Убийство в соборе: Пьеса Т.С. Элиота и её воплощения

Play by T. S. Eliot
the films

Murder in the Cathedral is a verse drama by T. S. Eliot, first performed in 1935 (published the same year). The play portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral during the reign of Henry II in 1170. Eliot drew heavily on the writing of Edward Grim, a clerk who was an eyewitness to the event. Some material that the producer asked Eliot to remove or replace during the writing was transformed into the poem "Burnt Norton".

George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, was instrumental in getting Eliot to work as writer with producer E. Martin Browne in producing the pageant play The Rock (1934). Bell then asked Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. Eliot agreed to do so if Browne once again produced (he did). The first performance of Murder in the Cathedral was given on 15 June 1935 in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral. Robert Speaight played the part of Becket. The production then moved to the Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate in London and ran there for several months. A significant performance of the play was held on 15 February 2018. Nithin Varghese, an assistant professor at St Berchmans College in Changanassery, directed the play for the first time in Kerala. This performance was part of the golden jubilee celebration of the postgraduate program in English at the college. The play was staged on the outdoor stage located in front of the Arts Block, and received positive recognition from the audience for its adherence to T. S. Eliot's original text.

The play, starring Robert Speaight, was broadcast live on British television by the BBC in 1936, during its first few months of broadcasting TV. The play was later made into a black and white film with the same title. It was directed by the Austrian director George Hoellering with music by the Hungarian composer Laszlo Lajtha and won the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. It was released in the UK in 1952. In the film the fourth tempter is not seen. His voice was that of Eliot himself. Hoellering wrote that "in stage productions [the knights' final] speeches amused the audience instead of shocking them, and thereby made them miss the point—the whole point of the play." In light of this, he asked Eliot for changes; and Eliot made major reductions to the speeches and added a shorter speech. It was filmed by the ABC in 1962.

The play is the basis for the opera Assassinio nella cattedrale by the Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti, first performed at La Scala, Milan, in 1958.

In 1951, in the first Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture at Harvard University, Eliot criticised his own plays in the second half of the lecture, explicitly the plays Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party. The lecture was published as Poetry and Drama and later included in Eliot's 1957 collection On Poetry and Poets.