Inanities: The Plays of Tom Stoppard

...This penchant for manipulating abstractions instead of developing characters may mean that theater-goers never have any significant emotional involvement with any of Stoppard's plays--but so much the better for legitimizing by contrast his intellectual pretensions, since audiences can congratulate themselves on their sophistication...

...I wrote them down...

...The ecdysiast turns out to be the secretary of another philosopher, the "other" George Moore, who is preparing a lecture on morality ("Man--good, bad, or indifferent...

...Eternity is a terrible thought," Rosencrantz muses, "I mean, where's it going to end...

...Yet Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead abounds with gags that are much closer to the spirit of Nell Simon than Beckett...

...But by the 1960s, when Stoppard first began writing, postwar social realism had begun to sour in England: Osborne had become, in Green's words, "the Noel Coward of his generation...

...Johnson was a Tory, Orwell was a socialist: We value the best cultural critics less for their angle of attack than for their courage in attacking--the courage, that is, to do battle with the reigning spirits of the age...

...But after the performance, Joyce and Carr quarreled: Carr sued Joyce for either a share of the profits or reimbursement for the clothing he had purchased for the part...

...But even the redoubtable John Leonard once proclaimed that "there isn't a better, furinier, more interesting English-language playwright loose in the world than Tom Stoppard...

...Like Travesties and Jumpers, it began with essentially one clever idea: Stoppard had the inspiration of writing about the extradramatic life of the two characters from Hamlet as a kind of "footnote to literary history...

...Though cultural criticism often suffers from such moralistic posturing, it is precisely the attention paid to questions of value that makes the cultural critic distinctive and, I would add, necessary-makes him different from the historian, who rightly sees such concerns as unprofessional...

...And for all its cleverness, the play was almost totally derivative...

...Really...

...Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) was a passionate brief on behalf of the decency of the common man and the values of social realism...

...But that aspect of his latest success was strictly fortuitous, according to Stoppard: "I never set out to write a The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 15 topical play--that would be madness...

...But if Stoppard is the best and most interesting English-language dramatist at work today, that is less a tribute to his art than a comment on the sorry state of the theater...

...Stoppard hit on the brilliant idea of picturing Joyce, Lenin, and Tzara through the eyes ofCarr, a bit player in the drama of history, and juxtaposing politics and art, Marxism and Dadaism, streamof-consciousness and dialectics--all in the spirit (and at times, very nearly the letter) of Wilde's satire on manners...

...In the course of their deliberations, one of the Home Office officials delivers a hilarious 20-minute paean to America the beautiful, as seen from the windows of the Silver Chief, streaking across the country in a madcap and mythical journey, evoking images drawn equally from B-movies and dime novels...

...Since Moore and the Jumpers are the kind of bumbling pedants found in almost every academic novel (see Lucky Jim, for example), it might be supposed that Stoppard means to lampoon all that simple-minded drivel...

...Stoppard always seems to lose his nerve rather quickly...

...in Dirty Linen ~New-Found-Land, Stoppard really doesn't have much to say - - f o r all the skill in saying it...

...not so many dying as dead...

...Gilbert wrote a play about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in 1891...

...as Robert Brustein put it, "Shakespeare provides the characters, Pirandello the technique, and Beckett the tone...

...at the same time that his personal life is cracking under a variety of press u r e s - n o t least of which is the murder of one of his professional antagonists...

...Stoppard's favorite stock figure is the wise fool, whom he characteristically and unfortunately burdens with his own serious intentions...

...Stoppard did manage to work out a kind of "American connection"--New-Found-Land, which is rather arbitrarily tacked on to Dirty Linen...

...For Stoppard, lacking even the socialist fervor that animated his literary predecessors, really has nothing else to give substance to his satires besides a glibness that masquerades as profundity...

...Most of the humor is as funny--and as lightweight--as the following exchange between Carr and his manservant: "There is a revolution in Russia, sir...

...Pair of briefs...

...Suddenly a shot rings out, and one of the tumblers falls to the ground, and we are plunged into a convoluted mystery that rather improbably manages to involve Zeno's paradox of motion, illusion/reality posers, and a few other chestnuts from college textbooks...

...Small wonder that the plays it subsidizes are hits...

...The second act begins with a lengthy and pedantic speech expounding the history of the Russian revolution, the intellectual biography of Lenin, and the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat...

...For Stoppard probably is the funniest contemporary English-language playwright--though he really is no more amusing than, say, the Beyond the Fringe gang, who cheerfully lacked his claims to seriousness...

...At his best the cultural critic raises questions rather than provides answers, questions that rarely are considered by writers nestled in particular disciplines...

