Dining out with Groucho Marx and TS Eliot
Dinner with Groucho at the Oxford Playhouse from November 2-5. Review by JON LEWIS
In June 1964, seven months before he died, St Louis-born poet TS Eliot had dinner at home in London with actor and comedian Groucho Marx.
Eliot had sent Marx a fan letter three years earlier, requesting a signed photo.
Their correspondence still exists, as does a letter Groucho wrote to his brother Gummo about the evening. These letters are the basis for this new comic play by Irish playwright Frank McGuinness which debuted in Dublin this September.
It’s so appropriate that this play, directed by Loveday Ingram for B*spoke Theatre Company, toured to the Playhouse after its Dublin, Belfast and London dates.
It’s the centenary of Eliot’s great poem The Waste Land, and Eliot was a postgraduate at Merton College Oxford where there’s soon to be an exhibition on Eliot and the poem.
McGuinness has re-imagined this dinner, taking place not at Eliot’s but in a fantastical London restaurant with a view of a wide river and its beach (designer Adam Wiltshire).
They are the restaurant’s only guests, summoned by a medium-like proprietor (Ingrid Craigie).
Eliot (Greg Hicks) and Groucho (Ian Bartholomew) form a bizarre double act, each bouncing ideas, accusations and witty jibes off each other as if they are on stage at the London Palladium.
McGuinness has them singing, dancing, joking and engaging in physical theatre, performing with and to each other.
Some of the lines are true, coming from Groucho’s letter, the rest a fantasy recreation of men who, despite their American origins, have little in common beyond their fame.
Groucho, who is Jewish, and Eliot, who published anti-Semitic views in prose and poetry, meet with a veneer of propriety like skating on thin ice.
All three performers are wonderful in this mix of sharp comedy and rich intellectual jousting. Groucho is typically fond of cutting one-liners, Eliot more erudite, but also crude witticisms. The play veers towards farce as the duo josh over the chicken soup starter that’s not Groucho’s film Duck Soup and ends in a mournful recognition that the dinner is imaginary.
A brilliant play.
