Confidential Clerk

A modern verse play that touches on the sources of longing and the need to be loved.
Eliot sets the action in London, where the financier Sir Claude Mulhammer engages a disappointed organist, Colby Simpkins, as his confidential clerk to replace the retiring Eggerson.
The play unfolds a delicate domestic intrigue, following Sir Claude’s quiet design to introduce Colby to his eccentric wife, Lady Elizabeth, in the hope that she will adopt the young man into their childless household.
A divided London household surrounds these polite deceits with the sharp intrusions of Sir Claude’s flighty daughter Lucasta Angel and her fiancé B. Kaghan, revealing how parents and children construct the illusions they require.
"Never has Eliot’s apparently effortless prosody been more precise.... He has achieved complete mastery of words" (Kirkus Reviews). "It is a wise, witty, elegant play whose characters speak finely and shrewdly" (Chicago Sunday Tribune).

• Play Scripts for Theater: Eliot crafts three acts of flexible, conversational verse that trace how private artistic longings—Sir Claude’s secret ceramic collection and Colby’s solitary piano playing—clash with commercial expectations.
• Family Drama: The plot turns on convoluted parentage and hidden origins as Sir Claude and Lady Elizabeth both lay claim to Colby, while B. Kaghan and Lucasta navigate their own uncertain backgrounds.
• Comedy of Manners: High-society satire sparkles through Lady Elizabeth’s obsession with Swiss mind-control doctrines and wall colours, countered by the rustic common sense of Eggerson’s vegetable garden in Joshua Park.
• Also by This Author: Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party and The Family Reunion.