...Stoppard's oeuvre has been characterized as "music hall with brains...

...When everyone was busy pointing his finger at the right, Orwell called attention to the equally smelly orthodoxy of the left...

...and that this principle is not to be sacrificed to that Fleet Street stalkinghorse masquerading as a sacred cow labelled "The People's Right to Know...

...Stoppard is, of course, being coy about his motives for writing...

...pard's plays testifies to an elevated sensibility...

...It's a brief case...

...In Travesties, the idiot savant is the aged Carr (splendidly played in Washington and New York by John Wood, who was rightly awarded a Tony award for his performance), who dodderingly announces: I learned three things in Zurich during the war...

...And these questions, moreover, are often unfashionable ones...

...What is it about Stoppard's plays that both attracts crowds and delights intellectuals...

...The humor of the play, such as it is, consists largely in elaborating the metaphor of the title...

...What impressed viewers of Stoppard's version, however, was its "existential" quality: Critics did not hesitate to compare his play favorably with the works of Samuel Beckett...

...The literary generation that came of age in the 1950s was rebelling against the dandies and aesthetes --the Sonnenkinder, as Martin Green characterizes them--who had dominated English letters during the previous 25 years...

...In that sense, Samuel Johnson may be said to have been the first cultural critic, for when his Whig friends championed the cause of the colonists Johnson pointed out that these defenders of liberty did not seem particularly concerned about the liberty of their slaves...

...No matter that their response is as shallow as his plays...

...Having abandoned social realism and its middlebrow pathos, Stoppard quickly established a reputation as a writer of "serious" comedies precisely because of his calculated dexterity with abstract ideas--which, for the most part, were conspicuously absent from the early works of the Angry Young Men...

...There is good reason to question a genre that descends from "Signs of the Times," in which Carlyle rants against what he calls the "Mechanical Age" and complains that "wonder, indeed, is, on all hands, dying out...

...Stoppard had also discovered that wartime Zurich was the home of Tristan Tzara, who was busily founding Dadaism, and Vladimir Lenin, who was busily writing Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, before his journey to the Finland station...

...In fact, it is the very poverty of his intellectual dexterity that forces him to fall back on empty displays of low humor...

...But before it is hastily inferred that Stoppard's Potomac triumphs provide further evidence that Washington is slowly supplanting New York as the cultural capital of the country, a few caveats are in order...

...As Stanley Kauffmann has noted, W.S...

...But those laughably noble expressions of mealy-mouthed humanism actually provide the rather shaky ground from which he launches all his intellectual gynmastics...

...In a typical Stoppard in-joke, the American in question is his real-life friend Ed Berman, an ~migr6 living in England, who originally commissioned Dirty Linen...

...Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else...

...ally won his case for the money, but lost the slander suit...

...Stoppard was the heir to this perverse literary counterrevolution: His first play, A Iflalk on t/Je I~ater (eventually produced in America as Entera Free Man) was seemingly about the failed dreams of a working-class Briton--a proper concern for a social realist-but was actually little more than an amusing whimsy...

...Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary...

...It is always tempting, of course, for both audiences and critics to inflate the worth of their own opinions, and this kind of self-serving judgment typically works to the advantage of playwrights with pretensions...

...Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim (1953) was an equally spirited satire of the decadent older generation...

...So I decided to go ahead with Dt)-ty Linen, even though it hadn't anything to do with America...

...As if embarrassed by his own superficiality and apprehensive that his audience has not kept pace with his juggling, Stoppard slows the play to a crawl...

...So much for the complex relationship of art and politics in an age of revolution...

...For it happens that those acrobats were actually academic philosophersmRadical Liberal Jumpers, no less, for whom "no problem is insoluble given a big enough plastic bag...

...By choosing laughter over protest, by becoming a farceur instead of an Angry Young Man, Stoppard assumed the role of a dandy without ever really having been a Decent Man--a rather endearing kind of precocity, as it were...

...Its investigation centers around the activities of a "mystery woman" who has been "going through the ranks like a lawnmower in knickers," compromising 119 Members--including five of the six on the Committee...

...for all his penchant for manipulating ideas, Stoppard is quick to summon up his music-hall heritage...

...When the Select Committee temporarily adjourns, their vacant meeting room is quickly taken over by two Home Office officials, who are deciding on an application of "an American with a beard" for British nationalization...

...The play exhibits a complex surface structure of self-reference, cross-reference (one of the sets is a library...

...When the curtain rises for the second act, everything that Stoppard managed to keep aloft during the first act comes crashing to the ground...

...Jumpers soon degenerates into a bedroom farce, complete with split-second timing in entrances and exits, wildly swinging doors, and even flashes of nudity...

