The Theatre of Tom Stoppard

The Theatre of Tom Stoppard

Anthony Jenkins
University of Victoria, British Columbia

Second edition

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© Cambridge University Press 1987, 1989

First published 1987

Reprinted 1988
Second edition 1989

British Library cataloguing in publication data

Jenkins, Anthony
The theatre of Tom Stoppard - 2nd ed.
1. Stoppard, Tom - Criticism and
interpretation
I. Title
822'.914 PR6069.T6Z/

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Jenkins, Anthony, 1936-
The theatre of Tom Stoppard.
Bibliography.
1. Stoppard, Tom - Criticism and interpretations.
I. Title.
PR6069.T6Z7 1987 82 2'.914 86-21572

ISBN o 521 37391 3 hard covers

ISBN o 521 37974 1 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2003

FP
For M A R I O N ,
BRONWYN and M E G A N

Knowing, being known . . .

Having that is being rich.
Contents
Fore words page ix

1 A free man i
Enter a Free Man, p.i- The Gamblers, p. 7 - The
Dissolution of Dominic Boot, p. 9- !/WIs forMoon
among Other Things, p. 11 - If You We Glad III Be
Frank, p. 14-A Separate Peace, p. 19 - Neutral
Ground, p. 21- This Way Out with Samuel Boot,
P. 23

2 Now you see him 24

Three stories: 'Reunion',/*. 24, 'Life, Times:

Fragments',/*. 26, 'The Story',/*. 27-Lord
Malquist and Mr Moon, p. 28 - Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead, p. 37

3 Victims of perspective 50
The Real Inspector Hound, p. 50 - After Magritte,
p. 54 - Teeth, p. 59 -Alberti Bridge, p. 61 - Where
Are They Now?, p. 65

4 Trapped in language 72
Another Moon Called Earth, p. 73 -Jumpers, p. 76

5 What did you do, Dada? 99

Dogg's Our Pet, p. 101 -Artist Descending a

Staircase, p. 105 - Travesties, p. 115

6 Ethics and manners 125

Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land, p. 125 - Every
Good Boy Deserves Favour, p. 131 - Professional
Foul, p. 136 - Night and Day, p. 142

vii
7 The real thing? 154
Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, p. 155- The Real
Thing, p. isg - The Dog It Was That Died, p. 172 -
Squaring the Circle, p. 176

Afterwords 183
Hapgood, p. 183

Notes 193

Vlll
Fore words
Had Lord Malquist and Mr Moon become a best-seller in the autumn
of 1966 and had Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead vanished - as
Ros and Guil do - after that year's Fringe Festival at Edinburgh, the
modern theatre could have lost its most adroit manipulator of stage
pictures. I mention this not just as an interesting might-have-been
but as a way of isolating Tom Stoppard's particular brand of theatri-
cality. Malquist gives us the punster and word magician who skips
from one chimera to the next with the same playfulness that animates
his radio and stage scripts. The novel obviously comes from the
centre of Stoppard's imagination. Its distorting mirrors and cartoon
characters are fundamental to the way Stoppard perceives life, and
must have an important place in any discussion of his theatre. Yet
despite the theatricality of the novel's dialogue and illusory pictures,
ultimately a relationship between reader, narrator and story cannot
be likened to one which involves audience, performers and 'happen-
ing'. It is this idiomatic difference which Stoppard seizes upon to
make things work on stage or in the sound studio.
In Stoppard's theatre, the stage is, first and foremost, a stage, just
as the radio is a box of sounds. Two attendant lords tossing a coin on
a bare stage create an immediacy which does not translate into a
description of two coin-tossing attendants. The picture itself is an
event and depends on the various rhythms at each spin of the coin,
the actors' facial and bodily gestures, the speaking silences between
them. More particularly, this image embodies the play which will
follow and transport us into a chancy, bewildering, ominous world, at
the same time that it stresses the fact that we watch two performers
using all their skill as two bungling players. Rosencrantz explores the
boundary between seductive reality and overt bravura. Its opening
sequence also makes capital out of our subconscious feeling that, at
any moment, something can go wrong with a performance. Stoppard
flaunts that risk-taking in the first scene ofJumpers where things do
go wrong with Dotty, the chanteuse, and might do so, in an unplan-
ned way, for the actors who jump in from the wings, stumble about
with a tray of glasses, or swing to and fro in an aerial striptease. Both
episodes provide us with a means of looking at the rest of the
evening's play, just as the elaborate sound picture which begins Artist
Descending a Staircase affects our interpretation of every other epi-
sode. Should a scene seem realistic, Stoppard encourages us to

IX
forget we are in a theatre or listening to the radio and then subverts
that convincing illusion with images which are equally convincing
and disruptively contradictory.
This fascination with the way words and images convey meaning,
connecting thought to speech or title to picture, shows Stoppard's
temperamental affinity with Wittgenstein and Magritte. But it also
has something to do with the fact that though he is supremely at home
with the English language he does not take it for granted. He was
eighteen months old when his family left Czechoslovakia. His father,
Dr Eugene Straussler, worked as a medical officer for the Bata shoe
company. Just before the Nazi invasion, the Strausslers were trans-
ferred from Zlin to Singapore, and in 1942, as the Japanese moved
against Malaya, Mrs Straussler and her two sons were evacuated to
India. Dr Straussler stayed behind and was killed some time after the
Japanese occupation. In Darjeeling, Tom's mother met Kenneth
Stoppard, a major with the British Army in India. They were married
in 1946, and the boys took their stepfather's name. Soon after that,
the Stoppards moved to England and, round about 1950, settled in
Bristol. Surrounded by English in Singapore, Stoppard did not 'live'
it until he went to hisfirstschool in India so that, like Wilde or Shaw,
he came to the language not as a foreigner but as someone who was
fractionally 'other', and so saw more clearly that words are signs.
Samuel Beckett, born beyond the pale, cultivated that awareness by
writing Godot in French and then translating it back into English; for
Stoppard, that invigorating estrangement, however subliminal, re-
mains an accident of history.
In The Real Thing, Henry says to Annie, "I don't think writers are
sacred, but words are". To demonstrate that, Stoppard has him pick
up a cricket bat and explain how pieces of wood have been put
together with intricate simplicity. The analogy between writer and
batsman could not be more English; it also combines elegance and
play to serious intent. That same combination of stylish play worries
some of Stoppard's critics. The most vociferous tend to be American,
perhaps because they take less delight in elegant glances to silly
mid-on and prefer words to be smacked into the stands by a no-
nonsense baseball bat. Walter Kerr's New York Times review of Dirty
Linen (1977) offers the most famous critique of Stoppard's games:
"Intellectually restless as a hummingbird, and just as incapable of
lighting anywhere, the playwright has a gift for making the random-
ness of his flights funny . . . Busy as Mr Stoppard's mind is, it is also
lazy; he will settle for the first thing that pops into his head."
His detractors, at home and away,findhim heartlessly intellectual,
cold, obsessed with patterns. To them he seems an essentially frivo-
lous dazzler who has little or nothing of substance to say. However,
since Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (i 977) ushered in a line of more
obviously 'political' plays, that picture of him has changed. John
Russell Taylor in his retrospective article, "From Rosencrantz to The
Real Thing\ for Plays and Players (1984) has fixed him with a neat,
amusing pin: "Enfant Terrible shapes up as Grand Old Man, intel-
lectual joker finds sense of responsibility, Tin Man welds heart to
sleeve. It is neat, tidy, and dramatically satisfying as a progression."
But Poor Tom is still a-cold, for Taylor adds that "one may be left
with a sneaking feeling that one preferred the rake unreformed, the
joker unsobered".
Stoppard's career seems to me to be all of a piece. Though his style
has become more reticent and his statements more direct, he con-
tinues to exploit the play in plays. Squaring the Circle (1984) is as jokey
about ways of looking and saying as Rosencrantz was. He has always
been completely serious about frivolity and stylishness as ways to
make ideas fly. And though his beliefs are surprisingly uncompli-
cated, they come from a benevolent, if sceptical mind. His assurance
that, beneath their confusion and cruelties, human beings 07? worth-
while and that the proof of this lies in man's ongoing search for a just
community may sound unfashionably optimistic but it generates the
play in all his major works. There is no despair in Stoppard, yet to call
Rosencrantz "Beckett without tears" (Robert Brustein: New Republic,
1967) ignores the very human bewilderment and terror that even-
tually overtake the jolly pair. It is this humanity which interests me in
Stoppard, and it appears much earlier than most commentators
allow.
The radio plays contain the essence of those qualities. Each
achieves a delicate balance between form and content, play and pain.
The medium's intimacy allows us to concentrate while words slither
or somersault; without the distraction of visual pictures, we move
steadily closer to the littleness behind his characters' desperate or
jaunty loquacity. Yet the verbal ebullience never works loose from the
supporting structure. Each of these plays, from The Dissolution of
Dominic Boot to The Dog It Was That Died, is a miniature marvel. That
balance is much harder to attain in the theatre because everything,
including the central idea, has to be bigger, but it is by that union of
form, idea, and human passion that the plays either stand, wobble or
fall. Jumpers achieves a brilliant unity and, on a lesser scale as a sort of
staged radio play, so does Every Good Boy, while Rosencrantz (a mite
too 'talky') and The Real Thing (problems with focus in the last two
scenes) have a flawed splendour. It took Stoppard longer to translate
his particular kind of theatricality into the vocabulary of the television

XI
cameras: his early farce, Teeth, is a one-shot triumph and Professional
Foul and Squaring the Circle show him continuing to test himself and
the medium.
Despite these verdicts, I do not intend to rank the plays into
leagues and divisions, like one of Stoppard's Dogg football results:
"Tube Clock dock, Handbag dock; Haddock Clock quite, Haddock
Foglamp trog". My main purpose is to show how and where they
work or don't as performances and strategies, since play scripts, like
music scores, are difficult to realize from the printed page. Because I
also want to show their interconnection, I approach them chronologi-
cally, as steps on a journey to the 'real' Tom Stoppard - or to as much
of him as they allow us to see. For that reason, I ignore his adaptations
from other writers, though those plays also have moments of inge-
nious staging. In focusing on the texts as theatrical games, I have
avoided nods of approval or gestures of rage to this or that particular
critic; instead, the essential names appear in the notes. Naturally my
ideas have been shaped by a host of conflicting opinions, to which
David Bratt's Tom Stoppard: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1982) gave
useful directions. But I would like to acknowledge those which have
been especially influential. Stoppard's own interviews, notably in
Ronald Hayman's Tom Stoppard (1974 and 1976), Theatre Quarterly
(1974), and Gambit (1981), have been my sheet-anchor, while Ken-
neth Tynan's profile in Show People (1979), Jim Hunter's Tom Stop-
pard's Plays (1982), and Tim BrasselPs Tom Stoppard (1985) gave me
ideas to ponder and reckon with. Except for Dogg's Our Pet (Inter-
Action Inprint), all quotation from Stoppard's work comes, as noted,
from the standard British or American editions of Faber & Faber or
Grove Press.
I am most indebted to Colleen Donnelly, who typed and retyped
with unflagging energy, accuracy and dedication, and to Doreen
Thompson, whose own work on Stoppard over the years has chal-
lenged and stimulated mine. In addition, she generously provided me
with the materials she had gathered for her MA thesis, Soya Beans
and Cricket Bats. The staff of the University Library in Victoria and
the National Sound Archive in Kensington were always helpful. I am
also grateful to the University of Victoria's English Department, to
my colleagues, Joan Coldwell, David Thatcher, Bill Benzie, and to
my wife, Marion, for support, advice and encouragement along the
way.

xu
Chapter i

A free man
As Tom Stoppard tells it, he was lazing in the water off Capri when
suddenly he realized he was twenty-three, unpublished, unheard-of,
and unlikely to be otherwise.1 At the end of that vacation, he turned
his cards in at Bristol's Evening World, where he had worked for two
years as feature writer and second-string arts critic, and, armed with
their contract for a twice-weekly column, 2 headed metaphorically for
deeper waters. The image is teasingly appropriate. His early work,
before the success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, shows
him testing his energies, looking for a distinctive style that would
allow him, like George Riley, the determined fantasist of his first
play, "a walk on the water".
So Stoppard did not burst upon the world like Athene from the
head of Zeus; he might not even have become a playwright. Although
he has said that young writers in the early sixties thought of the stage
as the route to success after John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (i 956)
and the "new" drama that followed,3 Stoppard in those years also
tried his hand at radio and television scripts, theatre criticism, short
stories, and a novel. If his experience as a journalist, reviewing plays
at the Bristol Old Vic, had given him a taste for "showbiz", as a
freelance writer he was prepared to slog away at such assignments as
a season's worth of weekly episodes for A Student's Diary on the BBC
Overseas Service; these were to depict the day-to-day life of an Arab
student in London (though he did not actually know any such student
at the time).4 Those scripts have disappeared, as have the five
episodes he wrote for the BBC's long-running daytime radio serial,
Mrs Dale's Diary. One wonders how Stoppard managed to attune
himself to that programme's middle-class respectability without slid-
ing into the parody that the good lady's diary entries invite: "I'm
rather worried about Jim [her husband]... yesterday, Mother gave us
all such a shock." For, in the early work that does survive in print, it is
a gift for parody that already stamps large segments as echt-Stopp&rd.
A Walk on the Water, the play he wrote in i960, which he has
described somewhat derisively as The Flowering Death of a Salesman,5
may originally have been a pallid reflection of Robert Bolt's Flowering
Cherry (1958), which itself pays more than passing obeisance to
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949). However, by the time
Stoppard's play reached the West End stage as Enter a Free Man
(1968), the text had been largely rewritten in a way that moves the
piece from those quasi-realist origins. Its first Act, in particular, now
stands as a sustained burst of manic energy that holds its own with the
later plays.
By comparison, Bolt's play has dated rather badly. What seemed so
effective and moving at the time, especially through the perform-
ances of Ralph Richardson and Celia Johnson, adds up to little more
than a well-made theatricality which pays lip-service to the new
realism of the late 1950s. The set of Flowering Cherry, for instance,
supports the rhythms of everyday living with its kitchen sink, fridge,
stove, and dining-table and, at the final moments, the back wall
becomes transparent, in a Millerish way, in order to reveal Jim
Cherry's vision of row after row of blossoming fruit trees. But the
action itself is simply a conventional middle-class family drama and is
shaped to the sentimental demands of effective curtain lines. At the
end of the first Act, Isobel Cherry, unable to bear her husband's lying
fantasies, runs into the garden where she leans "against the gate,
throws her head back, [and] cries exhaustedly. Oh, let me, let me, let me
leave him!" 6 At the same time, in ironic counterpoint, Jim is at the
kitchen table showing off to his daughter's friend in front of his son
by reciting the "muse of fire" speech from Henry V. Cherry's invoca-
tion to "the brightest heaven of invention" neatly underscores his
incapacity to distinguish truth from dreams, but psychological real-
ism gives way to theatrical tidiness when his memory fails at the
words "But pardon, gentles all . . ." and the curtain falls on the
juxtaposition of this repeated phrase and Isobel's reiterated "let me
leave him".
The tidiness of Enter a Free Man is of a different order since, in Act
1 at least, we are not required to enter the characters' lives or feelings.
What may read like two-dimensional realism on the page becomes,
on the stage, a series of zany, rapid-fire set pieces which owe more to
The Goon Show or Hancock's Half Hour on BBC radio than to
anything in Bolt's play. Free Man opens on a mood of bright heartless-
ness, the essence of this type of comedy in which one character scores
off another with a string of destructively witty one-liners. Linda "is
eighteen, self-assured, at least on the surface, and can be as cruel or
warm as she feels like being". 7 When she sums up her father, George
Riley, as "the man who's on his way . . . to the pub on the corner"
(10), the lights come up slowly on the suburban bar which shares the
stage with the Rileys' living-room (and hallway) where Linda talks to
her mother, Persephone. The comic deflation works, as it were, in
absentia, as Riley bursts through the pub door with a self-dramatizing
flourish, "Enter a free man!", and Linda, from the other side of the
stage, dismisses him as "Poor old Dad". The buoyancy that is
necessary to keep us at a distance from the comic malice is estab-
lished by this cheeky wit and by the efficiency and speed of this initial
overlap between home and pub. In addition, before any of this action,
as the houselights dim, a tinkling version of "Rule Britannia" initi-
ates the bouncy irreverence.
Such overt artifice allows us to sit back and watch George jump
through a number of contradictory hoops, and those leaps come so
fast upon each other that we have no time either to question their
credibility or to feel for George in his trials, other than to offer a smile
of recognition as he moves through one frustrating confrontation to
the next. Stoppard's technique here is very like the radio comedy of
the 1950s, though that influence may not be a directly conscious one.
He envisions George as "a smallish untidy figure in a crumpled suit
. . . a soiled fifty with a certain education somewhere in the past: it
gives him a tattered dignity now" (9). Stoppard has explained that he
allowed for that vaguely distant education so that George might voice
his bewildered hopes articulately;8 that remark probably reflects an
original, realist notion of George, but, as rewritten, Riley needs no
such motivation. He is funny because like Tony Hancock, for exam-
ple, he is the paradigm of rumpled self-importance,9 small in stature
but enormous in his own dreams, who reacts to those around him
with a predictability which, to us, seems hilariously mechanical but
which, to him, seems novel and incomprehensible. He remains
undefeated because he never learns from past experience. As Stop-
pard describes him, he is "unsinkable, despite the slow leak".
This self-confident inadequacy is constantly tested through colli-
sion with someone who is either unintelligent and naive (Bill Kerr to
Tony Hancock) or cagey and worldly-wise (Sid James). After Riley's
jaunty entry (undercut by Linda from the sidelines and by an "it's
him again" from the bar), he blithely accosts Brown, an anonymous-
looking stranger, in the hope of cadging a drink. Unperturbed by
failure, he turns to Able, a dim-witted but admiring sailor, to whom
he can display his own superiority until the point of explosion where
he is unable to countenance such gormlessness any longer:
RILEY: A man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. Who said that?
ABLE: Houdini?
RILEY {turning): Who?
ABLE: —dini.
RILEY: Houdini. No.
ABLE: Give up. (13)
On the other hand, with Harry, "flashy, sharp, well dressed", he is
himself the naive butt. For when Riley explains his latest invention, a
supposedly reusable envelope with "gum on both sides of the flap",
Harry leads him on into ever-increasing fantasy by pretending to take
his self-image seriously and so feeding his vanities. By the end of this
sequence, Riley is convinced that, with his brains and Harry's capital,
his fortune is made: "A partnership - my goodness - did you hear
that? I'm walking now, I'm on my way, committed - I'm walking and
I'm not going to stop" (23).
At home, Riley's life follows a similar pattern, with his wife as
dogged victim and his daughter as the superior sniper, though the
fact that they are relatives and female adds a variation. Persephone's
absorbed dusting and vacuuming make her an unsatisfactory audi-
ence and encourage her husband's my-wife-doesn't-understand-me
attitude. Faced with his daughter's barbs, Riley envisions himself as
the misunderstood parent, slaving for his family yet lacking respect.
The fact that Linda is the sole bread-winner and gives her father
weekly pocket money, since, as an "inventor", he does not consider
himself a candidate for unemployment benefits, does nothing to
deflate Riley's martyred dramatics.
Yet though these clashes of character depend for their effect on a
transparent exaggeration of stock situations, Act 1 is no mere for-
mula. The conflicts explode at high speed and are punctuated by
extended arias in which Riley gives voice to the injustice of an
unappreciative world. That tempo is sustained by flights of rapid,
tangled cross-talk reminiscent of The Goon Show. Other Goon effects
are the continuing catch-phrase (Riley's frequent hints that he wants
a cigarette or a drink from Able) and the sort of sequence which
builds on a cliche from popular fiction. Picking up Harry's suggestion
that the innocuous Brown may be an industrial spy, Riley launches
into an elaborate parody of a cunning, smooth-talking interrogator:
You can trust me. Fm just an ordinary man like yourself. I know you're only
doing your job - it's a dirty business, but when it's all over we're still people,
aren't we? The world goes on. I expect you're sick of it all - life on the run -
always looking over your shoulder, waiting for the knock on the door, the
unguarded word, the endless lies, loss of identity - it's no life at all. (25)
To hold these diverse materials together, Stoppard has organized
a tight, economic structure. The pub episode ends with one of Riley's
arias, during which he leans against a table, centre stage. The lights
slowly go down within the bar, leaving him alone in spotlight until the
other half of the set is gradually illuminated and, still talking, he is
back in his living-room an hour or so before he decided to leave home
for ever (as he often does on Saturdays). By backtracking, Stoppard
allows us to view Riley's complaints about his family's lack of appre-
ciation with prior knowledge that he will be equally frustrated and
inadequate in the outside world. The reversed time-loop also adds
comic point to Riley's delusions. We measure his annoyance over
Persephone's placidity against the romantic fiction he weaves around
Florence, the girl in the bar who truly does not understand him.
Similarly, the fact that we know he will be swept into that romantic
fantasy and into his illusory partnership with Harry subverts Riley's
criticism of Linda's dream knight-in-armour and her "living in a
fool's paradise". The Act ends at the point where it began. "Rule
Britannia" tinkles away, but we now realize it issues from one of
Riley's latest inventions, a patriotic clock which plays that tune at
noon and midnight (inconveniently). Riley has freed himself from his
ungrateful family, and when the words repeat themselves as he enters
the pub, "a free man", we understand what Linda means by "Poor
old Dad".
The second Act, however, does not have the same panache. Partly
this is because there are few surprises. The play's energy flags
because Riley can only journey downwards; we know there can be no
substance behind his dream of success with Harry and Florence. Nor
is this predictability offset by any inventiveness in the way the pair
effect Riley's awakening. Florence, as was apparent from the start,
has not the slightest notion what she means to him, and Harry, tired
of yesterday's joke, simply rips open one of Riley's envelopes to show
the uselessness of its double-gummed flap. Stoppard makes the pair
undisguisedly brusque in order to wring the pathos from Riley's
plummeting expectations. Even Able laughs at him, and he leaves the
bar, "hurt to anguish". The degree of that hurt signals the major
problem with Act 2, for at points like this we are urged to feel for
Riley as an individual; he is no longer the farcical automaton. Yet as
motivated individuals, rather than cartoon figures who move through
a series of stock situations, the characters of Free Man wobble discon-
certingly.
This change of focus, which pulls the play apart, is detectable from
the moment Riley tells his family that he is "going into industry" (61).
Linda, no longer the sniper, gently begs him to unpack his bags. If he
will "stay and be like other people", they can go together to the
Labour Exchange, where he can register and draw benefits until he
finds a job that suits him. The cartoon Riley would have reacted to
this with blustering pride, but Stoppard requires him to speak "to her
with equal gentleness and the same air of explaining to a small child".
The mood is sentimental, the tone a quiet yearning, and the rhythms
those of Miller's Willy Loman: 10
LINDA: Dad, you don't have to - dad, you're making it up - you know you are
- you don't have to -
R I L E Y {almost jubilant, but still quiet): I'm not! It's all true\
LINDA (nearly crying): Dad, you dreamed it.
RILEY: NO-O-O! You'll see - Pm not alone this time - Oh Lindy, Pll come
back in a Rolls Royce and then you'll believe me again and it'll be happy
again. (63)
This passage rings false not simply because it is derivative but
because it asks us to ponder family relationships, whereas the earlier,
unsinkable Riley was not the sort of figure to invite speculation about
his domestic happiness or unhappiness. Similarly, after he leaves,
Persephone, whom we have seen two-dimensionally, is suddenly
given a brain and a heart as she appeals to Linda's sympathy:11
It costs him - every time he comes back he loses a little face and he's lost a lot
of face - to you he's lost all of it. You treat him like a crank lodger we've got
living upstairs who reads fairy tales and probably wishes he lived in one, but
he's ours and we're his, and don't you ever talk about him like that again.
(Spent.) You can call him the family joke, but it's our family. (Pause.) We're
still a family. (67-8)
If we are to take this seriously as a revelation of true feeling beneath
the cardboard cut-out housewife, we must wonder how she can
accept her daughter's escapade with her latest motorcycling knight
or, for that matter, how Linda, who has a sharp sense of self-irony,
could fall to a succession of hard-riding smoothies.
Fortunately, by the end of the play, the characters are back in a
cartoon world, and we no longer have to worry over motivation. We
hear the sounds of rain, a clap of thunder, and water begins to pour
from a tangle of pipes on the living-room walls. It seems that one of
Riley's inventions has actually worked, until it is discovered that there
is no way of turning off this indoor-rain-machine for houseplants. As
Linda rushes around with buckets and saucepans, Riley appears to
admit defeat, only "the trouble is, I think I was meant to be an
inventor" (84). The final moment is nicely ambiguous. Though Riley
agrees to go down to the Labour Exchange "and inquire", Linda is
prepared to wait and see how he feels in the morning and offers him
an extra five shillings, since his week's pocket money went at the pub.
Riley accepts it, "just to tide me over", and enters the sum in his
notebook, as he has done every week for the past three years. He may
yet be free from the dole and once again afloat.
Flawed though it is, Free Man is not as weak as Stoppard himself
has said. To some extent it is "a play written about other people's
characters"12 but, revised over the years, it shows a talent for verbal
fireworks and a sensitivity to the possibilities of stage space, even if
dialogue, action, and content are not yet interlocked or distinctively
Stoppardian. As^f Walk on the Waterit was performed on commercial
television in 1963, but to little notice during the aftershock of Ken-
nedy's assassination, and staged in Hamburg the following year,
where Old Riley geht uber'n Ozean was booed by an audience who
expected kitchen-sink naturalism. The play was broadcast on BBC
radio (1965) and, in its final form, presented after the acclaim given
RosencrantZy it suffered by comparison and was dubbed "disappoint-
ingly arch and obvious".13 Free Man opened in March 1968 and
closed two months later.
A second play from the early sixties, The Gamblers, never did
receive a professional performance, though it was produced at the
University of Bristol in 1965. Stoppard has jokingly referred to it as
"Waiting for Godot in the Condemned Cell", yet he also describes it
as "my 'first' play - that is the first play I regard as mine, after I'd
cleared the decks wiihA Walk on the Water".14 The text has not been
published, but the passages that have appeared in print 15 do offer a
foretaste of Stoppard's themes, style, and fascination with the arbi-
trary nature of the human condition. In particular, the play's two
characters seem initially to be on opposing sides of a political revolu-
tion but are in fact two halves of the same coin. The Prisoner, who
used to be the jailer before joining the insurgents, awaits execution
simply because the revolt failed; had it not done so, the man who is
now his jailer would be in prison since he is the regime's chief
executioner. The Prisoner gambled and lost, though, by the play's
end, the wheel of chance has revolved again and the Jailer, having
decided the Prisoner is not the stuff of martyrs, changes places. The
expectant crowd will not realize the difference: the Jailer wears the
Prisoner's hood; the Prisoner dons the executioner's mask; they are
indistinguishable, as they always have been. So, too, are the opposed
forces in the larger scheme of things:
They're two parts of the same wheel, and the wheel spins. Do you know what
I mean?... The life cycle of government, from the popular to the unpopular.
The wheel goes slowly round till you get back to the starting point, and it's
time for another revolution.
Yet however the wheel spins, from revolution to revolution, the
Prisoner would always remain anonymous and unheroic.
He is entirely aware of his own littleness and of the ironies of his
situation; a cog in the wheel, and a weak one at that, he has only
become important because the victorious party needed a victim of
some consequence and so promoted him into a captive Header'. That
self-consciousness towards the ironies of one's own eternal inade-
quacy was to become one of the hallmarks of Stoppard's work. It
distinguishes the Prisoner from a figure like George Riley, who has
no such sense of inevitable failure. That knowing fatalism belongs to
Beckett's Vladimir, and Godot has also provided Stoppard with a way
of dramatizing human littleness through music-hall slapstick. In an
attempt to reach God, since He will not come down and burst the
prison open, the Prisoner clambers up a pile of furniture and on to
the Jailer's back. When that achieves nothing, he urges the Jailer to
stand on him. This sequence also exemplifies the Beckett joke which
Stoppard admiringly defines as "a constant process of elaborate
structure and sudden - and total - dismantlement".16 It is particu-
larly funny when a speaker boobytraps himself:

JAILER: YOU are the sun on the horizon. (Consciously theatrical)... The sun
of hope and truth about to flood a golden land of equality and fraternity
- and - and -
P R I S O N E R : Liberty.
JAILER: Liberty! Yes! A golden land where liberty is - compulsory]

Although Stoppard will never share Beckett's view of life's empty

absurdity, that influence does lead him to toy with metaphysics and
away from the routines of situation comedy. He has his own version
of "nothing is certain", and those perceptions begin to inform the
argument of The Gamblers. Its plot, on the other hand, owes some-
thing to Nabokov, whom Stoppard also admires. Yet the exchange of
prisoner for jailer is a contrived one; the play's shaping does not
convey the necessity which the characters purport to be trapped by.
Form and content support each other perfectly, however, in the
three radio scripts Stoppard wrote between 1964 and 1966. His
inventiveness seems to burgeon in response to the discipline and
challenge of creating pictures and action in sound only. Released
from the pressure of a large-scale narrative, he can concentrate
entirely on pattern as a means of saying and looking at an idea
through his own idiosyncratic fancy. The tight spiral of the first
script, The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, re-creates both the hero's
ascending distress and the imprisoning circumstances he tries to
break from. In 'M' Is for Moon among Other Things, Stoppard prods
below the patterns and begins to explore the pathos of imprisoned
littleness. Here, he finds a distinctive way for his characters to voice
their bewilderment towards themselves and life around them, and
this develops into the playful metaphysics of If You're Glad Til Be
Frank. In all three plays he draws the listener into that world and into
his characters' unease by condensing plot, dialogue, and sounds, so
forcing us to deduce much of what is happening, to participate, to
share in those little lives. As he gains assurance, Stoppard begins,
through sound and dialogue, to "ambush" his audiences. In these
scripts, he finds his own voice and his own vision of life's puzzling
uncertainty.
 The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, broadcast by the BBC in early
1964, is a candyfloss confection upon the moving-wheel theme,
stripped of all metaphorical suggestion. The idea is as simple as it is
entertaining: "The peg for Dominic Boot - a man riding around in a
taxi trying to raise the money he needs to catch up with the meter - is
the only self-propelled idea-for-a-play I ever had and I think I wrote
it in a day."17 Stoppard extends one dramatic image (in the vein of
Riley's spy-interrogation) into fifteen minutes of action-packed
panic. Sound effects, dialogue, and particularly deft cross-cutting
between scenes create a sort of short-hand language which the
listener must interpret in order to keep up.
No sound is wasted, and many serve a double function by further-
ing the action and weaving secondary threads that tie the episodes
closely together. The opening moments illustrate this economic
multiplicity:

Fade in street - traffic.

VIVIAN: Well, thanks for the lunch - oh golly, it's raining.
D O M I N I C : Better run for it.
VIVIAN: Don't be silly . . . . (Up) Hey, taxi!
D O M I N I C : I say, Viv . . .
VIVIAN: Come on, you can drop me off. (To driver) Just round the corner,
Derby Street Library.
(They get in - taxi drives.)
D O M I N I C : Look, Vivian, I haven't got . . .
VIVIAN: Dash it - that's taken about ten shillings out of my two-guinea
hairdo - honestly, I'm furious. Don't you ever have an umbrella?
D O M I N I C : Not when it's raining. (49)

Vivian is instantly characterized as a demanding, self-centred shrew

who gives Dominic no chance to confess to his lack of cash. In fact,
one of the major jokes is that we never do hear him actually explain
his predicament to anyone. The hairdo and missing umbrella, be-
sides instigating the taxi-ride and Vivian's grumbles, are two of the
connecting threads. A few scenes later, Dominic's mother, who is
equally critical and self-absorbed (no wonder she "likes that girl"),
joins him in the taxi to talk about her hair and his never having an
umbrella. This then occasions the next sequence, a few words from
the cabbie about who used to cut his own mum's hair, and that snatch
of family history enables Stoppard to mask a crucial piece of informa-
tion when later, amidst continued chat about who cuts whose hair,
Dominic learns that the driver owns a shop: "clothes, furniture, stuff,
second-hand" (56). By the final sequence, Dominic - still umbrella-
less and soaking wet - has sold everything he owns, except for a pair
of pyjamas, to the driver in exchange for the fare.
 By building repeated patterns of dialogue and by cutting rapidly
from scene to scene, Stoppard is able to dispense with large sections
of the plot. This technique draws the listener more intimately into the
action since it forces him to piece things together for himself. After
Vivian has left the taxi, we hear Dominic's inner thoughts and the
chink of coins as he tries to meet the fare. Against the noise of the
idling engine, the driver, silent up till then, asks (a shade sarcastically)
if he is waiting for the rain to stop: "No, um, the Metropolitan Bank,
Blackfriars, please." We instantly cut to the bank as a cashier asks
Dominic to step to the end of the counter. Whereupon, through a
brief interview and a tangle of muddled names, we deduce that
Dominic is overdrawn and that the bank has already refused two
cheques from the restaurant he lunched at with Vivian. The action
then moves swiftly to a second bank where the repeating pattern
suggests Dominic's troubles in two brief lines. We can guess the rest
for ourselves.
Whole playlets about the characters' lives are also implied by the
dialogue. The changing relationship between Dominic and the
driver is particularly well-managed. The latter is introduced as a
silent presence at the receiving end of Vivian's orders, and when he
does speak, his slight sarcasm immediately conjures up the cliche of a
world-weary cabbie, though he is moved to some wonderment when
Dominic asks to be taken to a third bank. As the ride grows longer,
the driver regales his passenger with a family detail or two, but never
beyond a certain point: business is business. Such hard-nosed
camaraderie then motivates the parody scene in which he bargains
for Dominic's belongings, dismissing them as junk which, for a
friend (his erstwhile passenger is now "Dom"), he agrees to cart away
for ten bob. Dominic does not find his actual friends much more
forthcoming. Stoppard has him borrow fourpence from the driver
and ring up Charles. Tone of voice creates levels of meaning, es-
pecially on radio, and this solo phone-call allows the actor wide
scope to manipulate stress and pause to suggest how distant a friend
Charles is and how disgusted he feels at being asked to repay a loan
by someone who can afford to travel around by cab.
Stoppard's ongoing preoccupation with characters who are called
either Boot or Moon seems to have begun about this time. Having
moved to London, he was writing theatre reviews and miscellaneous
snippets for Scene magazine and would often sign them "William
Boot", the name of a journalist in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. In Stop-
pard's imagination, anyone called Boot shows a certain aggressive-
ness in trying to shape his life, whereas a Moon is more kicked against
than kicking.18 In some ways, Dominic may seem like a Moon until

10
one considers his previous self-assurance. His mother and fiancee
may both be bossy, but he is no doormat. He survives by airy promises
and dud cheques (robbing banks "in a modest way") and has kept his
job at the office, despite his extended lunch-hours, by adopting a
mask of charming roguery. The play shows us his dissolution from
Boot to Moon.
As the taxi-meter ticks onwards and his panic mounts - the names
of the three banks, for instance, are made increasingly absurd - he
struggles valiantly to remain in control. He tries to borrow from the
firm's petty cash, but Miss Bligh has just spent it all on postage
stamps; he breaks into his gas meter, but the take falls short; it costs
him more to go to Croydon than the two pounds he recovers from
Charles. When his parents fail him, his last recourse is to Vivian, who
pushed him into his plight in the first place. But she is locked in her
librarian's world and cross with him for taking taxis when he is
supposed to be saving for their marriage. So Dominic cracks at last:
" O H , YOU S T U P I D COW, S H U T UP A N D GIVE ME TEN
P O U N D S FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!" (57). From that climactic
outcry on, Dominic is a drowning man - in more ways than one.
Fleeced by the taxi-driver, sacked by his boss, he stands weeping in
his sodden pyjamas, and the waters close over his dazed head as he is
bundled into another taxi:
MISSBLIGH:... Don't cry, Mr Boot. Your pyjamas are getting awfully wet
. . . I should do up your front, Mr Boot, you'll catch cold . . . Pull your
socks up, Mr Boot. (Up) Taxi!... come on, Mr Boot. Come on, you can
drop me off... (58)
Throughout its fifteen minutes, the comedy is kept aloft by the
breezy energy of Stoppard's narrative, and to find weighty signifi-
cance in the fact that Dominic is defeated by machines (the two
meters) or commerce (the banks, the junk shop, paper-work at the
office) would overload things. The play stretches a single, ridiculous
idea to the ultimate or, in Stoppardese, it is about a man who is always
being urged to pull his socks up and who can usually manage to pull
the wool over people's eyes until he is bereft of footwear.
A second short play, broadcast a few weeks later in the same series,
shows that Stoppard can indeed explore human relationships. For
the first time, he builds a schema out of his own particular vision of
life's absurdity. Neither of the two characters in 'M'IsforMoon among
Other Things19 is called Moon, although both are Moonishly passive
and confused (lunatic?): two self-absorbed individuals who occa-
sionally collide, harmoniously or disconcertingly, as they plod on
through the logic of their own blinkered lives. Each of the characters
in Dominic Boot and The Gamblers is also enclosed in his little box, but

11
this play presents the comic irony of such loneliness directly. The
theme goes back to Free Man. Riley, in particular, creates a complete
world of his own which is more real to him than actuality, so that his
wife, whose real name is Constance, has become Persephone, prob-
ably because he sees her as provider and destroyer, like the Greek
goddess. The wife in M' Is for Moon is also called Constance and
though, in outline, she is just as much a cliche as her predecessor,
Stoppard now takes us behind that facade in a convincing and
ultimately rather tender way.
Most of the play's dialogue is interior monologue and creates an
autumnal picture of a middle-aged, middle-class, childless couple
whose thoughts are somewhat richer than their humdrum lives.
Accordingly, the pace of this play is generally languid. Nevertheless,
Stoppard conveys the pair's boring existence in a far from boring way.
He begins with something of a sound puzzle which immediately
provokes the listener's interest, although this tricksy ambush is
neither as provocative nor as meaningful as it is to become in the later
plays. At first there is a silence, then a masculine grunt and a rattle of
paper. A silent second or so later, we hear an odd "flip", a sigh, and a
woman's voice whose manner and quality should persuade us that
the words are interior thoughts even if their meaning is not instantly
apparent. By the time we recognize the flips as the sound of turning
pages, the voice is followed by a further grunt and a man's spoken
thoughts. We now have our bearings: she is mulling over an encyclo-
paedia of some sort, and he is absorbed in a titillating news story. But
when Constance starts counting off months in her head, the connec-
tion "tonight", "my pills", "February the fifth, March the fifth . . . "
may mislead some listeners, even if the couple do not sound (to 1964
ears) sufficiently advanced. When we later discover that Constance's
worries about the date and the pills are not contraceptive - at
half-past ten she will be exactly "Forty-two-and-a-half, and all I've
got is a headache" - the deception has served to underline the fact
that sex is something Alfred only reads about in papers.
It is characteristic of Stoppard that he should make one detail
perform several functions like this - he considers the habit a matter of
temperament rather than something he consciously works at20 - and
the musings of Constance and Alfred (one can hardly call them
conversations) create a series of related layers, one on top of each
other, just as the scenes in Dominic Boot overlap. Constance's desul-
tory flips through the M to N volume convey the loneliness of her
empty life, and even when she voices her feelings to Alfred, he is not
there to listen. Her queries about the date also exemplify the way she
and her husband talk past each other. The effect is partly musical as

