Viv and Tom Onstage

Michael Hastings’s play Tom and Viv raised hackles, controversy, and cain when it opened at London's Royal Court Theatre in February. This was partly because it suggested that T. S. Eliot conspired to have his eccentric first wife, Vivienne HaighWood, certified insane and committed to an asylum, and partly because Hastings, accused I of inventing episodes about the poet’s tormented marriage, in turn countercharged the Eliot estate with guarding vital documents I with Fort Knox-like secrecy.

But although the play’s very existence appalled hard-line Eliot worshipers, it is neither iconoclastic nor muckraking. It deals compassionately with Eliot's long, virtually sexless marriage to the unstable, upper-middle-class Vivienne, and it is less an attack on poor Tom (seen as a tragically reticent figure with emotions as tightly fiirled as an | umbrella) than a vindication of Viv. Hastings said he wanted to write the piece because I “she has been Stalinized and turned into an unperson.” And his play—aided by Julie Covington's haunting performance—suggests that she made a vital contribution to Eliot's poetry (particularly The Waste Land), that her “madness" was the result of a hormonal imbalance, and that her more antisocial acts were simply a frantic bid for attention.

Hastings’s critics accuse him of I fabrication, and he admits inventing incidents like that in which Viv pours melted chocolate into the mailbox of Eliot's publishers. But the play does not claim to be documentary drama. It is an act of imaginative speculation, witty and touching, about the devouring nature of genius, the incarceration of a wronged woman, and the tragic mismatch between a Yankee puritan and an English misfit. Tom and Viv may not be the whole truth, but it tapped a public nerve and left unbiased spectators staring in pity at a profound misalliance and realizing that much of Eliot's poetry was fueled by private suffering.

The play was so successful in its limited I London run that it will be performed in New York at the Public Theater this winter and will reopen at the Royal Court next spring.

Michael Billington