...As the comedy unfolds, t~e lady in question turns out to be none other than the Committee's clerk, the aptly and unsubtly named Maddie Gotobed...

...his debt to Osborne and the other Angry Young Men has less to do with vanity than with a historical irony of English culture...

...in an equally startling turnabout, Amis had grown into a Tory and a snob, even going so far as to write a book on drink...

...Even with such easy targets as hypocrisy and the press, the best that Stoppard can offer is a kind of infantile libertarianism...

...In fact, the nationwide repertory theater movement, which has been stimulated by large grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, has degenerated in the last few years into a farm system for Broadway producers...

...and one of the thieves was saved...half the world is at peace with itself, and so is the other half...

...Unfortunately, Travesties is never anything more than a brilliant and ultimately unrealized idea...

...in Rosenwrantz and Guildenstern are Dead he relies on a kind of undergraduate wit to keep the audience awake...

...Before the play finally winds down, Stoppard has become as boring as Carr...

...He has shown loftier concerns in previous plays, even though his strategy has been to use the vehicle of comedy: " I want to demonstrate that I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours...

...A social revolution...

...To be fair, Stoppard should not be judged on the basis of what even he dismisses as a "knickers farce...

...The dazzling command of the language evident in this and other soliloquies by Stoppard is the primary reason (and justifiably so) he is acclaimed as a brilliant playwright...

...For there are some fairly standard comedic devices that he repeatedly employs: mistaken identities (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are periodically taken to be the other...

...As far as Dirty Linen~New-Found-Land is concerned, there can be no doubt about the influence of the music hall...

...To begin with, box-office guccess more often indicates a lack of sophistication than the reverse...

...And most of the laughs come so easily that it makes one wonder if Stoppard really is clever, or merely facile...

...The Washington scandals happened after I wrote it...

...Even more disquieting is the suggestion that appreciating StopRobert Asahina is managing editor of The Public Interest and film critic for The New Leader...

...A social revolution, sir...

...From Richard Ellmann's biography of James .J oyce, Stoppard learned thatJoyce had been the business manager of The English Players in Zurich during World War I. When the company mounted a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, Joyce hired Henry Carr, a minor official in the British consulate, to play the role of Algernon...

...Instead of Beckett, Ionesco is probably the proper name to invoke...

...This is most apparent in the play that established his reputation as a 16 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 "serious" playwright, Rosenarantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which opened in America in 1967...

...In this, he is considerably abetted by some talented actors--Hart, Wood, Michael Hordern, and Diana Rigg, among others--whose masterful interpretations lend an undeserved credence to his works...

...and Dirty Linen~NewFound-Land, which opened last fall at the West End Theatre ' in Washington, and then played to packed houses at the Kennedy Center before arriving on Broadway at the beginning of the year...

...Tzara tells Joyce, apropos Ulysses, "For your masterpiece i have great expectorations...

...more eat than starve, more are healthy than sick, more curable than dying...

...What are they doing in there...

...Thus Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are forever competing with each other in elaborate rituals of one-upmanship (a word game, a coin game...

...This kind of uncertain mix of seriousness and comedy is the primary flaw in Jumpers as well...

...in an age drenched with art and filled with those praising its virtues, Trilling doubted the importance of art...

...Eventually, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead lapses into what has since become a familiar pattern...

...are a trt21v., daz, zling exhibition), Stoppard can pass off his rather top-heavy dramas as entertainments, offering the masses existentialism, Marxism, and moral philosophy in convenient capsule form...

...Since Dirty Linen~New-Found-Land premiered in Washington shortly after the Wayne Hays/Elizabeth Ray revelations, local theater-goers may be forgiven somewhat for their susceptibility to such highjinks...

...Why is this man laughing...

...In Travesties, there is Bennett, who patiently explains Marxist theory to Carr...

...Unaccompanied women smoking at the Opera, that sort of thing...

...But this murder mystery never quite succeeds in elevating itself to the level of a metaphysical mystery, to which it aspires...

...It should therefore come as no surprise that Stoppard returned to World War I--the hirthdate of the Sonnenkinder--and to Oscar Wilde for the inspiration for his appropriately titled Travesties...

...And all those lovely Old Vic accents go a long way in impressing American audiences, despite Stoppard's own admission that "it doesn't interest me in any way to create characters," since he prefers instead "to try to reduce weighty preoccupations about the way the world is going to an extended exchange of epigrams with a first-act curtain...

...But a way with words, though necessary, is not sufficient for the dramatist's art...

...and dizzying allusion and circumlocution, woven together in a tangled skein of farce...

