The Nation's Pulse/Tom Stoppard on Broadway
Shaw, Peter
"consolidationist" strategy enunciated by Mr. John Biffen, the leader of the House of Commons, against the cutting-taxes-and-spending approach that the chancellor would have preferred...
...Robert Brustein put it that Stoppard is "tone deaf before the dissonant inflections of Western political protest...
...Yet ia, The Real Thing he not only fails ~ deal meaningfully with political issues, but treats them as insignificant compared to private life...
...and even, "They're going to get him one of these days, they're going to kill him the way they killed Romero in El Salvador...
...In The Real Thing Henry similarly hopes to put words together well enough to "nudge the world a little...
...The calm won't last, some say...
...In the play's love story the playwright, Henry, has an affair, divorces, and then discovers that his lover--now his second wife--is having an affair of her own...
...But in August 1981 when the crisis hit, few thought the calm would last a month...
...However there is one area, little noticed abroad or even by the rest of Mexico, which is nearly as ebullient as parts of Central America...
...There is the political reality that British public sector lobbies, and other interest groups, remain deeply entrenched and politically powerful...
...Devaluation is neatly programmed at a fraction of one American cent per day...
...Local elections in several key states passed off without incident...
...I saw that the paper dealt exclusively with reported cruelties practiced by Guatemalan officers and men on their own peasants...
...The only other critic to have commented on the hero's politics, Mimi Kramer in the New Criterion, also takes them to be Stoppard's, but finds herself in agreement...
...The actor who is playing her brother manages to become her real-life lover by expressing real passion when he has occasion to recite the line, "How is't with ye...
...And there are further richnesses if one reads the text...
...Don't you believe that's what they do...
...Another is worried that his image is getting a bit too right-of-center...
...When President Reagan next meets Margaret Thatcher he will not be meeting some changed lady with new political and economic susceptibilities...
...He is exposed, for example, as someone who has all the answers whereas they are "not what life's about...
...I had questions aplenty but after an unusually difficult hour I understood that Msgr...
...Stoppard, in the interview that placed Auden's remark on private derangement and public postures at the center of The Real Thing, said that "in the short term" journalistic work can help change the world...
...Public postures have the configuration of private derangement," says Henry, echoing a line from W.H...
...He is author, most recently, o f American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Harvard...
...And he added that the cocktail dip smeared over the features of the badly mannered prole in The Real Thing is a custard pie heaved in the face of all that unpleasant political dissent people were forced to endure in the 1960s and 70s...
...I know what you think...
...about infidelity...
...Who was feeding them...
...Now day by day, week by week, confidence grows...
...Chiapas, however, is Mexico's future, its only possible Next Frontier...
...But the serious study of these should never have the purpose of discrediting ideas themselves, only that of tracing their etiology...
...Were there guerrillas in the region...
...A balding, chain-smoking man in his forties Father Xavier said that, thanks to Adveniat, he had spent a few years at a German university and that he now forms part of Bishop Ruiz's team of 35 priests who have learned to preach in the native dialects and are dedicated to raising the consciousness of the Indians...
...or hear outbursts like, "The Bishop is responsible for all the trouble in this state...
...My impression (shared by many other commentators) is that on Grenada she made a mistake or miscalculation from which--once having staked herself to it in Parliament--she has had difficulty in backing down...
...The State of Chiapas, sprawling over cool mountains, hot brushland, and jungle along the 600-mile line where North America ends, is so far from major population centers and so cut off from the capital as to seem another country...
...It was the second movement of the "Appassionata" that held me for cloudless minutes as I crossed over to the cathedral and an appointment with Bishop Samuel Ruiz Florez...
...Things are bad down there right now although it takes a good deal of patient inquiry to find out just what is wrong...
...Thus Mrs...
...For example, Henry and Annie are given to communicating as lovers by asking one another, "Are you all right...
...But she failed to note that Stoppard makes his philistine point against the politically conservative Henry--specifically for using his eloquence against the idea of antl~-missile protestation...
...What are our real motivations...
...He has, moreover, written several dramatic works drawing attention to the plight of Eastern European intellectuals...
...It is Mrs...
...But these ideas do not derive from derangement of personality as the formula specifies and as Henry's can be said to do...
