play Family Reunion. It approached parody at moments but the audience was devout. The programme said it was the story of Agamemnon. Except for a Greek sense of doom and a Greek technique in the uses of choruses there was no connection apparent to me. The main fault was that it aroused too much intellectual curiosity about the details of the plot. I think a story must be well known before it can be treated in that way.

Comments: Evelyn Waugh (1903-1962) was a British novelist, travel writer and biographer. T.S. Eliot‘s blank verse play The Family Reunion was first published and performed in 1939. The production Waugh saw was at the Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate, London.

Posted in 1940s, Theatre, United Kingdom and tagged Audiences, Diaries, Evelyn Waugh, London, Mercury Theatre (London), Programmes, T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion on November 19, 2016 by urbanora. Leave a comment

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