As a dramatic performance, the character “T. S. Eliot” had one of the century's most successful runs. Formidably stylish, like Edith Evans's Lady Bracknell, it was exotic yet lifelike, as critics said when Olivier played Othello, and should have been extensively recorded on film. The grave voice and firm though melancholy gestures, head inclined a little to the side, were expert renditions of presence. Even the costume was capable of taking on small character-parts: as witness the heavily lapelled overcoat, the reliable shoes and umbrella, the wardrobe of identical three-piece suits ( “Nothing ever quite to excess,” his tailor is reported as saying). The Eliot costume, moreover, was animated by a range of interested parties, some of whom contributed anonymously to journals like the Times Literary Supplement, while others published poems in their own name with Faber and Faber, or signed letters under this or that nom de plume. Eliot the ventriloquist has been admired by plenty of commentators now, just as he himself admired artists able to carry off the difficult trick of vanishing into their own performance. Whether it was Nellie Wallace and Little Tich in the music-hall, offering “an inconceivable orgy of parody of the human race” (The Criterion 1.2: 193), or the Diaghilev Ballet's leading dancers (“Massine, the most completely unhuman, impersonal, abstract, belongs to the future stage,” he wrote in 1932: ibid., 1.4: 305), what he seems to have valued particularly is theater's power of removing both spectator and performer out of ordinary life.