12
these two disembodied voices develop their separate motifs which
occasionally run together in unharmonious chords, but the repeti-
tions and crossed lines also impress upon the listener the importance
of the date, "August the fifth, nineteen sixty-two". For when Alfred
decides to turn on the television, coming in on the last minutes of
Dial Mfor Murder (a wry touch that), thefirstitem on the news is the
announcement that "Marilyn Monroe, the actress, was found dead in
her Los Angeles home today . . ." (63).
Placed at almost the exact centre of the script, this is the point to
which the seemingly aimless dialogue leads and upon which its
concluding layers of irony depend. Constance herself sees none of
these connections. Quite literally, Marilyn does not appear among
the entries in her encyclopaedia. She shows no interest in the fact
that the actress died alone after an overdose of pills, since, for her,
Marilyn is all that she herself is not. She allows herself a passing
curiosity about Marilyn's age and whom she was trying to phone
when she died, but as Constance settles into bed, she too reaches for
her sleeping-pills - "I think I'll take an extra one tonight" - to take
her mind off the evening when the Gilberts came to dinner, a fiasco
of which her husband had previously reminded her:
ALFRED: . . . D is for Debacle - that which occurs when Mrs Gilbert is
offered meat by her husband's chief accountant's wife on a Friday!
CONSTANCE: {Crying) Well, I wouldn't have forgotten if you hadn't been so
awful on the phone - (65)
Perhaps she should not have phoned Alfred at the office, but as the
clock strikes half-past ten, 5 August 1962 has only one significance:
she is forty-two-and-a-half, and by the end of the month she will
have reached 0 to P.
The entire script plays with the meaning of meaning. Having first
led his listeners to question the meaning of the opening sounds and
misled them as to other meanings, Stoppard allows them into Const-
ance's thoughts about whether her life has any meaning. Had she
some choice, she would at least have something by which to measure
her present existence. At seventeen, she had made a choice of sorts;
up till then she had always been known as Millie, her middle name,
"then I went over to Constance, it sounded more grown-up" (63).
But she regrets the loss of a less confusing time, when she did not
need to measure or judge and when the letters in herfirstAB C stood
for one object only: A is for apple, M is for moon. Though she now
realizes that M can stand for Moon among other things, she does not
consider the multiple meanings each of those M-words can have.
Depending on one's perspective, 'Moon' suggests different things to
different people, as does 'Millie' - or 'Marilyn'.
 So Constance finds no meaning in the actress' suicide, and the
listener perceives an ironic one, while Alfred invests the news with
his own sexual fantasies. For him, that death is symptomatic of a
hard, selfish world in which no one took the trouble to listen to "the
poor girl" or to recognize her need and loneliness. But he, too,
cannot measure that against his domestic circumstances. He ignores
his wife's sleeping-pills and forgets his anger with her on the phone.
As he turns out the bedroom light and Constance flips through more
Ms in her lonely drift towards N, O and P, Alfred is aground on his
one particular M, imagining Marilyn's phoning him (presumably not
at the office) and his own caring reply:
... Do you feel better already? - Well, it's nice to have someone you know you
can count on any time, isn't it?... Don't cry, don't cry any more . . . I'll
make it all right . . . (Up - sigh) Poor old thing . . .
CONSTANCE: Oh, you mustn't worry about me, Alfred, I'll be all right...
(Think) Marshmallow... Mickey Mouse ... Marriage ... Moravia...
Mule . . . Market . . . Mumps . . . (67)
With this final moment, as Constance misinterprets her husband's
solicitude and thinks he intends it for her, the delicate comedy turns
the play back on itself, and we recall the constant misunderstandings
between the pair because of their separate perspectives and the
multiple meaning of words.
In 'M' Is for Moon, Stoppard's structure and style carry, and are
intrinsic to, his theme. The interior threnodies of Constance and
Alfred supply separate perspectives which dictate the way the pair
react to Marilyn's suicide. By allowing the listener to participate in
both those worlds, and to measure them more objectively against the
details surrounding the actress' death, Stoppard creates a third
perspective so that we experience for ourselves the fact that meaning
depends upon point of view. Compressed into fifteen fleeting
minutes, this multi-layered structure may not be completely
apprehensible, and it is not surprising that the idea originated as a
short story. Yet, as a listening experience, the play offers more than a
gentle comedy of manners. From the outset, Stoppard forces us to
cast about for our bearings. Whether we are totally aware of it or not,
we search for a frame of reference, a way of measuring events and
investing them with meaning. And something in Stoppard's own way
of looking at things seems to have found a clear focus within the
limiting and limited format of this brief radio play.
With his next script, If You're Glad Til Be Frank,21 broadcast two
years later in 1966, Stoppard has mastered the genre and arrived at a
personal vision, as evidenced by his playful delight in the possibilities
of the medium and by the unconstrained way he welds farce to
philosophy. Commissioned for the BBC's Strange Occupations, a
never-to-materialize series of half-hour plays aboutridiculousjobs,
real or imagined, If You're Glad is sparked off by supposing that the
voice of TIM, Britain's speaking clock, is not in fact a recording but
belongs to a lady doomed endlessly to announce the passing seconds.
When Frank Jenkins dials the number, he is surprised to recognize
the speaker as Gladys, his long-lost wife. Convinced she is being held
against her will, Frank rushes to the rescue, but he too is a slave to
time. As the driver of a London bus, he is bound to his timetable. If
he drives fast enough to get ahead of schedule, he can snatch those
few seconds to ring Gladys or fight through to "the top man in
speaking clocks" in order to demand her release. But ever at his back
comes the voice of Ivy, his tragedy-queen conductress, to remind
him he is falling behind or that his passengers are becoming in-
creasingly restive. The growing frenzy of these scenes is reminiscent
of Dominic Boot, as Frank tries to reach Gladys but is beaten back by
the clock or by the Post Office bureaucracy. But as an innocent-
against-the-system, Frank is not allowed much personality. He is as
open and honest as his name, likes a laugh or two, and is a stickler
where time is concerned. The script's comic bubble rises instead
from the minor characters and from the games Stoppard plays with
sound as he creates their regulated world.
He orchestrates the clockwork precision of their daily arrival at the
office by playing tricks with the well-worn sound effect of Big Ben.
The scene is established by loud sounds of traffic and the Westmin-
ster chimes as the great clock "begins its nine a.m. routine" (46).
Suddenly traffic noise vanishes; the continuing chimes sound muted
now, and we are in the vestibule as the hall-porter murmurs, "Nine
o'clock. Here we go." Precisely on the first stroke of nine, the
lowest-ranking employee enters the hallway, letting in the sounds of
traffic and an amplified Big Ben; these fade again on the second
stroke as the street door closes, and the pattern is repeated as the staff
enter at every odd-numbered stroke. Each person is greeted by the
porter and replies in a way that reveals his place in the hierarchy and
provides a lightning self-portrait. Myrtle, the secretary, responds
with a gay "Hello, Tommy", and so on up to the entrance of the First
Lord and his orotund "Morning, Tommy". We then follow Lord
Coot through a second door, through which all the other voices have
passed, and then through more doors and past the ranks until he
arrives at his inner sanctum (47). Myrtle's greeting, "Good morning,
your Lordship", shows the unctuous respect of a family retainer, and
the Lord's reply suggests he sees her as a sort of housekeeper
(though to the others she is more of an upstairs maid).
 If a new secretary gives the Lord some pause, in such an orderly
world where everyone has his appropriate niche, her arrival at pre-
cisely 1.53 a.m. allows Stoppard to twist an old slogan, "The Post
Office never sleeps", and to prepare us for Gladys, who also can
never sleep as she signals each passing ten seconds. That new recruit
also occasions an explanation as to the workings of the Lord's
empire: other voices are at work around the clock, like U M P (cricket
scores), P O P (music), E A T (recipes), and the secretary's job is to
keep them under continual surveillance. Cooty is Lord of all he
surveys and has his spies; since people are not machines, "the strain
is appalling, and the staffing problems monumental" (48). So Stop-
pard plants the suggestion that the hall-porter is another of the
Lord's informers. Their morning greeting had been followed by the
Lord's "(Conspiratorial.) Anything to report?" and we later hear that
they lunch together, "like brothers". But neither of them seems to
notice the sexual hanky-panky between Myrtle and (at least) two of
the staff, liaisons which dramatize the way this bastion of efficiency
rests upon human frailties of which the chief exemplum is Gladys
herself.
Gladys is on the verge of breakdown, and to depict her predica-
ment Stoppard creates an inner and outer voice. Principally we hear
the free association of her thoughts under which runs the continuous
soundtrack of her impersonal, automated phonespeak, although
those announcements can interject across her personal anguish or
they can fade out altogether. However, this tension between her
private feelings and her automaton's role as T I M is not the major
reason for her approaching disintegration. Her strange occupation
has given Gladys a disturbing vision of what Time means, and it is
this which threatens her peace of mind. Formerly she had sought to
find peace in simplicity. She would have liked to be a nun but was
unable to "believe enough'' to pass muster with Mother Superior.
The promise of serenity attracted her to Frank with his sunny laugh
and simple joke ("if you're Glad I'll be Frank") when they first met at
a dance; reliable as clockwork, he would drive past her window twice
a day "with a toot and a wave . . . everything the same" (57). T I M
offered even greater sameness until, through that unending repeti-
tion, she experienced a portion of eternity as the seconds stretched
ahead and behind her to infinity.
In Gladys' monologues, Stoppard solves the problem of how to
transmit complex ideas to a listener who cannot set his own pace
down a printed page or turn back for a second try. Here, he creates a
style that "fall[s] into something halfway between prose and verse"
(45). The effect is akin to modern verse-drama: a barely perceptible

16
rhythmic beat, a syntax that is more formal and organized than that of
everyday speech, and a spare, undecorated vocabulary release the
listener from the confusions of naturalistic speech-patterns and
enable him to concentrate more closely on what is being said. Many
of Gladys' lines have a tang of T. S. Eliot, though they are usually less
cerebral and more irrationally disconnected:
I can hear them all
though they do not know enough to
speak to me.
I can hear them breathe,
pause, listen,
sometimes the frogsong of clockwindings
and the muttered repetition to the
nearest minute . . .
but never a question of a question, . . . (61)

Towards the end, as Gladys nears collapse, her speeches echo the
rhythms of Lucky's long monologue in Godot: "yes, yes,... it's asking
too much, / for one person to be in the know / of so much, for so
many . . ." (65). Either way, the rhythmic and verbal patterning is
formalized enough to support ideas which guide us to a final under-
standing of why all clocks and our regard for them are so absurd.
Gladys has seen that nine today is not the same as nine tomorrow.
Time flows on endlessly and reduces man to a miniscule part of that
flow. Yet from a human perspective, time is divisible into ticks and
tocks which give our lives importance. Through Gladys, Stoppard
makes us see that Frank's slavish obedience to his timetable is not
simply a funny joke but absurdly sad as he drives around in circles,
and the satire on departmental bureaucracy widens and deepens
when we are made to recognize Lord Coot's ludicrous concern for
efficiency as a magnification of every man's belief that he is time's
master.
But what makes Gladys crack is neither the physical effort of her
job nor her feeling that it is pointless to divide time into units often
seconds. Her position has become absurd because she feels compel-
led to keep on, despite her knowledge. Part of her dares not answer
Frank's pleas over the phone because were she only to cough or
sneeze she would bring the Post Office's whole elaborate system
tumbling down. Another part of her knows that the disruption would
make no difference; time would go on without her, so she yearns to
blow the system to pieces. She has seen the void, and "if you can't
look away / you go mad" (51).
The struggle against madness stands as the common denominator
between the two centres of the play's action. Stoppard marries farce
to the play of ideas by making both Frank and Gladys the puppets of
circumstance. Under the conventions of farce, an ordinary, respect-
able, outwardly conformist character suddenly becomes vulnerable,
either through misunderstanding or coincidence, and is catapulted
into a number of increasingly extravagant misadventures which re-
duce him to a helpless automaton, no matter how he tries to assert
himself. In that tradition, Frank's phone-call to TIM precipitates
him into situations over which he has less and less control. Each time
he arrives at the Post Office in hisfightto reach Gladys, he gets a little
farther, and we hear his running feet and gasps for breath as he
charges into the building. But the harder he tries, the greater are the
forces that pull him back. Finally, the rush-hour traffic-jams give him
four spare minutes and he bursts into a Board meeting to the clamour
of porter, clock, horns, Ivy, the bureaucrats, and the "noise of rioting
passengers" at his heels. Then Frank is brought to a stunned halt, not
by the crescendo of protests behind him but by a blank wall of smiling
reasonableness as the First Lord explains, "My dear fellow - there's
no Gladys - we wouldn't trust your wife with the time - it's a machine,
I thought everyone knew that" (68). To general laughter, Frank
tumbles back to his everyday self.
Though farce usually explodes into frenzied physical action like
this, Gladys also suffers the dizzy panic of a farce figure. Completely
motionless, she is like someone on a precarious height ("serenity" in
her case) who is pulled at by an increasing vertigo whenever she looks
down, yet she cannot stop herself from doing so. In her case, too, the
First Lord's reasoning restores her, though to the automaton state
she so desires. In the concluding scene we no longer hear her in
close-up but as a voice through the phone, just as she was in the first
scene. Yet while she subsides into mindless repetition, her final
thought about Lord Coot, "He thinks he's God", suggests that the
frenzy could start all over again. As it could with Frank, for when Ivy
leads him away she tells him "you'll have to go on looking", for
Gladys. In this way, Stoppard unites the play's two seemingly dis-
parate styles, farce and philosophy, and the pleasure we derive from
that union is also a sort of vertigo. After the slight disorientation of
the script's opening words, when Frank gasps "It can't be!" in reply
to TI M's "At the third stroke it will be...", we are whirled up by the
escalating action and made dizzy by Stoppard's ideas in the manner
of a ferris-wheel ride.
In all three of these radio plays, Stoppard experiments with ways of
making episodes overlap or interlock so that a script's full meaning
derives almost solely from its patterned structure: the medium is the
message. Although he claims "that a lot of one's work is the result of

18
lucky accident What's wrong with bad art is that the artist knows
exactly what he's doing", 22 these plays exhibit an astute interplay
between action and dialogue. His other early writings do not possess
that architectonic economy and density. This is partly due to the fact
that on radio "actions" are sounds, so that the materials with which
he builds share a homogeneity, whereas on stage or particularly on
television the pictured action does not lend itself so readily to such
intricate dovetailing.
His television script,^ Separate Peace, is an exact contemporary of
If You're Glad, yet despite a number of ideas they have in common,
the teleplay is comparatively loose and uncharacteristic. Action and
dialogue run side by side; they do not intertwine into a structure
which in itself provides meaning. Nor has Stoppard organized the
pictured action in ways that are peculiar to television;^ Separate Peace
could be presented in any medium. There are only two sets, the office
and a private ward in the Beechwood Nursing Home, and the action
alternates consistently between them simply to further the plot.
The cameras come in on the night nurse seated at the office's
reception counter. John Brown enters through the main door, looks
around him, and proclaims everything "very nice". 23 It transpires
that he wants to be admitted as an emergency case even though there
is nothing wrong with him. The hospital is a private one, and "it's the
privacy I'm after- that and the clean linen" (168). The only incident
that is specifically visual in this sequence occurs when Brown makes
to unzip one of his cases to show that he has the wherewithal to pay
for a room and catches his finger in the zipper; as he sucks his wound,
a doctor arrives, looking somewhat tousled after being awakened in
the small hours of the morning. When asked "what seems to be the
trouble?", Brown extends his finger so that the doctor wonders why
he came all the way for that. After some argument, it is agreed that
Brown be admitted for "observation", even though, as he himself
repeats when the Nurse starts to pick up his bags, "No, no, don't you
. . . There's nothing the matter with me" (169). Like Gladys, Brown
wants serenity and orderliness; consequently, after he has followed
the nurse into his private room, he pronounces himself satisfied with
its atmosphere and with the promise of a daily routine: "Like clock-
work. Lovely" (170).
But hospital life does not develop into a metaphor of clockwork
existence as Glad's T I M job does, since we see little of that routine
in action. Instead the script's interests are purely narrative as we
follow the doctor's efforts to find out why Brown should want to be a
patient and where he comes from. His chief aid in this is Maggie, an
attractive young nurse, whose role is to engage Brown in friendly
bedside chats which might yield clues as to his identity. Whenever we
return to the office, the doctor is either on the phone to the local
police or is discussing Brown's case with Matron; these scenes mark
the staff's assessment of what Maggie has gleaned, and they plot the
next step in their investigations. Since the ward scenes are the more
extended, Stoppard avoids complete stasis by having Brown agree to
occupational therapy: we see him putting the finishing touches to a
comically misshapen basket, and later he has left his bed and is at
work painting a rural landscape on his walls.
The dialogue also furthers plot but needs no visual action to
support it. Brown's early conversations with the staff manage a
slightly jokey quality due to the way he interprets almost everything
they say in the light of his own determined plan:
MATRON: NOW, what's your problem, Mr Brown?
BROWN: I have no problems.
MATRON: Your complaint.
BROWN: I have no complaints either. Full marks.
MATRON: Most people who come here have something the matter with
them.
BROWN: That must give you a lot of extra work. (172)

The chats with Maggie are more conversational, since she is trying to
lower his defences; they are saved from utter flatness by the way
Brown blocks her every attempt. Although their banter when affec-
tionate sounds a trifle insipid, the catalogue of the staff's latest
theories about Brown and the latter's explanations of his own motives
inject energy into the piece. The ideas are, in fact, more lively than
their expression, though on occasion Brown can sound like Oscar
Wilde: "To stay in bed for tea is almost impossible in decent society,
and not to get up at all would probably bring in the authorities" (171).
Television at its most conventional is singularly passive; its audi-
ence sits back and watches a story unravel in pictures to which the
dialogue is generally subordinate. A Separate Peace makes few de-
mands on the viewer. The dialogue and the cutting from scene to
scene neither jolts our expectations nor forces us to participate by
experiencing a character's dilemma in ourselves. We are not dis-
orientated, as we are by the radio scripts and later stage plays,
although the circumstances which dictated the original transmission
may have caused mild puzzlement, since A Separate Peace was de-
signed to illustrate a short documentary (about chess players) which
immediately preceded it: "The play . . . does not in fact illuminate
what I think about chess players, in whom aggression is probably
more important than the desire to escape, but I persuaded myself that
this, the only idea I had at the time for a play, fitted well enough."24

20
Brown's plan to separate himself from the world starts things off
provocatively, and his nostalgia for his years as a prisoner of war (as a
Private who has found private peace) has a quirky ring to it: "It was
like winning, being captured. The war was still going on but I wasn't
going to it any more" (i 80). For the rest, Stoppard unrolls the story in
a single line.
There were more complicated and inventive twists and turns to
Neutral Ground*5 transmitted by Granada Television in December
1968, though written three years before - earlier, that is, than A
Separate Peace. Where Brown looks for a permanent refuge in a
no-man's-land, Neutral Groundconcerns an individual who has been
abandoned there. Stoppard was commissioned to write it for a series
based on myths and legends, which never got off the ground, and he
now claims to have felt somewhat dismayed when the play was
eventually presented as a separate entity. The plot adapts the Philoc-
tetes legend to the world ofJohn Le Carre in a rather ingenious and
ambitious way.
In Sophocles' play, Odysseus and Neoptolemus, son of Achilles,
have travelled to the deserted island of Lemnos in order to bring back
Philoctetes to Troy, for he possesses the bow and arrows of Hercules
which, according to prophecy, can bring victory to the Greeks. It was
Odysseus who had caused Philoctetes to be marooned there at the
beginning of the war because the latter's sufferings from a noxious
snake-bite made him too burdensome a passenger. So he sends
Neoptolemus and several of his followers on up to the exile's cave in
order to win his trust and deceive him into boarding ship. Eventually,
however, Neoptolemus confesses to his true role, but Odysseus
arrives to urge him to leave Philoctetes to his fate since the wounded
man hates them too much to go with them to Troy. But on his way to
the ships, Neoptolemus' conscience again troubles him and he re-
turns the bow to its rightful owner. Prepared now to stand against
Odysseus and the anger of the whole Greek army by taking Philoc-
tetes homeward as he hadfirstpromised, Neoptolemus is prevented
only by the divine intervention of Hercules himself, whose shade
commands them all to Troy.
Sophocles' play raises political issues: whether an individual
should be prepared to act dishonestly for the sake of the common
good; the clash between one who is physically weak but morally
stubborn and one who commands force but is morally slippery. Yet,
though Stoppard applies this plot to the agents and counter-agents of
modern politics, his play convinces least when he attempts to deal
with purely political ideas. What speaks to him in Sophocles is the
game of false appearances and the fact that much can be said for and

21
against both sides in the struggle so that a comparatively straightfor-
ward and commercial script contains within it a characteristic inter-
play between truth and illusion plus a certain amount of intellectual
leap-frogging from case to counter-case.
Stoppard's inventiveness shows most in the way he has transposed
major details from Sophocles. The island becomes a tiny inland
country south-east of Trieste. For two years, Mr Marin (code-name
Philo) has been trapped there between East and West. Before the
title credits come up on the screen, in what turns out to be a
flashback, we watch his arrival by train at the Austrian border where a
fellow passenger to whom Philo had given his fur hat is gunned down.
Later flashbacks show how Otis (the Odysseus character) abandons
him because that accidental shooting "makes you look too clean for
words, it's like a diploma" (136). Convinced that the Russians knew
Philo was a Western agent and had been feeding him false informa-
tion for months, Otis cannot be sure that his escape from Moscow
has not been engineered. Like his namesake, Philo is a poisonous
burden and like him he is needed again later. Otis finds out that the
information he once thought false "could make a lot of important
sense and we need Marin to read it" (155), so he sends Acherson
(Achilles' son) and Carol (Chorus) to pose as a salesman and his wife
on a working holiday in Montebianca.
This deception is made more complicated by the fact that the
viewer does not know the two are anything other than they seem to be
when they first appear, and because we have already seen two obvious
agents. Derived from a rival Trojan embassy in Euripides' lost play,
this anonymous pair, dubbed Laurel and Hardy in the script because
of their contrasting size, accord with the traditions of wise-cracking
hit men. Their part in the plot sends them chasing one chimera after
another: bursting into an attractive widow's bedroom, missing Philo
by minutes and, on taking Acherson for his last ride, falling to what
they thought was a toy gun. In contrast, the deceptions practised by
Otis' agents involve the emotions of the players. Acherson comes to
pity Philo, and it takes a none-too-pleasant conference with Otis to
persuade him to "just get him on that train".
The interchange between past and present and the cross-cutting
between both sets of agents work smoothly, yet the dialogue often
feels flat and is, Stoppard confesses, overwritten in places. Admit-
tedly, most scenes involve characters who are foreign to each other.
The script derives occasional fun from a stilted idiom, as when Carol
reads out from the guidebook, "the views are unexampled by the
largest traveller", a sentence Laurel gleefully applies to his fat friend.
However, the freely emotional sections also ring hollow. And nobody

22
who had suffered from the political realities of Europe would indulge
in the highflown sentiment that clothes Philo's reasons for returning:
My memories are good ones now. I don't think about the commissars, the
fear, the system, all the things that changed when the Russians came . . . I
particularly remember the peppers lying around the edges of the square -
red, orange, yellow, green, and all shades in between, all sunset and forest
colours,... on a summer evening after the market. (Pause.) That's what you
are giving back to me. (J59)
Yet there are many subtleties of characterization which lift the script
above cloak-and-dagger melodrama. Taking a hint from Edmund
Wilson's The Wound and the Bow, Stoppard has seen that personal
sympathies, not political loyalties, are the crux of the Philoctetes
legend.
At this point in his career, Stoppard was probably content to make
his script craftsmanly and marketable. An earlier play, This Way Out
with Samuel Boot, from 1964, had been rejected and, in synopsis,
appears to have been much more adventurous. 26 Samuel Boot,
another of Stoppard's stubborn individualists, wants nothing to do
with money. His younger brother, Jonathan, is compulsively acquisi-
tive: "There's no out. You're in it, so you might as well fit. It's the way
it is. Economics." Undeterred, Samuel decides to steal his brother's
hoard of trading-stamps and give them away; as he does so, a
scrambling mob of housewives tramples him to death: "He was a silly
old man, and being dead doesn't change that. But for a minute... his
daft old crusade, like he said, it had a kind of dignity." After that
script had been turned down, Stoppard's agent, Kenneth Ewing,
advised him to "stick to theatre. Your work can't be contained on
television."27
Chapter 2

Now you see him

Undaunted by his setbacks with television, Stoppard had other irons

in the fire. Three short stories appeared in 1964, the year Samuel Boot
was rejected, as part of Faber and Faber's Introduction 2: Stories by
New Writers. These short pieces are like nothing else in Stoppard's
repertoire, though certain ideas will reoccur later. Stoppard has
always been a self-cannibalizer, adapting and refining his thoughts. A
hopeless, raw pain caused by an unyielding woman, moral questions
about the responsibility of journalists, these themes will crop up in
The Real Thing, Dirty Linen, and Night and Day. The second story
even reflects the dejected ambition of a twenty-seven-year-old, un-
published, little known, and unlikely to be otherwise. Years later, in
reply to a query about his habit of steering away from personal
feeling, Stoppard replied smoothly (but feelingly?), "Well, I don't see
any special virtue in making my private emotions the quarry for the
statue I'm carving. I can do that kind of writing, but it tends to go off,
like fruit. I don't like it very much even when it works . . . Let me put
the best possible light on my inhibitions and say that I'm waiting until
I can do it well."1 Early in his career, in stories which could not
expect a wide readership, Stoppard here lets his guard down.
The most haunting of the three stories, "Reunion", is a mood
piece in which an unnamed man and woman recover a moment's
empathy, only to go separate ways. Its precise notation of external
detail and the way one of the characters searches to express an inner
confusion owe something to Hemingway, particularly to stories like
"Cat in the Rain". The rise and fall of emotion between Stoppard's
antagonists provides an objective framework for a similar rise and fall
within the male character, whose strivings we are invited to share.
Having loved and lost, the man experiences a grief, an ache, a
panic ("it") which threatens to unbalance him: "It kept coming like
the sea, never falling back as far as it came" (121). To break the
silence between himself and the woman, he tries for a careless
jocularity; "He watched and there was nothing, and paused." He
tries again; "He watched and there was nothing." Upon his third
attempt at idle chitchat, "He watched."2 The woman finally reminds
him that he came there uninvited. Her comment had been meant as a
rebuff, but he clings to those words as some sort of opening. She has
said something, so he attempts to establish their reunion on an "old
friends" basis. Her empty, agreeable, stone-walling remarks and the

24
way the man precisely notes the kitchen in which they sit and "the
new thickness of her ankles, thighs and body" (presumably she is
pregnant and so belongs undeniably to her husband) act as a counter-
weight to his self-pity, so that the man's sentimental agony builds
under continual outside pressure like a coiled spring. This tension is
extremely effective.
While he tries to keep the jokiness going, she cuts through to
basics: "He'll be back soon" (122). He considers smashing the milk
bottle that stands inconsequentially upon the table. Such violence
would be like screaming "the word" in the silence of a public library,
"and he would be all right". Back on the surface, he pushes beyond
pleasantry, asking if things are better than when the two of them were
together.
"You're sorry for yourself", says she. He agrees, and when he
reaches out to touch her she stands away. In defence, he launches his
ideas about the word "which if shouted at the right pitch and in a
silence worthy of it, would nudge the universe into gear" (123). The
idea grows as he contemplates violating the silence of the reading-
room at the British Museum. She reacts to that with vague amuse-
ment. His pain, "it", falls back farther than before, and he is encour-
aged to elaborate: you cannot shout "Love" in a crowded room,
"What do you suggest?" Entering the game, she posits "Fire!" so
that, feeling their togetherness, he laughs and marches round the
kitchen building idea upon idea. Perhaps the word would not be an
English one. So out comes a stream of nonce words until, unable to
check himself, he plunges back to the real purpose of his visit: "I do
love you . . ."
Touching her, trying to push back the pain, he veers desperately
into a fiction about the way artistic types like her husband beat their
wives and starve their children, and on into how he misses her doing
the things he remembers her doing, but especially "you in bed"
(124). Instinctively, she glances towards the window for her hus-
band's return, even though she only looks out onto rooftops. "We
could be very good. . . . We nearly were", he urges (125). She
recommends "a marvellous affair" with some girl. In one last throw,
he tells her "[her husband] isn't coming back . . . ever . . . I'm not
going away, ever", to which she politely agrees until, finally, she tells
him to "shut up". The tide of feeling wells up; his body disconnects;
to count numbers or yell out "the word" would no longer help him:
"only murder would stop it now, and it took a long time, stairs and
streets later, before he got a hold on it again, without, as always,
having murdered anybody".
The simplicity of this situation has puzzled those commentators
who look twice before accepting their Stoppard "straight" or who
misread the jokes that the man erects to cover up his feelings. Trying
to make the woman behave as "old friends" do, the man succeeds in
reaching a moment of shared laughter, only to ruin things by confes-
sing how he really feels towards her. Stoppard may have learnt from
his American mentor how to construct a mimetic prose whose struc-
ture follows the emotional ebb and flow between his two characters,
but the realism points to the genuine pain of a young man on being
turned down for someone else, and he handles that truth cleverly by
allowing us to emote with the man while exposing his self-indulgent
attitudinizing. "Reunion" is essentially dramatic, presenting a situa-
tion and its subtext. It also introduces the first in a procession of
bewildered, lovelorn males and, more quirkily, of unreachable
females, that stretches from here to Jumpers and on into the last Act
of The Real Thing,
The other two stories derive from Stoppard's life as a journalist.
"Life, Times: Fragments" projects Stoppard's own feelings (in
1963) on being twenty-six/seven and going nowhere as a writer.
Earlier he had transposed Bolt's Jim Cherry, who balked at rejecting
a safe job in exchange for his dream, into George Riley, who has
taken the plunge but has not found a route to success. Here, in one of
a series of fragmented scenes, the " I " lolls on a Spanish beach: "I was
sitting up to my navel in sea when I remembered I was not twenty-six
any more, and whatever it was I'd been waiting for slipped by then,
between waves, as quickly as that. I was twenty-six and biding my
time and when the next wave came I was twenty-seven and losing"
(127).
The fragments alternate between an " I " and a "he" narrator to
convey the sort of fantasy an unrecognized young writer might very
well indulge in: rejection slip after rejection slip - just wait till I'm
dead, then some critic will discover me and make his reputation.
Arrogantly dismissing all the modern world's great writers - "the
models are no good any more, we've had all that, we're on our own
now" (128) - he leans towards his lady, who takes somewhat longer
to remove the day's make-up than he does to destroy the literary
canon. He whispers, " 7 am -1 feel - seminal!' and she, getting up,
faceless for the dark, said, 'No, do you mind if we don't tonight. I've
run out of the stuff.'" This scene plunges into bathos with a Stoppar-
dian extravagance, and the piece ends with a comically vengeful hit at
unappreciative publishers and critics.
Atfifty,the persona, "the oldest sub in London", remembers how
his lady left him almost thirteen years before and, Ros-and-Guil-
like, he embarks on a parodied Lord's Prayer: "Lead us into sensa-

26
tion and deliver us from libel ..."(129). Then in self-parody he adds,
"You should see me. I am drowning with the panache of someone
walking on the water. That's not bad. I could slip it in somewhere.
When people ask me what I do, I say I'm a writer." But without public
acceptance no one can call himself a writer. Wishing he had found a
publisher and unsure about God, "for a long time he compromised
by praying at his typewriter". However, after the umpteenth rejection
slip, he falls on his knees: "And the Lord heard him and He sent an
angel to the writer as he knelt, and the angel said, 'The Lord thanks
you for your contribution but regrets that it is not quite suitable for
the Kingdom of Heaven.'" In the concluding fragment, someone
finally reads his work and "could not put it down" (130). A famous
critic is the first to find the writer's suicide note: " ' I have dis-
covered the body', he added, swiftly ransacking the furniture, 'of
his work.'" As a consequence, both he and the dead writer acquire
fame.
Where these fragments turn the frustrations of a free, but so-far-
unsuccessful man into a comic, liberating fable, "The Story" consid-
ers a theme which Stoppard will return to more than once: the
responsibility of the press. 3 This piece, the most conventionally
structured of the three, creates an ironic contrast between a repor-
ter's single-minded concern over the day-to-day workings of his job
and its cost, in human terms, to the person whose story he reports.
Jack, the narrator, describes one of his weekly visits to a neigh-
bouring court of law. His Runyonesque insider's jargon, as he details
the relationship between the Suny the paper he works for, and the
wire services to whom "we phone over anything good that breaks", is
shaped into an off-hand, matter-of-fact prose in the manner of
Truman Capote.4 In the course of the morning, a man comes before
the judge for interfering with a little girl while teaching her to swim.
Jack starts to jot down the particulars, then dismisses the whole
incident: "you can't do much with an indecency, at least not in the
Sun, and a two-par filler on someone outside the circulation area is
neither here nor there because you can't mention the kid's name or
anything" (13 2). He almost changes his mind when he learns that the
accused, James Blake, is a master at a famous school, "but I couldn't
be bothered" (133).
Back in the city, Jack bumps into Diver, the local Press Services
man, and chances to mention the indecency case and the school
Blake taught at. Diver suggests he puts out a couple of paragraphs,
which was nice of him since that meant Jack would "get paid what
was going" (134). So he phones a filler through to Press Services,
pops a variation of it into the Sun's overnight basket, "to cover
myself", and sends a third version to International-Express. By early
evening, his wire-service story "had reached the local daily in Blake's
area", and they phone Jack for more details, as do several of "the
boys" from the national tabloids. The next day, Blake's case was in
most of the newspapers, and a week later he was in them again,
having killed himself by jumping in front of a London tube train.
About a month later, a few small cheques arrived in payment for the
story: "I don't know what I spent [them] on" (136). These events
happened two years ago, and though Blake's suicide preyed on Jack's
mind for some weeks, "finally I got rid of it" (131). But Jack is not rid
of it, and seeing Diver standing on the same street corner brings it all
back. His story comes out from those guilt feelings, even if, as a
reporter, he would not admit that. So each reader has to decide for
himself about the moral issues in the incident.
The anecdotal nature of this last piece would translate readily into
film. Stoppard sold a script to ITV, and^4 Paragraph forMrBlakewas
screened in October 1965. The publication of these three quasi-
autobiographical stories, together with his radio and television plays,
were gaining him a modicum of public acceptance. A publisher's
note, outlining the success of the writers who had been included in
Faber and Faber's first anthology, predicted similar success for the
five authors selected for Introduction 2. They had "a very reasonable
chance of establishing themselves among the more interesting novel-
ists of the future" (9).
Stoppard then secured a contract for a novel from a second
publishing house; the book was published in 1966, the year of If
You yre Glad, A Separate Peace, and the original version of Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern. As he awaited the latter's student premiere, "I was
very light-hearted about the whole thing... there was no doubt in my
mind whatsoever that the novel would make my reputation, and the
play would be of little consequence."5
Lord Malquist and Mr Moon6 is Stoppard's most ambitious work
prior to Jumpers (1972), so it is not surprising that he should have felt
his future would lie in the success of that novel, especially since no
professional company seemed interested in Rosencrantz and Guil-
denstern at the time. Stylistically, the novel represents the culmination
of six years' exploration and experiment; thematically, it contains all
the ideas from the previous plays and short stories. Stoppard had
wildly shaken up the kaleidoscope of his personality to present his
most intricate and characteristic design to date, and how we view that
pattern depends on the book's many reflecting mirrors. What we see
from one angle looks entirely different from another. The novel
builds out of, and ultimately offers a commentary upon, ways of

28
looking at life. In the manner of the radio plays, structure and style
combine to force us to experience those shifting perspectives in
ourselves, and the book proves all the more disconcerting because in
its two hundred or so pages we can never rely for long on any one
perspective.
The novel's opening section, "Dramatis Personae and Other
Coincidences", as that title suggests, thrusts towards the reader a
diverse cast of characters who seem to have no logical relationship to
each other. Stoppard goes out of his way to make them as unlikely a
combination as possible and emphasizes that disparity by describing
them in a pastiche of styles, each element of which stands in glaring
contrast to its neighbours. We come upon them in medias res, as the
self-regarding, dandified Lord Malquist dismisses the human race
with a mere flick of an aphorism: " 'When the battle becomes a farce
the only position of dignity is above it', said the ninth earl (the battle
raging farcically beneath him)" (8). Moon, his amanuensis, unable to
extricate himself so carelessly, has difficulty in concentrating. He
scribbles down garbled fragments of Malquist's polished phrases as
they ride along Whitehall in a coach-and-pair. Already we have two
perspectives: Malquist's egotistical pronouncements and Moon's
inept account of that sermonette, distracted as he is by an inner voice
which keeps on questioning him. The two also react differently to the
people who press against the coach: Moon adopts an expression he
thinks suitable to a respectful populace; Malquist stares at them
blankly until a fat woman emerges from the crowd, hurls "a tight
roll of paper, loose end flying", and falls beneath the carriage
wheels.
This all seems like a comic rerun of St Evremonde's coach ride in
Dickens'^ Tale of Two Cities. We are back in the eighteenth century)
as Malquist arrogantly throws a handful of shining gold pieces into
the street and his frightened horses bolt towards St James's Street.
The fat lady lies supine in their rear: "Breeding . . . a lady does not
move." Then we are jarred into a new focus by Malquist's studied
theatricality; fondling one of the coins "and stripping off the gold
tinsel, he popped the resultant chocolate into his mouth" (12). Still
more unsettling is the undisguised transition to the next sequence
where two cowboys, bristling with narrow-eyed antagonism, ride
towards each other in a broad parody of second-class Westerns that
flounders into bathos when "LJ. [for Long John]" Slaughter cannot
control his ambling mare whom he keeps on calling "boy". Only a
dedicated aficionado could be expected to trace the oblique connec-
tion between the cowboys and Mr Moon. "Slaughter was a left-
handed gun." In the movie, Left-Handed Gun, the main character,

29
emerging from the saloon for the final shoot-out, cries out to his rival,
"Moon . . . Moon!"7
These cowboy banalities then jolt into a description, tight-lipped
and Hemingwayesque, of a lion stalking "a white woman, neither old
nor young, and she had lost one of her shoes" (13). And this is
followed, again without warning, by what seems to be some sort of
Christian allegory until the "dark man with thick matted curls that
hung down till they became a beard" (14) dismounts to kick his
donkey in the genitals, hops round to hit it between the eyes, then
sticks his fist under his armpit to dull the pain, whereupon "the
donkey turned to look at him with an air of christ-like forbearance"
(15). Jarring as these combinations are, certain details within each
episode also confound our expectations: nothing is what it seems to
be. This is particularly true of the next sequence, in which Jane is
described, in purple Barbara-Cartlandese, "sitting at her toilette, as
she called it in the French manner, dreaming of might-have-beens".
Tricked by that turn of phrase, we envision a former world, London
at "the height of the Season", and our golden heroine sighing in her
boudoir. A rider approaches; Marie, the French maid, announces
Monsieur Jones; the weeping Jane begs her to tell him she is not at
home. Only after the importunate suitor has shot away the lock do we
realize that Jane sits on the toilet, and Romance comes crashing down
with the bathroom door.
Then, having returned us to Mr Moon (still interviewing himself),
Stoppard describes the journey of the runaway coach so as to link the
previous episodes into a more coherent shape, although why Moon
should clutch a bomb and ride in a pink carriage through rows of
parked cars has still to be divulged. The coach swerves right
(shouldn't that read "left"?) along Piccadilly, and a protesting wall of
oncoming traffic parts before it as a woman totters out from the
colonnade of the Ritz Hotel and into Green Park: " 'Laura!' shouted
the ninth earl. Tull yourself together and go home!'" But Lady
Malquist falls to the ground; "a long yellow animal" emerges from
behind a bush, sniffs at her, and runs off: " 'Rollo!' shouted the ninth
early joyfully... 'she's found Rollo.'" Plunging against the one-way
traffic of Park Lane, the coach sends two taxis careering into a bus:
"From the ensuing fragmentation of glass and steel there bolted,
with a completeness and an air of instant creation that suggested to
Moon divine responsibility, a donkey with a white-robed rider sitting
on its back" (21). Eventually, the galloping greys pull up beside a
third horse tethered to the railings of a house in a mews off South
Street. In the drawing-room lies Jane who may, for a moment, be
taken for Malquist's mistress. But the elegant house is Moon's, the