...For all its pain Mexico has not slipped into disorder...
...More important, Brodie is also decidedly unpleasant...
...Thatcher's foreign policies that have caused puzzlement and concern in the U.S...
...Stoppard himself may or may not have succeeded in altering his audience's perceptions through the love story that lies at the heart of his play...
...Whether or not "consolidation" will deliver the economic goods in the U.K...
...In the scene in which Brodie is humiliated by Annie we learn that he was not a genuine anti-nuclear protestor...
...Thatcher's goals...
...Repayment of the crushing foreign debt is somehow being managed...
...Most suspect, even then, were Archbishop Romero of San Salvador and Bishop Ruiz of San Crist6bal de las Casas...
...With faster economic growth, the share of government in national income will thus fall...
...Despite such touches, neither the play's line-by-line wit nor what amounts to a triumph of British-style acting by a partly American cast can keep the handling of ideas from being a disappointment...
...The UN...
...But then, chillingly, something happens while Annie is rehearsing the role of the incestuous sister in a revival of "Tis Pity She's a Whore...
...He proves to be witty-which, however, is like saying that a minor character of Shakespeare proves to speak in verse...
...And since this character is manifestly autobiographical, they have criticized Stoppard for supposedly holding the same opinions...
...And what Argentina's 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984...
...Several Mexico City dailies maintain stringers in Tuxtla-Guti~rrez, the state capital, but their often sensational reports are invariably reduced to a paragraph or two on an inside page...
...Saul Bellow first offered a hint of how the TIIE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 27 job might be done with his aged character, Artur Sammler...
...But by Mary Ball Marti'nez later a young priest, one of several who have been denied a post in the diocese for refusing to preach Marxism, told me there are no seminarians, none at all...
...In a recent story by Elizabeth Hardwick, "On the Eve," the Bellovian world of New York's upper Broadway and its fashionable upper Madison Avenue are viewed through the eyes of a neoconservative intellectual...
...That there are connections between personal psychology and politics is certainly true...
...Fears must have been quieted because the flow of marks for Marx went on and continues today...
...His alter ego, Henry, may possibly offer a clue when, just before pronouncing on public postures and private derangements, he speaks of the current "desire to be taken for properly motivated members of the caring society...
...Perhaps it was the Vatican connection that put His Excellency on guard when I asked him how many Guatemalan refugees were encamped along the nearby frontier...
...One wonders what can have caused Stoppard's creative failure in the very realm of ideas where he has always been strongest...
...Hence not only are his potted ideas beside the point, but also Annie's rejection of him at the end hardly qualifies as a symbolic conversion from radicalism...
...Only after many talks with Chiapanecos of different social levels would I come to know the extent of bitterness against this man, learn of his escape from a street demonstration when the crowd shouted, "Go to Russia...
...Given the first-past-the-post electoral system, "one party is likely to be wiped out...
...As a result there are intricate parallels between art and life, and these seem largely to replace the usual Stoppardean intricacies of speculative argument...
...Certainly The Real Thing seems calculated to demonstrate that he rejects the lack of caring that critics of neoconservatism invariably associate with its opinions...
...John Biffen, the leader of the House of Commons, against the cutting-taxes-and-spending approach that the chancellor would have preferred to adopt...
...Later I would wish I had left the interview until the end of my visit...
...Putting a heavy cart of government spending before the horse of a freer economy may be good politics, but it does not make good economics...
...next she takes as her lover a working-class, leftish young actor who disapproves of her husband's dismissal of class realities...
...On the basis of this phrase Erika Munk justly faulted "the philistinism of the play's underlying statement that eloquence and complexity are incompatible with emotional truth...
...Xavier--"progressive" Latin American clergy dislike being called "Father"--invited me into his office and explained that the reason why the school appeared to be empty was that the students were living and working with the Indians in the villages...
...In the end it remains unclear whether or not Stoppard is aware that there is a discrepancy between his treatment of the political Left and Right...
...If not, who was invading farmland and murdering the owners...
...are of unrelated origin...
...He met Annie on a train while on leave, was attracted to her, set fire to a war memorial wreath to impress her, and went on to turn out a protest play more or less on demand as a way of gaining enough publicity to be released from jail...
...Brodie is not the real thing...