...Joyce counter-sued for the price of five tickets given Carr to sell, and for slander...

...The old moguls of the Great White Way may be giving ground to the new Medicis on the Potomac, but hard cash and box-office draw are still the rules of the game...

...Joyce eventu" Although the music hall is clearly responsible for that custard pie, Stoppard professes a debt of sorts to the tradition of social realism that erupted in postwar England: "From about 1956 and Osborne's 'Look Back in Anger,' it's true to say that most people my age who wanted to write, tended to want to write plays...

...Like Sir Archibald Jumper, who "very soon learned to jump a great deal better than he ever thought, and was rewarded with the Chair of Logic," Stoppard is a "first-rate gymnast, though an indifferent philosopher...

...Travesties, which played two lengthy runs in the nation's capital after premiering in New York in 1975...

...I forget the third thing...

...There is good reason to question a genre--if we can call it that--which, like sociology, is often weak as history, and, like the daily editorial, is often couched in the exhortative mode...

...puns, misnomers, and malapropisms, typically delivered at breathtaking speed (Joyce is referred to in his absence as Deidre, or Bridget...

...It was mostly vanity, I suppose, because a lot of attention came to people who wrote plays...

...The play concerns a Select Committee of Parliament, assembled to report on moral standards in the House of Commons...

...In addition, the Kennedy Center productions of Travesties and Dirty Linen/NewFound-Landwere underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities (as part of the Center's Bicentennial Humanities Program, no less...

...Stoppard also never hesitates to indulge the impulse to twit the upper classes: A familiar character in his work is the manservant who has only the most thinly disguised disdain for the alleged "betters" whom he serves (a part played by Arthur Treacher in countless movies...

...Robert Asahina Inanities: The Plays of Tom Stoppard Today's best English-language playwright really doesn't have much to say--for all the skiU in saying it...

...which suggests merely that the United States government has successfully institutionalized the entrepreneurial spirit of David Merrick...

...the net effect is to water down all that "existential" concern into a rather toothless whimsy...

...Their gymnastic feats are meant to represent the scholastic stunts of postwar English philosophers--hence the unsurprising metaphor of the title...

...in Jumpers, Crouch, who dabbles in moral philosophy...

...Eventually we learn that Carr's memories of the War years in Zurich have been distorted by the passage of time--but by then we no longer care...

...The play begins with a group of tumblers performing a series of spectacular acrobatic feats, and a voluptuous stripper swinging through the air on an "iron-jaw" rig and disrobing on each successive pass across the stage...

...Moreover, if Washington is supplanting anything, it is not New York, but rather New Haven and Philadelphia, which have traditionally provided trial audiences for Broadway-bound shows...

...In fact, the play is fundamentally silly, milking its entertainment value from the period costumes, music, and dances...

...I was having deadline trouble writing a play for an American season--I couldn't work out anything with an American connection...

...Finally, in Jumpers it is the "other" George Moore, whose lecture in moral philosophy leads to the following: Do not despair--many are happy much of time...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 17...

...Verbal and sight gags abound, never rising much above the most obvious sorts of slips, Freudian and otherwise...

...But there is nothing beneath this superficial manipulation of literary and political ideas...

...What he took as a measure of his hometown's sophistication was the enthusiastic reception given Tom Stoppard's last three plays: Jumpers, which opened its American season at the Kennedy Center in 1974, and enjoyed a record engagement before moving to Broadway...

...But even where he does juggle serious themes, as in Travesties, the result is ultimately frivolous...

...What sort of revolution...

...Through ignorance or cowardice, Stoppard continuaUy raises serious themes that he then manages to duck by fishing for easy laughs...

...In Dirty Linen it is Maddie (perfectly embodied in both the Washington and New York productions by Cecilia Hart as an irresistible combination of wide-eyed innocence and pert sexuality), who literally seduces the Select Committee into issuing the following pious proclamation: It is the just and proper expectation of every Member of Parliament, no less than for every citizen of this country, that what they choose to do in their own time, and with whom, is...between them and their conscience, provided they do not transgress the rights of others or the law of the land...

...A clever idea, to be sure--although not even original...

...Maddie is eventually relieved of most of her clothing, which then tends to pop up in the most expectably unexpected places, giving rise to exchanges like the following: "What is that...

...Since he has, as well, a genuine flair for theatricality (the opening ten minutes or so of Travesties, r exam ale...

...Henry Carr is at one point disguised as Tristan Tzara, who for Stoppard's purposes is himself masquerading as his own imaginary brother...

...In a spasm of civic pride, a Washington drama critic recently commended the local theater-goers for exhibiting somewhat more refinement than their New York counterparts...