30
lady his wife, and the new puzzlement also his as he sees her
stretched semi-naked upon a couch beside a kneeling cowboy, Jasper
Jones, "rubbing cream into her left buttock".
If Moon never knows whether to believe Jane's story about having
bruised herself when she fell in the bathroom, the reader never can
be quite certain about what goes on chez Moon. "Dislocation of an
audience's assumptions is an important part of what I like to write",
Stoppard once told an interviewer; "I'm fascinated by the corres-
pondence between easy stereotypes and truth." 8 Jane shares her
name with the busty blonde heroine of a comic-strip which ran for
years in the Daily Mirror. The cartoon shows Jane in the tightest of
clothing or more usually in little or nothing; enticing though she may
appear, she herself behaves with an innocent disregard for appear-
ances. For his Jane, Stoppard elaborates upon the possibilities of this
stereotype. At first she appears less than innocent, calculating the
effect of her dishabille upon her visitors, and later she is discovered in
a number of compromising situations with Malquist. On the other
hand, her apology "that you should find me in this awfully undone
state" (22) may be more innocent than its wording, and Malquist may
in fact be testing her right breast for cancer, reading her fortune from
the creases in her navel, or sharing the simple pleasures of a hot bath.
What is certain is Jane's childlike nature. She also had a "terrible"
family and suffers from epilepsy, the throes of which are made
to appear like erotic frenzy. So her behaviour may be the result of
sexual frustration, or a way to gain attention, or simply childlike
innocence; whatever the case, the novel implies that the truth of her
character is somewhat sadder than the outwardly comic stereotype
suggests.
The comedy surrounding Marie has no such undertones. Stop-
pard plays with the naughty-postcard image of the French Maid to
point up the deceptiveness of words as well as appearances. Moon's
feelings towards her veer between the avuncular and the lascivious:
" 'I'm glad you're living in my house because you are so - simple.' In a
minute he would have to eat her. 'I mean, you're [sic] breasts are so
little and - ' That is not what I meant at alPJ (27). But Marie is not so
"simple". Moon answers the phone to a man enquiring about her
advertisement: "French lessons. Corrective." Oblivious to the possi-
bility that this may be a prostitute's euphemism for sexual punish-
ment, Moon tells him that Marie is not available (74). When the man
asks if anyone else is there, Moon suggests Jane, although she only
knows the French she learned at school; at this, the caller insists that
"I'm all right, don't you worry" (not someone from the police). When
Moon asks the caller's name, the man, after a garbled attempt,
plumps "fiercely" for Brown, and we recall Moon's earlier memory
of the friend at school who used to make indecent phone calls:
One of his victims cunningly pretended interest in some obscene suggestion
and asked for the caller's name, and Smith blurted out, "My name is
Brown." There was a nuance in that which Moon had tried to pin down for
years. (54)
The deceptive oddities of language fascinate Stoppard, too.
Marie, who actually spends half the novel lying dead beneath a
couch, is at one point accused of being a voyeur:
"My dear Jane, we were sitting right on top of her. She could not possibly
have seen anything to afford her any gratification, unless she's a foot-
fetishist."
"She was listening," said Jane.
"An ecouteusel What a deliciously subtle refinement!" (48)
Sounds and sights prove so ambiguous at South Street, what with
"uncles" arriving to see Marie and a General who wants to take
photographs "at the usual rates", that they convince the donkey-man
(if not the reader) he is in a brothel.
Much of the novel's verve evolves from the fun Stoppard has with
stock characters and situations, subverting those hackneyed images
and his readers' expectations: "What I like to do is take a stereotype
and betray it All my best characters are cliches."9 L. J. and Jasper,
it turns out, are not cowboys at all; they dress that way, as do several
other clones, to represent "the Hungriest Gun in the West man with
the porkiest beans straight out of the can" (158). But in having both
of them play out that persona for real, Stoppard entertains us with
every conceivable permutation of the Western while tripping up
these two guns-for-hire with the ineptitude of their actual non-
cowboy selves. The pair "mosey" through London, vie for the
favours of "Fertility Jane", and talk (when they remember) with an
excruciating Texas drawl, but their saddle-bags bulge with cans of
beans, their maladjusted spurs play havoc with their inside legs, and
their aim is inaccurate, though lethal, during their final hilarious
shoot-out in Trafalgar Square. They also view the novel's other
peculiarly dressed characters as potential interlopers on their sales-
territory: "I don't care what you're selling, just piss off" (22).
Apparently there are other salesmen at large in London. The fat lady
who falls victim to Malquist's equipage recognizes the ninth earl as
"Mr San, the Toilet Tissue Man, and I claim the five pounds". In
that she is mistaken, for Mr Moon, in his dazed wanderings, stum-
bles upon a second pink coach with "a roll of pink toilet paper lying
on the seat" (149).
 The novel also admits more serious reasons for exploding a
stereotype. To satirize the way prepackaged images so often lead to
prejudice and bigotry, Stoppard creates O'Hara, Malquist's
mustard-liveried coachman, out of a number of contradictory cliches
whose collision defies all stock response. Having heard Malquist's
remarks about his servant's cockney wit, Moon has unconsciously
prepared himself for either a Sam Weller or, given the fact that
O'Hara is Catholic and smokes a stubby pipe, someone "Irish, boozy
and fat". O'Hara's defiantly music-hall-Jewish idiom disturbs Moon
less than the sudden discovery that the coachman is black. Caught off
guard by the collapse of all his presuppositions, Moon feels the way
he used to as a schoolboy, after football, when he would find himself
stuck half in and half out of his tight sweater and fighting to find some
air-hole. In similar panic, he pours out a torrent of racial insults
which are themselves the cliches of white hatred and fear. Then,
pulling himself together, Moon apologizes:
"If I'd had time to prepare my words I would have given the other side too. I
can see both sides . . . I distrust attitudes . . . because they claim to have
appropriated the whole truth and pose as absolutes. And I distrust the
opposite attitude for the same reason." (52-3)
But this Jewish-accented black Irish Catholic has his own pre-
judices. Taking one look at the Risen Christ, he ignores the latter's
stage-Irish patois and pronounces him "a Yid". Christ's Reincarna-
tion has convinced himself of his identity because, though he does
not fit the picture-book image of a tall, blue-eyed Jesus, "a class of a
Russian of the name ofJosephus" (he confuses the Jewish historian
with Joseph S[talin]?) described Him as "a little dark feller... with a
hook nose and eyebrows that met in the middle" (40). He also claims
to have the stigmata. Though his palm is unscarred, he screams when
Moon presses it with his thumb. So his claim may be true or it may
not be, or perhaps the Risen Christ was once one of the two thieves,
or one of the many anonymous thousands crucified by the Romans,
or "Then again, it could be fibrositis" (41).
Because of the novel's many deceiving mirrors, it would be a
mistake to see Mr Moon as a self-portrait. Although Stoppard has
admitted "I'm a Moon myself",10 he endows his protagonist with the
same irony that colours his other characters. On occasions we move
into Moon's mind and so get nearest to him, and many of his thoughts
express views that Stoppard himself has subscribed to in
interviews,11 but we are also distanced from him by a self-
dramatizing Angst that makes him a figure of fun. Moon is like Gladys
Jenkins in having glimpsed the void; he too cannot look away nor can
he cope with that vision. Moon's particular trouble is "the multi-

33
tude". Overwhelmed by a feeling of people and things multiplying
and expanding, he awaits the moment when modern civilization will
go bang. So he clutches his mad Uncle Jackson's home-made bomb,
determined to fight fire with fire and bring the world to its senses
before it reaches its own explosion point. Stoppard objectifies
Moon's profusely bleeding heart by having him accidentally cut
himself on tins or broken glass so that, battered and bloody, he
hobbles into Trafalgar Square where his idea of a ballooning creation
which must eventually pop comes true in a comically literal way. As
the bomb reaches the end of its twelve-hour time fuse, Moon hears a
music-box tinkling the National Anthem; out of his uncle's toy comes
an enormous balloon: "printed across its girth in black letters which
expanded with it, a two-word message - familiar, unequivocal and
obscene". Go-odsave- the music-box reaches Queen and the balloon
explodes: "A few people, obscurely moved, began to applaud" (165).
Moon, then, is inadequate and paralysed, a comic exaggeration of a
certain aspect of his creator, particularly evidenced by their shared
delight in arguing both sides of an issue: "But I take both parts . . .
leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues, refuting myself and
rebutting the refutation towards a truth . . . And you never reach it
because there is always something more to say" (53). I2
In Lord Malquist, Stoppard argues the other side of many of
Moon's attitudes, but both characters present half-truths and both
parody Stoppard's own ideas. For the ninth earl, the multitude lack
shape: "I long to impose some aesthetic discipline on them, re-
arrange them into art" (10). Whereas Moon considers he stands for
"substance" in opposing the ever-proliferating awfulness of man-
kind, Malquist retreats above the common herd into Style, a posture
which exaggerates into egotistic dilettantism Stoppard's tongue-in-
cheek remarks about his own stance as stylish dilettante. Compared
with his creator's distrust of polemics - "I must stop compromising
my plays with this whiff of social application . . . I should have the
courage of my lack of convictions"13 - Malquist's non-commitment
stems, not from a knowledge that all attitudes are relative, but from
the fact that "I am not frightfully interested in anything, except
myself." Malquist is a hollow man. Though on occasion he can talk
like a Yellow Book aesthete as, for example, when he discusses the
colour scheme of various prospective coachmen, his contempt for
humanity marks him as a relic of the ancien regime. If Moon feels too
much, Malquist considers emotion a breach of good manners:
"Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the
chaos" (21). However, behind that pose, Falcon, Earl of Malquist is
as rapacious as his Christian name suggests; but his emotions are

34
aroused only by his desire to stamp his mark on the English language,
as Lord Sandwich or the Duke of Wellington did, so that his studied
calm ruffles when the newspaper reports of his collision fail to
describe his coach as a malquist. The ninth earl represents the stylist
as victimizer and predatory egotist.
Viewed as a whole, the novel spins off on too many tangents.
Stoppard finds great sport in trying on different hats, exuberantly
switching from style to style, but he often pursues a joke for its own
sake.14 For instance, Moon, in search of a bottle of Scotch for Lady
Malquist, comes across Birdboot, the butler, ironing The Times.
When the latter protests at Moon's raid on a locked cupboard in the
pantry, the two burst into a quick parody of P. G. Wodehouse (133).
At times like these, Moon seems too self-assured and self-
consciously literary to square with the earnest, confused bungler who
has got no farther than the first line of his history of the world.
Moon's role in the novel makes consistent sense, but his voice
becomes difficult to place since it frequently overlaps with that of the
omniscient narrator, and this presents a major problem.
Nevertheless, Stoppard does see the need for strong central
threads to hold together the web of conflicting viewpoints. One of
these is the state funeral of Winston Churchill, during which all the
principal characters unintentionally tangle with each other in Trafal-
gar Square. Although the statesman is never actually named, the
crowds gathered outside the dying man's house in Hyde Park Gate
and the description of the procession itself reflect the events of
January 1965. Those mourning crowds confirm Moon's vision of
sprawling humanity, and on the day of Churchill's death, Malquist,
writing to confirm Moon's appointment as biographer, sees the
passing of an age when history was shaped by dedicated men of
action:
"For this reason, his death might well mark a change in the heroic posture -
to that of the Stylist, the spectator as hero, the man of inaction who would not
dare roll up his sleeves for fear of creasing the cuffs." (79)
It is on the afternoon of the funeral that Moon is blown to pieces by an
authentic anarchist.
The streets and parks of London, between Moon's house off
South Street and Malquist's in Queen Anne's Gate, also provide a
unity. Characteristically, Moon, with his passion for order and sym-
metry, ponders the relationship between one triangular area of land
and another: "the labyrinthine riddle of London's streets might be
subjected to a single mathematical formula, one of such sophistica-
tion that it would relate the whole hopeless mess into a coherent
logic" (122). Malquist sees only the passing landmarks of himself:

35
the shop where he bought his braces; South Street, home of Beau
Brummell. But the main effect of Stoppard's meticulous topography
is to create a surreal counterpoint between the realistic, detailed
landscape and the extraordinary figures who people it. London also
reminds him of one glorious pun, so he makes Moon hobble past
"the statue of Napier who captured Sind and sent back the message
Peccavi [I have sinned]" (151).
A third motif, taken both directly and by implication from T. S.
Eliot, weaves its way across and under the novel's surface. In burles-
quing certain lines from "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock",
Stoppard links Moon's stumbling protests against his world to the
confusions and anti-heroics of which Prufrock is the modern
archetype. Moon is himself partially aware of the parallel:
(That is not it at all,
that is not what I meant at all.
But when Pve got it in a formulated phrase, when I've got it formulated,
sprawling on a pin, when it is pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how
should I begin . . . ?)
And how should you presume? (23-4)
Later, while his bomb's time-fuse ticks away, he remembers with
ironic appropriateness a line from The Waste Land: "Hurry up please,
it's time." Alerted by these quotations, the reader makes still further
connections. Moon's bomb represents his own attempt to squeeze
"the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some overwhelming
question"; but whereas Prufrock does not dare to put that question
into words, Moon has either been asked the wrong questions all his
life or cannot find the right words to answer the overwhelming
question. Though "he would be presumptuous" (24), daring to press
the time-fuse, he is still beset by "a hundred visions and revisions"
because of the arbitrary nature of reality. And as he dances attend-
ance on Lord Malquist and Jane, bleeds his way across London to
retrieve Lady Malquist's lost shoe, or joins the crowd at Churchill's
funeral, Moon comes to typify Prufrockian inadequacy: the "atten-
dant lord" who is not Prince Hamlet but "almost, at times, the Fool".
The Waste Land, too, has a general relevance to Moon's vision of a
chaotic, degraded universe, and Stoppard's piecing together of
quotation and parody could be considered a comic equivalent of
Eliot's technique. Particular details from the poem also are reflected
in the novel: the crowded city, Lord Malquist's fortune-telling, Lady
Malquist's neurotic boredom, Jane's seduction in a punt on the
Serpentine, the three pistol shots that thunder out in Trafalgar
Square. But all these borrowings and distortions have been worked

36
into Stoppard's own version of a sliding world in which all truths are
relative and where eyes and ears deceive.
Lord Malquist and Mr Moon is his first walk on the water, but by
early 1967 Stoppard's name was still not one to conjure with. The
novel had sold only a few hundred copies,15 the plays had not been
seen on the London stage, and after the Royal Shakespeare Com-
pany had let their option lapse on Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are
Dead, Stoppard's agent had agreed to release the script to an Oxford
student group who wanted to perform it on the "Fringe" of the 1966
Edinburgh Festival. What happened next reads like a Stoppard
scenario, for what at first looked like one thing turned out to be its
opposite:
The play was done in a church hall on a flat floor so that people couldn't
actually see it. There was no scenery, student actors. The director didn't
show up. Someone else filled in. I turned up for thirty-six hours and tried to
put a few things right. It went on in some kind of state or other. . . . l6
The production opened to tepid reviews, but on the Sunday, Ronald
Bryden of the Observer singled it out as an "erudite comedy, punning,
far-fetched, leaping from depth to dizziness . . . It's the most brilliant
debut by a young playwright since John Arden's." 17 Had Bryden not
had the acumen to see through to the text despite the performance's
inadequacies, then, according to Stoppard, "I would have been said
to have failed as a writer, with the same text. . . It's a nonsense." 18
Within a week of that momentous review, the National Theatre had
acquired the rights to the play. After six years of trial and error,
Stoppard achieved "overnight" success with the opening of the
London production in April 1967.
Since then, the play has been the subject of all sorts of critical
interpretations, notably as a statement of existential or absurdist
intent or as a serious critique of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and those
views have led to what might be called the Catch 22 of Stoppardian
criticism: his theatrical fireworks masquerade as important ideas; his
important ideas are trivialized by theatrical trickery. The fallacy
behind this comes from supposing that frivolity and seriousness are
incompatible opposites (and Stoppard has always sought to unite the
two) or, in the particular case of Rosencrantz, to mistake the farcical
framework (derived from Waitingfor Godot and Hamlet) as the play's
serious thesis. What Stoppard does is to exploit the comic potential
of Ros and Guil's situation in Hamlet, a confused paralysis most
cogently expressed in modern terms by Estragon and Vladimir's
circumstances in Godot, in order to arrive at a statement about
death that is both serious and of universal application.
The reason such a strategy proves so difficult to come to terms

37
with lies in the inadequacy of language. 'A play' has come to be
understood as a very different experience from 'to play', which has
overtones of an escape from serious business. And that distinction is
particularly prevalent in Anglo-Saxon society, which separates the
serious business of culture from the mindless pleasures of popular
entertainment. Yet it is perfectly possible to play with ideas to serious
intent - scientists and publicity men even make that their business -
just as 'to play with' someone has different shades of meaning
depending on whether the players are footballers or political oppo-
nents. Similarly, in Stoppard's work, games are not superficial, either
for the author, his characters, or his audience, and Rosencrantz stands
poised between both terms when described as "a serious play".
In that context, the genesis of Rosencrantz proves instructive. To
cheer Stoppard on the drive back from an abortive conference that
saw the refusal of Samuel Boot, Kenneth Ewing happened to remark
that he had often wondered which king of England received
Claudius' letter commanding Hamlet's destruction; keeping to the
Shakespeare canon, was it Lear or Cymbeline? By the end of the ride,
Stoppard was playing with the idea of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at
the Court of King Lear.19 Some weeks later, Stoppard took up resi-
dence in West Berlin as the recipient of a Ford Foundation grant and
developed that playful "What if Ros and Guil were to meet...?" into
a one-act comedy which was given a single performance at the end of
his six months' tenure. Encouraged by his colleagues to pursue the
idea, Stoppard expanded the play into two Acts on his return to
England. Like Mr Moon, who discovered that straightening his tie
was "the culminating act of a sequence that fled back into pre-history
and began with the shift of a glacier", Stoppard found himself
moving steadily backwards into the two courtiers' history in order to
explain their arrival in Britain:
The interesting thing was them at Elsinore . . . By this time I was not in the
least interested in doing any sort of pastiche, for a start, or in doing a criticism
of Hamlet - that was simply one of the by-products. The chief interest and
objective was to exploit a situation which seemed to me to have enormous
dramatic and comic potential - of these two guys who in Shakespeare's
context don't really know what they're doing. The little they are told is mainly
lies, and there's no reason to suppose that they ever find out why they are
killed. And, probably more in the early 1960s than at any other time, that
would strike a young playwright as being a pretty good thing to explore. I
mean, it has the right combination of specificity and vague generality . . .
That's why, when the play appeared, it got subjected to so many different
kinds of interpretation, all of them plausible, but none of them calculated.20
What he did intend, he explains in the same interview, was "to
entertain a roomful of people" with the combination of the two

38
courtiers and the events at Elsinore; to do that, he sought "to inject
some sort of interest and colour into every line, rather than counting
on the general situation having a general interest . . ." That last
remark discloses the lure of his fatal siren, for the play is overloaded
with comic business and is consequently too long, but though the
entertainment appears unrelenting until the last few minutes, it does
not trivialize Stoppard's ideas.
One of the pleasures of a game is to pit oneself against a set of rules
or conventions. The rule book here is Hamlet, and everyone knows
the game except Ros and Guil, for should there be anyone in the
theatre unfamiliar with Shakespeare's play, Stoppard's title supplies
him with the crucial information. Ros and Guil are dead, even before
the play begins:
PLAYER: There's a design at work in all art - surely you know that? Events
must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.
GUIL: And what's that, in this case?
p L AYE R: It never varies - we aim at the point where everyone who is marked
for death dies.
GUIL: Marked?
PLAYER: Between "just desserts" and "tragic irony" we are given quite a lot
of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone
about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as
they reasonably get. {He switches on a smile)
GUIL: Who decides?
PLAYER {switching off his smile): Decides? It is written.21

But though the two courtiers know they are part of a game, they have
not read this particular rule book; all they know is that they have been
picked as part of the team.
So when we come upon them they are somewhere on the road to
Elsinore, unsure as to directions, in the middle of a game of their
own. But even this coin-tossing, while granting them some sense of
purpose, defies the rules by which they expected to play when Heads
comes up for the seventy-fifth time. This astonishingly simple image
presents what seems to be a chance-ridden world and immediately
distinguishes the one courtier from the other. Ros "is nice enough to
feel a little embarrassed at taking so much money off his friend" but
is not at all surprised at this unusual run of Heads (7). Guil, on the
other hand, "is well alive to the oddity of it", and the chasm which
those thoughts open up in front of him fills him with dread. To allay
that fear, he searches somewhat despairingly for a logical pattern that
will pull the coin-tossing back under the known rules; "One: I'm
willing it . . . Two: time has stopped dead . . . Three: divine
intervention" (10-11).

39
 From their point of view - though Ros directs more thought to his
toenails - the progress of their lives has no causal connection; they
remember "a royal summons", but what comes next? When logic
fails, Guil instigates a number of other games with which to bridge
the chasm. Falling back on their intelligence ("being of so young days
brought up with" a Prince), they try abstract word-play - anything to
prove they have control over events. But they are not in control.
When the Player and his troupe meet up with them, he confirms their
feeling of being participants: "I recognized you at once . . . as fellow
artists" (16). Once in Elsinore, other players come at them from all
directions. Oddly, the pair know how to play, responding to their
parts in the Shakespearean dialogue, but they do not know what they
are playing. Eventually, like Gladys or Alfred's Constance, they
prefer not to choose. Finding themselves with Hamlet on the boat to
England, they can safely float with the tide, holding their position, as
Guil puts it, "until the music starts" (72). But then the music does
start. At the sound of a band, the theatrical players pop out of their
barrel, the unknown game continues, and the boat has become a trap:
"our movement is contained within a larger one . . ." (89).
From their own little corner, in which one thing obstinately refuses
to lead to the next, Ros and Guil share the predicament of the two
tramps in Waiting for Godot. But their world is not in fact an absurd
one. Because we enter the theatre knowing the outcome of Ros and
GuiFs lives, the audience share the viewpoint of Godot - whoever he
is! In the Beckett play there can be no answers; Godot may or may not
exist and may or may not arrive; we know no more about him than do
Vladimir and Estragon. In the Stoppard play, life only seems absurd
because of the limitations of one's own particular angle. The audi-
ence who know Hamlet know the game Ros and Guil have to play and
are assured, as is Shakespeare, that "There's a divinity that shapes
our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will." Nevertheless, as part of
his game plan for Rosencrantz, Stoppard dangles a second rule book
before us, the script of Godot, at the same time that he invites us to
perceive the differences between his pair of attendants and Beckett's.
For the latter, time has stopped still, at least until Act 2, when
Vladimir sees the leaves on the tree and recognizes Estragon's dis-
carded boots and Lucky's hat. By the end of the play, Vladimir has
acknowledged the truth in Pozzo's remark about being born astride
the grave and, knowing that "we have time to grow old", is prepared
to go on. But whereas Godot presents us with an entrapping circle, or
a spiral at best, Rosencrantz is linear. Ros and Guil may sometimes
behave like their alter egos, but a known end, execution by the British
king, lies in wait for them, and the fact that a royal summons has

40
led them from one step to the next gives their death a kind of
sense.
Also the games they play while waiting for that end are not simply a
means to fill time, and here Stoppard resolves a problem that Godot
fails to answer. While, from a superior viewpoint, our little lives may
seem purposeless as we busy ourselves between birth and death,
from our own point of view that busyness seems both purposeful and
genuinely diverting. Consequently, Ros and Guil are far more articu-
late and intelligent than their counterparts in Godot. Admittedly the
two lords have been to the right school, but they also reflect our idea
of the joys we find between womb and tomb. It is crucial to the
meaning of the play that we should recognize both of them as fellow
human beings, and the major problem with the parallels Stoppard
constructs between his own play and Godot occurs when he has them
forget their own names. In Beckett, the characters can answer to any
name because a crazy world has robbed them of a sense of identity,
but from an empirical perspective, when ordinary people feel so
threatened and lost they tend to cling to their individuality; one's
name is the essence of that self. So although the confusion between
Ros and Guil also makes sense in terms of Shakespeare's text, since
they are non-entities to the King and Queen and (in Stoppard) even
to their former companion, Hamlet, that they should forget their own
names fails to ring true.
Stoppard uses Godot as part of the game he plays with the audi-
ence, juxtaposing its rules with those of Hamlet. Until one under-
stands that intention, Rosencrantz may seem to be Beckett diluted and
sentimentalized; it has none of Godofs taut spareness. But in the
theatre we respond almost totally to the garrulous niceness of the two
courtiers. We laugh at their confusion, from our omniscient vantage
point, but we also acknowledge ourselves in them, and what starts out
as an amusing evening at the expense of two friends ends with a sense
of personal loss. That final empathy is essential if, after all the game
playing has ended, we are to experience their deaths for ourselves:

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over . . .
Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing
more . . . the endless time of never coming back . . . a gap you can't see, and
when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound . . . (90-1)

It has often been argued that in making his pair so likable Stoppard
has been unfaithful to Shakespeare's concept. In Hamlet they are
mere henchmen who betray their past friendship with the Prince,
though they are too transparent ever to pose a threat to him. So
expendable as to have been omitted from some productions of the

41
play, so colourless as to have become theatrical bywords for anonym-
ity, if we think about their personalities at all we can but agree with
Hamlet's verdict: "Why, man, they did make love to this employ-
ment! / They are not near my conscience." Those who are fool
enough to step between two powerful opponents deserve whatever
they get. Villains by association with the corruption of Elsinore,
Shakespeare's pair are at their worst in their first scene with Hamlet,
when they fail to respond frankly to his appeal to "deal justly with
me", and again after the entry of the players with recorders, which
prompts Hamlet to accuse Guildenstern of thinking "I am easier to
be played on than a pipe". To achieve his own more attractive ends,
Stoppard concludes his Act i just as Hamlet first greets the pair, and
when we return after the interval we hear only the final phrases of that
interview. He omits the second episode completely, although some of
the recorder lines are transposed to the sea voyage. Having estab-
lished the convention whereby episodes from Hamlet come and go,
Stoppard does not actually break the rules of his game; instead, he
shows Shakespeare's home team playing away.
Though Ros and Guil can never be at home, we are their suppor-
ters, and it is through them that we come to feel what death is. We
know they must die as must we, but like us they behave as if that were
not the case. So inured are we to mortality that we have erased the
moment when we first understood. As the Player tells Guil, "Relax.
Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question-
ingyour situation at every turn" (47). Yet when they do think of death
they can only do so in terms of the living. In his jokey way, Ros
rehearses the irrational fears of us all:

I mean, you'd never know you were in a box, would you? It would be just like
being asleep in a box. Not that I'd like to sleep in a box, mind you, not without
any air - you'd wake up dead, . . . (50)
As events finally close in on them, their reaction is a human "Why
me?" They voice the self-pity we also feel regarding "the endless
time of never coming back". We shall miss us.
Death is terrifying because it rarely makes sense. If we can per-
ceive a pattern then there are certain consolations or platitudes:
"light goes with life, and in the winter of your years the dark comes
early". But when death seems arbitrary we can only react with a sense
of injustice and fear at the reminder of our own vulnerability. We
know all this, and Stoppard does not pretend to teach us anything. He
plays with ideas we usually put away from us and then makes us live
through "the absence of presence". When, after some three hours,
Ros and Guil simply disappear and the entire stage immediately

42
lights up to reveal the final tableau from Hamlet, we care nothing
about those noble corpses and are angered by the final two
Shakespearean speeches in which Ros and Guil are dismissed in a
single line. This is death's "human position", the sense that things go
on without regard to one's own important dramas. As Auden's
"Musee des Beaux Arts" puts it:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: . . .
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
Behind the humour of Rosencrantz lies a genuine compassion, and
the subtlety with which Stoppard works upon his audiences' emo-
tions lifts the play's ideas out of the commonplace. In Hamlet, the
skull beneath the skin becomes a metaphor for the corruption of a
court where "one may smile, and smile, and be a villain". In Stop-
pard's play, death is an abrupt exit from one's own drama into a place
incomprehensibly other, and the theatre itself becomes a metaphor
for that. "Faith in one's uniqueness dies hard", says Mr Moon, and
Ros and Guil, summoned to play parts they cannot predict, are made
self-consciously aware that they are players on a stage, and their
desire to remain so "dies hard".
Guil's first line, after five calls of "Heads" from Ros, immediately
implants that theatricality: "There is an art to the building up of
suspense." And at points throughout the play Stoppard breaks our
sense of illusion to remind us that we are in a theatre watching actors.
For example, after first meeting Hamlet, Ros and Guil discuss "his
illuminating claim to tell a hawk from a handsaw... When the wind is
southerly" (41). Seeking for their bearings, in several senses of the
word, the pair move down to the front of the bare stage; Ros licks his
finger, holds it up to the air, and the two stare out at the audience. In
that embarrassing pause, we experience the anomaly between an
empty, indoor stage and the demands the actors make of it. From
where they stand, the auditorium "doesn't look southerly"; from
where we sit, Guil's ramblings around the stage-space, as he wonders
about the direction of the sun, do not look as though they happen in
the open world. As the pair then make clear, the only wind comes
up through the floorboards, stages are notoriously draughty places,
and any lingering sense of illusion vanishes when, after a lengthy
silence,

43
 (. . . ROS leaps up and bellows at the audience)
ROS: Fire!
( G U I L jumps up)
G U I L : Where?
ROS: It's all right - I'm demonstrating the misuse of free speech. To prove
that it exists. {He regards the audience, that is the direction, with contempt -
and other directions, then front again) Not a move. They should burn to
death in their shoes. (43)

An estranging device like this not only emphasizes the way one's own
drama appears differently to others, and allows us sufficient detach-
ment to consider that truism, but it points up the nature of drama
itself and the oddity in the fact that we should find pleasure in going
to the theatre to watch life and death at work.
Like actors, all individuals need an audience. While waiting for the
other characters to "come pouring in from every side", Ros and Guil
improvise with each other, but were they to find themselves entirely
alone, despite the fact that contact with others leads to a series of
"obscure instructions . . . messing us about from here to breakfast"
(62), their lives would hold no meaning at all. Even though the Player
claims that "We're actors - we're the opposite of people" (45),
Stoppard makes us see Ros and Guil as both actors and people. The
moments of overt theatricality ensure this, as do certain moments
which temporarily halt our sympathies and stop us from entirely
losing ourselves in the pair as people until the denouement. Our
empathy towards them is not a sudden emotional outpouring but a
process in which we give ourselves to them by degrees during the
play, holding back whenever their cries of bewilderment become
overinflated or when they use rhetoric to persuade themselves to
dishonest ends such as allowing Hamlet to go to certain death.
Because of that fluctuating state, ourfinaland total empathy with the
pair is neither uncritical nor sentimental.
These tensions between detachment and attachment are similar to
those which, at any play, allow us to bear and find pleasure in the sight
of death on the stage. The remarkable thing about Rosencrantz is that
it leads us intellectually through all the peculiarities of staged death
yet still causes us to surrender to it emotionally. "There's nothing
more unconvincing than an unconvincing death", says the Player,
and yet if we were to be entirely convinced we would run screaming
from the theatre. We remain there because at the back of our minds
we have agreed to certain conventions, and it is only when those are
broken that the imitation of death becomes un- or too convincing.
What we expect is that the action on stage should have a convincing
level of reality, a delicate balance between the unreal and the too real.

44
Staged death must be clean so that we may see in it a pattern, an
appropriateness, which we rarely perceive in actuality. If there are no
jarring details in the rhythms of the actor or in his dying words, we are
able to emote towards him while remaining subconsciously assured,
under the agreed conventions, that the actor will get up afterwards
and live to do the whole thing another day. If the performance
appears exaggerated in a mechanical way, we detach ourselves com-
pletely and laugh. If it appears bloody, that delicate balance tips
towards complete attachment and we react in horror. However, a
complicating factor, as anyone who has been to a schools' matinee
knows, is that the level of reality differs from one member of an
audience to another. Hamlet offers a good example of this. Claudius
brings to the performance of the play-within-the-play his own
perceptions; he is the only member of the court who has experienced
murder "i' th' garden", and so he finds the players' imitation too real
and calls for lights.
A further complication stems from the actor and the way he
presents death's picture. To enable an audience to remain safe in
their seats, the actor must present death neatly. He must achieve a
degree of objectivity; that is what rehearsals are for, so that, while he
dies, a part of him consciously draws death in lines that seem both
elegant and substantial:
GUIL (fear, derision): Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't
death\ (More quietly) You scream and choke and sink to your knees, but it
doesn't bring death home to anyone... You die so many times; how can
you expect them to believe in your death?
PLAYER: On the contrary, it's the only kind they do believe. They're
conditioned to it. I had an actor once who was condemned to hang for
stealing a sheep - or a lamb, I forget which - so I got permission to have
him hanged in the middle of a play - had to change the plot a bit but I
thought it would be effective, you know - and you wouldn't believe it, he
just wasn V convincing! It was impossible to suspend one's disbelief -
and what with the audience jeering and throwing peanuts, the whole
thing was a disaster* - he did nothing but cry all the time - right out of
character - just stood there and cried . . . (61)
The condemned actor, suspended from his rope, could not feel
objective; unable to suspend his belief in what was about to happen,
he performed without the artifice that would have made his death
seem real to his audience. The ironies of that naturally appeal to
Stoppard, for here again point of view is everything. The credibility
of an acted death depends upon the perceptions that both the actor
and each member of the audience bring to it.
Consequently, as Guil becomes increasingly aware that some
disaster awaits him, he grows less tolerant of the actors' played-out

45
versions of death which do not square with his new perception of its
reality:
No, no, no . . . you've got it all wrong . . . you can't act death. The fact of it is
nothing to do with seeing it happen - it's not gasps and blood and falling
about - that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's
all - now you see him, now you don't, that's the only thing that's real: here
one minute and gone the next and never coming back - an exit, unobtrusive
and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until,
finally, it is heavy with death. (61-2)
Death for him means the pain and loss to those who survive. In Act 3,
after having read the letter which condemns him to death, Guil
experiences the pain of his own abrupt and final exit with an "inten-
sity which squeezes out life . . . and [his] blood runs cold" (89) with a
terror he thinks no actor could convey. In rage, he pushes on the
dagger he has been holding to the Player's throat. The actor staggers
and falls, and, for a moment, Guil thinks he has killed him - so do the
audience until the Tragedians applaud and the Player rises to take a
modest bow. In spite of his former protests, Guil believes in the
Player's death because he believes in the dagger, and the Player acts
in a way that answers those expectations; Guil was not to know that
the dagger, a stage property, had a retractable blade. At the same
time, the audience also suspend their disbelief, suddenly caught up
by the actor's skilful gestures, which match their expectations of what
dying should look like. In the daring theatricality of this moment,
Stoppard makes us live through the illusion despite all the play's
reminders that it is just an illusion. Then as Ros and Guil make their
final abrupt exit, "Now you see me, now you - " , we are left to bear the
weight of loss and to experience the pain of absence that Guil has
identified as death.
The whole play exemplifies, in a sympathetic way, the egoism
which causes us to fear death. When we think of dying, we think of
what it is like to lose a friend or of how much worse it would be to lose
ourselves. If death is absence, absence is also a kind of death: Hamlet
has disappeared, so he is 'dead' as far as Ros and Guil are concerned,
or they are, from his point of view (86-7). The collision between the
muddled striving of Ros and Guil and the purposefulness of those at
Elsinore dramatizes that sense of life's going on without us which
makes the thought of death so painful. As the pair stumble their way
through the court, they try to obey Claudius' vague instructions
concerning Hamlet, "glean what afflicts him". To do that effectively,
they try to pick up whatever clues they can in order to feel themselves
masters of the situation - secure at the centre of their lives. But the
other characters keep on coming at them from the wings, talking

46
purposefully, making demands on them, leaving them with the feel-
ing that the centre of events lies elsewhere, and it is that feeling that
the audience are left with at the play's end, when Ros and Guil are
dead and the survivors at Elsinore only concern themselves with state
affairs.
The action on stage punches home a sense of injustice which we
share with the two lost wanderers. Lighting changes and the sudden
shifts from the contemporary to the Shakespearean mode lurch us
from one world to another in as unsettling a way as that experienced
by Ros and Guil. That we, who know Hamlet, are able to interpret the
invading action may make the situation somewhat less terrifying, but
we too are jolted by the Player's all-knowing attitude (in the original
production at the Old Vic his tone and manner were peculiarly
sinister), and by the alarm that grips Ros and Guil when the charac-
ters from Hamlet bear down on them, smoothly and determinedly,
and then sail off again. The pair simply cannot control the traffic,
even when they act like policemen:
ROS : (... wheels again toface into the wings) Keep out, then! I forbid anyone to
enter! (No one comes — Breathing heavily.) That's better... (Immediately,
behind him a grand procession enters . . .) (5 2)

Yet in spite of the seeming inconsequence of their lives and our

sympathy with the pair's bewilderment, from a wider angle Rosen-
crantz presumes a coherent world. In Elizabethan tragedy, death had
greater significance than the Player (via Wilde's Miss Prism) would
allow: " T h e bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what
tragedy means" (58). Hamlet's death makes sense, unlucky though it
is, because it is the logical outcome of the step-by-step progression of
the previous action: "There's a design at work in all art", as the
Player also says. Tragedy explains death, making it part of a coherent
pattern which one rarely perceives in actuality, and Hamlet's death, if
undeserved, proceeds in a satisfying way out of a hard-won self-
knowledge. Unable to cope emotionally with his father's murder and
his mother's o'erhasty and incestuous marriage to the murderer,
Hamlet has busied himself with elaborate plans to test the ghost's
veracity and Claudius' guilt. But by the final Act, though Horatio
offers him a perfectly reasonable excuse to avoid the duel with
Laertes, Hamlet has come to the realization that he must meet the
fate that cried out to him when the apparition of his murdered father
first appeared. H e goes to his death open-eyed, with a new and
genuine sense of himself: ". . . if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all". Stoppard's characters also have an appointment
with destiny: "You are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. That's

47
enough" (89). But their journey brings them no new knowledge.
Though they succumb to their fate, they have no idea why they do so:
"To be told so little - to such an end - and still, finally, to be denied
an explanation . . ." They are little, like us, and are more moving,
because more pathetic, than the heroic Hamlet (Ros considers tales
of royalty "escapism"), but they are not tragic figures because they
cannot meet death on their own terms. Yet though their deaths are
neither satisfying nor heroic they are not absurd, for the play offers an
explanation to us, if not to them.
Just before Guil disappears for ever, he unknowingly approaches
the truth: "There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where
we could have said - no. But somehow we missed it" (91). He is
wrong if he thinks they could have said "no" to the messenger who
summoned them or to Claudius' requests; had they done so they
could not have been Ros and Guil. But Stoppard adds two details
which point up their blindness and give us a reason for their deaths
beside the fact that, as Ros and Guil, they had to die. In Act 2, the
Player's troupe rehearses for what in Hamlet is the play-within-the
play. However, their dumbshow extends beyond "The Mousetrap"
to include a mime of Shakespeare's "closet scene", in which Hamlet
stabs Polonius, and a commentary whereby the Player explains how
the Prince is then sent to England under the care of "two smiling
accomplices" who arrive, minus Hamlet, with "a letter that seals
their deaths" (59-60). As the tragedians who play the two spies stand
ready for their execution, Ros and Guil stare at them, unable to
understand why the two, who are dressed in identical coats to theirs,
should seem so familiar. The fact that the troupe performs all this
with an easy fluidity surrounds these future events with a fatal
inevitability, a feeling that deepens as the well-known incidents from
Hamlet criss-cross the rehearsal. At one point Ophelia and Hamlet
burst in to enact the last lines of the "nunnery scene", and as the two
prophetic accomplices mime out their execution with splendid effi-
ciency, the stage lights dim slowly to a blackout, then voices off-stage
break the silence with calls for lights, calls which in Shakespeare
break off the actual performance of "The Mousetrap".
The rehearsed quality and the dramatic telescoping of the action
enable Stoppard to have things both ways. Ros and Guil's destiny
appears unstoppable, yet as they stare at their doubles we are shown a
road not taken. As Guil once said, this combination of "the
ordained" and "the fortuitous" creates a "kind of harmony and a
kind of confidence" (12). Doomed as they are, the pair still seem free
to choose, and their refusal to seize that opportunity is nowhere more
apparent than when they read the letter condemning them to death.

48
In adding this detail, Stoppard provides them with an unequivocal
moment when they could have said "no". But though they now know
their destiny in no uncertain terms, they refuse to act on that know-
ledge and stand "appalled and mesmerised" as the tragedians sur-
round them in "a casually menacing circle" (89).
Although he sports with the techniques of the absurdists, Stop-
pard's universe is not their mechanistic one. Ros and GuiPs loquacity
may occasionally seem glib, but the play contains at its centre an
affecting exploration of what death means. The master stroke is the
creation of the Player, a world-weary actor-manager down on his
luck because of the current vogue for child actors, and willing to
stoop to any scurrility in order to make a living. By having him meet
Ros and Guil on the road to Elsinore and by making the troupe
stowaways after their play has displeased Claudius, Stoppard creates
the circumstances for an ongoing debate about life as drama, a debate
whose very theatricality persuades us emotionally as well as intellec-
tually.

