A very rare film.

A verse drama by T. S. Eliot, loosely based on the Alcestis of Euripedes and first perormed at the Edinburgh festival in 1949. The outer shell of the play, with its quartet of lovers temporarily adrift from the fashionable society to which they belong, is familiar with drawing-room comedies, but Eliot's deeper concern is with modes of spiritual reconciliation for individual Christians. The central action restores the unsatisfactory marriage of Lavinia and Edward Chamberlayne, with the restoration of engineered by the knowing psychoanalyst, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly. Its achievement requires, in a way uneasily assimilated by the acccomplished trivialty of the poetic dialogue, the Christian martyrdom of Edward's lover, Celia, a sacrifice that permits the predominantly secular life of the community to continue.

Adapted by: Desmond Scott
Produced by: Mario Prizek

Cast:
Murray Matheson: Sir Henry Harcourt Reilly
William Hutt: Edward
Helena Hughes: Celia
Mary Savidge: Lavinia
Jane Mallett: Julia
Gillie Fenwick: Alex
Jeremy Wilkin: Peter
Paddy Croft: the nurse

Run time: 77 mins
plain packaging