Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns)

Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888–1965), poet and dramatist, American by birth but English by adoption, who initiated a revival of poetic drama in England with a play on the murder of Thomas à Becket, Murder in the Cathedral (1935). First acted in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral, it was subsequently revived several times with great success in commercial theatres in Britain and the United States. A later play, The Family Reunion (1939), based on the Oresteia of Aeschylus, was considered less successful, mainly because Eliot failed to integrate the ritualism of the chorus with the realism of the setting, but it has had occasional revivals. Of his last three plays, commissioned for performance at the Edinburgh Festival, The Cocktail Party (1949) and The Confidential Clerk (1953) were based on Euripides' Alcestis and Ion respectively; The Elder Statesman (1958) on Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. In them Eliot moved closer to a mannered realism, disguising his serious purpose under the form of modern drawing-room comedy, and discarding the closely wrought poetic style of the earlier plays for a plain undecorated verse. All his plays were directed by E. Martin Browne.