49
Chapterj

Victims of perspective
The idea for The Real Inspector Hound,1 the one-act play that opened
in London in June of 1968, also originated during the years of
apprenticeship. Many of the jokes have a Goon-Show stamp, or they
parody familiar cliches. Though Stoppard began the play while still
in Bristol,2 the final version develops in purely farcical terms the
ambivalence between truth and illusion that informs both LordMal-
quist and Rosencrantz. But where the novel's many distorting mirrors
create some narrative confusion, both plays work clearly in and out of
a known structure, in this case the uwho-killed-thing" plot best
exemplified by Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, which was then a
mere fifteen years into its West End run. "I have enormous difficulty
in working out plots, so actually to use Hamlet, or a classical whodun-
nit . . . for a basic structure, takes a lot of the pressure off me." 3
Hamlet itself is a sort of thriller and has its Mousetrap scene. Lord
Malquist's "slim and useless volume bound in calf and marked with a
ribbon" investigates Hamlet as a source of book titles ("Her Privates
We") and Moon thinks "something is rotten" with modern life.
Hound has its two drama critics Birdboot and Moon, whose names
echo the novel and whose attitudes are not all that far removed from
the First Player's Boot and from Ros and Guil's full and half Moon.
Yet all Stoppard's characters up to this point appear to have some
freedom of choice. InHoundthey are puppets pulled by the strings of
the whodunnit or, in the critics' case, by an overwhelming ambition.
The play was always planned as an entertainment, a "nuts-and-
bolts comedy"4 and nothing more:
I originally conceived a play . . . with simply two members of an audience
getting involved in the play-within-the-play. But when it comes actually to
writing something down which has integral entertainment value . . . it very
quickly occurred to me that it would be a lot easier to do it with critics,
because you've got something known and defined to parody... If one wishes
to say that it is a play about something more than that, then it's about the
dangers of wish-fulfilment.5
Stoppard confesses his own fondness for the play because it is "very,
very carefully constructed... and I knew that I wanted it somehow to
resolve itself in a breathtakingly neat, complex but utterly compre-
hensible way."6 Two drama critics attend the first night of "a sort of a
thriller" with a patently meaningless plot. But as the action, such as it
is, unfolds, the two impose their own meaning upon the hand-me-
down materials. The sensual Birdboot emerges from his box of Black
Magic to savour the charms of the actress playing Felicity, to whom
he has promised a critical puff in return for services rendered, but
finds himself bowled over by a different actress so that he associates
himself with Simon in the play, who also rejects Felicity for Cynthia.
Moon, the second-string critic of another national daily, sits brood-
ing about the removal of his senior colleague. He therefore sees the
murder plot as peculiarly inviting, even though "it is not enough to
wax at another's wane" (19).
Halfway through the play, a phone rings on the empty set; Moon
answers it, and both critics become part of a play-within-the-play,
which then loops back to what went on before. In a sense, nothing in
the second half of Hound actually happens, since the actors repeat
their lines but with an appropriateness that seems new in the context
of the critics' projected desires. Accordingly, the set is intended to
implicate the audience; in the theatre, we also have a tendency to
bring our own meanings to a staged action. At the outset, Stoppard
calls for "a huge mirror" in which the audience seem to see them-
selves: "Impossible. However, back there in the gloom - not at the
footlights - a bank of plush seats . . . one of which is now occupied by
Moon" (9). But Stoppard is nothing if not pragmatic: "it's always
worked much better with the critics at the front".7 The mirror image
does not matter much anyway; if the critics sit downstage with their
backs angled towards the audience, they will still suggest the front
row of a group that includes us.
The problem with Hound, and why it seems the least satisfactory of
all Stoppard's plays, is that the theatrical whodunnit tends to be
transparently banal in the first place, so that to parody its emptiness
simply restates the obvious. The plot of the actual Mousetrap appears
so contrived and its characters such ludicrous stereotypes that audi-
ences have for years taken the play as a comic send-up of the genre,
so all Stoppard's burlesque does is to underline the banalities in a
rather schoolboy manner.
The Christie play, set in the Great Hall of Monkswell Manor,
begins with a number of melodramatic sound-effects followed by a
radio report of a murder, regarding which the police "are anxious to
interview a man seen in the vicinity, wearing a dark overcoat, light
scarf, and a soft felt hat". 8 Some minutes later, Giles arrives home
and removes his overcoat, hat and scarf. It goes on like that, trailing
blood-red herrings and heavy-handed coincidences in its wake. So a
parody cannot achieve much in the way of witty or subtle insights.
Stoppard adds Mrs Drudge, the turbanned charlady, to switch on the
radio and react in overdrawn alarm to the announcement that an
escaped madman, described in the vaguest of terms, has been seen
near Muldoon Manor: enter a man "answering this description....
He is acting suspiciously." Christie's hotel guests are cut off from
outside help by a snowstorm; all Stoppard does is to multiply that
lumbering device by surrounding his manor with "desolate
marshes", "treacherous swamps", and a "fog... shrouding the cliffs
in a deadly mantle of blind man's buff", though he does make the
point more wittily through Mrs Drudge:
Yes, many visitors have remarked on the topographical quirk in the local
strata whereby there are no roads leading from the Manor, though there are
ways of getting to it, weather allowing. (16)
His most successful lampoon occurs at the entrance of Inspector
Hound who has reached the Manor on swamp boots: "These are two
inflatable - and inflated - pontoons with flat bottoms about two feet
across" (30). This ridicules the not-so-directly outlandish arrival of
Christie's Detective Sergeant Trotter on skis.
The silliness of all this, until the two critics enter the scene, is
relieved occasionally by ripples in the dialogue:
SIMON {to MAGNUS): So you're the crippled half-brother of Lord Muldoon
who turned up out of the blue from Canada just the other day, are you?
It's taken you a long time to get here. What did you do - walk? Oh, I say,
I'm most frightfully sorry! (25)
And the arrival of Hound occasions a splendid sequence of verbal
and visual booby-traps (30). But generally the watchword here is
"nothing succeeds like excess" as Stoppard doubles and triples the
cliches which, presented singly and straight, would still create a
preposterous situation for the critics to inflate with their individual
ambitions.
The comedy surrounding the two critics is more successfully
pointed. Both Birdboot and Moon provide a range of styles to parody,
as opposed to the whodunnit's creaking plot, and Stoppard's ear for
rhythms, turns of phrase, and idiom renders their intellectual preten-
sions in lethal detail. Birdboot writes for a popular audience: "[The
author] has created a real situation, and few will doubt his ability to
resolve it with a startling denouement For this let us give thanks,
and double thanks for a good clean show without a trace of smut"
(35). Moon directs himself to elitist readers, even when he examines
Birdboot's colour slides of a review which has been blazoned in neon
outside a theatre: "Large as it is, it is a small masterpiece - 1 would go
so far as to say - kinetic without being pop, and having said that, I
think it must be said that here we have a review that adds a new
dimension to the critical scene" (15). And as he draws attention to his
own cleverness by evoking a host of influences upon the ridiculous
play, from Dante to Dorothy L. Sayers, he completely overlooks
Agatha Christie. With the two critics, Stoppard can reveal the comic
pretensions of their personalities in addition to parodying their jar-
gon.
Birdboot's desire impels him into Simon's role until the point
where, as his predecessor did, he looks down at the body on the
drawing-room floor. It has lain there from the outset, unnoticed by
the characters in the whodunnit and uncommented upon by the two
critics. The corpse, at stage-front, initiates much comic business as
the characters in the murder mystery steadfastly overlook what is so
apparent to us and what is usually the central piece of evidence in a
thriller. As far as they are concerned there has been no murder for
Hound to investigate, so there is some relief when the Inspector
eventually notices the corpse - "Is there anything you have forgotten
to tell me?" - though his enquiries then revolve around the identity of
the victim rather than the killer. But when, in his turn, Birdboot
chances to look down, he recognizes the corpse as Higgs, the senior
critic whom Moon envies so much, and that moment allows a light-
hearted glance at the theatrical parodoxes so central to Rosencrantz.
The audience has presumed the corpse to be part of the play (as, in a
different sense, they continue to do). The actors in the thriller now
appear to have been purposely avoiding araz/bodyfor, when Simon
looked at it, his surprise and "alarm" might not have been part of the
script. The critics, too, see the body as "really" dead. Shocked
though he is, Moon finds his desires have been realized by Higgs'
death, while Birdboot, catapulted from his fantasy-world by the
discovery, tries to tell Moon 'who dunnit'. But the cliches of that
world envelop him again when, just as he is about to name the
murderer, a shot rings out and Birdboot falls dead.
The mechanics of the farce structure have swept both critics into
circumstances beyond their control. Someone in the play is no longer
play-acting, as Moon, leaping to the stage, discovers his friend is also
really dead: "That's a bit rough, isn't it? - a bit extreme!" Hound does
resolve "in a breathtakingly neat" way when Moon takes on the role
of the Inspector only to be accused of murder by Magnus, who tears
off his moustache to reveal himself, to the actors, as the "real"
Inspector Hound and, to Moon, as his paper's third-string theatre
critic, Puckeridge, whose own ambitions are the last to be fulfilled, as
he shoots his competitor and returns us to a wickedly faithful parody
of the denouement of The Mousetrap: "Yes! - it is me, Albert! - who
lost his memory and joined the force, rising by merit to the rank of
Inspector, his past blotted out - until fate cast him back into the home
he left behind" (48).

53
 But though contrivance is essential to farce, the undisguised
mechanics of the action must appear to be self-propelled along a
mad, logical trajectory. After the two critics enter the thriller, Simon
and the first Inspector Hound can have no place in it, so Stoppard has
them leave the stage to sit in the critics' seats and deliver their own
reviews of the ensuing events. The logic behind this seems tenuous at
best, an actor's revenge upon the critics, and those critiques have not
been sufficiently worked into the escalating plot as further instances
of obsessive wish-fulfillment. In their few comments, the actor-
reviewers tear down the play itself and only fleetingly criticize
Moon's acting. This results in contrivance of a different order: these
two characters appear to be controlled by the playwright's ends rather
than by the necessities of the action.
The play most associated with Hound, since they were revived
together as a double bill in 1972, was also "an attempt to bring off a
sort of comic coup in pure mechanistic terms" . 9 After Magritte,10 first
presented by the Ambiance Lunch-hour Theatre Club in 1970,
depends absolutely on a carefully contrived structure. With no
ulterior purpose beyond the brilliant solution of its own seemingly in-
soluble problems, it has the self-conscious artifice of a Malquistian
equipage. In fact, the puzzles with which this one-act play challenges
its audiences appear as disruptive as the seemingly chaotic collision
of events and characters in the opening chapter of the novel, with the
advantage that in the theatre the conflicting details can all be display-
ed instantly at one and the same time. Hound seems to avoid all
mystery until at least its half-way point, since everyone ignores the
body and we do not realize the irony behind Moon's remarks about
"waiting for Higgs to die. . . . I wonder if it's the same for Puck-
eridge?" (17) or Birdboot's guess as to the villain of the piece: "It's
Magnus a mile off" (27). After Magrittey which has no real plot -
"The activities in this room today have broadly speaking been of a
mundane and domestic nature bordering on cliche" (44) - presents
puzzle upon puzzle in the assurance that "There is obviously a
perfectly logical reason for everything" (32).
We perceive the opening tableau of the play without the means to
connect cause and effect, just as the paintings of Rene Magritte
rearrange ordinary objects, such as a rock, a train, a bowler hat, in
ways that divorce them from their expected roles. But whereas the
play's business is to restore the links in the causal chain, Magritte's
paintings are meant to admit no such resolution:

The images must be seen such as they are... The mind loves the unknown. It
loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind

54
itself is unknown. The mind doesn't understand its own raison d'etre, and
without understanding that (or why it knows what it knows), the problems it
poses have no raison d'etre either.11
Accordingly, Magritte's L'Assassinmenace, the picture which promp-
ted Stoppard's initial tableau, simply presents "the mystery".12
Two large respectably-dressed figures in overcoats and bowler
hats stand on either side of what amounts to a proscenium, which
frames a bare, uncarpeted room. The man on the left grasps a club
whose knob resembles a human knee-cap; the one on the right holds
a net at the ready; both stare abstractedly outwards, although, be-
cause their faces and bodies are angled slightly towards the opening,
they could be listening to movements in the room behind them.
Immediately beyond the opening, to the right, a wooden table with a
simple cloth supports a gramophone into the horn of which a man
gazes as if listening to the record as he leans against the table. Behind
him lies a naked woman on a couch whose shape and unyielding
surface suggests a coffin; a towel draped across her neck isolates her
rather masculine-looking, bloodstained head. Beyond her is another
opening which duplicates the foreground's proscenium; this is
blocked by the grille of a balcony above which rise the heads and
shoulders of three impassive male observers against a background of
mountains. The mystery arises from the peculiar isolation of each of
the figures, linked though they are by the ascending lines of the
floorboards and by a moulding which runs from the front of the
proscenium and right round the room at exactly the height of the
balcony's balustrade. Though the painting has - untypically - a
narrative coherence, its air of brooding quietude disturbs the mind.
Stoppard's picture mystifies but is not mysterious. The room is
also bare, for nearly all the furniture, including "a wind-up gramo-
phone with an old-fashioned horn", is piled up against the door in
the rear wall. At the centre hangs a light with a heavy metal lamp-
shade and, about a yard away, a basket of fruit dangles from another
cord. Mother lies face up on an ironing-board with one foot against
the surface of an upturned iron; she is swathed in a bath towel, wears
a black rubber bathing cap, and on her stomach rests a bowler hat.
Reginald Harris stands on a wooden chair in order to blow into the
lampshade; stripped to the waist, he wears evening dress trousers
under green rubber fishing-waders. Thelma Harris, with elegant
coiffure and dressed in a ball-gown, crawls about on all fours, looking
down at the floor "and giving vent to an occasional sniff". A large
window at the back reveals the helmet, face and shoulders of PC
Holmes; he "might be a cut-out figure; but is not". Though the
narrative links in this picture seem much more opaque, the ensuing

55
dialogue and action reveal in a casual way the logic behind this
ordinary, if eccentric, household.
The Harrises have been practising for a professional dance com-
petition, hence the stacked-up furniture. Mother rests on the
ironing-board because the extra height saves Thelma's back while
she gives the old lady a massage before her bath. Reginald blows on
the light bulb so that he can remove it and plug in the iron for his
dress shirt; he wears waders because he has also had to change the
light bulb above the bath already drawn for Mother. His bowler hat
lies within reach so that he can place it on the fruit-basket once he
removes the bulb, for the fixture's proper counterweight has broken,
scattering metal pellets over the floor; Thelma, who has a cold,
searches for the last of these. However, once the room and its people
have been restored to order and the audience put in the know, enter
PC Holmes and his superior, Inspector Foot, with interpretations of
their own:
FOOT: (without punctuation) I have reason to believe that within the last hour
in this room you performed without anaesthetic an illegal operation on a
bald nigger minstrel aboutfive-foot-twoor Pakistani and that is only the
beginning! (31)
Although After Magritte, like LordMalquist and Rosencrantz, works
towards a rational order beneath life's sometimes confusing surface,
Stoppard does share a kinship with the Belgian painter. Both of them
question the nature of perception. Magritte pictures the impossibility
of knowing, since objective reality, projected as something outside
ourselves, can only be perceived by the subjective sense. Stoppard
constantly emphasizes the second part of that paradox by showing the
way our subjective desires limit or distort our angle of vision. As
Wittgenstein put it:
I ask you, is the subject-experimenter observing one thing or two things?
(Don't say that he is observing one thing both from the inside and from the
outside; for this does not remove the difficulty.)
I can say "in my visualfieldI see the image of the tree to the right of the
image of the tower" or "I see the image of the tree in the middle of the visual
field." And now we are inclined to ask "and where do you see the visual
field?"13
The two also share Wittgenstein's concept of the unreality of lan-
guage, for words can have no meaning apart from the way they are
used. For Magritte, to label the picture of a pipe as u a Pipe" repre-
sents an abuse of language; one cannot smoke it, for instance, and so
he writes "this is not a pipe" under its picture or inscribes "door"
under the picture of a horse. For Stoppard, the meaning of words

56
depends on a learned code which continually blinds us to its inherent
unreliability, as illustrated by the opening fracas between Thelma
and Reginald:
(HARRIS blows into the lampshade.)
THELMA: It's electric, dear.
HARRIS: (mildly) I didn't think it was aflamingtorch.
THELMA: There's no need to use language. That's what I always say.
(II)
Presumably, like the Harrises, Stoppard visited the Magritte re-
trospective held at the Tate Gallery (in 1969). Mother Harris, a
fanatic for the tuba, thought the exhibition was "rubbish": "Tubas
on fire, tubas stuck to lions and naked women, tubas hanging in the
sky . . . if you ask me the man must have been some kind of lunatic"
(37). Thelma's verdict speaks for all of them: "it just wasn't life-like".
But Stoppard himself must have been struck by the theatricality of
Magritte's pictures, which are often framed by stage-wings, and by
the way the painter repeatedly takes up motifs, as he himself does, in
a continuing effort to resolve the technical problems they pose. And
as far back as LordMalquist, Stoppard had toyed with the deceptions
of painted landscapes. Mr Moon looking out of his kitchen window
feels soothed by the gracious prospect of distant hills; later he goes
out only to find himself in a walled yard smelling of rotting garbage.
But this contradiction also has its solution. Moon turns to discover
the kitchen window has been sealed by a huge painting; the label on
the back reads "Panachrome Murals giveyou a New Outlook. Moon was
intensely grateful. Perhaps there was an explanation for everything"
(56).
In After Magritte there are conflicting explanations for everything.
While rearranging "this bizarre spectacle" in their living-room, the
Harrises argue about a one-legged man who hobbled up to their car
as they drove away from the Tate. Each person's picture of reality
bears a different descriptive label. Ironically, in explaining this to
Inspector Foot, who interprets the figure as their accomplice in the
Crippled Minstrel Caper, each person gives one detail that accords
with the actual facts: Reg saw the man in pyjamas; Thelma noted
shaving foam on his face; Mother saw the alligator handbag. Yet none
of these actual facts seems any less fantastic than the distorted ones.
Their muddle also extends from the language they use, since
words like "operation", "practice", and "caper" vary in meaning
according to their context:
MOTHER: Is it all right for me to practice?
FOOT: No, it is not allright!Ministry standards may be lax but we draw the
line at Home Surgery to bring in the little luxuries of life.

57
MOTHER: I only practice on the tuba.
FOOT: Tuba, femur,fibula- it takes more than a penchant for rubber gloves
to get a licence nowadays. (33)
As this passage shows, Inspector Foot's perceptions are further
distorted by personal vanities; like the critics in Hound, he has his own
ambitions. A stickler for detail and precision, he ties himself into
mental knots in his anxiety to have his enquiries fit with a precon-
ceived and complicated theory that will bring him glory down at the
police station. Foot's overbearing determination parodies Joe
Orton's Inspector Truscott, who will stop at nothing, search-warrant
or no, to bring in his man, though Stoppard's version eschews the
self-serving ruthlessness of Loot. Here his policemen, however com-
ically exaggerated, never resort to violence.
Such entangling complications unravel with a smoothness that
makes the farcical details of After Magritte seem utterly inevitable.
Having created a cartoon-like tableau to begin with, Stoppard can
afford to launch his cardboard characters into their arguments about
the one-legged man with the same cut-out artifice: "For some
reason, my mind keeps returning to that one-legged footballer . . . "
At the same time that those arguments escalate, the confusing
appearances in the living-room become grounded in logic; even the
potentially awkward stage-business of returning the furniture to its
normal place is neatly covered by Mother's jaunty tune as she prac-
tises on her tuba. But though the stage picture now makes sense, the
arrival of the Inspector propels the confusions over the Crippled
Minstrel Caper still faster until everyone is in the dark, metaphor-
ically and literally, before the light bulb can be returned to its fixture.
During that blackout, the Inspector unknowingly discloses to us, but
to none of the characters, that it was he who hobbled up to the
Harrises' departing car, and upon that 'illuminating' information the
light comes on again to reveal the characters in another set of
postures, which would seem as grotesque as their earlier ones had the
audience not been privy to the causes behind these latest effects.
Only PC Holmes lacks the means to interpret the new picture. After
entering the room and switching on the light, he "recoils" and the
lampshade descends onto the table (or into the tuba). Like that light
at centre stage, the whole play balances on a fulcrum. As we solve the
puzzle of the introductory tableau so, like a counterweight, the
identity of the one-legged man who hopped up to the Harrises' car
grows more and more mystifying. When that mix-up is solved, the
final tableau, clear as light to us, plunges PC Holmes into darkest
confusion and the stage light also glides downwards to its extinction.
From the early radio plays on into Lord Malquist and Rosencrantz

58
and these two one-act farces, the contradiction between distorting
perspectives pits the characters (sometimes unwittingly) against each
other and involves the audience in a similar counterpoint, perceiving
or misperceiving the action. These ambushes had become second
nature to Stoppard and they now provided him with a way of using
the intimacy of the television camera to advantage.
Teeth, transmitted in early 1967, has a less outlandish logic than his
other farces, but those entrapping perspectives at last allow Stoppard
to impose his personality upon the small screen. He starts by per-
suading us that George is having an affair with his dentist's
receptionist-wife, and then, half-way through, we discover that the
receptionist is George's own wife. However, since George's actual
inamorata does happen to be the dentist's wife, he has every reason to
be terrified of the chair, the drill, and the pincers. In this way, the
script makes farce out of the fears nearly everybody has of dentists,
terrors which the cameras emphasize in close-up. All Stoppard's
early plots, when they are not evolved from other plays, either build
out of joke ideas that are a part of modern folklore, like the human
T I M voice or, in this play, the dangers of offending one's dentist, or
they centre upon a recent event: the first moon landing, the deaths of
Marilyn Monroe and Winston Churchill, the Magritte retrospective
at the Tate. Those ideas then seem to trigger a fantasy which divides
off into many seemingly contradictory directions but which finally
comes together in the neatest and tightest of knots.
The half-hour of Teeth1* begins realistically with the sort of con-
versation one might overhear on a London bus, as the cameras focus
on a Woman ys Own magazine and the eyes of George, the eavesdrop-
per, behind it. As he listens to conspiratorial whispers from two ladies
seated on the couch opposite, we share his view of the dingy waiting-
room, and the two voices become clearer and louder as his concen-
tration on them deepens. Agnes is in the middle of explaining to
Flora how she had thought of killing herself. The word-play suggests
the semi-literate minds of the two women - "Plenty offish in the sea,
I say" . . . "Different kettle altogether" - stuffed with the phraseology
of advertisements and pulp literature: "I wouldn't be here today if we
hadn't been all-electric." But once we notice that George "has been
studying a bra-and-panty ad" in his magazine, this may act as a filter
that colours the way we interpret the next part of Agnes' narrative as
she explains how Jack Stevens burst in on her while she was in the
bathroom, though this slight frisson soon resolves into the play's
controlling motif. Agnes had been caught with her two front teeth out
and, as the toothpaste advertisements proclaim, flashing smiles have
sex-appeal. This prelude ends with a shot of George's "great white

59
smile" in deference to the two women's sudden awareness that he
has been listening.
The audience find themselves the victims of perspective when an
elaborate false trail opens up as the dentist's receptionist enters.
From her surprise at seeing George and from their whispered con-
versation once they are in the ante-room, it would seem that this
smiling Lothario has come to chat up his girl friend after having
forgotten her birthday. The trail leads farther astray when George,
enquiring about her new ear-rings, is told they were a gift from "a
very good friend". "Don't give me that", he replies; "you're a
respectable married woman. It was Harry, was it?" Presumably,
then, they came from her husband, Harry, whom George feels sure
he can play false with his winning smile. The trap at the end of the
trail clicks shut when George makes a grab for the wife, who backs
away anxiously, and through the surgery door comes Harry. Since he
simply smiles and jokes with the embarrassed pair, we wonder how
much he knows as he ushers George into the surgery and the camera
focuses on the instruments of torture, "silent, waiting, ready . . ."
(75). By these means, Stoppard has built up a game of now-you-see-
it, now-you-don't, which will control the rest of the play, putting us as
much in suspense as George is. And the cameras ensure that point of
view, with close-ups of George's terrified eyes as Harry probes away
at his mouth and his treachery.
However, this game of cat-and-mouse starts pleasantly enough,
except that Harry's camaraderie implies that George's life as a
travelling salesman lives up to its stag-party reputation, "lovely work
if you can get it", and his conversation takes on a double edge as he
complains about his wife's frequent absences from home. So much of
what Harry says could either refer to dentistry or adultery as he prods
deeper into George's mouth and situation:
HARRY: You've been letting yourself go a bit, haven't you?
(G E o R G E'S worried eyes)
I'm glad you came in today - this is a serious warning, George; you think
what people can't see isn't happening - but it all comes out in the end.
Your sins always find you out.
(GEORGE'S eyes: HARRY probes.) (77)

These double-entendre* broaden into farce as Harry punctuates his

game with nicks to George's mouth or fiddles with a hypodermic
syringe and a concoction which stains the teeth green but which will
be excellent for George's "condition". Casually mentioning the way
he dealt with his wife's previous indiscretion - "Oh yes. Collins
wouldn't be showing his face around the fair sex for quite a while to
come . . . and a real smiler, he was" (80) - Harry then approaches

60
with a fiendish-looking mallet and chisel only to pass by the terror-
stricken George and adjust the head-rest with a thumping whack.
Eventually, Harry calls for 'Mary', the name of George's wife, and
in walks the receptionist who had seemed to be Prudence. As the
viewer readjusts to that relationship, Harry's torture takes a psycho-
logical twist. While George's wife, Mary, mixes the green paste, the
dentist comments brightly about the odd places salesmen go to. Then
the camera zooms in on George's worried eyes and gaping mouth
while off-screen we hear Harry and Mary flirtatiously adjusting her
new ear-rings. An extensive silence follows, during which George's
eyes swivel as he tries to see what the two are doing. When they come
back into his view, Harry's tie and Mary's white cap are noticeably
adrift, and when Harry, "humming softly", moves to fit the oxygen
mask on George, the picture dissolves back to the waiting-room and
more double entendre:
AGNES: That's it, I wouldn't have a man without them on principle -
FLORA: Because if they've gone already, what'll go next, I said.
AGNES: That's the point.
FLORA: (Pause: sighs.) Mind you, I was sorry. Six months later mine turned
black. I wouldVe had anybody. (88)
Whereupon the door opens from the ante-room into which George is
emerging, "a stricken man". As he passes through, Mary coolly asks
if he will be late again that night, and, since Prudence has her
dressmaking class, Harry wonders "if I could ask Mary to stay behind
a while - as she knows the ropes". Faced with the stares of a
now-crowded waiting-room, George "lets out a thin smile which is
more like a wince. His middle tooth is missing. At this, all the patients smile
at him, as one of their own. All around there are smiles like broken-down
brooms."
No other screenplay from this period depends so neatly on
opposed perspectives or uses the cameras so effectively. In Another
Moon Called Earth (1967), about which more later, and The Engage-
ment (1970), a fifty-minute expansion of Dominic Boot for an Amer-
ican network, the eccentricity and theatricality seem disconcertingly
artificial and tend to overwhelm the screen. The short stage farces
are too frenzied to allow their audiences to linger over the meaning of
those battling points of view. Only in the radio plays does Stoppard
explore the possibilities of the union between farce and philosophy
which Jumpers would eventually ceremonize. Albert's Bridge, broad-
cast in July 1967, like If You 're Glad (with which it was to be paired in
a stage production on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1969), contains
characters who are overwhelmed by their own peculiar vision of
humanity. Three years later, Where Are They Now? suggests, in a

61
strangely moving and more naturalistic way, how most of our pers-
pectives on the past are determined by our need to stay happy in the
present.
Aptly, the protagonist of Albert's Bridge15 had been a philosophy
student and had wanted to stay on at university, "but they wouldn't
have me". During his final vacation he takes a temporary job painting
Clufton Bay Bridge, "the fourth biggest single-span double-track
shore-to-shore railway bridge in the world bar none - " (12). Albert
feels happy there above the crowded town. Although he shares none
of the ninth earl's effete cynicism, he retires from the farce below,
devoting himself to what he considers a work of art. From up there,
the town and its people look like bricks, dots and beetles: "I saw the
context. It reduced philosophy and everything else" (17). When the
town council's Bridge Committee decides upon a long-lasting paint
which will eliminate the need for more than one painter, Albert
applies for that job and dabs away in sublime isolation until his eyrie
is invaded by Fraser, who has climbed there "because up was the only
direction left" (31). Fraser's nightmare, like Mr Moon's, derives
from a ballooning population in a limited world. He intends to jump
from the bridge, but after some time up there everything below seems
ordered and bearable: "each square a function, each dot a function-
ary. I really think it might work. Yes, from a vantage point like this,
the idea of society is just about tenable" (34). Once down in the town
Fraser again feels suicidal, yet when he climbs back up he again
wants to live: "I'm forced up and coaxed down. I'm a victim of
perspective" (37).
There are other intersecting perspectives. In an amusing variant of
the vestibule-door sequence at the beginning of If You're Glad, the
four bridge-painters are first heard clambering down after their day's
work. Their calls to each other, at different distances from the
microphone, grow closer until the men come together in a descend-
ing line. "Dad", who has been doing the job for twenty years, has had
enough and will not be starting again at the other end of the bridge for
a further two-year stint, whereas Albert sees the endless task as a
finite achievement:

DAD: I've spread my life over those girders, and in five minutes I could
scrape down to the iron, I could scratch down to my prime.
ALBERT: Simplicity - so . . . contained; neat; your bargain with the world,
your wages, your time, your energy, your property... all contained there
in ten layers of paint, accounted for. (11)

Back home, Albert's mother views his university career as a waste

of time; he could already have been a trainee executive in his father's

62
factory: "That university has held you back." Nothing practical can
come from a study of philosophy: "You're thinking all the time. It's
not like you, Albert" (16). Up on the bridge, Albert's thoughts are
what make his job exciting, and the impracticality of sliding paint in
behind the rivets is a challenge: "No one will see that from the
ground; I could cheat up here. But I'd know . . ." (10). His father,
"Chairman of Metal Alloys and Allied Metals", wants him to work
his way up from the bottom, but Albert prefers to start up top because
"there are no consequences to a coat of paint. That's more than you
can say for a factory man; his bits and pieces scatter" ( n ) .
Despite his lofty, detached perspective, Albert is no spectator
hero. Gladys, who shares his sense of man's littleness, half wants
Frank to rescue her from that isolation; Brown, painting his murals in
solitude, still cares about the lives of the hospital staff. Albert even-
tually cares for nobody and nothing but his bridge. His detachment
starts out as disarming vagueness; he neglects to tell his mother he
had a vacation and tumbles into marrying Kate, the maid, because he
happened to be still in bed when she came to clean his room. In the
early months of his job, he wants Kate to wheel their baby girl to the
bridge so that he can see them, and he contemplates his assimilation
into society as "the honest working man, father of three... content in
his obscurity" (24). But "don't wave, don't look down" becomes
more than a safety motto as his obsession for the bridge grows. A
comic Icarus - "I'm the bridge man" - Albert comes to see his family
as two more dots. So the baby's rattle annoys him; he starts working
on Saturdays; he is unaware of his neighbours' names.
Kate, a simple soul who wants only Albert's happiness, though that
includes Allied Metals, persuades him to take a holiday. Albert
considers Scotland and the Forth Bridge, but he agrees to go to Paris
where he is just as obsessed:

ALBERT: . . . The pointlessness takes one's breath away - a tower connects

nothing, it stands only so that one can go up and look down. Bridge-
builders have none of this audacity, compromise themselves with func-
tion. Monsieur Eiffel, poet and philosopher, every eight years I'll
scratch your name in the silver of Clufton Bay Bridge. (29)

For Kate "life is all close up" (25); for him it is dots, bricks and
beetles, so he stays up there all night or races off each morning
without a goodbye. Albert never regrets having married Kate, yet
when she takes the baby and leaves him, his mind is on the bridge. As
Fraser remarks when he hears Albert singing away at his work, "Very
nice, very nice. The egotist school of songwriting" (31), and by this
time Albert regards any visitor as a threat, so if Fraser intends to jump

63
he had better do so: "And you're holding me up. I've got to paint
where you're standing" (33).
Albert/Icarus eventually falls because of the Committee's miscal-
culations. Mr Fitch, the City Engineer, loves efficiency as much as
Albert does, "It's poetry to me - a perfect equation of space, time and
energy" (20). Despite the new long-lasting paint, if one man takes
eight years to complete the bridge, "in two years' time he'd only be a
quarter of the way along, so the old paint would be ready for another
coat" (35). Anxious to save his reputation in the town, the Chairman
demands action, so seventeen-hundred-and-ninety-nine painters
are deputed to join Albert and finish the bridge in a day. Albert may
see himself "as the centre" of things, but he had not thought they
would "go to such lengths". From his perspective, the men represent
an army "flung against me by a madman! Was I so important?" (40),
whereas Fraser sees them as the vanguards of an overspilling popu-
lace who, like him, have nowhere to go but up. But, as Albert once
said of the bridge, there are "rules that make it stay up", and the
engineering department has forgotten to tell the painters to break
step. As they march onward, whistling "Colonel Bogey", in a spoof of
The Bridge on the River Kwaiy and their rhythmic steps begin to ring
metallically as they reach the bridge, we hear the sounds of creaking,
wrenching, "rivets starting to pop".
The play spans its sixty minutes of air time with all the logical
simplicity of a (non-collapsed) bridge. Its characters, blinkered or
made grandiose by a particular view of things, rigidly pursue their
individual ends. Despite its rich texture, the main thread of the plot
arcs through the air with none of the diversionary tangents of those
plays which set out to snare the audience along the way. We begin
placed at Albert's shoulder, listening to the close-up slosh of his
paint-brush and the distant shouts of his workmates from various
levels below, then "very close", so that we share Albert's self-
contained happiness as he croons softly to himself. Each ensuing
scene is riveted to its neighbour either by a linking sound-effect or by
an abrupt cross-fade so that the play's forward momentum undulates
with a pleasing delicacy. These transitions telescope the time
scheme, as Albert flies higher in his pride and Kate sinks lower into
despair. Within those clear lines of development, Albert has Gladys-
like soliloquies whose lyricism, while not so metaphysically com-
plex, is particularly suited to the creation of radio's mind-pictures.
Reminiscent of the broad humour and poetic scene-painting
of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, the play seizes all the oppor-
tunities the medium has to offer. Not surprisingly, it won the Prix
Italia (1968) for radio drama.

64
 Having taken the brio style to its limits in Albert's Bridge, Stoppard
switched to a patterned realism in his next play for radio. The
characters of Where Are They Now? (1970) 16 are not cartoon
stereotypes, though they are distinctive social types; consequently,
most of their remarks seem to come from within, pulled out of them
in dialogue which people of that class or occupation might actually
speak. They are no longer propelled by a manic situation or by a
single, heightened obsession. The comic collision of perspectives
still matters, indeed the play is about perspective, but because the
characters no longer collide full tilt into one another there emerges a
subtle interplay of attitudes, none of which can be said to stand as
Stoppard's final statement, and the play contains a range of feeling
that is both wider and more heartfelt than the radio farces and more
penetratingly ambiguous than 'My Is for Moon.
Symptomatically, the engendering aphorism here is not a mildly
diverting idea, like the ceaseless painting of the world's large bridges,
but that "schooldays are the happiest days of our lives", a sentiment
to which many of his audience may feel passionately committed or,
since the play was originally written for Schools' Broadcasting, pas-
sionately antipathetic. To juggle the perspectives, Stoppard sets an
Old Boys' Dinner in 1969 against a lunch scene in that school
twenty-four years earlier. At the outset we hear the hum of adult male
voices which subsides into an expectant silence. An authoritative
voice delivers the Grace, and a scraping of chairs, as the gentlemen
take their seats, leads with no division whatsoever into a young boy's
"Eurgh!" and we are back in 1945 at a table in a school hall, where
the boys are not thankful for the wartime rations they "are about to
receive". By the play's end, that irony has come to include the whole
of their school lives and whether or not the men around the hotel
table should feel "truly grateful" for having had those boyhood
experiences.
As the play moves back and forth across time, we are set wondering
how the boys got to where they now are, and within the naturalistic
limits of the dialogue Stoppard plants one of his booby-traps. The
school lunch involves Mr Dobson, the former Latin master, and
three boys in particular who are referred to, both by him and by each
other, as Groucho, Chico and Harpo. The conversation soon reveals
that Chico's actual name is Brindley, whose older self chats with Mr
Dobson at the beginning of the second scene. However, for the major
part of the play we are kept guessing as to the adult identities of the
other two, although the fact that Harpo murmurs a single "Yes, sir"
during the school scenes and an Old Boy called Gale says one quiet
"No" to repeated attempts to draw him into the adult table-talk

65
encourages us to put those two together and therefore to deduce that
the talkative Groucho has grown up into the voluble Mr Marks. The
device is an aural equivalent of the "find the lady" game Stoppard
plays in Rosencrantz during the pirate episode when Hamlet leaps into
the left barrel, the Player into the right one, and Ros and Guil hide in
the middle one. When the lights come back up after a blackout, only
two barrels remain on stage; the centre one is missing, but out of the
Player's come Ros and Guil while out of Hamlet's comes the Player.
Similarly, the boy we think to be Marks eventually turns out to be
Gale, and until that game resolves itself it ensures that we continually
measure the boys against the men, thus enforcing that part of the
play's meaning.
Brindley, whose identity we do learn quickly, contains no mystery;
in his case, "the boy is father to the man". As Chico, he can always be
relied upon to give Mr Dobson the answer he requires or to trot out
the roots of Latin nouns and verbs on demand. The sort of boy who
delights in precise detail, he readily volunteers whose turn it is to
serve at table or that the rice pudding is bound to have been made
with Klim, a powdered milk-substitute. As the Reverend Mr Brind-
ley, he still defers to "Mr Dobson" and has grown even more precise,
instructing Marks on the appropriate ways to address a vicar, correct-
ing him on English usage, explaining to Dobson that Gale, whom
none of them has met for years, has just returned from Lagos.
The Latin master, too, has simply become more set in his ways. In
Dobson's benevolent sarcasm and donnish wit, Stoppard has cap-
tured that British schoolmasterly habit of always performing to the
gallery, usually at one pupil's expense, in order to display a deliber-
ately cultivated, endearing (?) eccentricity as he scores off Harpo and
invites the boys to share a waggish joke built out of the Ministry of
Food's propensity for using reversed names for their products:

D O B S O N : Nothing wrong with Klim. Fresh from the Ministry of Food's

prize herd ofJersey woes. I have just said something extremely risible -
Root, boy!
C H I C O : Rido - ridere - risi, I laugh! (129)

The reality of this studied eccentricity enables Stoppard to savour the

peculiarities and nuance of language without unnaturalistic exag-
geration. Mr Dobson calls the boys by their nicknames and shares
their slang as part of the school's private world and mode of speech:
he wonders why Anderson did not go to "Staggers [report sick] this
morning", "who's on tucker today", and whether Harpo has a "mog
chit [an excuse note]". At the Dinner, among near-equals, he can
afford a joking reference to his Welsh ex-colleague as "Jenkins the

66
French". At lunch, among lesser mortals, his jokes tend to have a
pretended ferocity which nevertheless contains a genuine dismis-
siveness: "[French] will prove invaluable to you in later life should
you join the Foreign Legion, which most of you will probably have
to" (129).
This ambiguous mixture of bullying and comradeship, ferocity
and concern explains why some boys like school while others do not,
or why schooldays can be miserable to live through but wonderful in
memory. The play shows happiness itself as a relative emotion. A
master's behaviour, however hateful at the time, becomes part of a
private and shared world of slang, nicknames, hard knocks, as one
looks back through rose-coloured spectacles. This is especially
possible if, like Mr Marks, one needs those roseate memories as part
of one's present self-image.
At the Dinner, the "Corpulent Marks" reveals himself to be a vain,
patronizing snob whose limited intelligence flickers behind an in-
sensitive, hearty faqade. Believing himself a connoisseur of the good
life, he commands the waiter to leave the wine near them on the table,
"there's a good fellow", and complains that the menu is "pretty
unimaginative". The bottle contains "pretty poor chablis but I'll have
another crack at it" (125) and "as for the turkey, I wouldn't give it to
my chow" (130). This gives him a chance to explain that he keeps this
dog, "an absolute brute", to guard the "bit of decent silver, you know
. . .", that he happens to own. But that bluff manner only draws
attention to his empty-headed awfulness.
Stoppard injects phrases like "old man" into Marks' patter and
allows him to chortle over their schoolboy slang, which still infects his
adult vocabulary, because Marks has invented for himself the sort of
persona that needs to have had a rip-roaring boyhood. Convinced by
that fiction, he professes genuine shock that Crawford, last term's
head boy, should seem such a greenhorn: "The Upper Henty must
be full of children!" (128). Brindley excuses the remark as "heavily
ironic", but Marks is incapable of that; he sincerely remembers his
schoolboy superiors as larger than life. To some extent we all share
that perspective, though Marks' legend of himself requires that those
who made him tremble should have been kings, like Mr Jenkins with
"his famous Bruiser". Brindley hopes "that sort of thing no longer
exists", but Marks has converted the master's harshness into the
necessary school of hard knocks, and to confirm the legend has sent
his son to his old school.
Through that boy, Stoppard lets us see the nicknames, the slang,
and young Mr Crawford (so out of place and naive at the Old Boys'
Dinner) from an altered perspective. Mr Marks asks Crawford

67
"how's Gerald buckling down?" Crawford wonders whom he means;
Christian names are not the form at school. Marks blunders on;
naturally not, all well-liked boys have nicknames: "You haven't been
accepted till you've got a nickname" (132).True, and not true, since
Crawford, sharing his name with a well-known brand of biscuits, is
sometimes known as "Crackers". In suddenflashback,we hear him
"viciously" reacting to that name and accusing his juniors of being
"wet, stinky boys". Nicknames can be degrading; kings can be
tyrants; schoolboy jargon can itself become an instrument of torture.
The episode after this reveals Gale's identity and makes us also
realize that Mr Marks was formerly as intimidated a "wet" as his son
now is. The ebullient ass who doubts whether "I was actually afraid"
of the fearsome French master once had "the frits" at the mere
thought of French class. Yet Marks does not consciously lie. His son
will probably grow up to be just as expansive about the old school.
Gale, who has sat through this reminiscent talk with singular
reticence, bursts out in bitter criticism upon the Headmaster's rising
to ask the gathering to pay a minute or two's silent tribute to Mr
Jenkins, whose death occurred a few days before the Annual Dinner.
We know that Gale had specifically requested to sit at the same table
as the French master, and now he explains that he has attended this
reunion, after years of absence and refusal "to contribute to the
[School] Magazine's 'Where Are They Now?' page", because he
knows how memory plays tricks with actuality: "I wanted to see if I'd
got him right" (136). In his opinion, the master was a stupid bully: "I
think we would have liked French. It is not, after all, a complex
language" (135).
From the Head's viewpoint, Jenkins was a "selfless worker for the
school" in the twenty years he was French master and after his
retirement. We can read between the lines to allow for the softening
that usually accompanies a eulogy for the dead, when the Head
describes his colleague's "dapper figure, with gown billowing and
moustache brisding" or his dominating baritone in Chapel (134).
"Billowing . . . bristling . . . hurrying... shaming younger men" are
words that could describe a holy terror to those on the receiving end.
Mr Dobson can only wonder why Gale bothered to come there: he
neither confirms nor denies these two views of Jenkins. From his
perspective, to interrupt the Dinner for any sort of tribute is "Ridicu-
lous fuss" since "Every master dies in the twelve months preceding
one Old Boys' Dinner or another - except for that appalling man
Grimes who actually died during one" (126).
With such conflicting memories, Groucho, Chico, Harpo and the
Headmaster might have been at different schools. To highlight this,

