And with The Cocktail Party (1950) this rhythm
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stablishes itself with the opening lines: You’ve missed the point completely, Julia:There were no tigers. That was the point. It remains basic, though used with freedom andsubtlety, throughout this play. The language of TheCocktatl Party is strikingly less highly-coloured thanthat of the two earlier plays; alliteration and rhymeare hardly in the picture at all; and yet it has solvedwith considerable success the problem of patterningracy and realistic speech with just sufficient form tomake non-prose effects possible when the playwrightmay want them. This success, and the acceptability ofthe play on the stage, argue strongly for the investiga-tion and development of the accentual metres. The playgoer will also find that the tangential andapparently ungirdable ebullience of Christopher Fry isoften, and often at his best moments, formal enoughin a stress category though seldom in a syllabic. Theauthor’s rather disarming statement in his Foreword toThe Lady’s Not For Burning (1949), that ‘every man is
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