...Thatcher's tactics that have changed, not her goals...
...Auden that Stoppard has identified as the genesis of his play...
...This new strategy has created a widespread impression that Mrs...
...Meanwhile, the government will move ahead with a faster pace of privatization than in its first term...
...Trouble doesn't show on the surface in the graceful 450-year-old town of San Crist~bal de las Casas where one walks across the central plaza to the sound of Beethoven piano sonatas wired from the trees...
...Thus if anyone has a legitimate complaint, it is the Stoppard admirer who had reason to expect a higher level of argument on both sides of the question of the military self-defense of a Western democracy...
...Just as I chink what Anthony Lewis writes in the New York Times is: "It's common practice for Guatemalan soldiers to throw infants in the air to catch them on their bayonets...
...Her supposedly new "let's talk to the Russians" line is nothing new at all...
...But it would be more accurate to say that the deafness belongs to Henry, the character Stoppard has created...
...Thatcher's backbench " s u p p o r t e r s , " moreover, are ideologic*ally opposed to--or politically scared of--doing anything to reduce the government sector, a reluctance in part caused by recent changes in Britain's party politics which have become a three-cornered fight of very uncertain outcome at the next general election...
...Ruiz at a Vatican press conference back in the mid1970s...
...Thatcher feels constrained to edge forward at an extremely cautious pace on economic policy...
...The revenues acquired from these asset sales will provide a (small) extra margin for reducing taxes...
...But his indictment is soon rendered meaningless by a trick of the plot...
...The apparent changes in Mrs...
...But for an occasional anthropologist and a back-packing American or European student, few foreigners visit the Mary Ball Marffnez is a free-lance writer based in Europe...
...I n real life Stoppard is a member of the Committee for the Free World, an organization dedicated to arguing the case for the West...
...she then arranges to act in it herself...
...The politics center on Annie, Henry's lover-wife, who is an antimissile activist...
...Was the Church involved...
...As for the peace activists and Brodie, they are ridiculed for having the shallow, if well-meaning, ideas of shallow people...
...And yet if one looks carefully it emerges that the conservative Henry does not really have the best of the political argument...
...I had met Msgr...
...Brodie, freed from jail, appears onstage in the last scene at Henry and Annie's...
...Later, there is a similarly weighted rejection of cleverness...
...He showed me a proof he was correcting, a bulletin to be given out to the press in Spanish and then go overseas in German translation...
...Someone suggested I talk with the supervisor of the seminary...
...The prote'g~, Brodie, has written a protest play...
...The passing scene, with its androgynous dress styles, and the titles in a bookstore window, confirm for this intellectual his political conversion from liberalism...
...They cut off the man's head, rip up the belly of the woman, stuff the head inside the belly and sew it up...
...First she acquires as a prote'g~ a young soldier who has been jailed for setting a (harmless) fire during a peace demonstration...
...But his shallow treatment and ultimate dismissal of politics hardly nudges anyone in a meaningful direc: tion...
...In other words, the consolidationist strategy is a reflection of political worries and considerations, not a change in Mrs...
...Certain Latin American bishops had been invited to Rome to talk with the heads of the West German charity organizations, Adveniat and Misere, in order to convince them that money donated by the faithful of Germany was not being used (as it certainly was) to promote leftist causes...
...Catholics abroad were being generous, he said, particularly with regard to his present work of contacting the Central American refugees...
...As I read I began to smile...
...In contrast, Stoppard seems bent on humiliating Henry, who is given woefully inadequate political attitudes that serve only to discredit his position...
...And yet the play's ideas--or more precisely its political attitudes--have drawn sharp criticism from at least two reviewers...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL CLERICAL MATERIALISM IN MEXICO'S SOUTHEAST There is an alarming amount of violence and lawlessness in Mexico right now but not where it shows...
...THE NATION'S PULSE TOM STOPPARD ON BROADWAY by Peter Shaw Tom Stoppard's currently successful comedy, The Real Thing, has been greeted nearly everywhere as a welcome excursion into the realms of love and personal relations by a writer who has always specialized in ideas...
...It has perhaps not been stressed enough that in its decisive victory last June the Conservative party's share of total votes was actually smaller than in 1979...
...T h i s is not to say that The Real Thing's reputation for verbal brilliance is undeserved...