68
Stoppard implants a comic subplot, if one may so dignify a single
strand in a thirty-five-minute script. Throughout the Dinner, a
running contretemps occurs between Dobson and an equally elderly
gentleman, also called Jenkins, who sits at the place apparently
intended for the dead French master. Dobson tries to place this man,
who was his junior at school, but fails to understand why the stranger
should say he was a weekday boarder - "No such thing" - or why he
did not belong to a House. For a moment, Dobson is too annoyed to
play his expected self: "You're mad! I may be senile but I'm not
completely loco" (127). Jenkins, equally piqued, complains to his
neighbour that Dobson "must have been a complete nonentity. If he
was there at all" (131). At the end of the evening, those assembled
rise to sing the school song, and, after an introductory chord, Jenkins
sings o u t . . . alone. The piano falters; Jenkins stops: "I say, have they
changed the Song?" He has mistaken the Old Hovians' Dinner for
that of his own "Oakleigh House for the Sons of Merchant Seamen's
Widows" (138).
This outrageous comedy of errors defines the comic extreme of a
range of contradictory memories; Gale's bitterness stands at the
other extremity, and Stoppard carefully relates the two by having the
'false'Jenkins describe his memories to that silent neighbour at table.
The interloper also moves the play from its focus on the French
master's character to a commentary on the nature of happiness itself.
None of the verdicts is precisely Stoppard's own. Gale's diatribe
stands out, owing to the concrete and specific way he dismisses the
dreamdays of Billy Bunter, "the incorruptible Steerforth", cricket
and "your best friend's beribboned sister" with an anguished portrait
of loneliness and boredom unprotected by literary models:
God, I wish there was a way to let small boys know that it doesn't really
matter. I wish I could give them the scorn to ride them out - those momen-
tous trivialities and tiny desolations. I suppose it's not very important, but at
least we would have been happier children, and childhood is Last Chance
Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much. (136-7)
This seems like the play's bedrock of feeling, and its placement just
before the final deflation of the Dobson-Jenkins muddle makes it
something of a climax. Nothing has felt so autobiographical since the
short stories; Stoppard has described his own schooldays with a
similar dislike:
I left school thoroughly bored by the idea of anything intellectual, and gladly
sold all my Greek and Latin classics to George's Bookshop in Park Street. I'd
been totally bored and alienated by everyone from Shakespeare to Dickens
besides... I was seventeen, and it took about anotherfiveyears for me to start
buying them back - not the same books, but books.17

69
That this disaffected youth should turn out to be the most bookish of
contemporary playwrights or that Gale should become a "crusading
journalist" chimes with the ironies of the play's shifting perspectives.
But if the force of Gale's remarks strikes lethally at the sentiments
of the concluding school song which urges all fellow Hovians to
"Spread the flag of Britain / All around the globe! / And the lesson
we have learned / In happy days at Hove", a final cross-fade conjures
up Gale's shouts and laughter as he plays ball "on an open windy field
. . . It is a day he has forgotten, but clearly he was very happy" (139).
He himself had admitted to only one moment of perfect happiness,
and not at Hove either, in prep school as he walked down a corridor,
running a finger along the moulding of a wall:
. . . I mean I experienced happiness as a state of being: everywhere I looked,
in my mind, nothing was wrong. You never get that back when you grow up; it's
a condition of maturity that almost everything is wrong, all the time, and
happiness is a borrowed word for something else - a passing change of
emphasis . . . Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up. (137)
A second aspect of the song is vindicated by Jenkins, who may have
gone to a lesser school - Brindley calls them "the lot having dinner
downstairs" and Marks had dismissed them as "the lower decks" -
but his days there have given him standards to live by. For one thing,
he sees through Marks' attitudinizing. For another, though it would
have been impossible in 1970 not to shudder at the Imperial bravado
of the song, Jenkins' British standards kept him going through his
years in up-country Malaya, and when his England disappeared after
the Second War,
It wasn't home any more, you see, not as I knew it... Once I'd retired and life
was all leave, well I began to feel I was abroad again. Dammit, I was homesick.
(Chuckles) Or schoolsick. I think I came back just to attend this dinner, for
the first time. Like you, I believe. (130)
Jenkins is like Gale. Both men's youth has shaped their lives and both
are aware that memory falsifies, yet both cannot but let it do so.
" 'What is Truth?' said jesting [Thomas]; and would not stay for an
answer." There can be no answer concerning the true nature of
happiness. In 1965, the actual John Gale, a journalist whose reports
on events in Egypt and Algeria during the 1950s revealed the under-
side of Empire, produced an autobiography wryly entitled Clean
Young Englishman. Though Stoppard's Gale makes no comment on
the Imperial theme, John Gale's experiences turned him into "what
they like to call a manic-depressive". Writing cursorily about his own
schooldays, towards which he is generally dismissive, he too remem-
bers them as a sequence of storied events, like the cricket match in

70
which he hit the ball "square off the front foot past point for four: it
went like butter. I have never hit a ball better. Cricket was worth
playing for that shot alone." He notes his disillusion when he moved
up from prep school: "I had believed that all public school boys were
witty, cynical and enlightened, leading dazzling lives . . . the school
seemed a lifeless cardboard sham in comparison with my prep
school." There are no memories of magisterial sadism. When he is
ironic about a master's foibles, though, his critique inevitably turns
into an appreciation of eccentricity:
[The Headmaster] was always kind and gracious to me, but since I was
neither an aristocrat nor a scholar, I was scarcely to his taste. He took each
form once a week, and addressed even the smallest boys as "gentlemen".
After beating a boy he would sometimes offer him sherry.18
Even for this detached observer, looking back after having witnessed
policies that exposed the sham behind imperial benevolence, irony
becomes tinged with sentiment.
Our memories colour and are coloured by the persons we are;
happiness comes at the most unexpected moments. Far from being a
criticism of the school system, Stoppard's play accepts and explores
these ambiguities. Unlike his previous plays, Where Are They Now?
does not demand that its audience make a first leap up to an intellec-
tually amusing or provocative premise. Each character views an
inescapable fact of life with about as much accuracy as his fellows. In
other plays, one character's frantic obsession collides with another's,
which can also sometimes represent the daft systems of society, or all
the characters hold contradictory ideas about a particular event. Like
Rosencrantz and, in its minor way, lMy Is for Moon, this play illumines
the human condition. Here, though, each character seems impelled
completely from within. Only once does Stoppard impose a jokey
aperqu - when he makes Marks giggle after the final Grace, having
had the unlikely thought (for him) that after thanking the Lord three
times a day at school "we lost touch . . . where is He now?" (137). A
small masterpiece, this script implicates the listener beyond the
momentary trap created by the boys' identities. Its tricks of memory
resonate against the truth of our own experience to remind us that we
too are the victims of perspective.
Chapter 4
Trapped in language
At one point in the first Act of Jumpers, George Moore complains to
Inspector Bones about the difficulty he has experienced organizing
the paper he intends to deliver at a philosophers' symposium: "the
words betray the thoughts they are supposed to express. Even the
most generalized truth begins to look like special pleading as soon as
you trap it in language" (46). The idea derives from Wittgenstein's
PhilosophicalInvestigations, but such 'influence' is a complicated mat-
ter. Stoppard constantly reminds interviewers and critics alike that
what a person writes about is largely a matter of temperament. His
novelist friend, Derek Marlowe, commenting on Stoppard's work
habits, gets them wrong:
For Tom, writing a play is like sitting for an examination. He spends ages on
research, does all the necessary cramming, reads all the relevant books, and
then gestates the results. Once he's passed the exam-with the public and the
critics - he forgets all about it and moves on to the next subject. 1

Far from forgetting his homework, Stoppard used it to advantage in

Dogg's Our Pet, while waiting for the first rehearsals of Jumpers, and
would return to that material some years later, transforming Pefs
game-playing into political statement.
In addition, what a writer swots up for his public exam is bound to
have a personal significance. One cannot be sure exactly when
Stoppard began reading the Austrian philosopher, but as early as Free
Man Linda talks casually about there being "two of everyone. You
see you need that, and if the two of him's the same, I mean if [her
father is] the same in the pub as he is with us, then he's had it."
Similar ideas abound in Rosencrantz, in terms of the deceptiveness of
symbols and language. One of the philosopher's thoughts, unpub-
lished at the time of the play, will serve to illustrate the sympathetic
bond between the two thinkers:
A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death.
Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a
hero well, as in the theatre, it means rather being able to look death itself in
the eye.
For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he
himself~ the human being, is the one who has to die.2

Quite independently, this thought delves to the play's emotional

centre.

72
 Throughout his career, Stoppard seems to come upon outside
influences - Beckett and T. S. Eliot were "the twin syringes" of his
early self3 - which confirm ideas he has already been toying with.
Jumpers, for instance, is the result of a lengthy gestation, rather than a
couple of years' reading. Two thematic strands in that play exemplify
this process, and their transformation over the years epitomizes the
way he returns to old ideas and reworks them until he has mined their
theatrical potential.
The relationship in Jumpers between George Moore and his wife,
Dotty, began life in Lord Malquist, and the 1967 television play,
Another Moon Called Earth,4 presents another, closer version. In the
novel, Mr Moon agonizes over the provocative yet equivocal liaison
between his wife and the ninth earl, giving vent to his feelings with a
despairing "I just don't care". In the television play, Bone, like Mr
Moon, constructs human history: "I dissect it - lay bare the logic
which other men have taken to be an arbitrary sequence of accidents"
(93). Sitting in his study he is interrupted by cries of "Wolves! Look
out!! Rape! Rape! Rape!" coming from his wife's room. Penelope,
like Dotty after her, has obviously cried "Wolf!" too many times, for
Bone reacts by criticizing the logic of the outrage she pretends to.
Wolves are unlikely to rape their victims. When Penelope acts out the
rape for her distant husband - "it's too lovely - oh - don't stop - ah - 1
don't care if he comes in - ", Bone "weakens" and storms into her
bedroom (91).
The eccentricity of this first scene demands too much of its
television audience, lulled by the realism of the Bones' surroundings.
Dilettantism needs an equally outlandish vehicle to carry it success-
fully into one's living-room, and the television play suffers from an
uneasy union between cartoon characters and a three-dimensional
setting. In Lord Malquist the surrounding circumstances were im-
aginary though 'real' as we read of them; here, the same ideas sound
less acceptable, given the normality of the Bones' flat. Where Jumpers
will open with an extraordinary tableau which forces its audience to
leap out of everyday reality into the play's particular world, the
television script has no such launching pad, so its dialogue seems to
sputter into madness too precipitously.
A second salvo from what will become Jumpers' battery also mis-
fires in AnotherMoon. Penelope has taken to her bed because the first
man to reach the moon "stood off the world with his feet on solid
ground, and brought everything into question" (92). The lunanaut
has seen "the whole thing for what it is . . . he's made it all random"
(108). In contrast, her husband's historical opus, in which he has
struggled as far as the third century B C, provides a way of "discover-

73
ing the patterns - exposing the fallacy of chance - there are no
impulsive acts - nothing random - everything is logical and connects
into the grand design" (101). The idea of a revolutionary perspective,
which alters everything, goes back at least as far as Gladys Jenkins
who, from her eminence in the Post Office, has seen "such distance,
/ such disappearing tininess so far away, / rushing away, / reducing
the life-size to nothing" (50).
Although Stoppard denied any familiarity with existentialism, the
influence on him at the time must surely have been Sartre's Nausea.
In that novel, Antoine Roquentin has been working on a biography of
the eighteenth-century Marquis de Rollebon (reverse the "de Rol",
change u bon" to its opposite, "mal", add the "quis" and one has
something like Lord Malquist - though a less complicated derivation
may simply be "my lord Marquis"). Despite his having private means
and no personal ties, Roquentin is neither free nor happy; the world
preys on his nerves and creates within him a feeling of vertigo, "the
Nausea". In a universe whose laws are arbitrary, anything is possible;
one's tongue might turn into a centipede, and the thought terrifies
him. The biography had helped him forget his own existence, but he
eventually comes to accept that an unpredictable universe throws the
onus for living upon each individual: "All is free," he discovers, "this
park, this city, and myself."5 Climbing a hill above the town of
Bouville gives him a sudden and new perspective, and his vision is
particularly relevant to Albert's Bridge6 for he, too, sees the people as
little black dots amidst the patterned geometry of the streets below.
The way Albert finds his life's purpose in the artistic symmetry of
steel gently parodies Nausea'sfinalmoment when Roquentin decides
to take his life in his own hands by writing a novel. His illumination
comes as he listens to a scratchy old recording of "Some of These
Days" and imagines a Jewish musician in his stifling apartment
twenty floors above New York composing this song and so creating a
reason for his having lived. Roquentin decides to create something
which never existed before; he will find salvation through art, pro-
ducing a novel which, like Albert's bridge, "would be as beautiful and
hard as steel".
In Stoppard, the possibility of a mind-bending shift of perspective
had struck other characters besides Gladys and Albert. In Lord
Malquisty Moon feels "that reality was just outside his perception. If
he made a certain move, changed the angle of his existence to the
common ground, logic and absurdity would separate. As it was he
couldn't pin them down" (32). In Rosencrantz, Guil ponders the fact
that one lives "so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the
corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is

74
like being ambushed by the grotesque" (28). None of them has seen
the world from beyond its boundaries as Penelope's lunanaut has,
but that landing, long one of Stoppard's personal fantasies, alters the
logic of all things. Wittgenstein's Tractatus explains the limits of logic:
Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.
So we cannot say in logic, "the world has this in it, and this, but not
that".... since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the
world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as
well.
The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is
as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists.. ?
As Stoppard once suggested, "There's an element of coincidence in
what's usually called influence. One's appetites and predilections are
obviously not unique. They overlap with those of countless other
people, . . ." 8
The moon-landing idea does not work well in Another Moon
because for Penelope it remains only an idea; it has no connections -
as it will have in Jumpers - with the state of things beyond the
bedroom. So Penelope's peculiar view of the lunanaut appears as just
another symptom of this child-wife's neurotic behaviour, and the
play merely pits the wife's eccentric logic against her husband's,
while it unravels her none-too-mystifying claim to have given her old
Nanny "the push". Neither Bone nor his wife provokes in us much
interest: he retreats to his private pursuit of the world's history; she
has taken to her bed ten days before because the lunanaut has spoiled
things, just like Nanny Pinkerton who would keep winning at cards or
at noughts and crosses. The dialogue, crisp and clever though it is,
skitters across a void, unable to mask the play's jejune plot and
tiresome characters. Yet their situation is such that, what with her
emotional breakdown and his confused malaise, we should want to
feel for them.
Just as emotions are trivialized, so the word-traps and deceptive
appearances are reduced to comic misunderstanding as the charac-
ters dance their dance, stumbling occasionally over one another's
feet:
BONE: Well, this way! She won't keep you a moment. . . I'm Mrs Bone's
husband.
ALBERT: Mr Bone.
BONE: Yes . . . I'm something of a logician myself.
ALBERT: Really? Sawing ladies in half- that kind of thing?
BONE: Logician . . . (100)
The games here fail to satisfy because the players themselves do not
take those pastimes seriously. Penelope's charades with Albert have

75
as little impetus behind them as has the game of battleships she plays
with her husband, so the viewer does not feel pressed to investigate
the relationship between the wife and her doctor. The latter, too,
behaves in a totally casual manner, whereas Malquist, in a similar
situation, throws all his ingenuity into appearing casual. The situa-
tion in Bone's household is simply good for a pun or two.
Apart from the dialogue, there are moments of technical ingenuity.
During the game of battleships, the sounds of the astronaut's
celebration parade drift in from outside so that when Penelope hits
one of her husband's submarines the imagined depth charges are
made concrete by the actual booms from the ceremonial canon and,
as the military bands reach the house and jets scream overhead, those
noises orchestrate Penelope's mounting hysteria. Yet that very
brittleness, a neurosis which Penelope tries to forestall by playing
games and pushing Nanny through the window because she "felt like
it", takes away all force from her view of what the lunanaut has done.
When Bone enters the bedroom to find her at the window gazing
down on the parade, having walked there despite her own and the
doctor's insistence that she has lost the use of her legs, her words are
simply words: "There goes God in his golden capsule. You'd think
that he was sane, to look at him, but he doesn't smile because he has
seen the whole thing for what it is ... he's made it all random" (i 08).
Some five years after this short television script, Stoppard had
transformed these ideas into Jumpers, the play which, up to the
present moment at least, stands as his most completely achieved
stage work. Everything knits together in Jumpers: stage-picture, dia-
logue, lighting, sound-effects, action combine into an ultra-
theatrical game that matters deeply. George and Dotty Moore,
fumbling and lost to each other, yet hanging on for dear life, are
under siege. The astronaut's yellow uniform, so literal in the televi-
sion script, has become the symbol of a cynical and manipulative
pragmatism made concrete in the persons of Sir Archibald Jumper
and the Radical Liberals: "I have seen the future", said the late
Professor McFee, "and it's yellow." Doing his homework for this
play led Stoppard to understand how words, which he had always
seen as sliding, ambiguous and confusing, can, because of those
inadequacies, be deliberately used to deceive, persuade or under-
mine. Jumpers therefore marks the turning-point in Stoppard's
career as he moves towards the political implications of words that
ensnare. The play is also very funny (ha-ha and peculiar) from
beginning to end.
The relationship between the Moores, like that between the
Moons or the Bones before them, is larger than life. So to propel his

76
audience into a heightened world, Stoppard begins with a daring and
extravagantly theatrical flourish. From the completely darkened
stage, a voice grandiloquently announces the return of "the much-
missed, much-loved star of the musical stage, the incomparable,
magnetic Dorothy Moore!" 9 Dotty (aptly named, it soon turns out)
walks into a spotlight to the sound of applause but fails to pick up on
the musical introduction to "Shine on Harvest Moon". Re-
introducing herself as "incomparable, unreliable, neurotic", she asks
her unseen audience for the cues and rapidly becomes entangled in a
jumble of moon tunes; unable to continue, she apologizes and leaves
the stage. The public disintegration of a beautiful star - and Dotty
must look like a goddess - is oddly disturbing, especially
when it comes without warning, but the next events prove still more
unsettling.
A loud drum-roll introduces a female stripper seated on a swing
attached to a chandelier which arcs in and out of the spotlight's beam.
We now feel as disoriented as Dotty and as confused as the waiter
who then stumbles with his tray of drinks into the light. The stage-
audience protests vociferously at his blocking the view. Every time he
looks in their direction, the stripper flies in, having shed more and
more of her clothes; every time he looks behind him to see what the
fuss is about, the stage is empty. Eventually he "backs into the path of
the swing and is knocked arse over tip by a naked lady, B L A C K O U T
and crash of broken glass" (18). Instantly, the off-stage voice
proclaims "the INCREDIBLE - RADICAL! - LIBERAL!! -
J U M P E R S ! ! " ; spotlight, music, and eight yellow-clad figures
come leaping and tumbling from both sides of the stage. Dotty
wanders on to complain that the jumpers are certainly not incredible.
Calling for someone truly unbelievable, she turns to find George, a
rumpled, shabby figure, clutching a sheaf of papers: "Promptness I
like." George protests about the noise, but is furiously dismissed:
"It's my bloody party, George!"
Several muddled moon-songs follow as Dotty strolls amidst the
jumpers, who have begun to form a human pyramid until, obscured
from our view, she sneers, "Jumpers I've had- yellow, I've had them
all! /^credible, barely credible, credible and all too bloody likely -
When I say ]ump,jumpl" A gun-shot sends one of the figures reeling
from the base of the pyramid. Dotty walks through the gap and looks
down in surprise as the dying jumper tries to pull himself up by her
dress. After a few precarious seconds, the pyramid collapses away
into the surrounding darkness. The party is over. Isolated in the
spotlight and calling out for "Archie", Dotty stands in her now
blood-soaked dress while the units of the Moores' apartment

77
assemble around her. When the stage is fully lit, the immobile Dotty
is discovered to be in her bedroom still clutching the dead jumper.
The hyperbole of this opening assault prepares the audience to
accept any event that may follow; the overt theatricality of the action
and set-change forbids our settling into the Moores' apartment with
a cosy sense of everyday life. An idiom has been established that will
support the most outlandish of fables.
But this opening has also established a bond of confusion between
ourselves and the Moores. Although they know why their party takes
place, by the end of this prelude Dotty stands paralysed, George has
been excluded, and we are also in the dark. The rest of the staging
keeps us at varying levels of knowledge and ignorance, groping along
with the Moores for enlightenment of one sort or another. The entire
set, two rooms separated by a reversed-L-shaped corridor, creates a
paradigm of the sort of world all Stoppard's characters inhabit. Like
their predecessors, George and Dotty live inside the boundaries of
their own special view of the world. What goes on in one box may or
may not mean something to the inhabitant of the other box, and, if it
does, then that something is likely to appear different.
One of Stoppard's favourite stories concerns a friend who kept
peacocks.10 Seeing one disappear over the garden wall, he inter-
rupted his shaving and dashed out after it. Recovering the bird, he
waited to cross a busy road. What, Stoppard wonders, can the
occupants of the passing cars have made of a man standing at the
roadside in a dressing-gown with shaving lather on his face and a
peacock tucked firmly under one arm? A similar vision of Inspector
Foot of the Yard had puzzled the Harrises in After Magritte. A replay
occurs in Jumpers when George answers the door to Inspector Bones.
George is somewhat surprised to see a man with a bunch of flowers,
since he had expected to confront Archie. Bones "recoils" as from a
madman, since George has forgotten to remove his shaving cream
and carries a bow-and-arrow and a tortoise, having been interrupted
in the middle of demonstrating a fallacy in logic.
Jumpers' set evokes exactly this interdependent independence.
George's study, to the right of the hall as we look at the stage,
presents his ivory tower: a trifle sterile, especially when furnished in
the stark, modernist outlines of the National's original production,
and cluttered with books, papers, and the paraphernalia he uses to
demonstrate his ideas. Dotty's bedroom, confined by the reversed-L
shape, exudes luxury and femininity with its lush carpets and cur-
tains, elegant furniture, record-player, huge television set and four-
poster bed. Their separate lives are suggested by this contrasting
decor, by the fact that George's study includes a monastic-looking

78
day-bed, and by the actual barrier of the corridor between the two
rooms, although once the action starts we realize that this apartness is
more extensive than any of the staging proclaims. Dotty, alone in her
room and now calmly considering what to do with the corpse, hears
somebody singing "Sentimental Journey" to himself. Things get off
to a false start as she addresses the voice as "Darling!" and Crouch,
the hall porter whom we last saw employed as the waiter at the party,
explains her mistake. Crouch leaves; George's secretary, the pre-
vious night's stripper, hurries in; life at the Moores' moves into its
9 a.m. routine, except that from the bedroom Dotty calls "Help!"
first quietly then "slightly louder". George looks up at the imaginary
mirror between us and him; he may or may not have heard the
distress call as the lights go to black in Dotty's room.
The intermittent disappearance of that area of the set is essential
to the play's effect and meaning. The device ensures that the audi-
ence will focus primarily on George, awarding him a large proportion
of their sympathies despite his muddle-headed inadequacy. At other
times, when we see both rooms, we understand more than George
can or, owing to a previous blackout, we are for a moment more
muddled than he is. For example, since we have already seen the
dead jumper in Dotty's bedroom, her cries of "murder" out of the
darkness have a more complicated effect on us than Penelope's to
Bone. We can understand why George thinks them an irritating
distraction, yet we can also sympathize with Dotty's panic and sus-
pect that she refers to the whole state of their marriage with her "is
anybody there?" On the other hand, Stoppard may have been a shade
too clever when he makes her quote Macbeth:
DOTTY (off. Panic): Help! Murder!
( G E O R G E throws his manuscript on the desk and marches angrily to the door.)
(Off) Oh, horror, horror, horror! Confusion now hath made its masterpiece
. . . most sacriligious murder! - (Different voice.) Woe, alas! What, in our
house?
(GEORGE, with his hand on the door handle, pauses. He returns to his desk and
picks up his papers.) (24)
The general reference to murder and the aptness of "in our house"
are amusing enough, but the literariness may mislead us into thinking
Dotty callous and so not truly horror-struck. Only later do we learn
the dead acrobat's identity, Duncan McFee, but by then we have no
time in the theatre to connect back to these lines on the murder of
Duncan 11 and so change our minds about Dotty's lack of feeling.
When the lights come back up on the bedroom as George enters to
look for his pet hare, Thumper, we have lost our overview entirely,
for during the blackout the corpse has vanished. In another respect

79
we are even less in the know than George who, after a glance around
the room, ignores Dotty's apparently lifeless body, face down and
naked on the bed. Stoppard allows us a moment to misread that
picture while George searches in the off-stage bathroom for Thum-
per. Emerging, he casually asks whether Dotty is a proverb - "No,
I'm a book" - whereupon he guesses The Naked and the Dead and we
suddenly leap ahead of George, who cannot know that title's appro-
priateness. When he leaves, the lights stay up to reveal the jumper
hanging from a hook on the door George has closed (at the National
the door synchronized with a trick cupboard to disclose or conceal
the corpse).
The habitual charades between husband and wife lead up to the
enigma of Archie's behaviour with Dotty. George's suspicions and
her defence are partly taken from Another Moon but now the lines
have more emotional force, since for the past twenty minutes or so
George has been shown battling with questions of logic, and the
now-you-see-it-now-you-don't quality of the action and staging has
created a context for what is possibly a misunderstanding or possibly
a half-truth:
GEORGE {reckless, committed): I can put two and two together, you know.
Putting two and two together is my subject. I do not leap to hasty
conclusions. I do not deal in suspicion and wild surmise. I examine the
data; I look for logical inferences . . .
(He has lapsed into a calm suavity.)
Now let us see. What can we make of it all? Wife in bed, daily visits by
gentleman caller. Does anything suggest itself?
DOTTY (calmly): Sounds to me he's the doctor. (32)

If Dotty is deceiving George, and we never do know for sure, then the
charade is a most elaborate one. At the end of Act 1, Archie and the
jumpers bring in "a machine of ambiguous purpose" and a number
of lights on stands. This machine, supposedly a dermatograph, con-
nects to Dotty's television screen. When the bedroom lights up for
the first time in Act 2 it appears to be empty until voices sound from
behind the closed curtains of the four-poster:
(These sounds are consistent with a proper doctor-patient relationship. If D O T T Y
has a tendency to gasp slightly it is probably because the stethoscope is cold.
A R C H I E on the other hand, might begetting rather overheated under the blaze
of the dermatograph lights.)
A R C H I E (within): E x c u s e m e . . .
(A R c H1E *s coat comes sailing over the drapes, G E O R G E retreats, closing the door.)
(60)
At this stage of the play, it is crucial that we should also find it
impossible to know the truth of the situation. When George goes

80
back into the study, his "How the hell does one know what to
believe?" (71) refers us to his confusion over the discussion paper, in
which he seeks to prove that God exists, and to the Archie-Dotty axis
which fills us with a similar confusion and so dramatizes what would
otherwise remain an abstract philosophical conundrum. Stoppard
draws those parallels together in the dialogue. Trying to deal, or to
put off dealing with Dotty's neurosis, for which Archie purportedly
attends her, George ("facing away, out front, emotionless") tells the
story of how Wittgenstein asked a friend why "it was natural" to
suppose the sun moves round the earth. The friend replied that it
looked as if it did, to which the philosopher answered, "what would it
have looked like if it had looked as if the earth was rotating?" (75). I2
Moments later that same philosophical problem is applied to events
in the bedroom. George sees a close-up picture magnified on the
television screen. Depending on how magnified it is, the audience
may for a moment believe they see a view of the moon's surface as
they did in Act 1. However, George recognizes it as his wife's naked
body and angrily switches off the set:
G E O R G E : You must think Pm a bloody fool!
ARCHIE: What do you mean?
G E O R G E : Well, everything you do makes it look as if you're . . .
{Pause)
ARCHIE: Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if I were
making a dermatographical examination? (78)
"Confusion now hath made its masterpiece" indeed. Experiencing
that, the audience participate in the sexual and philosophical battle
between George and Archie.
The play's most elaborately deceptive moment takes its effect from
a combination of lighting, dialogue, action, and sound-cues. After
Inspector Bones, who confesses that "show business is my main
interest, closely followed by crime detection" (46), has been estab-
lished as an ardent fan of Dotty's, he prepares to question her about
the previous evening's party: "after which, I will take my leave,
perhaps with her autograph on the cover of this much played much
loved gramophone record" (45). We see him standing outside the
darkened bedroom, sprucing himself up and fishing for Dotty's
gramophone record as he balances his tributary flowers, now in a
vase. Tapping respectfully on the door, he enters, and the bedroom
glows romantically:
.. .pink curtains have been drawn across thefrench window, and there is a rosy hue
to the lighting, DOTTY, gowned, coijfed, stunning, rises to face the Inspector.
Music is heard. .. romantic Mozartian trumpets, triumphant, DOTTY and
BONE sface each other, frozen like lovers in a dream, BONES raises his head

81
 slightly, and the trumpets are succeeded by a loud animal bray, a mating call.
DOTTY, her arms out towards him, breathes, "Inspector . . ." like a verbal
caress. From B o N E S 'S lifelessfingers,the vase drops. There is a noise such as
would have been made had he dropped it down a long flight of stone stairs.
BONES is dumbstruck.
D O T T Y lets go a long slow smile: "Inspector. . . ."
From behind the closed curtains, the stiff dead J U M P E R falls into the room like a
too-hastily-leaned plank. (5 2)

Although the trumpets create an appropriate, if comically exagger-

ated, sound-track for the Inspector's sense of triumph and Dotty's
enchantment of her public, the action appears to shift into farce at the
"mating call" and goes hilariously awry when the vase falls loudly on
the thick carpet. T h e sequence builds to the sudden and unexpected
appearance of the corpse and an instant blackout. However, we may
have noticed George testing his tape-recorder, and now that our
focus moves over to his study we watch him launch once more into
dictating his paper. Arguing that beauty is "an aesthetic absolute"
just as goodness is a moral one, he turns to the recorder to illustrate
three different kinds of trumpet sounds. In this new context, we again
hear the snippet of Mozart which George invites his opponents to
compare aesthetically with the trumpeting of an elephant (the "loud
animal bray") and with "the sound made by a trumpet falling down a
flight of stone stairs" (the vase effect).
In Jumpers, Stoppard's characteristic tricksiness has sinister im-
plications behind it. This is particularly so during the charades. T h e
pleasing irony of The Naked and the Dead turns darker and more
cynical when, in order to cover up the dead body as George returns to
the bedroom, Dotty "calmly lets her robe slip down her back" and, as
a further clue, "turns to look at him coquettishly over her shoulder":
"Lw/#'s back! - in town - Very good!" (43). Consistently, throughout
the play, the jokes sour. Amidst the bedroom's pink romance, Dotty
tests her charms on an admirer, but she may be trying particularly
hard because she knows he is a policeman. Once the corpse falls to
the floor, her charms are all she has to save the situation: when the
blackout ends, "Music! Lights! Dorothy Moore - in person" is
discovered swinging and miming to her recording of "Sentimental
Journey" for her audience-of-one.
At the start of Act 2, Bones appears from the kitchen with a
dinner-trolley complete with an elegant meal for two; halting in the
corridor, he listens to the sound of Dotty's voice "rather as a man
might pause in St Peter's on hearing choristers" (57). T o George he
describes her as a vulnerable, nervous little bird and suggests that any
psychiatric expert would be prepared, at a price, to say on the witness

82
stand that Dotty had snapped "under the strain". George does not
yet know about the murder, but Archie, who has already had the
evidence spirited away in a large plastic bag, is only too eager to
manipulate Dotty's compliant fan. Treating him like a manservant,
Archie hands him the coat from the bedroom floor "and then readies
himself to put his arms in the sleeves". Archie is a psychiatric expert
(she needs a lawyer!) and Dotty's legal adviser (a man has been
murdered!); being a coroner as well, he hands Bones a death certifi-
cate and a suicide note which suggests McFee had a nervous break-
down and shot himself inside a plastic bag (64).
Bones is impressed by the expertise, but not enough to contem-
plate "offers of large sums of money for favours rendered". Archie
tries the psychological approach, suggesting that Bones looks like a
man whose services to the Force have not been truly appreciated and,
as a University Chancellor, offers him the Chair of Divinity along
with "prestige, the respect of your peers and almost unlimited credit
among the local shopkeepers". Then comes the fist from beneath the
glove: "a professorship will still be regarded as a distinction come the
day - early next week, in all probability - when the Police Force will
be thinned out to a ceremonial front for the peace-keeping activities
of the Army" (65). Since Bones cannot be deflected from enquiring
what became of the gun if McFee shot himself inside a bag - "Very
good thinking indeed! On consideration I can give you the Chair of
Logic" - the problem is left to Dotty as he races into her darkened
room in answer to her calls of distress. Stoppard keeps us all in the
dark for the next few minutes. Only one loud "Darling!" impinges
upon the two philosophers' conversation until an urgent cry of "Rape
. . . Rape!" sends Archie gleefully into the bedroom to find Dotty
sobbing on the bed and Bones looking guilty. No doubt some
"arrangement" could save the incorruptible officer. After the next
blackout Bones has gone for good and the victorious pair sit eating a
civilized lunch from the trolley.
That Archie can talk glibly about the Army's "peace-keeping
activities" exposes the cynical power the new Rad-Lib regime has
with words, and the huge television screen in Dotty's room acts as our
window to those political realities in the outside world. Also, since the
screen later registers whatever the dermatograph has scanned, this
stage-property serves to underline Archie's connections with Yellow
Power. The television is on when the bedroom set first slides in
behind Dotty and the jumper. The white spotlight moves from her to
the screen, where it changes into a satellite picture of the moon, then
to close-ups of an astronaut, rocket, and moon-vehicle, the accoutre-
ments of the first British moon mission. This event and the Rad-
Libs' victory parade, televised on a second channel, establish a
context which will govern our reactions to George's philosophical
paper.
In landing upon the moon, the two-man space-capsule had suf-
fered damage to its booster rockets. When the time came for lift-off,
millions of home viewers watched the commander, Captain Scott,
knock Astronaut Oates off the foot of the ladder then pull it up and
close the hatch. Stoppard names his explorers after the two most
famous members of Scott's ill-fated Antarctic Expedition in 191 o.
The historical Oates, incapacitated by frost-bite and not wishing to
hamper his already hard-pressed companions, walked off into the
snows. His act of self-sacrifice has become the stuff of legend, but in
Jumpers Oates' actual last words, "I am going out now. I may be gone
some time", are transferred to Astronaut Scott, "I am going up now
...," as he saves his own skin at his partner's expense. By converting
an archetype of heroic sacrifice into an image of expediency, Stop-
pard prepares us for the main argument in George's paper which will
take human altruism as man's saving grace and as "proof" that
goodness is not simply a matter of social convention. On the contrary,
as George will also point out, the conventions of society can change
or be manipulated, and it is that fact which makes the other happen-
ings on the television screen so important to the play's central rela-
tionships and meaning.
The enormous screen dominates Dotty's bedroom. Pictured
there, from time to time in Act 1, are shots of a long procession of a
decidedly military character. George finds the noise of the brass
bands disconcerting as he dictates his paper, turns the set off on
entering the bedroom, and only notes some sort of parade once the
sounds of jets come screaming over the house. Through those
reactions, Stoppard pinpoints the weakness in George's moral posi-
tion, for though he is disturbed by the Rad-Lib victory his concern is
never strong enough to pull him away from his intellectual pursuits.
Yet for us, the pictures and sounds from the screen and the scream-
ing jets overhead project all that the Rad-Libs stand for out into the
auditorium and vivify the details of the dialogue. Because of this, we
are unlikely to share George's naive faith in democracy. The Party
have juggled the votes, taken over the broadcasting system, arrested
the leading newspaper proprietors, and intend to "rationalize" the
Church and, as Archie implied, establish the military State that the
nature of their victory parade suggests. Yet George only bursts out in
protest over the idea that Sam Clegthorpe, the Party's spokesman for
agriculture, has been made the Archbishop of Canterbury. Even
then, he soon retreats into irony:

84
D O T T Y : DO you find it incredible that a man with a scientific background
should be Archbishop of Canterbury?
G E O R G E : How the hell do /know what I find incredible? Credibility is an
expanding field . . . Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before
the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.
"Archbishop Clegthorpe? Of course! The inevitable capstone to a
career in veterinary medicine!" What happened to the old Archbishop?
D O T T Y : He abdicated . . . or resigned or uncoped himself-
GEORGE {thoughtfully): Dis-mantled himself, perhaps. (38)
In having George joke like this, Stoppard nevertheless illustrates the
way the most intelligent can slide into acceptance and become an easy
prey to powermongers. One oiJumpers' main points is that credibility
does expand.
If the theatricality of Jumpers dramatizes the Moores' mental
confusion and the cynical expediency of the world around them, the
same can be said of the play's two major plot lines. The one, Archie's
confusing relationship with Dotty, has a great deal to do with the
other, the murder of Duncan McFee. That George should be obli-
vious for most of the play to the murder that takes place in his flat
underlines his withdrawal from the actualities of life, in addition to
creating many comic misunderstandings. But knowing that one of
the jumpers died at the party, we may be inclined to suspect Dotty as
his murderer from her position behind the human pyramid. Her look
of surprise as the dying man clings to her might confirm that suspi-
cion but then it might also point to her innocence. However, because
so much else goes on at the Moores' we would probably not dwell
upon this until well into thefirstAct, when Dotty fleetingly admits to
being "in a bit of a spot" (34). The whodunnit only becomes central
upon the arrival of Inspector Bones, and, cleverly, with no sign of
forcing things, Stoppard keeps us in ignorance as to the victim's
identity by having Bones mention everything about the previous
night's party except the fact of a dead body, so enamoured is he of
Dotty's aura and of the theatrics of his role as investigator. In his
conversation with George we hear the name of McFee for the first
time as one who attended the party held to celebrate the Rad-
Lib victory. From George's explanation of his colleague's ethical
stance, the audience might even suspect McFee of being a potential
murderer:
G E O R G E : He thinks good and bad aren't actually good and bad in any
absolute or metaphysical sense, he believes them to be categories of our
own making... For example, McFee would hold that when we speak of,
say, telling the truth as being "good", and, er, casual murder as being
"bad", you don't really want to go into all this, do you?
B O N E S (his pencil poised, his eyes wide): I am enthralled. (48)

85
 Stoppard forces us into this guessing game so that we may feel for
ourselves how difficult it is to verify anything, let alone the good and
the bad. At the end of Act 2, when George finally learns about the
murder, he too believes that Dotty shot Duncan:
GEORGE: Crouch says - You can't hide! - Dorothy - it's not a game! Crouch
says he saw - For God's sake - I don't know what to do -
ARCHIE: Crouch says he saw what, George?
GEORGE: Well, he didn't actually see . . .
ARCHIE: Quite. We just don't know.
GEORGE: There are many things I know which are not verifiable but nobody
can tell me I don't know them, and I think that I know that something
happened to poor Dotty and she somehow killed McFee, as sure as she
killed my poor Thumper. (78)
But Dotty, despite appearances, has not killed Thumper. Minutes
later George finds out that he himself killed the hare with an arrow he
inadvertently let loose on an instinctive reaction to Dotty's cry of
"Fire!" from the bedroom.
In the mean time, we have witnessed a crucial conversation be-
tween Crouch and Archie in which the porter explains his friendship
with McFee and how the latter had been stunned by the behaviour of
the astronauts on the moon. As the spokesman for the logical positiv-
ists, Duncan had come to the conclusion he was "giving philosophi-
cal respectability to a new pragmatism in public life" (79). The
contrast between these new explorers and the former Oates and
Scott had convinced him that there is an absolute good:
If altruism is a possibility, he said, my argument is up a gum-tree... Duncan,
I said, Duncan,13 don't you worry your head about all that. That astronaut
yobbo is good for twenty years hard. Yes, he said, yes maybe, but when he
comes out, he's going to find he was only twenty years ahead of his time.
(80)

If Archie knew of Duncan's conversion - Crouch says, "he no doubt

told you" - then on his own admission he had a motive for murder.
Earlier, while dealing with Inspector Bones, Archie had suggested
that, apart from the jumpers themselves, anyone at the party could
have fired the shot, including himself. When Bones asks him why he
should have wanted to do that, Archie's hypothetical answer that
perhaps "my faithful protege had secretly turned against me" (63)
leads to his saying that if the "figurehead of philosophical orthodoxy"
had gone astray, "I'm afraid it would certainly have been an ice-pick
in the back of the skull" (64). Considering the Rad-Libs' victory
parade, this reference to the elimination of Trotsky is apt. We recall,
too, that Archie "had a furious row last night" with McFee and was
anxious to know from George whether the Inspector had asked him

86
about it (68). Whether or not Archie did in fact kill Duncan, the
moment we suspect him of that crime opens a new view onto his
relationship with Dotty. Knowing that Bones, Crouch and George
think her guilty, Archie is quite willing to let them do so, whereas she,
thinking all along that Archie had done it, has been trying to protect
him.
Having let us see the manipulative Archie as a second Astronaut
Scott, Stoppard immediately plants a further possibility as he makes
Crouch go on to explain how he and Duncan used to talk philosophy
while he waited to pick up his girl. As Crouch speaks, the secretary,
who has sat wordlessly in the study throughout the play, "comes
down stage to make use of the imaginary mirror . . . a grim, tense,
unsmiling young woman, staring at the audience" (80). It transpires
that she and Duncan had been secretly engaged for three years. He
had dreaded telling her he had a wife, though his wife knew about the
secretary, but his decision to relinquish the Chair of Logic had left
him no alternative. On that awesome thought, the secretary clicks her
handbag shut and briskly takes her coat from a cupboard. The
strategic click and her unyielding grimness both point to what
Crouch calls "a certain kind of girl". It was she who swung from the
trapeze and, as she puts on her coat and goes out for lunch, it is she
who has "a bright splash of blood" down her back. Seeing that stain,
George then discovers that the blood has trickled down from the top
of the wardrobe and so finds that his own pet jumper lies dead. As
Archie has said,
The truth to us philosophers, Mr Crouch, is always an interim judgment. We
will never even know for certain who did shoot McFee. Unlike mystery
novels, life does not guarantee a denouement; and if it came, how would one
know whether to believe it? (81)
This elaborate, interlocking superstructure of stage devices and
plot may seem cumbersome when described like this, but in perform-
ance the theatrical razzle-dazzle along with the impenetrability of
Archie's "professional" behaviour and the mysterious murder com-
bine to create in us the vertigo that also threatens George and Dotty.
The game-playing here dramatically conveys the issue at the play's
centre, the inadequacy and danger of words in a society which
considers all truths to be relative. There, at that centre, the most
human of Stoppard's flawed protagonists, George and Dotty,
struggle to express, in inefficient words, what they instinctively know
to be right, and it is their battle which makes the outward games a
matter of burning concern. What to believe? As George muddles his
way through his paper on "Man - good, bad or indifferent" or as
Dotty attempts to cope with the fact that the first moon-landings have

