PLOT
SUMMARY
Act
1
The first act of The Cocktail
Party is the only one divided into three separate scenes. The first scene
opens on a party in the drawing room of the Chamberlayne home in London with
all of the play’s major characters—Edward, Julia, Celia, Peter, Alex, and the
Unidentified Guest—present. There is witty bantering about people not present,
making this seem like many British drawing-room comedies. Lavinia Chamberlayne
is missing, and her husband, Edward, a lawyer, makes up a feeble excuse for the
absence of his wife, who has invited the guests. He tells them that she has
gone to visit an aunt in the country, but most of the party guests are
skeptical. They all leave except for the Unidentified Guest, whom Edward asks
to stay and talk with him.
Edward tells the stranger that
Lavinia left him the day before, and that he tried to cancel the party but
could not reach the people who did attend. During the conversation, he
expresses his concern over what his life will be like without her, and the
stranger tells him that he will arrange for Lavinia to return the following
day.
Julia and Peter return to the
apartment with the excuse that Julia has lost her glasses. Julia leaves by
herself, but Peter stays and asks Edward’s advice about starting a romance with
Celia. They are interrupted by Alex, who has come to make sure Edward has a
dinner. While Peter discusses Celia with Edward, Alex goes into the kitchen to
cook, interrupting sporadically to ask where things are kept. Alex and Peter
leave together, and Edward phones Celia’s house at the end of scene 1.
Scene 2 takes place in the same
room, fifteen minutes later. Celia enters, and it soon becomes apparent that
Edward and Celia have been having an affair. She thinks that Lavinia’s
departure has opened the door to their getting together, but he tells her that
he has agreed to let the stranger arrange for Lavinia to come back. Alex
phones, reminding Edward that he has left dinner on the stove for him, and when
Celia goes to check on it, Julia shows up at the door. She assumes that Celia
returned for the same reason she did: to make dinner for Edward. While Julia is
out of the room, Edward explains to Celia that their affair is over. She says
that she realized, as soon as she heard that Lavinia had gone, that it was not
what she had wanted anyway.
Scene 3 takes place in the same room
the following afternoon. The Unidentified Guest returns to see if Edward still
wants Lavinia back. When he says that he has been tempted to change his mind,
just to show that he is free to do so, the stranger tells him,
You will change your mind, but you
are not free. Your moment of freedom was yesterday. You made a decision. You
set in motion forces in your life and in the lives of others which cannot be
reversed.
After the Unidentified Guest leaves,
Peter, Celia, Julia, and Alex enter separately, saying that they have been
invited by telegrams from Lavinia. Lavinia says when she arrives that she knows
nothing about the telegrams. All of the party guests then exit together,
leaving Edward and Lavinia alone. He tells her about the story that he
concocted at the party the night before, and she says he should not have
bothered, that it would not have fooled anyone. After a few minutes of their
talking, exposing each other’s weaknesses, Edward decides that he regrets his
decision to have Lavinia come back and feels like he is having a nervous
breakdown. Lavinia goes about taking care of common household chores.
Act
2
Act 2 takes place in the consulting
room of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, a psychiatrist; he is the Unidentified Guest
of the previous act. He goes
over his instructions with his
nurse, telling her to send in the first patient, then to wait until he rings
the buzzer three times before sending in the second, then send the third
patient in when the other two have left. Before he starts seeing patients, Alex
enters and says that he was the one who arranged for Edward to see the doctor.
He leaves by a back door, then Edward enters.
Edward immediately suspects, upon
seeing the familiar face, that this meeting and Harcourt-Reilly’s presence at
the party were arranged by Lavinia. Harcourt-Reilly explains that there is
probably nothing wrong with him, psychologically, and that it would not be
worth being resentful because his marriage would have turned out the same
whether Harcourt-Reilly had interfered or not. While Edward wants to be put
into a sanatorium, so that he can have some time alone, Harcourt-Reilly does
not believe that he needs such drastic treatment. He says that Edward needs to
talk with another patient of his, a similar case, and he has the nurse send in
Lavinia.
Lavinia is under the impression that
Harcourt-Reilly had sent her to a sanatorium during the time that she was away,
but he explains that it was actually a hotel. When Edward and Lavinia start
bickering with each other about who is more mentally distressed,
Harcourt-Reilly corrects them for both being dishonest with him. He mentions
Edward’s relationship with Celia and then discloses the fact that Lavinia was
having an affair with Peter. He determines that they are perfectly matched.
And now you begin to see, I hope,
how much you have in common. The same isolation. A man who finds himself
incapable of loving and a woman who finds that no man can love her.
When they leave, Julia comes in and
announces that she has brought Celia. Celia does not think that she is worth
the psychiatrist’s attention, that her life is interesting. She explains that
she suffers from an acute awareness of solitude and “a sense of sin.”
Harcourt-Reilly gives her two choices for dealing with her condition. She can
become reconciled with the human condition, accepting the simple things in life
and ignoring the terrifying extremes, or her life can be a treacherous journey
to an unidentified place. She chooses the journey, and he sends her off, telling
her, “Go in peace, my daughter. Work out your salvation with diligence.”