...Of course I did...
...Ruiz was not going to provide the answers...
...British national interests have always dictated that peace (although not at any price) is preferable to war with the Soviets...
...He sounds like rubbish, but you know he's right...
...A considerable number of Mrs...
...When Annie obviously parrots Henry's refusal to accept the putative iniquity of the class system, her working-class actor-lover says: I prefer Brodie...
...In another article a few weeks later, Brustein agreed with Erika Munk's contention that the play's success rested on what he now termed its "profound political conservatism...
...To be sure, extremist politics--not at issue here-often issue from a pathological source...
...Both of them have complained of the playwright-hero's unfriendliness to anti-nuclearist, antiestablishment activism...
...he asks...
...The idea is to let government spending grow, but on a tight leash...
...Xavier hurriedly recovered the paper, "What do you find that's funny...
...When it comes to Henry's own politics the outcome is much the same: His ideas are shallow, and they are eventually given a drubbing by his political opposites...
...Another recommended contact, one Father Eugenio, turned out to be in jail on a charge of smuggling arms to Central America...
...Any literary attempt to get at the psychology of the neoconservative intellectual has a built-in interest...
...Having devoted himself to publicizing the depradations of East European Communism in a country, England, where the political center among intellectuals lies even further to the left than it does in the United States, Stoppard may well have had some worries about his image...
...In The Real Thing, whenever gruff, hearty common sense comes in to rout epicene wit, the immediate casualty is political conservatism...
...One of us is probably kicking his father, a policeman...
...region, Mexicans never, unless their business demands it...
...You think this is Communist propaganda, don't you...
...You sound all right, but you know it's rubbish...
...The region has everything--fertile soil, an abundance of water, and wide, relatively unpopulated spaces waiting to be developed...
...All those involved in this and other love affairs are actors who perform in Henry's plays, the current one of which happens to be Peter Shaw has written for Commentary, the New Criterion, and other periodicals...
...Virtually every reviewer has been able to single out a subtly brilliant felicity not mentioned by anyone else...
...Unfortunately that argument is given a surprisingly inadequate presentation on both sides--so much so that one senses a purposeful suppression of serious thought on Stoppard's part...
...From nearly every point of view the country appears to be holding on in a remarkable way...
...Though hardly friendly to her character, Hardwick gives him an active intellect and treats him with authorial sympathy...
...Annie gets Henry, despite his contempt for the play, to rewrite its pedestrian language...
...Annie now rejects him, and though he is not the one she has been having an affair with, her freeing gesture of dismissal (pushing a container of cocktail dip in his face) seems to be the trigger for a lovers' reconciliation with Henry...
...The attachment of Margaret Thatcher, and of her chancellor, to the goal of freeing British society and the economy seems to be as strong as before...
...This formula supposedly applies to Henry's antipathy to the peace protestors, which is seen as not only personally inspired but also as typifying his lack of human sympathy...
...Imports above basic necessities have been stopped...
...But even here the discrediting should come from that which is deplorable in the politics themselves...
...Not surprisingly, the reviewer for New York's Village Voice, Erika Munk, who regards Stoppard as "a clever right-wing playwright," interpreted this scene as follows: Robert Brustein, writing in the New Republic, who also identified Henry's views with Stoppard's, wrote that at the end of the play "love conquers all--even casual adulteries and messy social dissent...
...What Stoppard seems not to have anticipated, though, is that a critic like Erika Munk would show no interest whatsoever in subtle repositionings, whether of the right or center...
...Foreign tourists are as welcome and as pleased as ever and the country's president can still face crowds with notably fewer bodyguards than the average chief executive...
...When I couldn't manage a serious expression he became angry...
...It is true that Henry speaks for Stoppard when he ridicules the ideas in Brodie's 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 play: "politicians are puppets, Parliament is a farce, justice is a fraud, prop-erty is theft...
...For her, if Henry stands for Stoppard, and Stoppard's politics are right of center, then the play is ipso facto "shallowly reactionary in its art and its politics...
...But in the long term, he believed, art operates more profoundly if less directly "on our moral sensibilities...
...is another question...
...Thatcher has become a "middle-ofthe-road" politician, This I very much doubt...
Vol. 17 • April 1984 • No. 4