87
reduced mankind and his morals to something limited and arbitrary,
the dice may be loaded against them but, sentimental though this
sounds, their hearts are somehow in the right place. In a scientific
world, there must be more to Man than meets the microscope.
Archie regards George as he would the Dodo. In a "rationalized"
society, what was once the University chapel has become the gymna-
sium, a place where "the more philosophical members of the uni-
versity gymnastics team and the more gymnastic members of the
Philosophy School" (51) can learn to jump, to expand their political
and intellectual credibility at Archie's command. But George refuses
to "jump along with the rest", because in his view British moral
philosophy "went off the rails" roughly forty years ago. Hoping to put
things back on track, George prepares his attack on the "main-
stream" logical positivists, a school of thinkers who insist that the
only factual statements are those which can be proved through
observation. "Truth" must be capable of scientific verification, and
anything which falls outside this area of fact is not philosophical.
Logical positivism goes back to the 1920s when the 'Vienna Circle'
sought to extract all mystery from philosophic investigation and to
rationalize it in accordance with science, "the sum of all meaningful
statements".14 In Cambridge, Wittgenstein had concluded that
"what we cannot speak about we must consign to silence",15 a
statement which seemed to banish everything beyond the realm of
"atomic facts" to irrelevance. Accordingly, A. J. Ayer in his Language,
Truth and Logic, the orthodox bible of British logical positivism,
maintains that "all utterances about the nature of God are nonsensi-
cal". For Ayer, "moral judgements do not say anything. They are
pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the
category of truth and falsehood."16 For its opponents, logical positiv-
ism simply circumvents the problems of human ethics: "they dis-
appear not because they have been solved but because they are
dismissed"17 or, as Jumpers puts it, "no problem is insoluble given a
big enough plastic bag" into which to sweep it. Wittgenstein himself
in his Philosophical Investigations came to revise his view about the
nature of factual propositions by suggesting that language itself
determines what is real, because we perceive things through lan-
guage. In consequence, all objective fact is an illusion.
But instead of building an argument which would point out the
subjectivity of all scientific verification, George tries to meet the
opposition on their own "logical" ground. An intuitionist like his
namesake, G. E. Moore, George "insist[s] that goodness [is] a fact,
and on his right to recognize it when he [sees] it" (67). But in the first
part of his paper George traps himself, because words can only go so
far in describing the indescribable; after a certain point one has to
leave "proof behind and take the leap of faith, a jump into the void,
and George is no jumper. Wittgenstein's thoughts on this are helpful:
If someone who believes in God looks round and asks "Where does every-
thing I see come from?", "Where does all this come from?", he is not craving
for a (causal) explanation; and his question gets its point from being the
expression of a certain craving. He is, namely, expressing an attitude to all
explanations. — But how is this manifested in his life?
The attitude that's in question is that of taking a certain matter seriously
and then, beyond a certain point, no longer regarding it as serious, but
maintaining that something else is even more important.18
As he gathers together his random notes to dictate his paper,
George runs into immediate trouble over the way to pose the ques-
tion of whether God exists. The linguistic tangles of the first part of
his paper unintentionally illustrate how "language is an approxima-
tion of meaning":
. . . why we should believe that existence could be asserted of the author of
"Principia Mathematica" but not of Bertrand Russell, he never had time,
despite his punctuality, not to mention his existence, to explain, very good,
keep to the point, to begin at the beginning: is God? (To SECRETARY) Leave
a space. (25)
George can never jump that space. He feels he needs God - or
preferably two - to account for the Creation and for the moral
behaviour of His creations. But as he thrashes about with First
Causes, Zeno, bows and arrows, the tortoise and the . . . but Thum-
per is missing . . . his paper becomes a ludicrous Whodunnit on a
cosmic scale.
However, when George turns to moral absolutes, Stoppard builds
up his long speech into the climax of the first Act. Despite the comic
counterpoint between Dotty's seduction of the Inspector and the
recorded trumpet sounds or the running jibes about McFee's jump-
ing skills (to which at one point the secretary raises her head), George
begins to find the words to mount a vigorous attack. The positivists
would say that "good" means different things to different people;
George does not dispute that, since it is not a statement about values
but about the use of language. But when the argument does move on
to human behaviour, George wins our sympathy because of the
sudden force and clarity of his thesis and because we have seen from
the rest of the Act where man-made values can lead:
. . . Professor McFee should not be surprised that the notion of honour
should manifest itself so differently in peoples so far removed in clime and
culture. What is surely more surprising is that notions such as honour should
manifest themselves at all. (54~5)

89
 In Act 2, Stoppard changes tack from argument to satire. Bones
presses George to spare no expense in Dotty's defence; George
assumes he is talking about his own phone-call of complaint to the
police about the noise at the party. Having calmed down since then,
he regrets his action. Bones suggests that George has concocted this
story to shield Dotty, but George argues that as the householder he
must be held responsible for any disturbance that occurred in the
flat: "It was just a bit offunl Where's your sense of humour, man?"
(59). To the Inspector's ears, George talks like the acrobatic jumpers
in the sort of doublespeak on which the Rad-Libs' policies depend.
For if "good" means different things to different people, people can
be persuaded to accept new conceptions of good, and a murder can
be defined as "a bit of fun".
The comedy of this episode leads directly to the core of George's
argument when he returns to his paper. Picking up on the vagaries of
language, "a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas"
(63), George addresses himself to the distinctions between "a good
bacon sandwich" and "the Good Samaritan". In the first expression,
"good" can be described in other terms, "such as crisp, lean and
unadulterated by tomato sauce". The goodness of that sandwich
would not be apparent to someone who liked his bacon "underdone,
fatty and smothered in ketchup". In the second expression, however,
there is no getting away from the fact of the Samaritan's goodness; it
is an absolute value, to be expressed in no other way, and not, as the
positivists would have it, a mere statement about "feeling, taste or
vested interest":

... when we say that the Good Samaritan acted well, we are surely expressing
more than a circular prejudice about behaviour. We mean he acted kindly -
selflessly - well. And what is our approval of kindness based on if not on the
intuition that kindness is simply good in itself and cruelty is not? (66-7)
"Intuition" also saves Dotty, though in her case she would prefer
to have her problems spirited away in words. In the first Act, one of
Dotty's functions is to voice the positivist opinions of Archie who,
apart from his off-stage announcements at the party, makes his silent
first entrance at the very end of the Act in order to choreograph the
disposal of the inconvenient corpse. In consequence, Dotty might
appear as another of Archie's creatures; she would indeed like him to
dispose of her inconvenient moon-madness, but something within
her resists his linguistic plastic bag. For example, when she begs
George to stay with her, "I don't want to be left, to cope . . ." (with
Duncan's body or her own mind), he pleads work and assures her
"things will get better", a phrase which spins her Archie-wards. But

90
her recital is cross-cut by personal reservations and finally undercut
by her actual circumstance, which will not simply disappear because
"Archie says" it should. Furthermore, in repeating the positivist
"line" she adopts the same detached, ironic tone towards it that
George uses in his paper. At one point, George asks her what she
meant by "God help you and the Government", a question she
deliberately and wittily takes as a philosophic one: "I only mentioned
God reflexively." Nevertheless that leads her to ponder why God
refuses to disappear despite the positivists and their political arm, the
Rad-Libs:
DOTTY (still merry)'. And yet, Professor, one can't help wondering at the
persistence of the reflex, the universal constant unthinking appeal to the
non-existent God who is presumed dead. Perhaps he's only missing in
action, shot down behind the thin yellow lines of advancing Rad-Libs
and getting himself together to go BOO! (35)
The note of bright hysteria under her irony stems from Dotty's
psychotic reaction to the very first moon-landing. But Man's foot-
steps on the moon did more than spoil the romance of Moon-spoon
-June songs and wreck her stage career. Dotty suffers from another
of those mind-warping perspectives. For her, men on the moon have
seen mankind "all in one go, little - local" so that all human values
which "never had edges before" have been seen to have limits. The
behaviour of the astronauts during the latest mission confirms what
happens when absolute values are perceived as relative values, and
Dotty feels certain that when the rest of the world catches up with
that view chaos is come again (75). Actually, then, she shares
George's faith in the lightness of the Ten Commandments, whose
rules, unlike those of tennis, cannot be changed. Were Archie able to
convince her that there are no absolutes, then the moon-landings
would have no significance. Instead, she is torn between wanting to
believe in Archie's logic and knowing intuitively that things are
otherwise.
Both she and McFee are disciples who cannot become apostles of
the positivist creed. Although George never knows that McFee's
crisis was also the result of moon happenings, convinced instead that
the jumper was a smug time-server, he reacts to the news of Dun-
can's "suicide" with mild surprise:
Where did he find the despair . . .? I thought the whole point of denying the
Absolute was to reduce the scale, instantly, to the inconsequential behaviour
of inconsequential animals; that nothing could ever be that important . . .
(69)
Dotty knows that despair but, oddly, that knowledge marks her as her
own mistress and not Archie's puppet.
 Dotty and George's concern over absolute values is more than
abstract word-play. Neither of them takes a moral stand, yet the ideas
they give voice to have urgency because of Archie's manoeuvrings
within the flat and the Rad-Libs' manipulations outside it and on the
screen. But ifJumpers has darker undertones than any of its prede-
cessors, it is also the first of Stoppard's works (apart from "Re-
union") to explore a human relationship in any depth. The Malquists
and the Moons, Constance and Alfred, Glad and Frank, Albert and
Kate, even Ros and Guil for that matter, all talk past each other from
within their self-absorbed enclosures. The Moores do that too, but
they also make convincing attempts to reach each other, and the
failure of those efforts creates a poignant, human drama at the centre
of this verbal and theatrical whirligig. The fact that they are both
intelligent people with a dry sense of their own inadequacies and
absurdity gives them an unsentimental view of themselves and each
other, but their intellect ultimately destroys their will. Dotty, shut
away in her bedroom, takes refuge in her trauma when the going gets
rough. George, buried in his notes or wandering purblind through
the flat clutching his paraphernalia for his defence of love and
goodness, takes cover amongst "matters of universal import"
whenever demands are made on him. Yet the two do have moments
of desolate or furious contact, and those episodes establish an ironic
picture of two people who seem unable to put their well-meaning
intuitions about universals into personal practice.
In the first of these episodes, the audience receive an immediate
impression of a shared life from the way George can take Dotty's
charade-playing for granted. Stoppard has frequently been accused
of not understanding women or of failing to create a complex,
believable female character, and Dotty has been singled out as the
major weakness of Jumpers, but her behaviour here, though eccentric
and stamped with her creator's own personality, has corners to it,
facets and angles which make her a complicated, interesting and -
given the play's established idiom - credible individual. All Stop-
pard's women characters have a sort of inner mysteriousness, an
untouchable knowingness which makes them puzzling to their
Moon-partners or provocative when allied with the worldly poise of a
Harry (in pub or dental surgery), a Malquist or an Archie. Perhaps
this impenetrability is the mark of what Stoppard cannot understand,
but in Jumpers those hidden areas of personality make a dramatic
impact. Dotty's external vibrance and neurotically destructive ten-
dencies allow us to feel there is more to her than meets the eye, and
Stoppard has given her moments with George in which we glimpse
that inner self. In addition, he makes Dotty aware of her own mystery

92
as a woman and a star - a mystery which she deliberately uses on
George and later, quite lethally, on the Inspector.
Her first actions in the play as neurotic moon-singer, critic, and
commander of the acrobats, or as a histrionic attention-seeker (with a
penchant for Shakespeare) and player of ambiguous charades all
present the threatening puzzle behind the glamour. But as the scene
with George continues, she veers from behaviour which could seem
acted out into a desperation that arises from a genuine annoyance at
not being able to reach her husband. Since we do not yet know about
her Angst over the astronauts, this sequence between the Moores
re-creates a fairly normal thrust-and-parry between two people with
a shared history and a fair knowledge of each other's habits and
weaknesses but with insufficient regard for each other's inner be-
wilderment. This scene works because Stoppard has made Dotty
George's intellectual match. As we soon discover, she had once been
his student and she can laugh at her former career: "not at all bad for
a one-time student amateur bored with keeping house for her profes-
sor" (39). Moreover, that intelligence and sense-of-self inform most
of her remarks so that the characters pierce each other's guard and
then, after a feint or two, resume the attack. Dotty's mind, and the
energy it generates, makes her verbal thrusts seem entirely her own.
Having dismissed George's claim to friendship with Bertrand Rus-
sell, she quickly stabs at his "living in a dreamland", and when he
defensively turns that aside, she falls back dejectedly on the bed: "Oh
God . . . if only Archie would come"(31).
But it is their moments of stillness, rare in Stoppard, as the two
reach across the gap between them, that move us nearest to who they
are and persuade us that Dotty would not need Archie were George
less unavailable. The stage-directions indicate the characters'
genuine feeling:
DOTTY: I won't see him any more, if you like. (Turns to him.) I'll see you. If
you like.
(GEORGE examines the new tone, and decides the moment is genuine.)
GEORGE {softening): Oh, Dotty... The first day you walked into my class ...
I thought, "That's better!" . . . It was a wet day . . . your hair was wet...
and I thought, "The hyacinth girl" . . . and "How my hair is growing
t^-" (33)
Granted that the mood lasts only an instant, since George protects
himself with bits from T. S. Eliot which Dotty picks up in gentle
mockery, it does lead to their frankest interchange so far (Dotty is "in
a bit of a spot") and to a relaxed affection. The climax of this scene,
after more rounds of fencing, depends on a further instant of repose
after Dotty bursts into hysteria and pictures George and herself

93
under the moon of songwriters and poets. In tears, she clings to
George who, bewildered and silent, can do nothing but stroke her
hair, until it occurs to him that she may have seen Thumper. The
question ruins the tenderness between them and, shamed though he
is by his gaucherie, he has thrown one more chance away (41-2).
However, in Act 2, an angry exchange proves just as convincing an
indicator of the depth of feeling between them. That episode also
adds to our sense of Dotty as her own person and qualifies our
hitherto unreserved sympathies towards George who, from this point
on, appears alarmingly naive and indecisive.
Oblivious to murder in his house and to repression on the streets,
George emerges from the bathroom holding a dead goldfish whose
bowl Dotty had commandeered for an earlier charade. Interestingly,
the fish is called 'Archie', which suggests a shared joke at the latter's
expense and fits well with the sort of detachment towards the whole
psychiatric game that Dotty has displayed throughout the play. Shak-
ing with rage, George calls Dotty a "murderous bitch", lamenting
that the fish should have been murdered for the sake of a game:
DOTTY (angrily): Murdered? Don't you dare splash me with your sentimental
rhetoric! It's a bloody goldfish! Do you think every sole meuniere comes
to you untouched by suffering?
GEORGE: The monk who won't walk in the garden for fear of treading on an
ant does not have to be a vegetarian . . .
D OTTY : Brilliant! You must publish your findings in some suitable place like
the Good Food Guide,
G E o RG E: No doubt your rebuttal would look well in the Meccano Magazine.
DOTTY: YOU bloody humbug! - the last of the metaphysical egocentrics!
You're probably still shaking from the four-hundred-year-old news
that the sun doesn't go round you\ (74)
The way Dotty cuts through George's finer feelings and the way he
delivers an equally smarting attack on what he takes to be her
mechanistic views transform the play's philosophic debate into a
lively marital quarrel, and Dotty's tirade leads naturally into her
speech about the moon-landing's reduction of mankind, making it
appear a spontaneous perception which wells up out of her anger (in
Another Moon virtually the same speech had seemed imposed on
Penelope). The irrationality behind their rage gives the clever dia-
logue a heartfelt drive. Had George listened to remarks like Dotty's
"it's impossible to imagine anyone building a church on the moon"
(39), he would know that her universe is not a mechanistic one; on the
other hand, she is hardly the one to accuse George of being numbed
by the planets. This sequence also ends in a climax of tears. Archie
dismisses Dotty's emotion as mere emotion, "When did you first

94
become aware of these feelings?" (75), yet Dotty calls out to "Geor-
gie" -"But G E O R G E won't or can't..." Another chance of rapproche-
ment has flown away on the winds.
At the end of the Act, George's remark about the monk who feared
to step on an ant returns to plague him. Climbing down from his desk
after discovering Thumper's fate, George accidentally steps back
onto the carapace of Pat, the tortoise: " C R R R R R U N C H ! ! ! " With
one foot on the desk and one on Pat, he "puts up his head and cries
out, 'Dotty! Help! Murder!'" (81). So the patterns of the play's main
action are rounded off in the same way that they began, when
George, faced with a corpse, cries out for help to a partner who
makes no answer. Then, as George falls sobbing to the ground,
Jumpers shifts into a dream sequence, just as it began with a seeming-
ly surreal ritual.
This dream coda, a Georgie-through-the-looking-glass night-
mare version of the philosophical symposium, has earned about as
much critical disfavour as Dotty has. Yet it is perfectly attuned to the
play's idiom, balancing the extravagance of the opening scene on
either side of the musically choreographed bagging of Duncan
McFee which occurs at the close of Act 1. In addition, the coda
directly articulates the philosophic and moral points at issue in
George's rambling paper and Dotty's hysterical or angry outbursts.
Stoppard's original plan for the coda made his meaning still
plainer.19 As George lies on his study floor, the Symposium assem-
bles behind him with Crouch enthroned as Chairman, Archie at his
side, and three jumpers dressed in yellow gowns as gentlemen-
ushers backed by projected slides of the gym-chapel's magnificent
stained glass. After "approximately two minutes of approximate
silence" to the memory of Duncan, Archie is called upon to begin the
debate, "Man - good, bad or indifferent?" Following an unreal-
sounding burst of applause, Archie, ever the suave magician, whirls
down words on George's confused brain to turn his questions about
God and existence into ridicule:
. . . If the necessary being isn't, surely mother of invention as Voltaire said,
not to mention Darwin different from the origin of the specious - to sum
up: Super, both natural and stitious, sexual ergo cogito er go-go some-
times, as Descartes said, and who are we? Thank you.
{Shattering applause.
The USHERS hold up score cards: '9.7' - '9.9' - '9.8'.) (83)
At this point in the first version of Jumpers, Archie summons
Captain Scott, who then enters ceremonially. The symposium has
become a court of law, and Archie, aping the sentence structure and
loaded wording of a defending counsel, would like Scott "to imagine

95
if you will the scene of events last Thursday morning". His casual
phrasing makes the fight on the moon sound like a street accident,
and he prompts his client to describe his "instinctive" reactions on
knowing that the capsule had only enough power to lift one passen-
ger. This whole speech provides an overt example of the way Archie's
doublespeak translates self-interest into a public good as he praises
Scott's "rational assessment" of his usefulness to society back on
earth (84). This episode was cut in order to streamline thefinaleand
because it simply underlines what happens in the rest of the coda.
The cut makes good sense dramatically, since George has nowhere
shown concern about the moon landing, so would be unlikely to
dream about Scott, but, more significantly, the later text delays
George's failure to take action until the murder of Clegthorpe,
whereas the earlier version weakens this climax by having him lamely
refuse to question the witness: "Why should I cross-examine the
figures of my dreams? If that is the real Captain Scott, then I am the
Archbishop of Canterbury."
The two texts then converge to reveal another of Archie's doubting
disciples. The rationalization of the Church has moved too fast for
the people, who still clamour for the sacraments; their unreasonable
fancies, like Dotty's, cannot be talked away, though Clegthorpe
pleads that "surely belief in man could find room for man's beliefs"
(84). Stoppard then has Archie quote from Richard HI and from the
story of Thomas a Becket's murder to give focus to this new clash
between a tyrant and his former friend: between State and Church.
To the opening bars of "Sentimental Journey", the jumpers menace
Clegthorpe and hustle him upstage until they have made him part of
their pyramid:
GEORGE: Point of order, Mr Chairman.
C L E G T H O R P E : Professor - it's not right. George - help.
C R O U C H : DO you have any questions for this witness, Professor?
G E O R G E : Er . . . no, I don't think so.
C R O U C H : Thank you.
(The music goes louder.)
GEORGE : Well, this seems to be a political quarrel Surely only a proper
respect for absolute values . . . universal truths - philosophy - (85)
George's dream of his own moral failure in letting Clegthorpe die
suggests that deep down he knows he has failed Dotty in a similar
way, and it is she who now appears. In George's dream, she sits high
above him and the chanting jumpers on her silver moon, a cool
commentator towards whom no man could possibly remain indif-
ferent, as opposed to that word's rationalistic meaning (neither good
nor bad). As George imagines her, Dotty can only believe that "two

96
and two make roughly four" whereas, in reality, she suffers from the
fact that they can no longer be relied on to make four. Again, the pair
of them drift pathetically apart.
The coda emphasizes the fact that, despite his failure, George has
the right ideas although he is unable to use them to meet life head on.
The audience is bound to sympathize with his insistence on an innate
goodness in mankind, yet the play as a whole and the coda in
particular are designed to show that simply to be well-meaning is not
enough. It is characteristic and endearing of George to find goodness
in something as inconsequential as "the exchange of signals between
two long-distance lorry-drivers in the black sleet of a god-awful night
on the old A i " (71); in fact, he immediately sees how that could make
him "sound like a joke vicar". However, he has no such reservations
about defending the basic value of such inconsequence; if rationality
were the be-all and end-all, "the world would be one gigantic field of
soya beans" (40). The irrational stamps us as human.
Jumpers may proclaim the forces of whimsy, in that George, Dotty,
Crouch and Bones all live fiercely eccentric lives; but Archie and the
grim secretary are also eccentrics, so Stoppard's own view is more
complicated than that. At the end of the coda he makes George point
to the irrationality of the logical positivists themselves, who can say
that knowledge is only that which can be proved but who "claim to
know that life is better than death, that love is better than hate . . ."
(87). Yet since words can make the rational seem irrational (and vice
versa), whimsy offers no real defence against the likes of Archie,
whose final speech reduces disease, war, pollution, famine and cruel-
ty to relatively minor mishaps. His last comic flourish converts the
pessimism of Waiting for Godot ("Astride of a grave and a difficult
birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the
forceps. We have time to grow old") into a jaunty sexual encounter as
he cocks a snook at Sam (Beckett and Clegthorpe): "At the graveside
the undertaker doffs his top hat and impregnates the prettiest mour-
ner. Wham, bam, thank you Sam."
George in his eccentric pursuit of "universal truths" considers
himself beyond politics, both inside and outside his home, and will
not fight to maintain the standards he values. Consequently the final
comment belongs to Dotty, spotlit on her silver crescent, who sings
farewell to the world of lovers' vows and irrational dreams: "Goodbye
spoony Juney Moon." But even if he will not defend himself, alone
and calling out in the dark, George like Dotty will not join the
jumpers. Though Archie would rationalize away injustice and pain,
and though Dotty (as George dreams her) would toss aside romantic
fancy, the play does leave us with an irreducible sense of individual-

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ism. The very illogic of George's failure to help Clegthorpe when he
knows the good in the Samaritan, those moments when he and Dotty
cling to each other inarticulately - these incongruities defy the tidy
reasonableness of Archie and his plastic bag. Foolish, bewildered,
blind, and inconsistent, George and Dotty are finally too much
themselves to let the system and the soya beans take over.
Chapter^
What did you do, Dada?
The period between Jumpers (1972) and Travesties (1974) established
Stoppard in the minds of West End audiences as a name that ensured
an evening's laughter mixed with a satisfying sense of intellectual
challenge, whether or not his plays proved fully comprehen-
sible. At the same time, an increasing number of professional critics
were beginning to see him as a showman whose theatrical precocity
did not quite mask the fact that his ideas, though clever, were not, in
their opinion, sufficiently thought through. Others who were pre-
pared to take Stoppard's thoughts seriously, felt nonetheless that
weighty subjects should, somewhere along the way, arrive at sober
statement. Still others clicked their tongues over Stoppard's refusal
to commit himself to one point of view, contenting himself with airy
structures of ingenious and amusing complexity instead of disturbing
his audience's view of themselves.1
From his beginnings as a writer, Stoppard always seems to have
been looking over his own shoulder, conscious of his weaknesses (as
regards plot or characterization) or of the temperamental bent which
attracted him to particular ideas and authors. His reaction to these
public criticisms was equally self-conscious and was apt to lead him
into statements which defensively stressed the artifice of his work:
"I'm not impressed by art because it's political, I believe in art being
good or bad art, not relevant art or irrelevant art." 2 The polish and
quotability of such statements had the effect of blinding his detrac-
tors to the impulse behind this artifice. Looking back in a 1981
interview at his public performance as the disengaged artist, Stop-
pard analysed his reaction:
. . . I began writing at a time when the climate was such that theatre seemed to
exist for the specific purpose of commenting on our own society direct-
ly. Temperamentally this didn't suit me, because I would much rather
have written The Importance of Being Earnest than . . . than . . .
INTERVIEWER: breaking in) Than Look Back in Anger}
S T O P P A R D : Yes. Well, hang on, that's more complicated because Look Back
in Anger is full of wonderful speeches which I would like to have been
able to write.3
It is characteristic that having taken a position he should immediately
backtrack, determined to be fair to what he admires in Osborne's
play. Even here, Stoppard has to shade things, to argue one point and
then its opposite, because simple statement is too simple. Clearing

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that away, he goes on to explain his early defensiveness: "I took on a
sort of 'travelling pose' which exaggerated my insecurity about not
being able to fit into this scheme, and I tended to overcorrect, as
though in some peculiar way Earnest was actually more important
than a play which grappled."
Beneath the pose, Stoppard clung to a sincere distrust of easy
argument or of head-on commitment to ideas which, when thought
twice about, need not be as true as they first seemed. Yet his urge to
remain objective did not mean that he held no personal views. Like
his own George Moore, if Stoppard could not prove things to be true
or false, given the inadequacy of words and the deceptiveness of
appearances, he still "knows that he knows" certain basic truths. In
consequence, he goes back over the same themes and situations,
trying to reach the ultimate statement about them, or he will weave a
detective story into his plots to show how this most deductive of
literary structures can fall victim to the treachery of ear and eye just as
more abstract detective work, such as political or philosophical
theory, frequently does. In the 1981 interview, arguing after the fact,
he could claim that "I had to change as time went by, and began
looking for marriage between the play of ideas and the work of wit."
The marriage idea, first voiced to interviewers in 1974, does repre-
sent a change of pose, but it did not require a change of heart. For
example, Albert ys Bridge, from the mid-sixties, can be interpreted as a
study of artistic detachment, with Albert, increasingly absorbed in his
own art at the expense of his commitment to life, versus Fraser, only
able to cope with living in Clufton after having viewed it from above.
In the end, both come crashing down.
Jumpers and Travesties made it possible for Stoppard to lower his
defences and publicly announce the marriage of two sides of himself;
they did not alter his views about politics and art. Jumpers, in that it
upholds standards of human behaviour, is a political statement: "the
play reflects my belief that all political acts have a moral basis to them
and are meaningless without it". 4 Stoppard's strategy had always
been to show how one viewpoint and its opposite were simply restate-
ments of each other, but in Jumpers he presents this duality more
forcefully. Instead of withdrawing from the impasse with a smile, he
implies a third, superior principle against which both arguments may
be measured. He has seen how important "it is to set each one up
against a moral standard, a consistent idea of what constitutes good
and bad in the way human beings treat each other regardless of class,
colour or ideology, and at least my poor professor in Jumpers got that
right".5
Ideas and wit go together for Stoppard because only through that

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union can he achieve the objectivity needed to rein in his volatile,
impressionable senses. Yet the marriage is never a placid one since
part of him (51 per cent by his count) would be perfectly content to
drift along, courting adulation for his inventive cleverness, while
another part of him, the serious thinker, tries to pinpoint the way
things are. Scared of being over-serious - "It's not a condition of
good art that you sit in a brown study" - yet "catching" himself in too
much admiration of the "sort of eclectic, trivial person who's very
gifted",6 Stoppard pursues a middle path with integrity and intellec-
tual humility, although he can sometimes be pulled out of centre in
one direction or the other. Dogg's Our Pet,7 the short piece he wrote
for Ed Berman while waiting for Jumpers to go into rehearsal at the
Old Vic, exemplifies the way he responds intellectually to what for
others might seem an entirely light-hearted occasion and how that
serious idea then leads to a flourish of playful cadenzas.
The play celebrates the inauguration of The Almost Free Theatre
in Soho as a permanent home for the multifarious enterprises of Ed
Berman, the theatrical entrepreneur for whose Ambiance Theatre
Stoppard had already written After Magritte. But the germinal idea
derived from the reading he had done for Jumpers: Wittgenstein's
thesis about a man who calls for particularly-shaped pieces of wood
from another man standing some yards away; when he calls for a
block, he receives a block, and so on. As Stoppard explains in a note
to Dogg's Our Pet,
A stranger who did not know the language, coming upon this scene, would
conclude that, probably, the different words described different shapes and
sizes of wood. But this is not the only possible interpretation.
Suppose, for example, the second man knows in advance which pieces
Charlie needs, and in what order. In such a case there would be no need for
Charlie to 'name' the pieces he wants, but only to indicate when he is ready
for the next one. (81)
The two men need never discover they speak different languages
unless a third person were to use one of their codes: "in the play it is
Charlie who finds himself outnumbered". The point then is to
educate the audience and, to a certain extent, Charlie in a language
which sounds like English but which means something else. Char-
lie's simple, monosyllabic words no longer express what they are
supposed to; the Magrittean divorce between description and picture
has become an intricate puzzle. When Charlie, "some kind of work-
man or caretaker", calls out "Plank!", a plank zooms from the wings;
he catches it and starts to build a platform. When he shouts the word
a second time, he is surprised by a football; this is followed by a
schoolboy, Baker, hopping from foot to foot in readiness for Charlie's

101
return throw. A glare "freezes him to a standstill". Charlie then
tosses the ball to Baker and calls out "Plank!"; a plank comes and he
places it beside the first one; a third plank is dispatched in the same
way. Then another schoolboy, Able, comes on stage yelling "Plank!"
to Baker, who throws him the ball. They throw it back and forth,
calling out "Plank!" (meaning "Here!") to each other until Charlie
"freezes them to a standstill" (82). As Charlie continues building
with slabs and blocks, the audience come to realize from the boys'
counter-actions that "slab" and "block" could also mean "ready"
and "next". At the entrance of a fourth character, Dogg, the head-
master, we glimpse yet another lingo: the military method of naming
the letters of the alphabet - Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog.
The playfulness generated by this investigation into the frail codes
of meaning derives as much from the celebratory occasion and the
circumstances of the play's production as it does from the accumulat-
ing misunderstanding between the characters. For one of his many
guises, Berman had adopted the soubriquet 'Prof. R. L. Dogg' in
order to cheer "dry academics who leaf through library index cards in
the never-ending search for permanence"; his poems for children
would one day be listed under 'Dogg, R. L.' 8 More immediately, the
pseudonym had launched a group of actors into the streets and
schools as Dogg's Troupe; Dogg's Our Pet creates a cheery anagram
out of that name. In shaping his idea to the demands of an opening
ceremony, Stoppard orchestrates a celebration between actors and
audience by formalizing the sort of improvisational games actors play
to sharpen their technique - he pays tribute to the Troupe's inven-
tiveness and calls the script "a description of an event collectively
arrived at" 9 - moulding them into a situation which would appeal to
both adults and schoolchildren.
The piece starts rousingly to establish a sense of occasion as a
march tune blares out from the wings of an empty stage. The
entrance of Charlie in overalls and carrying a radio creates an anti-
climactic counterpoint, and this contrapuntal movement governs the
rest of the action as the audience oscillates between participation and
bewilderment. When the bustling headmaster enters, he hurries
along the front row of the audience handing out miniature flags in the
school colours to be waved by everybody at the climax of events, and
he involves them still further by providing what amounts to a brief
lesson in Dogg Maths as he counts out the flags. He hands flowers to
the boys and later stretches a ribbon in the same school colours from
one side of the stage to the other so that it passes a few feet above the
now-completed platform. Watching this activity, we try to deduce its
purpose, just as we attempt to discover meaning behind the verbal

102
symbols. Ultimately, we perceive the point when Dogg rolls a red
carpet towards the foot of the platform and smirkingly ushers in a
gracious-looking lady: "perhaps she is the Queen, or perhaps the
wife of the Chairman of the Governors". But having arrived at the
idea of an opening ceremony, we again flounder when the Lady reads
her dedication address "nicely" but in language which makes coher-
ent sense yet whose unpleasant meaning destroys our expectations:
"Sad fact, brats pule puke crap-pot stink, spit; grow up dunces
crooks . . . nick swag, swig coke, bank kickbacks; frankly cant stick
kids" (92-3). After this, however, situation and dialogue move in
tandem as the Lady cuts the ribbon and Dogg and the boys sing the
school song, "Floreat Cane", over and over. For a time, our world
and Dogg's find common ground in a third, ancient (and ironically
obsolete) code.
Simultaneously, Stoppard uses this simplest of dramatic struc-
tures - the building of a platform with differently shaped pieces of
wood, the cutting of a ribbon, the singing of an anthem - to demons-
trate varying ways in which we derive meaning from physical and
verbal gesture. At one point, seeking some respite from the sur-
rounding confusion, Charlie switches his radio on again and so
initiates a sequence which points to the fact that intonation alone can
often convey a fair amount of information. One of the most familiar
rhythms to a British audience is the particular rise and fall of an
announcer's voice as he reads out the weekly football results. Vocal
inflection and our previous exposure to Dogg numbers make an
immediate impact, and Stoppard expects that his audience may even
come to deduce that one or other of "Clock" and "Foglamp" corres-
ponds to "City" and "United": "Tube Clock dock, Handbag dock;
Haddock Clock quite, Haddock Foglamp trog; Wonder quite, Pick-
nicking pan . . ." (89). Stoppard also builds a joke from written
symbols whose significance neither we nor Charlie understand. The
slogans the boys create out of the "indecipherable signs" scrawled
over the spare slabs and blocks they use to make a wall, centre stage,
have a somewhat strangled idiom in English. The only way we can
guess what they mean to Dogg is by observing his physical reaction.
Seeing D O G G P O U T T H E R E E N D S , the headmaster gives Charlie a
slight tap on the cheek, but when that leads to protest he knocks him
through the wall. After this happens a second time, Charlie deduces
that practically anything he says will arouse the master's anger. After
Dogg returns from escorting the Lady offstage, he glares at Charlie
for having presented her with a bouquet while "respectfully" mur-
muring "Yob", a word he has come to think means "flowers" in
Dogg. Charlie, seeing him fuming, makes another deduction and,

103
borrowing a trick of Stan Laurel's, "dutifully hurls himself through
the wall" (93).
Watching Dogg's Our Pet is like viewing an intermittently familiar
ritual through a thick pane of glass. Throughout it all, Charlie
functions as our confused interlocutor. Though we laugh at his
slapstick antics with blocks, slabs, and wall, we also share his be-
wilderment and make many of the same logical assumptions. Stop-
pard relies on that sympathy in laying the final trap, for ultimately he
reveals that the one person we thought we understood completely
does not, after all, speak quite the same 'language'. Picking himself
up out of the wall, Charlie mounts the platform to address the
audience. For the first time in the play, what is said on stage makes
sequential and unequivocal sense, and yet, because Charlie has not
been a neutral observer of the previous action, but is in fact the school
caretaker, he has a different interpretation from ours, one which
surprises and yet brings everything back to normality. From his point
of view, the footballs, the words on the wall, the 'language' the boys
use are all part of the behaviour that makes his job harder:
Three points only while I have the platform. Firstly, just because it's been
opened, there's no need to run amok kicking footballs through windows and
writing on the walls. It's me who's got to keep this place looking new so let's
start by leaving it as wefindit. Secondly, I can take a joke a well as any man,
but I've noticed a lot of language about the place and if there's one thing I
can't stand it's language. I forget what the third point is.
The speech also works economically to tie up the investigation of
language and the opening of the actual theatre. But Stoppard goes
further by turning the 'language' of the theatre games in on itself. We
automatically accept the empty stage-space as some sort of area
inside or (more probably) outside the school but we have not seen the
objects coming from the wings as flying through windows nor have
we been able to see the building blocks as an actual wall or the slogans
as schoolboy graffiti. Stoppard then has Charlie descend from the
podium to tidy both the place and the play by rebuilding the wall so
that the fourth side of each of its pieces assembles to read D O G G S
TROUPE THE END.
Seriousness and frivolity balance neatly here upon a central pivot,
a third ingredient which has not received much attention from
Stoppard or his commentators. The major characters in all his work
experience various degrees of agony. Charlie's pain is of the lightest
sort; the play's knockabout confusion presents it frivolously and his
final speech, in which he takes a 'serious' view of the goings-on
around him restores the balance. But in plays like Rosencrantz and
Jumpers the anguish grows increasingly desperate and that sort of

104
pain is completely foreign to the unfeeling mechanics of farce, the
label so often attached mistakenly to Stoppard's plays.
It is this pain which eventually tips the balance towards seriousness
in Artist Descending a Staircase,10 the radio play commissioned by a
consortium of European broadcasting companies and aired by the
B B C in November 197 2. In the abstract design of its controlling idea
the play has a certain kinship with Dogg's Our Pet, but emotionally it
leads on from Jumpers, while thematically it offers what Stoppard
himself called "a dry run" for ideas that will appear more expansively
in Travesties.
The play's design follows a precisely worked time-pattern. Begin-
ning in the present, it moves back in five irregular stages to 1914, and
then the next five scenes repeat those stages in an upwards direction
on into the present: "So the play is set temporally in six parts, in the
sequence A B C D E FE D C B A" (73). In this way, all three artists of
the play descend a time-staircase back to their innocent youth before
they took up the fashions of modern art. Like Marcel Duchamp's
cubist painting, "Nude Descending a Staircase", the script breaks
that descent into separate moments and, like cubism itself, it then
reassembles the captured parts. The title refers literally to the rapid
descent of one of the trio, Donner, who has fallen through the rickety
balustrade at the top of the stairs to their attic studio. But the V
pattern sends the listener back into the past in search of clues which
might explain what appears to be Donner's murder in the first scene;
however, when the action moves up to the present once more the
journey turns out to have been a wild-goose chase. Again Stoppard
adopts the logic of a detective story to show how deduction often
leads us weirdly astray. Naturally in a radio play we base those
assumptions on aural evidence, and Stoppard has tailored his design
to take advantage of the materials the medium provides in order to
embroider upon the idea that "people have been taught to expect
certain kinds of insight but not others" (82).
The script's middle scene, the flashback to 1914, illustrates the
way Stoppard plays on our expectations through sound-effects. The
three friends, Beauchamp, Martello and Donner, are on a walking
tour in France, but along with the sound of feet which establishes this
scene we hear the clip-clop of what we take to be a horse.
Beauchamp's opening declamation also paints the picture: "All my
life I have wanted to ride through the French countryside in summer,
with my two best friends, and make indefensible statements about
art" (104). Although this encourages us to interpret events in a
particular manner, Stoppard plays scrupulously fair, for one of
Beauchamp's "indefensible" remarks warns us that "Art should

105
break its promises." So, despite the pile-up of such commands as
"Whoa, boy, whoa" and the sound of skittering hooves when any-
thing startling occurs, Stoppard plants other clues to suggest the
'horse' may not be what it seems. By this time in the play, we have
already experienced a host of deceiving sounds so we should be alert
to the hint he slips into Donner's complaint about their holiday, "I've
had nothing to eat today except for half a coconut", a menu odd
enough to draw our attention, especially since coconuts have a
reputation as a sound-effect. We might also notice that Donner tells
Beauchamp to "shut up" whenever he starts his "Whoa, boy" routine
and that Beauchamp claims "this horse only believes in me" (106).
This break between sign and meaning has much to do with the
friends' own interpretation of their surroundings ("There's a discre-
pancy between the map and the last signpost", says Martello), so that
once he has revealed the truth about the 'horse' ("For God's sake,
Beauchamp, will you get rid of that coconut!") Stoppard moves on to
the serious business of the scene and of the entire play: how do we
know what we 'know'?
One answer is that we tend to arrive at verdicts which justify our
personal prejudices. The friends have continued with their planned
holiday, even after the Serbs "shot that absurd Archduke Ferdinand
of Ruritania", because Martello's uncle in the Foreign Office, blind
to anything beyond Britain's interests, has assured them there will be
no war because "His Majesty's Government is not ready to go to war,
and it will be six months at least before we are strong enough to beat
the French" (109). Uncle Rupert may be a ludicrous relic of the
Napoleonic Wars, but with the hindsight of history we can appreciate
the sombre reality behind his obsolete ideas. Martello's aunt exhibits
a similarly Edwardian certainty: "You live in a sane and beautiful
world, my auntie said, and the least you can do, if you must be a
painter, is to paint appropriately sane and beautiful pictures." Mar-
tello does not satirize either relative, for the three innocents abroad
share this confident Britishness and so misinterpret, or refuse to see
clearly, the evidence before them. However, the listener, again be-
cause of history's perspective, will not now misunderstand the sound
of lorries, explosions, and passing cavalry in the high summer of 1914
which the travellers, blithely joking on about Beauchamp's Tenth
Horse, prefer to reason away, because "if a man can't go for a walk on
the Continent nowadays, what is the world coming to?" (108). This
sort of statement accounts for the bite under the scene's tricksy
surface: we already know that the three carefree young men will grow
up to be ridiculous old fools, but now we see this fall from innocence
in the wider context of what the world is coming to. Each scene in the