Alex and Julia enter, discuss the
choices made by Celia and the Chamberlaynes, and recite a prayerlike poem for
the success of all of them.
Act
3
Act 3 takes place in the same place as
the first one, two years later. Edward and Lavinia are preparing for another
cocktail party. They act as a thoroughly domestic couple, worrying about which
guests will be offended and whether the pictures on the walls are straight.
Julia arrives early, and is soon followed by Alex, who has been out of the
country, in an exotic island country called Kinkanja. Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly
comes in. Peter arrives from Los Angeles, where he has become a writer for a
movie company. When he says that he came to London to get Celia to do a screen
test for his next movie, Alex breaks the news that she is dead. She was working
as a missionary in Kinkanja when a plague broke out, and she stayed with the
infected inhabitants during a social uprising, only to be crucified and
cannibalized. Harcourt-Reilly expresses no surprise at the way that Celia died,
nor any sorrow that she met such a gruesome end. He recites a poem about life
and death and says that he knew she was destined to meet a violent end. All of
the people leave, one-by-one, and Edward and Lavinia prepare to assume their
formal social attitudes in time to greet the guests of their cocktail party.
CHARACTERS
Miss
Barraway
At the beginning of act 2, Sir Henry
Harcourt-Reilly gives his secretary precise orders about when to bring each of
his patients into his room, reviewing the code that he will buzz on the
intercom system to let her know when it is time for the next. Miss Barraway
appears briefly, bringing people onstage and ushering them off.
Caterer’s
Man
In act 3, when Edward and Lavinia
are preparing for their cocktail party, there is a man from the catering
company around, setting things up. His function is to show that, even in their
home, they are on their “social” behavior, and that they have no private behavior
any more.
Edward
Chamberlayne
Much of the play centers around the
problems between Edward and his wife, Lavinia. Edward is a lawyer, a boring and
unimaginative man who feels that he is being stifled by Lavinia. When the play
begins he has been having an affair with Celia Copplestone, a fact that does
not come out until later. Left in the awkward position of hosting a dinner
party that Lavinia arranged before she left him, he makes up a flimsy excuse
about her being away to visit a sick aunt—an excuse nobody believes.
Discussing his separation from
Lavinia with Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, Edward is so uncomfortable at the
change in his routine that he wishes for her back, and when Harcourt-Reilly
says that he can arrange it, he asks him to do so. He worries about looking
ridiculous, but Sir Henry assures him that a little humiliation would be good
for him. Edward is jaded about love and tells Peter that Peter is lucky to have
missed out on the affair that he had hoped to start with Celia, because it would
turn boring after a few months.
Edward breaks off his relationship
with his mistress, Celia, while other characters are walking in and out of his
living room. The fact that he has to maintain such an awkward pretense during
such an important, intimate moment says much about how he is a slave to his
social image. He is aware of how ridiculous his situation is, and it makes him
feel old.
Edward feels so much regret when
Lavinia returns to him that he thinks he has had a mental breakdown. He moves
out of the house and wants to be admitted into a sanatorium, but his
psychiatrist, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, pairs him up with Lavinia, saying that
they are perfectly matched. On the doctor’s advice, they stay together, and in
the end they are seen as a couple preparing to host a cocktail party. Edward is
a little more sympathetic toward Lavinia in the end, but their relationship is
still cold and rational. He feels guilty about the violent death that befell
Celia, but he is able to soon put it out of his mind.
Lavinia
Chamberlayne
Lavinia is absent from the stage
during the first two scenes and much of the third, having left her husband,
Edward. It is not until later that the audience finds out that she has seen the
psychiatrist for two months, that she had an affair with Peter, and that during
the time she was gone, she checked herself into what she thought was a
sanatorium. Lavinia is such a controlled and controlling person that her
husband is entirely surprised by both her mental distress and her secret love life.
Harcourt-Reilly explains that the end of her affair with Peter caused Lavinia
to realize the truth about herself:
It was a shock. You had wanted to be
loved; you had come to see that no one had ever loved you. Then you began to
feel that no one could ever love you.
With this realization, Lavinia comes
to realize that Edward, a man who is incapable of loving anyone, is the ideal
mate for her, because he will not stray from her and will act kindly toward her
to assure her continuing companionship. Whenever he tries to paint Lavinia as
being pushy and demanding, she points out that he is indecisive and needs
someone to tell him what to do. In the last act, two years after the start of
the play, they are together again, functioning smoothly as a couple, but seeing
herself without illusion has left Lavinia worn out and tired. Like Edward, she
feels somewhat guilty about Celia’s death, but unlike him she realizes that it
would be good for them all to try to understand Celia better.
Lavinia begins the last act tired
and wishing that she did not have to host the coming cocktail party, but
stirred up by her curiosity about Celia, she finds new enthusiasm. Her last
line—“Oh, I’m glad. It’s begun”—shows more optimism than she previously …
