"I'm reviewing the BBC Audio version with Benedict Cumberbatch as TS Eliot and Lia Williams as Viv Haigh-Wood/Eliot.

First performed in 1984, this play is intense and powerfully performed on audio with an excellent cast.

However, it's striking to see that the original reviews were controversial, apparently, because of the way that Eliot is portrayed as cold and cruel. Listening to this in 2025, with feminist scholarship having recuperated more of the lives of literary wives like Vivienne, as well as there being more general understandings of the ways in which the term 'mad' is both culturally constructed and historicised, as well as how it has been used to mediate patriarchal constraints and containment of women, it's hard not to want to have a questioning and corrective dialogue with the play.

I understand that Hastings read the correspondence and did extensive interviews with the family and friends of both parties but it's inevitable that for a taut and emotive play, complexity has to be sacrificed for artistic intent. That's fine - I would just say that we should be wary of accepting this as more than a single reading of a complicated relationship.

So these are not so much criticisms of a play which I think works emotively as a play, as a note on how it might be mediated for a 2025 audience. One thing that immediately jumps to mind is that we know far more about Eliot's life-long relationship with Emily Hale, given that their letters which had been sealed in the archive until 2020 have now been opened - see The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse. Another - and not the only - woman in a fraught and vexed relationship with Eliot who was also written into his poems like The Wasteland. As the 'madonna' to Viv's 'whore', in Eliot's mythology, Hale offers another perspective through which to view this marriage.

There has also been more scholarly work done on Vivienne's contributions to the poetry - and if words in The Wasteland, for example, were originally hers rather than his, then there's an immediate contestation and undermining within the poem itself of the dominant voice.

The play already asks questions about the extent to which Viv was ever 'mad' - whatever that was supposed to mean - with a young doctor explicitly querying the diagnosis towards the end. But the ending that really didn't work for me was the sudden Heathcliff/Wuthering Height-alike scene where Eliot is described as digging up the earth following Viv's burial - this is so contrived, so out of character and so melodramatic that it sort of covers up some of the more pressing issues raised, allowing a kind of sentimental 'ah! how tragic love is!' weepiness to bring the play to a close.

A gripping, passionate piece of dramatic writing, then - but one which, inevitably, simplifies the representations of the two protagonists as well as their troubled marriage.

UPDATE 25 April 2025:
When Vivienne died in 1947 she bequeathed her diaries, fictional sketches, poetry and letters to the Bodleian where they were accessible to researchers. After this play was performed in 1984, Mrs Valerie Eliot, the widow and literary executor of TS Eliot, claimed the copyright of Vivienne's papers and, thus, controlled who had access to Vivienne's voice - eerily reminiscent of the way Ted and then Olwyn Hughes controlled Plath's papers? "

"“That reminder brought me straight to her. She was as open and trusting with me as ever, but her expression was very sad, and as she sat in her poor house, gazing out over the dewy garden and crying in concert with the crickets� lament, I felt as though I must be living in some old tale.�


An Imperial Celebration of Autumn Foliage, by Tosa Mitsuyoshi (17th century).

The young man has never been here before. He notices a dim light and hears the subdued hum of whispered conversation. (What could it be about?) He makes his way softly to a crack he finds in the lattice shutters. A blind rattles. He stops for a moment, heart pounding. But no one seems to have noticed. He peers through the crack and sees three women sewing in the circle of the lamp’s brightest light. Then his eye falls on her, the girl he had seen that night, also by lamplight—it must be! She lies with her head pillowed on her arm, gazing into the lamp, her hair spilling over her forehead. Her whole figure stirs troubled yearnings in him.

We may condemn him for his voyeurism, but we’re twice as guilty, peering through a different crack into this vanished world. And like him, we fall hopelessly in love.

* * *

Around this time last year, when the plague struck and the world seemed to be coming to an end, I was looking for a new book to read. I can’t remember what made me decide on this ancient Japanese novel, but with all the time I was spending at home, I figured I could finish it in a month or two, over the summer before fall classes began. Ha! I couldn’t have been more wrong.

For a long time, there was no greater comfort than lying propped against my pillow, reading this book by lamplight. But as it often happens with very long books, I began to grow restless. The book has hundreds of characters (only referred to by titles and honorifics, which are constantly changing—if you’ve ever complained about Russian patronymics, just wait till you read this!), and it has nothing resembling a plot. The “action� unfolds at the breakneck pace of a Heian-period ox-drawn carriage (about two miles an hour). I was certain I’d made a mistake. But it was too late; I was already melting under the caresses of Stockholm syndrome. I just had to finish this. A year later and I finally have. I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long, but now I’m sad; the characters I’ve come to know over a year are gone.