106
play contains its drop or two of acid, and Stoppard lures us towards
them with his disarming games.
This taste of bitter-sweet which makes the play so effective comes
particularly from Stoppard's manipulation of his characters down
and up the V pattern. The old men of the first scenes still talk about
Sophie, the only other character in the play, as if she were part of
their lives. By the time we actually meet her in the fourth episode we
know she has died after a "sad enough life". Stoppard effects the
transition back to 1922 through the elderly Conner's yearning cry so
that she enters the play like a faded souvenir from the past:

Oh Sophie . . . I try to shut out the memory but it needs only ... a ribbon ...
a flower... a phrase of music... a riverflowingbeneath ancient bridges
. . . the scent of summertime . . .
(Cliche Paris music, accordion . . .) (91)

The sentimentality quickly disappears, however, when Sophie com-

plains that the accordion player downstairs drives her mad. We are
not in Paris but in Lambeth, and after that trick of sound Stoppard
pits Sophie's brave voice against the noise of a suitcase being strap-
ped up and the young Beauchamp's half-hearted attempts to explain
that he has finished with her. The girl's desperate cheerfulness as she
quips with Martello maintains a tenseness until she can pretend no
longer: "He doesn't know what to do with me, does he?" (94). Even
then she finds refuge in irony so that the scene's pathos comes from
her attempt to clamp back her emotion rather than from the fact that
she is blind and rejected by the man she has loved for two years:
"Perhaps he was going to leave a note on the mantelpiece. As a sort of
joke" (95). Stoppard then moves us back to 1920, knowing that the
aftertaste of Sophie's pain will affect our attitude to the polite gaiety
of the moment when she first meets the three friends. Since we know
what will transpire, Beauchamp's intense concentration upon his
experiments with sound in this scene and the next (with the coconut)
now seem to signpost an innate lack of feeling.
Sophie's blindness does eventually command our sympathies, but
at first Stoppard uses it to delineate her lack of self-pity and, since
she too must rely on sound, he can thereby involve his audience in
still more games. As Martello guides her up the stairs we hear a
ping-pong game in progress, and this becomes louder as they enter
the room. At the sound of a winning shot, Sophie offers congratula-
tions but is somewhat taken aback when the play resumes. She
cannot see Beauchamp's recording, just as he and Donner have not
seen her blindness. After explanations all round, Sophie reacts
cautiously to the whistling tea-kettle: "Is that the gramophone

107
again?" (97). She then insists on serving their tea, a process which
necessitates further sound pictures. By the time we return to this
scene after experiencing the French walking tour, all four are in-
volved in another guessing-game. Sophie has apparently said to the
three that she never loses her bearings, so we hear them instructing
her to step this way and that until they call a halt: "I am exactly where
I started, standing with my back to my chair" ( n o ) . They might have
moved the chair, in which case she would have deduced wrongly, as
indeed happens when she bumps against the misplaced tea-table.
Here the deductive game has become part of the polite banter that
controls the scene, a formal exuberance which conveys a period
flavour but rings hollow the nearer we come to the betrayal of two
years later.
The fading laughter, as Beauchamp guides Sophie downstairs,
and Donner's reiterated warning, "don't fall", ensure a mood of ill
omen as we move forward via the repeated accordion music and the
sound of receding footsteps on the stairs to the barely audible slam of
a door. The listener is now as blind as Sophie, sharing her focus and
her vulnerability in close-up. Donner wants to stay with her, but in
the first part of the scene she had explained that "I can't love you back
. . . I have lost the capability of falling in love" (95). Now, as she lays
her desperation bare ("I feel more blind than I did the first day, when
I came to tea"), neither she nor we can be sure that Donner is still in
the room. Her speech, which takes up the whole scene, builds in
intensity as she tells him they cannot live as brother and sister and
that she will not accept his pity: "Am I to weave you endless tablemats
and antimacassars in return for life?" (111). But neither can she live
alone in the dark, and here Stoppard's adroit use of the medium
forces us into Sophie's imagination as she envisions day-to-day
obstacles of a poignant triviality: who will be there to find a missing
shoe, make sure her clothes match, or do up the back of her dress?
Her panic at the silence in the room adds to her sense of helplessness
and exposure. As she loses her self-control, the mounting rhythms of
her speech convert the script's predominant sportiveness - were
"Mouse" (Donner's nickname) still there he would be playing a cruel
trick - into a moment of complete terror which culminates in a violent
sound of smashing glass as she throws herself through a window
down to the courtyard below.
The irony of Sophie's fall darkens as we move up to the present
and Martello's opening comment: "She would have killed you, Don-
ner." The girl's helpless dependency probably would have killed
him, since he truly loved her yet could not have made her happy, but
Martello means that, had she fallen a few feet to the right, her body

108
would have struck him as he waved goodbye to his friends. Donner
did intend to stay and care for her, and his constancy towards her
memory creates the play's second centre of pain. On our way down
the V pattern, we have heard Martello's patronizing dismissal, "Poor
Donner, he never had much luck with Sophie" (79), and how the
latter burst out weeping when Beauchamp criticized his post-Pop,
pre-Raphaelite portrait of her: "Shut up, damn you! - how dare you
talk of her?! - how dare you" (84). Stoppard has also distinguished
Donner's relatively clear-eyed thoughtfulness from his friends' flip-
pant egotism; even in France, it was he who eventually interpreted
the sights and sounds around them as acts of war: "They might think
we're spies . . . and kill us. That would be ridiculous. I don't want to
die ridiculously" (108).
In the continuation of the scene between the two old men, Martel-
lo shows his utter blindness to Donner's feelings as he mulls the
flavour of "defenestration" or idly toys with "de-escalate" and "in-
fluence" as words to describe "people being pushed downstairs or
stuffed up chimneys" (112-13). Sophie's fall simply meant the end
of "a nice girl who was due for a sad life", and the friends are "no
doubt due for our own [fall] one way or another" (nice that, consider-
ing Donner's death) so that he views the fifty years since then as "a
brief delay between the fall of one body and another". Martello can
also chat on about a missing tooth from his own Pop portrait of
Sophie - at which Donner sighs, "Her teeth were broken too,
smashed, scattered" - so the listener may find it hard to decide
whether Martello's decision to tell Donner that Sophie possibly
singled Beauchamp out by mistake is meant to bring comfort or is yet
another instance of his heedlessness. Whatever the motive, the re-
velation proves devastating and reduces Donner to moans of "Oh my
God". Yet despite this threnody of pain, one week later, just before
his own fall, Donner is happily at work on a realistic portrait of
Sophie in a garden with a unicorn. Fired by his love, he has deserted
"that child's garden of easy victories known as the avant garde" (81),
remembering how she first spoke about her blindness: "I can put a
unicorn in the garden and no one can open my eyes against it and say
it isn't true" (103).
Martello's motives, Donner's pain, even Sophie's fall (which
Beauchamp insists was an accident) all show themselves capable of
interpretation and misinterpretation, as do the play's equivocal
sound-effects. Stoppard encapsulates all this in a misleading tape-
recording which seems to point to Donner's murder. The elderly
Beauchamp, still enraptured by his recordings, had persuaded Don-
ner to switch on the recorder as he worked silently and alone, but

109
instead of the silence Beauchamp had expected to ensnare as his tape
went round in a loop, he had captured a sound-picture of Donner's
last moments. When the play begins, we hear "an irregular droning"
and the noise of stealthy footsteps. A floorboard creaks; the droning
suddenly breaks off; the footsteps cease; then across the expectant
hush comes Donner's calm voice: "Ah! There you are!" This is
followed by two rapid steps and a thump before Donner cries out and
falls through the bannisters to his death. Listening to the tape,
Beauchamp and Martello accuse each other of having crept up on the
sleeping Donner and of striking him. One of the two must be his
murderer, since Donner's calm greeting as he woke suggests that the
footsteps could only have been those of a friend, and he had no other
friends. The listener may share that verdict, even though the two
crotchety old men continually disagree in their interpretation of
other, past events:

MARTELLO: . . . Remember how John used to say, "If Donner whistles the
opening of Beethoven's Fifth in six/eight time once more I'll kill him)"}
BEAUCHAMP: John who?
MARTELLO: Augustus John.
BEAUCHAMP: NO, no, it was Edith Sitwell.
MARTELLO: Rubbish! - you're getting old, Beauchamp. (77)

This talk of killing is designed to encourage our suspicions, as is

Stoppard's emphasis upon the pair's ill temper and the way they
magnify small irritations, so that when we move down the time-loop
we will be on the look-out for some minor grudge that brought one or
the other of the old men to violence.
However, in that journey, we discover instead those ambiguous,
deceiving sounds. The initial tape-recording sets off a trail of slaps
and thumps that leads to the scene in France where flies buzz in the
summer heat and the talk is interrupted by smacks as the young men
swat at them. Accordingly, Beauchamp says more than he intends
when, just before leaving to buy some fly-spray, he tells Donner "that
in this loop of tape there is some truth about how we live" (115).
During the final scene, as the two old men continue their mutual
recriminations, the listener discovers that there has been no murder.
The tape actually captured Donner's attack on a fly that buzzed
around the recorder, a sequence which is now repeated, except for
the climactic crash through the bannisters, as Beauchamp takes up
the hunt:

BEAUCHAMP: That fly has been driving me mad. Where is he?

MARTELLO: Somewhere over there . . .
BEAUCHAMP: Right.

no
The original loop of TAPE is hereby reproduced:
(a) Fly droning.
(b) Careful footsteps approach. A board creaks.
(c) Theflysettles.
(d) BEAUCHAMPkk
(e) BE A U C H A M P : Ah! There you are.'
(f) Two more quick steps and them Thumpl
BEAUCHAMP: Got him! (116)

In this way, the deceptive loop of tape does contain the truth about
the way the characters have lived, for the relationship between all
four of them evolved from just such a moment of equivocal evidence,
a misinterpretation that led to fifty years of anguish, just as
Beauchamp's tape will lead to each aged survivor's torture of the
other.
After the Great War, just before she lost her sight completely,
Sophie had attended the trio's first exhibition, "Frontiers in Art",
and had been particularly attracted by the face of one of them, though
she had never learned who was who. However, she had seen a
newspaper photograph in which the three were posed beside their
work, and her man was shown standing by a painting of what looked
like a field of snow behind a low black railing. There had only been
one snow scene, and that was Beauchamp's, but years later Martello
tells Donner how Sophie's description of the picture suggested a
much taller fence and that he had long suspected that the painting
she meant was actually Donner's picture of thick white posts against a
black background (114).
Artist Descending offers its listeners more than an ingenious union
of ideas and comic artifice. Behind the glittering cleverness, Stop-
pard's depiction of sorrow and misunderstanding injects the play
with an emotion that is all the more moving because of his con-
strained handling of a potentially saccharine plot. The script's con-
trivance detaches us from the sentimental, yet its patterning also
colours our sympathies as we move from scene to scene along the
time-loop knowing what the characters must come to. And in the
light of Stoppard's preoccupation at this time with his own responsi-
bilities as an artist, the play makes a stirring, if indirect statement
about the connection between artistic discipline and human feeling.
Donner, the most consistently sensitive of the three friends, dis-
covers himself as an artist once he learns that Sophie had perhaps
loved him all along. Invigorated by this feeling, he gives up dabbling
in facile experimentation to engage "in the infinitely more difficult
task of painting what the eye sees" (81) by creating his tribute to
Sophie. This denouement suggests that sympathy and openness

i n
are essential to the artist, for Donner, despite his years of tawdry
enslavement to the trendy, is finally redeemed by his ability
to feel, whereas Beauchamp and Martello can never pass beyond
cynical detachment, an attitude that always did and always will
infect their 'art'. There is a connection here with Jumpers, for
George, though no artist, ultimately fails because he cannot put
his intuitive feelings into practice: between the emotion and the response
falls the shadow.
Like him, Donner has always been on the periphery of life (and
art), though he has the potential to be more than a by-stander.
Nicknamed " 'Mouse' because he enters quietly" (93), it was none
the less he who was open to the realities of the French walking-tour -
"I nearly drowned trying to cross a laughing torrent, the honest locals
have stolen most of our money" (105-6) - while the other two
indulged themselves in games with coconuts or fantasies "about my
next work, a beautiful woman, as described in the Song of Solomon"
(109) as the guns exploded around them. Their Exhibition repre-
sented a withdrawal into unfeeling mockery by turning the Great
War's actual frontier into "a lark" through their pictures "of barbed
wire fences and signboards saying 'You are now entering Patago-
nia' " (95). It was Donner alone who noticed Sophie at the gallery- "I
believe we exchanged a look!" (101) - and it was he who felt
compelled to remain with her. The other two never progress beyond
schoolboy larks, either as individuals or as artists. Their accusations
over Donner's dead body devolve into destructive sarcasm and petty
insult, and their art has a similar sterility. Martello in fact recognizes
his own empty acrobatics but cannot free himself: "no wonder I have
achieved nothing with my life! - my brain is on a flying trapeze that
outstrips all the possibilities of action. Mental acrobatics,... whereas
you . . . came to grips with life at least this once, and killed Donner"
(78).
In this speech, Stoppard himself comes to grips with those critics
who were accusing him of mental acrobatics, and the entire play
stands as his eloquent defence. Beauchamp and Martello's arty larks
are empty of meaning because neither of them savours or feels
curious about life. Donner, on the other hand, had always been
susceptible to the world around him. He can never remake the past
with Sophie and he is to "die ridiculously", but before he does so he
comes to terms with his feelings for her through the expression of his
art. Though he admits that Martello's suggestion as to Sophie's
mistake may have been a lie in revenge for Donner's having damaged
his figure of her, the mere possibility that she truly loved him gives
meaning to his work. This new sense of commitment also alters

112
Donner's opinions about art itself and so enfolds the play's debate
about an and life in a personal crisis.
That Donner's views before and after Martello's revelation differ
so markedly suggests that the human factor in itself forms a dividing
line between skilled talent and artistic truth, though whether the
artist can have any direct impact on life continues to be the nagging
question at the centre of Stoppard's work from this point on. The
senseless horror of the Great War had made the form and structure
of conventional art seem a fraudulent perversion of what life was
really like and had led the three friends to "nonsense art" just as it led
Duchamp from Cubism to Dadaist non-sequitur. Yet at their first
Exhibition, though Sophie liked "the way you roared with laughter at
all your friends" (95), she found their work "frivolous and not very
difficult to do" (100), a statement that Martello and Beauchamp are
quick to agree with.
Stoppard, an admitted master of the frivolous, does not, however,
see frivolity, when it means shapelessness, as any truer a reflection of
life's chaos. Championing both sides of the argument with typical
conviction, he makes Sophie the spokeswoman for a painstaking
naturalism and Martello the advocate of the unexpected. Neither
view cancels the other because both point to the artist's imaginative
truth. She sees the artist as "celebrating the impulse to paint in
general, the imagination to paint something in particular, and the
ability to make the painting in question" (100), whereas he feels that
the artist cannot teach people to think in one particular way but
should "paint an utterly simple shape in order to ambush the mind
with something quite unexpected about that shape by hanging it in a
frame and forcing you to see it, as it were, for the first time" (101).
The essential difference between them lies in the degree of skill it
takes to make that imaginative statement, and here Stoppard has
Sophie deliver something of a lecture on the fact that art "celebrates
a world which includes itself - I mean, part of what there is to
celebrate is the capability of the artist" (100).
Art as complex celebration or as a frame that ambushes the mind
points directly to Stoppard's own concern with the 'play' of ideas,
though ironically he gives the one to the anti-frivolous Sophie and
the other to the anti-formal Martello. Yet though he undercuts
Sophie's stance by means of her own naive earnestness and
Beauchamp's joking query as to whether she wears appropriately
blue stockings, the argument is weighted her way because of Don-
ner's conversion to her viewpoint (in a previous scene) and the lack of
something vital in the natures of the other two. Donner has come to
see Beauchamp's recordings as "the mechanical expression of a
small intellectual idea" (81). He goes on to define the artist as
"someone who is gifted in some way which enables him to do
something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all
by someone who is not thus gifted" (83), to which Beauchamp, failing
to swat a fly, shouts "Missed!" And, to a certain extent, Donner has
done so, for, as he continues to explain, "An artistic imagination
coupled with skill is talent." Skill defines talent and also submits
creativity to certain "standards outside itself" for comparison, but it
need not make art. What the play and the reason behind Donner's
conversion both imply leads back to Martello's lament. The artist, no
matter how imaginative or skilful, must come to grips with life.
Stoppard thus acknowledges that hummingbird flights of fancy
would be nothing more than skilled acrobatics unless their whirring
flight path traced certain human truths. His dilemma is that of Yeats'
"Sailing to Byzantium", where the artist, seeking an objective dis-
tance from the "sensual music" of everyday life, finds that creative
artifice, in order to be art, must still "sing / To lords and ladies of
Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come". The human
centre within the elaborate structure of Stoppard's more serious
plays vindicates him on this. But other aspects of the artist's relation
to life defy solution. What use is the artist to society; should one talk
of'use' at all? Does the artist's picture of life have any effect on the
direction society will take; should one expect it to? As Donner
explains to Martello, looking back on their days in Paris after the
War, all art, whether rational or their own "anti-art of lost faith . . .
was all the same insult to a one-legged soldier and the one-legged,
one-armed, one-eyed regiment of the maimed" (89).
In the rest of the play, Stoppard debates these issues in comic vein.
Even before the War, Beauchamp could talk breezily about surprise
and that "Art should never conform" (104). When he asks Donner to
explain why he became an artist, the reply is suitably nonconformist:
"I heard there were opportunities to meet naked women." But
Beauchamp wants him to say that the artist should not need to justify
his place in the community:
. . . he cannot, and should stop boring people with his egocentric need to try.
The artist is a lucky dog. That is all there is to say about him. In any
community of a thousand souls there will be nine hundred doing the work,
ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky dog painting or writing
about the other nine hundred and ninety-nine. (105)
Yet, over the years, Donner has felt guilty at being "a lucky dog", and
his ultimate experiment sought to justify art to anyone whose main
concern is survival: "The answer, like all great insights, was simple:
make it edible" (87). Stoppard whirls this non-answer into curlicues

114
of fancy as Martello exclaims that Donner's sugar sculptures "will
give cubism a new lease of life" (88) or that his ceramic steaks will
"put taste where it belongs".
After his conversion, however, Donner can see that their anti-
rational creations freed them from any sort of social accountability,
and this no longer worries him. Instead he makes his art accountable
only to himself and the dead Sophie. Before Martello's revelation,
Donner's hopeless love had meant "that, even when life was at its
best there was a small part missing and I knew that I was going to die
without ever feeling that my life was complete" (113). But in painting
Sophie with the unicorn, he gives himself up to the memory of what
she truly was: her appearance, her courageous wit, her taste in
pictures. Although Beauchamp thinks that to paint an Academy
portrait is as ludicrous and useless as any of their past experiments -
"surely you can see that a post-Pop pre-Raphaelite is pure dada
brought up to date" (84) - for Donner it brings him close to Sophie,
and the last words he hears from Beauchamp suggest that finally
through art he has captured her and found his own completion:
"Poor Sophie. I think you've got her, Donner" (115).
The implications ofArtist Descending- that the artist's responsibi-
lities are ultimately to his own sense of truth and to the standards of
historic tradition - become the undisguised centre of debate in
Travesties.11 In the stage play, Stoppard meets the jibes about his
refusal to commit himself to direct political and social statement
head-on. Just before the play opened, he had defended his "oblique,
distant, generalized" stance by maintaining "that's what art is best at.
The objective is the universal perception, isn't it?" 12 Yet in Jumpers',
George's "respect for absolute values . . . universal truths —philoso-
phy" made him deaf to Clegthorpe's plea for help, and in Artist
Descending the friends' proclamations about aesthetic truths made
them oblivious to the realities of war. In Travesties, Stoppard sheds
any lingering unease about his own neutrality by turning Switzerland
into a metaphor of artistic detachment: "to be an artist at all is like
living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in
IQI7, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over
the eyes of Narcissus" (38). Furthermore, the reality which his
characters ignore has greater impact on our own lives than either the
brave new world of the Rad-Libs or the Edwardian sunset of the
Great War. Across the play looms the figure of Lenin, for whom
there can be no artistic neutrality: "Literature must become party
literature". Instead of shaping society, the artist now becomes the
measure of its worth: "The easiest way of knowing whether good has
triumphed over evil is to examine the freedom of the artist" (39).
 Travesties is such a grab-bag of styles and incidents - Stoppard
called it "a pig's breakfast" 13 - that to quote lines out of context risks
betraying the many-sidedness of the playwright's continual debate
with himself through the opposed voices of his characters. All the
more so because the action on stage reflects the prejudiced and
rusting memory of its narrator, the aged Henry Carr. In Artist De-
scending, the old men's memories appear equally defective, as when
they wrangle over what Edith Sitwell might or might not have said on
this or that occasion in the past. But though every episode, as we
move back and forth in time, is generated by some remark at the end
of the previous sequence, we experience each event as it actually
happened and not, as in Travesties, through the contorted filter of a
guide. Sitting in his apartment in Zurich, Carr remembers himself as
the British Consul, instead of the consular functionary he really was,
and transforms Bennett, the actual Consul, into his manservant. To
complicate things further, Carr's memories of Zurich in 1917 are
shaped by the plot and verbal rhythms of Oscar Wilde's The Import-
ance of Being Earnest in which he triumphed as - "not Ernest, the
other one" - Algernon Moncrieff, a performance he places one year
earlier than history allows so that James Joyce, the troupe's business
manager, meets both Tristan Tzara, who in reality had nothing to do
with the production, and Lenin, who "was the leader of millions by
the time [Carr did his] Algernon".
Through Old Carr, Stoppard has brought together three arche-
typical attitudes to art and the function of the artist, and those views,
though somewhat twisted by Carr, do none the less convey aspects of
their speakers' actual personalities and, through the play's shaping,
add up to a final statement of Stoppard's own position. Furthermore,
the debate has a greater immediacy than the one in Artist Descending
because the political utilitarianism of Lenin and his amanuensis,
Cecily, challenges artistic expression in the present day and collides
with Stoppard's innate antipathy towards rigid thinking.
Tzara's attitude, like Martello's or Beauchamp's, echoes the War
which has made everything meaningless. To proclaim that absurdity,
he and his friends at the Cabaret Voltaire recite fragmented poems to
fractured jazz music under the banner of Dada, a word that can either
stand for childish babble or for a double 'yes' to a life freed from
traditional ideas: nowadays, "A man may be an artist by exhibiting his
hindquarters. He may be a poet by drawing words out of a hat" (38).
Stoppard gives Carr Donner's rebuttal about artistic skill but then
pushes the argument further by having Tzara point out that, in
making 'Art' mean whatever he wants it to mean, he is only doing
what the Establishment does "with words like patriotism, duty, love,

116
freedom, king and country" (39). This idea that language can be
"conscripted" into the service of various ideologies lies at the heart of
Stoppard's work (particularly Jumpers) and will be exemplified by
Lenin. Yet Carr, and part of Stoppard, cannot accept that. Somehow
those words must possess some unadulterated currency; the
Dadaists' cynical views "merely demonstrate the freedom of the
artist to be ungrateful, hostile, self-centred and talentless, for which
freedom I went to war, and a more selfless ideal for a man of my taste
it would be difficult to imagine". In a later flurry, Carr displays some
envy towards the artist's special freedom which, like a schoolboy's
sick-note from Matron, excuses him from physical duties: "you were
let off to spend the afternoon messing about in the Art Room. Labour
or Art. And you've got a chit for life} (passionately) Where did you get
n?" (46).
But if Carr dismisses the idea of the artist's privileged role as "art's
greatest achievement, and it's a fake!" (47), Joyce embodies that
specialness. By means of an elaborate piece of staging, Stoppard sets
the word-magician against the iconoclast by having Joyce conjure a
carnation, coloured flags and finally a rabbit from the hat in which he
had deposited the small bits of paper that made Tzara's improvised
poem. If the Dadaists are "demolition men to smash centuries of
baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple" (62), Joyce's role is to
document the destruction of those temples and give them perma-
nence:
What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch?
Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new
markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand
enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that
launched a thousand ships - and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the
most human, the most complete of all heroes - (62)
The images of Troy resound with the splendour of an artistic heri-
tage that stands as one of mankind's glories and which dramatizes
Stoppard's most overt statement about the artist's function. Although
he builds Joyce's speech up to an anticlimactic exit - Ulysses will add
further vitality to the legend but will "leave the world precisely as it finds
if* (63) - the force of those images proves his point. A work of art has
no immediate effect on society but contributes in the long run to a
cultural climate, ethical standards against which society measures
itself.
Stoppard's interviews at this time raise the same idea with still
greater directness. To the suggestion that his plays make no clear
(political) statement, he admits his inability to take sides: "Few
statements remain unrebutted", because "I just don't know."14

117
However, he goes on to argue that his dialectical stance is just as
effective as the direct approach because no play, in the short term,
can move mountains in the way a newspaper article can. He
instances a story in the Guardian about wages in South Africa:
"Within 48 hours the wages went up. Now Athol Fugard [the South
African playwright] can't do that." 15 What writers like Fugard do is
to create a social awareness which would enable the Guardian to
know that the article on wages was actually worth printing. "Briefly,
a r t . . . is important because it provides the moral matrix, the moral
sensibility, from which we make our judgments about the world."
In Travesties, Joyce's statement is one of the few that go unrebut-
ted. And, for many in the audience, Lenin's speeches in Act 2 would
re-emphasize the importance of the artist as guardian and nurturer of
moral sensibility. Stoppard again organizes his stage picture to
achieve that emphasis. Lenin and his wife describe their arrange-
ments for their journey on the sealed train which will take them
across Europe to St Petersburg. We hear the sounds of the train
setting off as Tzara announces its prompt departure and leaves the
stage to Carr, who now comes to the decision that the Lenins must be
stopped. As he decides, the train noise grows louder and, on Carr's
exit, rises to a deafening crescendo to imitate the way its sound still
ricochets around the world. A light then focuses on the lone figure of
Lenin in the exact pose of a famous photograph which "Stalin had
re-touched so as to expunge Kamenev and Trotsky who feature
prominently in the original" (84). The stage directions call for the
speech to be "delivered from the strongest possible position" so that
Lenin, high on his rostrum, will create a dramatic contrast to all that
has gone before: "Down with non-partisan literature! Down with
literary supermen!" (85).
Denying the artist a privileged role, Lenin proclaims that every-
thing to do with the printed word must come under party control.
Then, in a passage that amplifies Tzara's remarks on the use of
language, he maintains that the new order will make the artist truly
free. Free to write whatever he wishes, although he must recognize
that "every voluntary association, including the party, is also free to
expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party
views". Free because he need no longer depend on the money-
market. Free because his words will serve "the millions and tens of
millions of working people, the flower of the country, its strength and
its future" (86). The image grows all the more chilling when his wife,
Nadya, explains from the sidelines that these words come from one of
Lenin's actual speeches, or when we hear his own brand of icono-
clasm as he shreds artists through his political grinder. From his

118
view, Tolstoy the "sincere protester against social injustice" is also
"the jaded hysterical sniveller known as the Russian intellectual".
Reactionary though this portrait will seem to other segments of his
audience, Stoppard does present a sympathetic case for Lenin's
hatred of'arty' intellectuals. Fulminating against the Dadaist exces-
ses of Mayakovsky for which the Commissar of Education, who
permitted them, "should be flogged for his futurism" (87), Lenin
changes his opinion on seeing the hungry but enthusiastic young
faces in the communes to whom the poet's works speak. "After this",
says Nadya, "Ilyich took a more favourable view of Mayakovsky. He
admitted that he was not a competent judge of poetical talent." No
other character in Travesties exhibits Lenin's self-doubt. Describing
his instinctive reaction to Beethoven's 'Appassionata', he may stand
condemned from his own mouth and, incidentally, provide a shining
example of art's humanizing influence, but he also makes clear that
the conditions of Revolution necessitate the sacrifice of such in-
stincts:
... superhuman music. It always makes me feel, perhaps naively, it makes me
feel proud of the miracles that human beings can perform. But I can't listen
to music often. It affects my nerves, makes me want to say nice stupid things
and pat the heads of those people who while living in this vile hell can create
such beauty. Nowadays we can't pat heads or we'll get our hands bitten off.
We've got to hit heads, hit them without mercy, though ideally we're against
doing violence to people . . . (89)
Stoppard himself has attested to the power of this sequence when
performed by actors able to convey their own human ordinariness:
"When they walk on the stage you don't really think that man has
contradicted himself throughout... You think he really had a burden
to carry... The equation is different, and even I am seduced by it." 16
Stoppard does not intend to show that position A is better than B,
for both Joyce and Lenin's views are simply different attitudes to the
same problem: how the artist serves society for the common good.
The decision-making comes, as it does in Jumpers, when two atti-
tudes, Joyce's egoism and Lenin's self-abnegation, are held up to the
light of an ultimate morality; as Stoppard remarks, in describing all
his serious work, "At the ideal centre there is a way of behaving
towards people which is good and a way which is bad . . ." I ? In that
light, the politician stands condemned and the artist appears as a
bulwark of social morality, even though he does nothing directly. It is
this that we are left to ponder after Old Carr's speech that closes Act
1 in which he imagines arraigning Joyce: ". . . and I flung at him -
'And what did you do in the Great War?' 'I wrote Ulysses,' he said.
'What did you do?' Bloody nerve" (65).

119
 Nonetheless, other aspects of Travesties belie that humanity.
Oddly, the serio-comic debate over the artist's responsibility, which
Stoppard cares so much about and presents so forcefully in Artist
Descending, now has little human feeling behind it. Where Jumpers
balances frivolity and seriousness on either side of a central pivot,
George and Dotty's anguish, in Travesties there is no such centre, and
the play pulls in opposite directions. Stoppard has noted how the two
plays share a similar structure:
You start with a prologue which is slightly strange. Then you have an
interminable monologue which is rather funny. Then you have scenes. Then
you end up with another monologue. And you have unexpected bits of music
and dance, and at the same time people are playing ping-pong with various
intellectual arguments.18
The big difference, however, lies in his decision to make Old Carr his
viewfinder for most of the action. In the theatre this invites confusion.
The "strange" prologue in the Zurich Public Library introduces
everyone but Carr. It is amusingly disorientating in that hardly a word
of English is spoken, though the characters at their separate tables
behave much as they might have done in actuality: Tzara takes a large
pair of scissors to what he has just written, cuts out each word, pops
them into his hat, empties out the pieces and then recites the result-
ing 'poem'; Joyce dictates to Gwendolen (Carr's sister) fragmented
words from what some may recognize as Ulysses; the Lenins talk in
Russian about the revolution in St Petersburg; Cecily bustles in and
out to call "Sssssh!" The sequence ends with one of Joyce's limer-
icks, but when he strolls off, with rakish hat and stick, crooning "If
you ever go across the sea to Ireland", his manner seems that of a
fantasy figure.
It is only after this change of tone that Carr takes up the narrative to
tell of the "James Joyce I Knew". The script allows for the possibility
of making the old man an on-stage observer from the outset, and the
original production had him strum on a piano as Joyce sang and the
Library set disappeared, additions which clearly established the
characters as creatures of memory. But no such allowance occurs at
the start of Act 2, where Stoppard deliberately breaks the reminisc-
ences to have Cecily lecture the audience on Marxism and the
Lenins. The break can be justified by the fact that Carr never met the
Lenins; however, since we learn this from Old Cecily only at the end
of the play, dramatically the lecture comes as a startling interruption
which initiates the uneasy alliance throughout the rest of Act 2
between Carr's fantasies, as shaped by Earnest, and the Lenins, as
presented through historical memoirs and letters.
But Carr's major effect is to rob the play's ideas of most of their

120
impact. The old man has very little connection with the play's
critique about art and the artist, and certainly no emotional invest-
ment in it. For him, the plot justifies his own importance amidst a
group of'artsy' charlatans and political nobodies: "And don't forget,
he wasn 7 Lenin then! I mean who was he! as it were" (81). What drives
him is a fury, which still rankles, at the way Joyce tipped him a few
francs after his triumph in Earnest and refused to defray the cost of his
wardrobe. In real life, Carr and Joyce had gone to court, the one to
recover his expenses, the other to sue for threats and libel. In the
theatre, the way the old man's feelings travesty the events ofio,i5-i8
proves Wildely amusing but it also creates a barrier between the
audience and the play's ideas.
Carr's first "interminable monologue" illustrates that effect. In
Jumpers, George's efforts to organize his thoughts about God reach
an impasse or become derailed in much the same manner as Carr's
memories. But we overhear George through the invisible 'fourth
wall', sharing a frustration whose full meaning is brought home to us
by the play's ensuing action. Old Carr addresses us directly with the
self-consciousness of a stand-up comedian. His recollections de-
liberately parody the titles and style of Edwardian memoirs, though
his verbose and punning detachment occasionally breaks down to
reveal more than he intends as he brands Joyce u a liar and a hypo-
crite, a tight-fisted, sponging, fornicating drunk not worth the paper,
that's that bit done" (23). The last self-conscious phrase reins in his
animosity. We then enter the play proper light-heartedly, diverted by
Carr's late-night-review, Beyond the Fringe performance, a manner
which colours the remainder of Act 1.
When the action begins, Carr's interchange with Bennett recalls
Algy's with Lane in Earnest, and the verbal short-circuits, empha-
sized by a quick dimming of the lights, also maintain an air of
performance. Each time Bennett interjects the line, "Yes, sir. I have
put the newspapers and telegrams on the sideboard, sir", the con-
versation takes off on a fresh tangent to convey the quirks of Carr's
memory and to allow the transmission of information about the War
and the Russian Revolution in a style that "breaks its neck" 19 to be
funny. Tzara arrives as a stage-Frenchman and Joyce enters as "an
Irish nonsense". Together with Gwen, the quartet break into a
cross-fire of dialogue which chimes together as a series of overtly
clever limericks. Such stylization re-creates the puppet theatre of
Old Carr's imagination, but it also weaves a gauze between the
audience and what the characters say, confronting us instead with the
way things are said. Consequently, when these figures deliver their
views on art, those ideas seem to spin from the top of their heads. No

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one within the purlieu of Carr's memory shows any caring. If they
lose their tempers, they simply obey the stop-and-start patterns of
the narrative, so that when every argument disintegrates into the
same childish invective we are again faced with the play's style rather
than its content:
c ARR : My God, you little Rumanian wog - you bloody dago - you jumped-
up phrase-making smart-alecy arty-intellectual Balkan turd!!! Think
you know it all! - while we poor dupes think we're fighting for ideals,
you've got a profound understanding of what is really going on, under-
neath! - you've got a phrase for it! (40)
Carr and his characters all have "a phrase for it"; their ideas do not
plummet down to their inner selves. They have no inner selves.
Knowing that an artist, however committed, can never guide his
society directly, Stoppard seems to taunt his critics with the dispas-
sionate and apparently uncaring surface of Travesties. The gambit
is Oscar Wilde's, but Stoppard's nothing-up-my-sleeve artifice in
reply to mutterings about his own intellectual wizardry falsifies the
essential humanity which propels his argument. This confrontation
rises to the play's surface in Act 2, when Cecily, the disciple of
Marxism, maintains that art must serve and change society, whereas
Carr posits Wilde as the exemplum of the detached artist who feeds
man's spirit:
CARR: ... Wilde was indifferent to politics. He may occasionally have been a
little overdressed but he made up for it by being immensely uncommit-
ted.
CECILY: That is my objection to him. The sole duty and justification for art
is social criticism. (74)
Carr happens to be quite wrong about Wilde, and though he may act
here as Stoppard's dislocating mouthpiece, his opinion and the style
of both speakers pander to an image of Oscar-the-dandy that will
probably be uppermost in the minds of those who know nothing of
Wilde's "The Critic as Artist" or "The Soul of Man under Social-
ism". Furthermore, Carr's reminiscences, which dance to the tune of
Earnest's stylized rotundities, work against Stoppard's defence of art
as something which, in Martello's phrase, comes "to grips with life".
Wilde's Earnest, in defying the late-Victorians' ultra-serious attitude
to life, derives much of its energy and conviction from the determina-
tion of Algy and Jack to win their respective ladies. Travesties explodes
out of Carr's unrequited fury over Joyce's high-handed behaviour
after his success as Algy. The way this Jack - no, the other one - wins
his Jill, despite misunderstandings as to the artistic and philosophic
merits of Joyce and Lenin, matters not in the least to the play's central
thesis.

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 In Act 2, Carr goes to the library disguised as Tristan, in a furtive
attempt to discover the Lenins' plans. As he listens to Cecily's lecture
- "the rich own the poor and the men own the women" (78) - he
imagines her as a nightclub stripper. Through his eyes, we watch her
librarian's desk light up as she gyrates to "The Stripper" while
proclaiming Marx and Lenin. His "Get 'em off?" chimes exactly with
what we know of the irascible Old Carr, but the image of his young
self teeters precariously, and the parallel between Travesties and
Earnest becomes a contrivance. Carr has no real interest in Cecily's
charms, pace Stoppard's attempted cover-up: "I should like to make
it clear that my feelings for Cecily are genuine" (82). Animating both
Carrs, young and old, is the business of the trousers, his animosity
towards Joyce, and the nine-days'-wonder of his performance as
Algy. So Travesties'finalmarriage-go-round only emphasizes the
ingenious yet tenuous way Stoppard has engineered his plot, which
turns on the accidental exchange of Joyce's and Lenin's work in
progress, to accord with Earnest's ultimate revelation about a lost
handbag. And though Old Carr's final statement diverts us deliber-
ately and comically from the matter at hand (in an echo of Charlie's
confusion in Dogg's Our Pet), his speech also reduces the battle
between art and politics to a shrug of the shoulders:
I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly,
you Ye either a revolutionary or you Ye not, and if you Ye not you might as well
be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as
well be a revolutionary . . . I forget the third thing. (98-9)
The failure of Travesties, therefore, is not the result of its zany mix
of styles, since the library scene immediately establishes and supports
that stylistic hodgepodge, nor can it be blamed on the counterpoint
between travestied characters like Joyce and Tzara and those like the
Lenins who basically appear as their historical selves, although the
latter pair do tend to travel (literally and metaphorically) in an en-
closed compartment. As his final words indicate, the alliance be-
tween the play's farcical action and serious ideas ends in divorce
because of Old Carr. Where the play depicts the artist as a type of
revolutionary, Carr amusingly sees them as opposites and - more
damagingly - shrugs off their whole debate with the 'so what?'
attitude that also colours his version of every serious argument
between the characters whom he derails in explosions of personal
invective.
Had the action been stage-managed by a more translucent narra-
tor, Travesties might stand ironically as Stoppard's most Brechtian
fable, with its snatches of song and dance, open stage, self-contained
episodes, dialectical argument, and undisguised theatricality. But

123
given the subjective quirkiness of Carr, each character's independent
point of view is subverted by a narrator whose own attitude is
epitomized by his attraction to The Importance of Being Earnest as an
opportunity for several changes of costume and for whom the Great
War (between nations or between himself and Joyce) centres upon
the quality of one's trousers. Yet the ideas in Travesties cannot be
shrugged aside as so much dandified nonsense. It surely does matter
that though the artistic revolutionary, unlike his political counterpart,
has no immediate effect on society, it is his work which ultimately
shapes our ethics because he refuses to submit to the State. For
though the artist may appear "irresponsible" when he demands, as
Tzara does, "the right to urinate in different colours" (61), given
Lenin and the Marxists' sense of social responsibility "multi-
coloured micturition is no trick to those boys, they'll have you pissing
blood" (83).
It is Carr who says that, but the terror of this remark in no way
affects his older self, and so the idea is reduced to a snappy one-liner.
This is characteristic of much of Travesties. Jokes and puns fly out at
us in rapid profusion. Lines like "jewelled escapements and refugees
of all kinds" (23) or the description of "a Swiss redlight district,
pornographic fretwork shops, vice dens, get a grip on yourself" (24)
make inventive and, at each given moment, effective detours into
Carr's jackdaw mind. But at other times, the jokes are either so
elaborate as to lose their point in the theatre, as when Tzara's
pieced-together nonsense poem turns out, if one takes the time to
wrestle with it, to make considerable sense in French (for example,
"noon avuncular ill day Clara" (18) converts into " 'nous n'avons que
Tart', il declara") or they simply go on too long. The limerick
sequence in Act 1 or Gwendoline and Cecily's later "Mr Gallagher
and Mr Shean" routine stretch out to the point of self-indulgence,
while the prolonged interview between Tzara and Joyce (a parody of
the catechism in Ulysses and Lady Bracknell's interrogation of Mr
Worthing) halts the action in order to deliver undiluted information
about Dadaism, a tactic as diversionary as Cecily's much-criticized
sermonette on Lenin. In all these cases, the play's style draws our
attention away from its content or back to the self-regarding Carr,
who like some rusted Lord Malquist, withdraws from chaos with
style. But, however entertaining that might be, the old man's
egocentric and barren version of history eventually trivializes the
central idea that the artist's independent vision and humanity turns
fact into spiritual gold.

