About the Play:

Murder in the Cathedral is a full-length drama by Nobel Prize-winner T.S. Eliot. The Archbishop Thomas Becket speaks fatal words before he is martyred in T.S. Eliot's best-known drama, based on the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170. Praised for its poetically masterful handling of issues of faith, politics, and the common good, Murder in the Cathedral bolstered his reputation as the most significant poet of his time. Especially recommended for school and contest use.

Murder in the Cathedral is a much loved masterpiece of modern verse drama. Archbishop Thomas Becket, brutally murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170 defending his church against the intrusions of King Henry II, became a Christian martyr and Saint at whose tomb Henry was forced to pay penance. Did Henry order the murder or did his knights take matters into their own hands? As Becket awaits his fate in Canterbury Cathedral, he is visited by several tempters, offering him power and pleasure. But the one who unsettles him is the voice of his own desire: a sinister figure who flatters him with visions of his glory after death and reminds him that "saints and martyrs rule from the tomb". This well known drama by one of the world's greatest poets tells of the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket who, though tempted, refuses to betray his conscience – a conscience which demanded that he place loyalty to the Law of God above loyalty to the Law of Man. Murder in the Cathedral was written in 1935, when extremist ideology was on the rise across Europe. That dark shadow looms over the drama, coming to the fore when the four knights who killed Becket step forward to exonerate themselves, talking of "stability" and "putting our country first".

Murder in the Cathedral was written for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. While this often-studied theatre classic is rarely performed professionally, it remains one of the great plays of the century. Like Greek drama, its theme and form are rooted in religion and ritual purgation and renewal, and it was this return to the earliest sources of drama that brought poetry triumphantly back to the English stage.

Cast: 9 female, 10 male

About the Playwright:

T.S. Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright and literary critic, arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Born in St. Louis to a distinguished family who put no pressure on him to pursue "practical" things, he studied at Harvard and then Oxford before publishing The Love Song of J. Alfred Purfrock, his first masterpiece. He won the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature, the highest honour available to any writer in the world.