“He felt her there beside him, just as she had always been on evenings like this when he had called for music, and when her touch on her instrument, or her least word to him, had been so much her own; except that he would have preferred even to this vivid dream her simple reality in the dark.�

The Tale of Genji was written in eleventh-century Heian Japan by Murasaki Shikibu, a court lady the details of whose life are shrouded in mystery. (It’s often said to be the world’s first novel, which isn’t exactly true, but I don’t think it matters.) It’s a strange, almost a haunted, book, with a beauty that seems not of this world. Its hero, Hikaru Genji, isn’t a samurai (which you might have expected—those would only appear in literature centuries later), but a man of the arts, the illegitimate son of the emperor, and, above all, a lover. Casanova’s exploits seem to pale in comparison. She tells of his adventures and many, many loves.

“The sight of her lying there, so beautiful yet so thin and weak that she hardly seemed among the living, aroused his love and his keenest sympathy. The hair streaming across her pillow, not a strand out of place, struck him as a wonder, and as he gazed at her, he found himself unable to understand how for all these years he could have seen any flaw in her.�


Murasaki Shikibu Gazing at the Moon, by Tosa Mitsuoki (17th century).

Murasaki’s themes are the eternals: love, lust, and loss—but mostly love. Heian-period gentlemen were rarely able to see the ladies they pursued. Court protocol required that women spent most of their lives sequestered behind screens and blinds, eagerly waiting for a poem on scented paper—or anything to break up the monotony—and all it took was the sight of a woman’s sleeves spilling out from underneath them to make a man burn for her. There’s much to enjoy here, but there are sections that make for, uh, uncomfortable reading. Men in the book sometimes force themselves on women. Sometimes, this is portrayed as romantic; at other times, it’s frightening. Murasaki’s tale is less about the hero than the women he’s involved with—“their feelings, their experiences, their fates,� as Royall Tyler writes in the introduction. One of the most fascinating things about the book is the way Murasaki acknowledges and critiques the patriarchal society that confines her and other women.

“Ah, she reflected, there is nothing so pitifully confined and constricted as a woman. What will reward her passage through the world if she remains sunk in herself, blind to life’s joys and sorrows and to every delight? What will brighten the monotony of her fleeting days? � What a waste for her to shut herself up in her thoughts…�

The Tale of Genji is often compared to In Search of Lost Time, a comparison that, at first glance, doesn’t seem worth taking seriously. But the similarities are striking. Both Murasaki and Proust always have their eye on the future—even the most seemingly insignificant details, however casually introduced, return triumphantly, like a motif in a symphony, hundreds of pages later. Both tell of their aristocratic milieu’s splendor and decline. And both are obsessed with time and its passing. This book’s central motif is mono no aware, the awareness of the impermanence of things, that everything comes to be and ceases to be, like the spring mist rising from a lake, like the light of fireflies, like the parting of lovers, like (of course) the blooming and scattering of the cherry blossoms. Our lifetimes are like a dream. Time passes quickly. Our dew-like lives will vanish before dawn. We should cherish every moment we have.

“The place was a little way into the mountains. the blossoms in the City were gone now, since it was late in the third month, but in the mountains the cherry trees were in full bloom, and the farther he went, the lovelier the veils of mist became, until for him, whose rank so restricted travel that all this was new, the landscape became a source of wonder.�

The characters in this book are always yearning for the irrecoverable; the scent of orange blossoms always drifts in to bring back the past unbearably to them. I’m still trying to understand why I love books (and films, and music) about memory so much. Maybe it’s because reading a book, especially one as all-encompassing as this one, is the closest we can ever get to living another person’s life; their memories become ours as well, and their sorrow, our sorrow. But I guess every book—every work of art, really—is an artifact of memory, ˛ő´Çłľ±đ´Ç˛Ô±đ’s memory, even from the instant the pen touches the blank page. It’s impossible to say where the present ends and where memory begins. What was once “contemporary,â€� with the flight of time, becomes a quiet rustle on the wind, a song, so subtle that you just might miss it, of the way things were and will never be again.

“Not that tales accurately describe any particular person, rather, the telling begins when all those things the teller longs to have pass on to future generations—whatever there is about the way people live their lives, for better or worse, that is a sight to see or a wonder to hear—overflow the teller’s heart. � To put it nicely, there is nothing that does not have its own value.�


A Boat Cast Adrift, by Sata YoshirĹŤ (1966).

The Tale of Genji has taken its place among the actual experiences of my life. The book reaches to us through time. How strange it all feels, yet how familiar, how distant, yet how close! In a sense, it’s a lovely testament to the constancy of the human heart in an ever-changing world."