124
Chapter 6

Ethics and manners

After Travesties, Stoppard changed tack. To write anythingis a chancy
business: a combination of calculated intent, lucky accident, and
inspired connections. Stoppard has himself described the way he
often starts with an image, like the dead body in Inspector Hound or the
collapsing human pyramid ofJumpers, and then chips away at it until
the play's ultimate pattern explains his initial picture.1 But for a
playwright there then comes the problem of conveying that pattern to
a person sitting in row F. The near-debacle of Rosencrantz at Edin-
burgh had shown how vulnerable a script is to actors and director.
And though Stoppard could later command the resources of the
National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company and, from
Jumpers on, the directorial skills of Peter Wood, his particular brand
of theatrical audacity was not easy to bring off. Daring to break the
action of Travesties with Cecily's extended lecture on the history of
the Russian Revolution and then, as the audience recovered, to
discountenance them still further with the prosaic Lenins and the
ladies' rhythmical "Mr Gallagher and Mr Shean" sparring match
proved too confusing on the stage, so out went most of Cecily's
sermonette. Understandably, in an interview just after that premiere,
Stoppard acknowledged the riskiness of such theatrical display:
"ideally what I'd like to write now is something that takes place in a
whitewashed room with no music and no jumping about, but which is
a literary piece - so that the energy can go into the literary side of what
I do. I'd like to write a quiet play."2 Looking back, some two years
later, he would admit to the structural faults in Travesties but add that
the major speeches were still the o altitudo of that brand of theatrics:
"I don't see much point in trying to do it again, though I probably will,
for want of being able to do anything else." 3 The plays that belong to
the period between these two comments are neither "quiet" nor
safely realist, but they do mark a retreat from the three-ring circus.
Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land,4 the knickers farce that opened
at the Almost Free Theatre in April 1976 and transferred two
months later to the Arts, where it ran for years, seems to abandon the
comedy of ideas entirely. This "little joke play", an undisguised (and
probably liberating) frolic, took shape in response to his promise to
write something in honour of Ed Berman's becoming a British
citizen. When Dirty Linen "went off in a different direction", Stop-
pard hit upon the idea of New-Found-Land to pull things back to the
occasion at hand. This concoction, apparently so unlike anything
he had done before, bears many characteristic fingerprints. For
example, his decision to insert New-Found-Land into the silly antics
of Dirty Linen is, on a minor scale, a typical piece of audacity; if a
structural divide cannot be bridged over, then flaunt it. And the
isolation of'New-Found-Land's two characters from each other and
from Dirty Linen's sexual shenanigans exemplifies the way Stop-
pard's characters passionately maintain a personal vision which occa-
sionally accords, but more usually conflicts with, someone else's. To
end the first part of Dirty Linen, the members of the Select Commit-
tee on parliamentary promiscuity are summoned away by the Divi-
sion Bell. As one door shuts, another opens; in comes Arthur with a
file of papers and shouts back to his colleague, just behind him, that
they have at last found an empty room. For a moment two worlds
touch when Arthur, clearing away a clutter of newspapers from the
table, reacts to a pin-up in one of the tabloids with a wide-eyed
"Strewth!" that, by this time, has become a running joke. In all other
ways, they seem to belong, as the text maintains, "in another play"
(52)-
Stoppard accentuates that separateness by making the second civil
servant, Bernard, extremely deaf and endearingly senile. As Big Ben
crashes out the hour just above their heads, Arthur cringes but
Bernard "looks around vaguely" (55). If the one cannot hear, the
other will not listen, because he has heard Bernard's story about
winning a fiver from Lloyd George ad infinitum. To cut across the
preceding action with a doddering account of how "father knew
Lloyd George" is a cheeky gambit, and the elderly clerk's obsession
allows even this part of the play to wander away from the business of
Ed Berman's naturalization papers which the two men have met to
consider. Yet this apparent break in tone is not bewilderingly tricksy,
for an audience will feel immediately familiar with the Lloyd George
chestnut and, when it transpires that the statesman was more in-
timately acquainted with Bernard's mother, this story rapidly attaches
itself to the sexual innuendo that threads through the entire action.
Though daringly unorthodox, the surprising entrance of this pair
quickly attunes with the prevailing mood and then becomes a
launching-pad for two Stoppardian monologues.
The first one emerges from a ripple of verbal misunderstanding, as
Bernard produces the treasured £5 note he won from the then Prime
Minister, and Arthur reminds him that they are supposed to advise
their own Minister about the naturalization papers. It is soon unclear
to which Minister each speaker refers, and when Bernard adds that
"he asked me for my views about French, you know" (56), the

126
audience would assume he means Mr French of the Select Commit-
tee. But Bernard means the Field Marshal who was replaced by Haig
in the First World War, and that thought leads him irrevocably to the
famous fiver. For him, the anecdote points to the fact that "Welsh
intuition is no match for English cunning" (58): in betting that Big
Ben could be seen from the upstairs windows, the Prime Minister
had apparently forgotten that "Big Ben is the name of the bell, not the
clock." A less self-absorbed listener will perceive that Lloyd George,
in pressing the bet, specifically mentions the window of the bedroom
in which Bernard's mother "received us gaily, just as though she
were in her drawing-room", and will come to his own conclusions on
hearing how Bernard, returning home after having his war-wound
attended to, meets the Prime Minister coming down the front steps.
Offering to return the money, he is told to "keep it,... I never spent a
better £5".
But no such conclusions arise, since Bernard ends by remarking
that the Americans saved Haig (and the Allies) and this prompts
Arthur to remember the applicant, who is also American. Stoppard
then plays with the biography of the real Ed Berman but, by present-
ing those details as oddly assorted facts from Arthur's file and by
keeping the applicant anonymous, he makes the in-jokes about his
friend general enough to amuse any audience and then builds them
into an inspired muddle:
BERNARD:...A theatrical farmer with buses on the side, doing publishing
and community work in a beard ... are we supposed to tell the Minister
that he's just the sort of chap this country needs? Does he say why he
wants to be British?
ARTHUR: Yes, because he's American.
BERNARD: Well he's got a point there. (59)
Finally, one of those comic deflations that Stoppard admires so much
in Beckett, as Bernard praises Americans for their modernity, open-
ness, lack of ceremony, generosity, ambition, self-confidence -
"Apart from all that I've got nothing against them" - effects a
transition to Arthur's rhapsody on "My America!" (60).
This monologue, less inconsequent though otherwise quite simi-
lar to those of George Moore and Old Carr, stands as a set piece. It is
very much a performance, a moment of unabashed 'showbiz' which
makes the stage so attractive to Stoppard. But the theatrics here are
more single-minded and one-dimensional. As Arthur warms to his
(as opposed to the applicant's) new-found-land, he takes our exclu-
sive attention, since Bernard almost immediately nods off to sleep.
No longer the unassuming junior, he embarks on a cliche-packed
travelogue set loose by his creator's flair for parody. The speech

127
works by cramming in as many platitudes as possible about America
and its landscape. It begins with a grandiose description of the
Greyhound of the Deep smashing through the waters of Long Island
Sound. The Statue of Liberty glows, to the tears and wonderment of
the immigrants who pack the lower decks: "destined, some of them,
to become the captains and the kings of industrial empires... to put a
chicken into every pot, an automobile by every stoop, to organize
crime as never before . . . New York! New York! It's a wonderful
town!" (60-1). Stereotyped phrases for Wall Street, the Bowery,
and The Great White Way tumble out until the Chattanooga train
sends us on a circuitous route through New England in the Fall to
"Chicago - Chicago! - it's a wonderful town", Kentucky blue grass,
hill-billy Tennessee, and on through the Old South to Californian
paradise where we stare in Keatsian "wild surmise" at the Pacific.
The banalities roll along con brio, and Arthur enfolds himself in these
American dreams: imagining "a cheerful shoeshine boy with a
flashing smile" (62), he sports a pair of stars-and-stripes socks;
reaching Galveston, he pulls out a pack of American cigarettes;
entering the Wild West, he reveals a tin star on his waistcoat. He is as
obsessed with Americana as Bernard was over the fiver, and when the
Committee returns for its meeting, he has become brash America: "I
think you got the wrong room, buster" (65).
Obsession in fact controls all the play's parts, though Stoppard has
also invented other smaller links: previously a committee member
recalls a train journey he made across America, "but that's another
story" (3 2) - although it isn't, quite - and when Dirty Linen resumes,
Bernard automatically shows off his fiver, only to have it torn to
pieces by the Committee's chairman in mistake for an incriminating
note of his own. This misunderstanding creates an instant of surpris-
ing poignancy. Otherwise mayhem prevails, though it does not shoot
off in all directions, as it tends to do in the longer plays, because
everyone on the Select Committee shares the same passion for
Maddie Gotobed, their recording secretary, and the same terror of
being caught out.
Stoppard's "literary" energies are also unusually circumscribed,
and pursue with manic concentration the naughty-postcard aspect of
farce. French knickers and Freudian slips turn up all over the place.
The action is simple-minded, but the dialogue exploits the twists and
traps of language. Dirty Linen begins with a less demanding variant of
the first library scene in Travesties. Cocklebury-Smythe and
McTeazle (the MPs and their secretary have crassly provocative
names) arrive together at the overspill meeting-room in the Big Ben
tower. For several minutes their exchange consists entirely of foreign

128
expressions, like "Cest la vie", "Ooh la-la?" and "faux pas". Tired
phrases, in whatever language, are to colour every section of the play.
When Maddie arrives, so do the double entendres, and words skid into
pot-holes as each man, without rousing the suspicion of his col-
league, tries to persuade Maddie to deny any liaison at the Coq d'Or.
Their dialogue is also waylaid by the charms of the lady herself: "why
don't you have a quick poke, peek, in the Members' Bra - or the
cafeteria, they're probably guzzling coffee and Swedish panties,
( M A D D I E has crossed her legs) Danish . . . " (22). Language becomes
abstract and playful, as in Dogg's Our Pet, when both MPs reel off
alliterative lists of pubs and restaurants, tongue-twisting alibis which
Maddie must then repeat as best she can. Puns run the gamut from
the clever to the plain awful: "It's a briefcase", says the Chairman as
he hides away his underwear (43). And by having the Committee
investigate (or circumvent) charges in the newspapers about "Moral
Standards in Public Life", Stoppard makes fun of parliamentary
jargon and the tabloids' cheap suggestiveness. Mr French, recogniz-
ing the secretary's pin-up in the Sun, reads on:
Maddie Takes It Down!
'Madeleine Gotobed, twenty-one, is a model secretary in Whitehall where
she says her ambition is to be Permanent Under Secretary. Meanwhile,
titian-haired, green-eyed Maddie loves being taken out, but says the men
tend to look down on a figure like hers - whenever they get the chance!' -
disgusting - 'Matching bra and suspender belt, Fenwicks £5.35. French
knickers, Janet Reger £8.95.' (51)
To underscore the one-track minds of all his characters, Stoppard
uses the stage with minimal flamboyance. The set only requires a
suggestion of walls, two functional doors, a table and chairs for the
members, a blackboard on which to record the way they voted or, as
Maddie sees it, to enter the results: "Home win!" One recurring
staging device accentuates the style of the popular press. From time
to time, one or other of the gentlemen boggles over a pin-up in the
scandal rags before him. At his appreciative "Strewth!", though he is
too engrossed to notice, Maddie has moved into an especially pro-
voking pose; that teasing picture is then captured by a flash-bulb as
she looks straight out at the audience and freezes. Maddie also loses
skirt, slip, and blouse to various unintentional hands and calmly takes
back knickers from, or returns underpants to, her former conquests.
Yet these realities prove less lip-smacking to the Committee than do
the photos in their newspapers.
However, although the farceur in Stoppard runs free, Dirty Linen
does contain a modicum of seriousness. His expressed aim was to
torpedo the stereotype that Maddie appears to be: "Her whole

129
attitude in the play is one of innocent, eager willingness to please"
(24). He wanted to persuade the audience to dismiss her as a mind-
less redhead and then show her as the only person on stage with
common sense.5 But he plays his hand too soon. Having bedded the
people who count on Fleet Street, Maddie knows that "they've got
more people writing about football than writing about you and that's
in the cricket season" (37). So it comes as little surprise when the
Committee adopts her point of view in their final report. We have
perceived her good sense for some time, even though her secretarial
talents are ludicrous, and the destruction of the stereotype is hardly
less predictable than the change in Mr French who, as a puritan
stickler for rules of all sorts, eventually must - in this type of comedy
- join his philandering colleagues. Nevertheless, in allowing Maddie
to think, Stoppard injects the farce with ideas about the responsibili-
ties of the press which go back to his early concerns in "The Story"
and which will later be developed entirely seriously in Night and Day.
Cocklebury-Smythe, who happens to belong to the National Un-
ion ofJournalists, feels that "newspapers are the people in a sense -
they are the channel of the government's answerability to the gov-
erned" (36). Mrs Ebury sweeps that ideal aside:
And on top of that they're as smug a collection of inaccurate, hypocritical,
self-important, bullying, shoddily printed sick-bags as you'd hope tofindin a
month of Sundays, and dailies, and the weeklies aren't much better.
Withenshaw, the Chairman, had also attacked the journalists' altru-
ism; muck-raking is simply a way to sell more papers in a slow season
by "sticking their noses into upper reaches of top drawers looking for
hankie panties, etcetera" (30). Yet the Committee accept a journal-
ist's moral right to investigate the private habits of public figures even
as they agree with Maddie that newspapers are just as much a
commodity as haberdashery. So it is she who, from her own extensive
knowledge of the journalists' sex-lives, reminds them that the press is
run by the same sort of people as they are and that the private life of
politicians is nobody's business but their own. Eventually, Mr French
will dress that up in more formal attire, adding the proviso that such
behaviour should "not transgress the rights of others or the law of the
land" (72), but Maddie's version is the more succinct:
All this fuss! The whole report can go straight in the waste-paper basket. All
you need is one paragraph saying that MPs have got just as much right to
enjoy themselves in their own way as anyone else, and Fleet Street can take a
running jump. (41)
Maddie's down-to-earth style typifies the brash comedy of this
joke play, but bobbing about midst the panties and the pin-ups are

130
ideas which Stoppard will come back to less lightheartedly. In paring
away the theatrical high jinks, while not yet abandoning their high
spirits, he returns to his own past as a journalist and begins to explore,
however farcically, the rights of the individual. Actually, those rights
were first championed in Jumpers, when George protested at the way
a totalitarian society could change "the rules", and in Travesties the
artist stood out as the guardian of spiritual, if not political freedom.
What moved those themes to the centre of Stoppard's work was the
political realities he experienced while wrestling with his next play,
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.6
In his introduction to that text, Stoppard has described the for-
tuitous circumstances that led to his final statement. In 1974, Andre
Previn, the conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, had
invited him to write a play which included an actual orchestra. He
"jumped at the chance" but, as his deadline came and went, he had
reached an impasse. His first idea had been about a millionaire who
could afford an orchestra, but, since the little he knew about music
went back to his kindergarten days as a triangle-player, he next
thought of "a millionaire triangle-player with his own orchestra" (6).
When this "whimsical edifice" began to teeter, he imagined what
would happen were the triangle-player to imagine the orchestra - he
would no longer have to be a millionaire - and "This is where matters
stood when in April 1976 I met Victor Fainberg".
The encounter gave him something to write about instead of a
logistical problem to solve. Fainberg had been arrested for demon-
strating against the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Judged insane, he was committed to a prison-hospital for five years
and then exiled:

For Mr Fainberg freedom was, and is, mainly the freedom to double his
efforts on behalf of colleagues left behind. His main concern when I met him
was to secure the release of Vladimir Bukovsky, himself a victim of the abuse
of psychiatry in the U S S R , whose revelations about that abuse had got him
sentenced to consecutive terms of prison, labour camp and internal exile
amounting to twelve years. (6-7)

Fainberg's stand touched a nerve, since Stoppard had been reading

about Russian dissidents for a projected television script, and, once
he had drawn the connection between a lunatic triangle-player and a
"mad" political prisoner, "in a few weeks the play was finished" (7).
He had confronted an unusual courage and, in transmuting it for the
stage, was brought forcefully against the problem he had voiced
through Donner in Artist Descending: "How can one justify art to a
man with an empty belly?" - or with a twelve-year prison sentence.
The experience was not quite Saul's on the road to Damascus, but
from this time on Stoppard's plays become explicitly political.
Every Good Boy is as economical as the best of the radio plays. It
requires little physical action and concentrates on the actors' voices,
which, in key moments, derive added impact from Previn's music.
However, one effect which could not be achieved on radio depends
on the spatial and emotional distance between the three acting areas
set amidst an orchestra which is always there before us. As the play
begins, Ivanov, the lunatic, and Alexander, the dissident, are seated
on their beds as if in a cell; the two other spaces, representing an
office and a schoolroom, are in darkness, though Sacha, Alexander's
son, is already at his desk and his teacher stands over him. Things
start normally enough as the orchestra tune up, but after a time they
do so in mime. Once this dislocating silence has been established,
Ivanov stands up with his triangle and rod at the ready and the players
become still. The silence grows even more disturbing when Ivanov
eventually strikes his instrument and the orchestra burst into a
mimed performance. All we hear is an intermittent ping from the
triangle as Ivanov concentrates on his part. What we see are the busy
musicians and, in the cell, "a man watching another man occasionally
hitting a triangle" (15). Soon the music begins to be audible, growing
louder until the lights come up brightly on the orchestra and we
realize that the triangle has its part in a Russian-sounding symphony
which now goes at full swing. The strategy is characteristically unset-
tling, but here Stoppard manoeuvres us into a moment of madness to
which we react less stoically than does Alexander himself, a scheme
he is to develop through the rest of the action.
Since we are bound to bring feelings of outrage to Alexander's
situation, Stoppard concentrates our focus on the lunatic Ivanov
rather than on the hospital authorities, in order to dramatize both the
madness and threat of this place. For Ivanov is a threatening figure
despite his air of apparent harmlessness. His barrage of words, as he
apologizes to Alexander for the inadequacies of his imagined orches-
tra, presents an extended version of the way the prison doctor and
Sacha's teacher brush aside all argument, and his mad logic parallels
their sweet reason, which could at any moment slide into violence.
The incipient threat is made the more fearsome by Ivanov's comic
mask, and Alexander reacts to him from the outset with a wary calm.
At first, Ivanov's contempt for his own musicians and his insistence
that Alexander must be an instrumentalist of some kind appear as an
amusing tyranny until, without the slightest change of tone, the
interrogator reveals a darker side: "Give me a clue. If I beat you to a
pulp would you try to protect your face or your hands? Which would

132
be the more serious - if you couldn't sit down for a week or couldn't
stand up? I'm trying to narrow it down, you see" (17). As this
sequence develops, Stoppard draws the narrowest of lines between
the comedy of Ivanov's whirling obsession (so reminiscent of Old
Carr's) and its political subtext, which infects as seemingly farcical a
remark as "the Jew's harp has applied for a visa" and which rises to
the surface without warning:

- why, I know people who make the orchestra eat in the kitchen, off scraps,
the way you'd throw a trombone to a dog, I mean a second violinist, I mean to
the lions; I love musicians, I respect them, human beings to a man. Let me
put it like this: if I smashed this instrument of yours over your head, would
you need a carpenter, a welder, or a brain surgeon? (18)

Having presented the terrors of the hospital-prison in this comic

way, Stoppard draws in his other characters with a straight-faced
understatement which gains emotional power the more it is seen in
parallel to Ivanov's mad volatility. To achieve this, he depends on
effects of light and sound during the transitions between the three
acting areas and on the patterned structure that connects each epi-
sode to the next. For example, the first scene ends as Ivanov offers
advice to his cell-mate - "Number three -practise^' - and strikes his
triangle. That note leads, as the lights fade, to the doh-ray-me sound
of a school band, whose performance soon goes awry because of an
obtrusive triangle in it. Eventually its hectic notes are all we hear.
When they stop, the lights come up on the schoolmistress who, with
cool sarcasm, reprimands Sacha for subverting the concert. The
connection is tightened by the teacher's deliberate word-play as she
decides on Sacha's punishment - "Detention is becoming a family
tradition" - and tells him to open a book: "Any book. Fathers and
Sons, perhaps" (19). Her autocratic style is more placid yet no less
blinkered than Ivanov's, and through Sacha we now view dissidence
with unchecked pathos.
Like his father, whose name he bears in diminutive form, he does
not want to play in an orchestra, though the triangle he resists is both
musical and Euclid's "polygon bounded by the fewest possible
sides", a definition he must copy out neatly ten times from his
geometry book. It may be objected that these connections lead to
unfortunate connotations when the teacher tells Sacha that the au-
thorities make his father copy out a million times, "I am a member of
an orchestra and we must play together." 7 That the State is like a
well-run orchestra is her own vindictive equation but, lest we accept
that, the music itself is often so radiant or so in sympathy with
Alexander, when it punctuates his long speech about his arrest, that

133
we are surely brought to wonder how orchestrated societies could
produce such sound or, since Previn echoes composers like Pro-
kofiev and Shostakovich, how artists create in spite of State direc-
tives.
Stoppard dramatizes that same contradiction through the Doctor
who, in the third scene, rises from his place amidst the strings
section. As he sheds his role as violinist and moves towards his office
to assume power, the entire orchestra mock that authority with music
which exactly matches his walk and with aglissando from the strings as
he sits down behind his desk. So it is as prison doctor that he seems
most mechanical and, appropriately, his first interview is with Ivanov
who has his own mad rigidity. These ideas come directly to the fore
some scenes later when Alexander enters the office:
D O C T O R in his OFFICE playing violin solo. Violin cuts out.
DOCTOR: Come in.
(ALEXANDER enters the DOCTOR'S light.)
DOCTOR: Hello. Sit down please. Do you play a musical instrument?
ALEXANDER: (Taken aback) Are you a patient?
DOCTOR: (Cheerfully) No, I am a doctor. You are a patient. It's a distinction
which we try to keep going here, though I'm told it's coming under
scrutiny in more advanced circles of psychiatric medicine . . . (26)
Later still, Sacha visits the prison and mistakes Ivanov for the Doctor
at whose desk he sits (33). But the Doctor himself is drawn entirely
seriously. The comedy arises out of these misunderstandings and
from the clash of views, especially when, having convinced Ivanov
that there is no orchestra, he remembers he has a performance of his
own and races across to his place amongst the actual musicians.
The new ingredient in Stoppard's blend of serious-play is the
restraint with which he presents all the characters except his lunatic
triangle-player. This is particularly noticeable in the way he develops
Alexander, who voices his suffering in matter-of-fact terms and
whose rebellion takes the form of a quiet, stubborn refusal. That
firmness appears from the outset in his careful defence against
Ivanov, yet his position is made the more delicate by his struggle not
to cough and so ruin his violent cell-mate's imagined concert. His
pain shows in a similarly indirect fashion at the end of the first school
scene, when Sacha cries out against his father's punishment and,
from across the stage, Alexander calls the boy's name so that the
teacher's self-righteous treatment of the son becomes the father's
nightmare. The anguish of that dream comes mainly from the per-
cussive music which cuts into the voices from the darkened stage.
The music is also crucial to the emotion behind Alexander's
account of his arrest. A long orchestral prelude turns into another

134
nightmare: an off-key piccolo distorts the melody, which then builds
to a strident climax. Bursting out of his dream, Alexander awakes to
Ivanov's peculiar ministrations: "Don't worry . . . Any trumpeter
comes at me, I'll kick his teeth in. Violins get it under the chin to boot,
this boot, and God help anyone who plays a cello" (22). Ironically, the
cellos lead sonorously into Alexander's solo, which is prompted by
Ivanov (now the concerned psychiatrist) who asks him to "Tell me
about yourself- your home, your childhood, your first piano-teacher
. . . how did it all begin?" The speech moves with the cellos, which
glide mournfully under the words until "I thought this was most
peculiar" (23) when the orchestra takes over and allows us pause to
consider the detention of writers who have published "mad" books.
Timed to this accompaniment, the next words slow to a colourless
monody as Alexander describes how C (Vladimir Bukovsky) went
back to the mental hospital for protesting against the arrest of A and
B. These impersonal letters match the notes of the musical scale and
the points in Sacha's geometric figures but, as the litany progresses to
Q, R, S, and T, the rising emotion in the music belies the dispassion-
ate prose. In this way, Stoppard eschews all but the blackest comedy
and protects Alexander from self-pity by giving him an air of de-
tached astonishment: "You see all the trouble writers cause" - his
words echo the teacher's disapproval and so the school band begins
again in the background - "They spoil things for ordinary people."
Alexander considered himself to be ordinary, except that he had a
friend who was constantly in trouble, until "one day I did something
really crazy" (24). At that, the music gives way to the frenzied beat of
a snare drum; we move back to the schoolroom, where Sacha is in
trouble for damaging school property, the drum he has progressed to
from the triangle. In the teacher's eyes, this behaviour confirms the
boy's likeness to his father. The lights fade; we are back in the cell,
and slow violins accent Alexander's report of his internment in the
Arsenal'naya Psychiatric Hospital where, after two years, he began a
hunger strike. Back, too, comes the contradistinction between human
achievement and social tyranny: "Russia is a civilized country, very
good at Swan Lake and space technology, and it is confusing if people
starve themselves to death" (24). Stoppard highlights the most mon-
strous of the prisoner's sufferings by having Sacha innocently remark
that his father smells like "Olga when she does her nails" (25) in
dialogue made dreamlike by an undertow of sustained, metallic notes
from the orchestra. Then complete silence frames Alexander's bland
assertion that, since a starving man gives off the odour of nail-polish-
remover, the authorities will give in to this inconveniently well-
known dissident, although to save face they "need a formula".

135
 His meeting with Victor Fainberg impressed on Stoppard the
"single-mindedness, . . . [the] willingness to make a nuisance of
himself" (7) which must have moved the commissars to get rid of
him. The subdued style of Every Good Boy captures that stubborn
dignity, and its denouement ridicules the officials' embarrassment.
Having deputed Sacha to persuade his father not to "be rigid", and
failed, the Doctor arrives at stalemate, whereupon a succession of
crashing cymbals, drums, and swelling organ announces the gran-
diloquent entry of "Colonel - or rather Doctor - Rozinsky" (27), the
deus ex machina of the piece. Rozinsky has prepared his escape route
by personally choosing Alexander's cell-mate, the eponymous luna-
tic, Alexander Ivanov, and, as he quells the bewildered protests of the
Doctor and the madman, deliberately puts questions to the two
patients that he knows they will answer satisfactorily. Ivanov cannot
conceive that the Soviets would "put a sane man into a lunatic
asylum" (36), and Alexander has no imaginary orchestra. "There's
absolutely nothing wrong with these men" (37). So the play rounds to
this calculated, smug conclusion, and Sacha, ascending the corridor
that runs through the orchestra, calls from that height to the liberated
Alexander.
Some months before Every Good Boy was first performed at the
Festival Hall in July 1977, Vaclav Havel, a playwright Stoppard much
admires, was arrested in Prague along with an actor and a journalist
for attempting to deliver a petition (Charter 77) that urged the Czech
government to allow citizens the rights guaranteed by the Helsinki
Agreement, to which Czechoslovakia had been a signatory. Stoppard
does not say so, but it must have crossed his mind that, had his own
parents not left Czechoslovakia in his childhood, he might himself
have been in Havel's situation. All he could do was add his name to
those who protested at the Chartists' arrest. At the time, he was still
planning his television play about Russia to commemorate Amnesty
International's Prisoner of Conscience Year. In connection with that,
he accompanied an Amnesty friend on a short visit to the Soviet
Union and was brought too close to want "to trick" the experience
out as fiction "but not close enough to enable me to write about it
from the inside. Instead, the trip to Russia unlocked a play about
Czechoslovakia" (9). This allowed a distance from which to write
about a political reality and to confront his own origins and fellow-
feeling towards Havel and the Chartists.
Given that aesthetic distance, Professional Foul turned out to be the
most naturalistic play he had so far written. This was not simply due
to the realism which television affords. Having seen repression first-
hand, he was unable to dress it up as a comic fable (however carefully

136
managed) or as disguised myth (like Neutral Ground). Those theatri-
cal instincts were borne out by his "embarrassed" feelings some
months later, when Bukovsky came to a rehearsal of Every Good Boy
and the reality of the man collided against the quite different reality
on stage. "For people working on a piece of theatre, terra firma is a
self-contained world even while it mimics the real one. That is the
necessary condition of making theatre, and it is also our luxury" (8).
After the Chartists and the visit to Russia, he could not permit
himself that degree of luxury. Instead, ProfessionalFoul'poses the case
of an English intellectual, protected by his own social expectations
and code of good manners, who, while at a conference in Prague,
comes to see what frail protection they offer and feels compelled to
act against injustice. The play is about being wrenched from a
self-contained world into another, less comfortable one, as if George
Moore, having refused Clegthorpe's cry for help, were suddenly to
lose his moral blinkers and take a stand against the Rad-Lib future.
Professor Anderson, the play's central character, is "fastidious".
The first scene on the plane to Prague illustrates that manner, in his
neat dabs to the mouth with a serviette as he ends his meal, his covert
interest in the girlie magazine left lying on the seat beside him, and
his squeamishness about "the way the wings keep wagging. I try to
look away and think of something else but I am drawn back irresist-
ibly" (44-5). He is also rather vague and out of touch with things,
much to the disappointment of Bill McKendrick who, in introducing
himself as a fellow speaker at the Colloquium, had expected his name
and work to provoke some recognition. Those characteristics, his
general politeness, his meticulous way with words stand in contrast to
McKendrick's rougher style and are meant to place him for us and
for his abashed colleague as representative of "a higher civilization
alive and well in the older universities" (48). Their conversation also
implants certain clues, ironic signposts to what lies ahead, for Ander-
son knows "there are some rather dubious things happening in
Czechoslovakia. Ethically... We must not try to pretend otherwise"
(46) and admits to "being a tiny bit naughty" towards the Czech
government, though he prefers not to elaborate lest he make
McKendrick his "co-conspirator . . . Ethically I should give you the
opportunity of choosing to be one or not" (47).
However, the following scene provides an incident which hints at
something beyond donnish fastidiousness. Waiting for the lift in the
lobby of his hotel, Anderson recognizes members of England's soc-
cer team, in Prague for a World Cup qualifier; so expert is he on the
game's finer points that next morning he advises the two players
about the Czechs' probable strategy. Stoppard still likes to make and

137
then break a stereotype but, as befits the play's naturalistic style, that
surprising side of Anderson is crucial to the logic of his later be-
haviour and though, in summary, he may seem like another of
Stoppard's comic philosophers, his manner and talk are made con-
vincingly lifelike.
Through this portrayal of the unexpected quirks of character in a
fastidious and moral man, Stoppard invites us to ponder the way
"ethics and manners are interestingly related" (54). At the time,
Anderson means good manners and, as a guest of the government,
refuses to breach them by smuggling his ex-student's doctoral thesis
out of the country. He expects the same courtesy from the State and
finds Hollar's precautions against bugging-devices unbelievably
cloak-and-dagger. However, he is momentarily lost for words on
learning that this first-class student has been reduced to taking
labouring jobs and now cleans public lavatories. Like Vaclav Havel,
who worked in a brewery after his plays were banned, Pavel Hollar
has written things which in the government's view do breach good
manners or - in Anderson's rephrasing - "correct behaviour".
Nevertheless, Anderson maintains his principle of good manners
despite the fact that he may not agree with his hosts on what correct
behaviour is.
Such linguistic shading has much to do with the play's title.
During the soccer match, one of the English players deliberately
obstructs his opponent in order to stop a sure goal. At the same time,
Anderson is about to witness another deliberate foul in Hollar's
apartment when the police, having spent hours in search of incrim-
inating writings, claim to discover a package of American dollars.
Transparent though that is, they need to arrest Hollar as a black-
marketeer because "we do not have laws about philosophy. He is an
ordinary criminal" (70). Later, after a passing glance at the bad table
manners of an American professor, the theme takes on a further
irony when a drunkenly boorish McKendrick harangues some of the
lads from the English team:

ANDERSON: McKendrick, you are being offensive.

MCKENDRICK: Anderson is one of life's cricketers. Clap, clap. (He claps in a
well-bred sort of way and puts on a well-bred voice.) Well played, sir. Bad
luck, old chap. The comparison with cricket may suggest to you that yob
ethics are working class . . . It may be simply that football attracts a
certain kind of person, namely yobs - (85-6)

But Anderson's own behaviour is no longer quite cricket, "trying to

look away" has grown increasingly impossible. After his skirmish
with the police, he rewrites his paper for the next day's Colloquium,

138
whereupon the Chairman counters that "discourtesy" with a profes-
sional foul of his own. As Anderson heads for goal by asking the
delegates to consider a "State ethic which finds itself in conflict with
individual rights", fire-bells ring and the philosophers are requested
to leave "in an orderly manner" (91). In the final scene, as their
departing plane taxis down the runway, Anderson admits to yet
another professional foul: he had concealed Hollar's thesis in
McKendrick's brief-case since he knew his own luggage would be
thoroughly searched. McKendrick is horrified at the risk he has been
put to: "It's not quite playing the game is it?" But then, as Anderson
wryly points out, "Ethics is a very complicated business. That's why
they have these congresses" (93).
The play needs this ironic, tightly-structured scheme in order to
support an ethical debate of a more complex kind. The title of
Anderson's advertised paper, "Ethical Fictions as Ethical Founda-
tions", could well fit the thesis Hollar himself professes in the hotel
bedroom: that each individual, "the human being, not the citizen",
has inalienable rights which might not be logically justifiable to
certain political theorists - or philosophers, for that matter - but
which are essential to each human's idea of himself. From a logical
point of view they are fictions, but they are also inventions which, in
Hollar's view, express an actual human need: "I observe. I observe
my son for example" (55). Though Anderson is not yet ready to
accept that, the idea that human truths are self-evident leads back to
Jumpers and George's assertion that something as "trivial" as the
greeting between two long-distance lorry-drivers in the night "seems
to affirm some common ground that is not animal". The idea also lies
at the heart of Stoppard's own thinking. A 1981 interview elaborates
on Hollar's condensed reference to his son:

Fin finding it hard to keep little boys out of my plays - my four sons ... may or
may not be relevant - but something which has preoccupied me for a long
time is the desire to simplify questions and take the sophistication out... If
somebody came out of East Germany through the gate in the wall and wished
to communicate the idea that life inside this wall was admirable or indeed
platonically good, he'd have a reasonable chance of succeeding in this if he
were addressing himself to a sophisticated person. But if you tried to do this
to a child, he'd blow it to smithereens. A child would say, "But the wall is
there to keep people in, so there must be some reason why people want to get
out."8
And, incidentally, that topic is also fundamental to Stoppard's insist-
ence that theatrical artifice, even in all its razzmatazz, need not falsify
the serious truths that it supports: "Ethical Fictions as Ethical
Foundations".

139
 The turning-point of Professional Foul, when, to coin a phrase,
Anderson does something really crazy, is not the sentimental reaction
it might at first appear to be. The erstwhile professor of fastidious
ethics does find that his cosy theories about social contracts crumble
before the policemen's utilitarian sense of purpose and the evident
despair of Mrs Hollar and her son. But that experience is not what
changes him, even though the original telecast milked the emotion of
his meeting with Sacha and his mother for all it was worth, despite
Stoppard's request for "rather a tough little boy" (73). Anderson's
own sense of panic on discovering how his secure world can shake on
its axis causes him to reconsider Hollar's thesis: conclusions he had
once thought "unsafe for me", because they were intellectually
precarious, have become dangerous to his person. In his revised
paper he takes the plunge, defining "rights as fictions" which ought
to be respected as truths:
A small child who cries "that's not fair" when punished for something done
by his brother or sister is apparently appealing to an idea of justice which is,
for want of a better word, natural. And we must see that natural justice,
however illusory, does inspire many people's behaviour much of the time.
(90)
However they were to have been interpreted in his original paper,
the ethical fictions of the rewritten version are the frail signs of
unarguable truths; as Hollar had told him, "You see, to me the idea of
an inherent right is intelligible. I believe that we have such rights, and
they are paramount" (55). Such a conclusion was not new to Stop-
pard: "I can honestly say that I have held Anderson's final view on the
subject for years and years." In accord with that, he draws his
interviewers' attention to the fact that Jumpers also shows a moral
philosopher "trying to separate absolute values from local ones and
local situations. That description would apply to either play, yet one
is a rampant farce and the other is a piece of naturalistic TV drama." 9
McKendrick's paper for the Colloquium is also important to the
play. We do not hear it directly, since Anderson, our view-finder, was
"a tiny bit naughty" that afternoon and sneaked away to the soccer
match, though he got no farther than the Hollars' flat. But that
evening at the dinner table, McKendrick explains his interpretation
of the catastrophe theory, an idea which actually derives from con-
temporary philosophy10 and which applies nicely to Anderson's vola-
tile feelings after his brush with Czech authority:
MCKENDRICK: There's a point - the catastrophe point - where your
progress along one line of behaviour jumps you into the opposite line;
the principle reverses itself at the point where a rational man would
abandon it. (78)

140
For Anderson, about to jettison his Oxbridge safety-net, such a
theory reduces man to an automaton, in that moral courage becomes
simply a predictable pattern of behaviour. However, Stoppard's own
point is to show that a moral man is no pre-programmed robot.
Anderson's turnabout has an ethical rationale (Hollar's thesis and
experiences) and his decision to reverse his earlier concept of
correct behaviour finally absolves him from McKendrick's charge
that "you end up using a moral principle as your excuse for acting
against a moral interest".
The first paper at the Colloquium is delivered by the American
Professor Stone. His assertion that "the ambiguity of ordinary lan-
guage raises special problems for a logical language" (61) provides a
context for Stoppard's habitual quirks of style and for most of the
play's funny moments. But the paper also points to the way linguistic
ambiguities can become the tools of politicians (again set Jumpers).
Incongruities have coloured the play's first scene, in that Anderson's
academic vagary causes a series of misunderstandings. McKendrick,
looking down the aircraft to a third colleague, Chetwyn, the one
activist amongst them, happens to ask whether Anderson knows
Prague. Anderson eyes Chetwyn warily: "Not personally. I know the
name" (45). A similarly harmless confusion involves McKendrick,
who takes the English soccer players for philosophers and so mis-
understands Anderson's explanation of their relative positions in the
field: "He's what used to be called left wing. Broadbent's in the
centre. He's an opportunist more than anything" (50). At the Collo-
quium, Stone's over-earnest 'academese' allows Stoppard to move to
the fantastical edge of his realist compass. As Stone expands upon his
theme, the cameras cut to the translators' booth, where the interpre-
ters miss the idiom of his examples or fall apart completely, thus
providing a comic illustration of the semantic confusion Stone's
paper is all about (62). The lecture ends in further ambiguity when
Anderson rises to make a quick getaway and is understood to be
asking a question.
Stoppard makes Anderson concoct a face-saving ad lib on verbal
meaning in order to create a parallel with what Hollar had said about
moral meaning, and this is signalled by the professor's sly twist of
Wittgenstein's most famous dictum into "Whereof we cannot speak,
thereof we are by no means silent." For language is not the only way
humans communicate nor can it be expected to be logical:

. . . the important truths are simple and monolithic. The essentials of a given
situation speak for themselves, and language is as capable of obscuring the
truth as of revealing it. (63)

141
These conclusions inform the events which immediately follow in the
Hollars' apartment. Though Anderson speaks no Czech, he (and the
viewer) can understand the language of fear and of force. Mrs
Hollar's anger and distress at the injustice of the police are as
self-evident as the fact that a lavatory attendant could not have the
capital to launch himself in the money business. Anderson's taxi-
driver is able to interpret his request to wait five minutes while he
delivers something: he "did all the things people do when they talk to
each other without a language" (72). In those fundamental ways the
characters communicate more honestly than when they use the same
national language, for the police chief, who can speak English, does
so to terrorize and confuse. He can suggest that Anderson's only
reason for accepting the government's invitation was to attend the
soccer match, that Hollar's letter to the Czech President was
slanderous, and that naturally he is under surveillance as a well-
known black-marketeer. In its own way, too, the whole scene speaks
out for the right to speak out.
After finishing the script, Stoppard visited Czechoslovakia for the
first time in his adult life and was there able to talk to Vaclav Havel
directly. Yet although this literal return to his roots might have looked
in 1977 like the culmination of the interior journey he had travelled
after Travesties, the three plays which belong to that period will not
support a theory of The Sudden Politicization of Tom Stoppard.
The "politics" of undeniable human truths and inalienable human
rights begins with Jumpers and continues to define the roles ofJoyce
and the Lenins in Travesties. What is new about Stoppard from that
point on is the simplicity with which he formulates those ideas
dramatically: the undeviating, obsessive line that links Dirty Linen
and New-Found-Land; the tight patterns that surround the madman
and the prisoner in Every Good Boy, whereby the farce eats like
acid into the authorities' bland and pompous reasonableness; the
carefully worked cause-and-effect structure that moves Anderson
from "correct" to "incorrect" behaviour in Professional Foul.
What is also new, and why Stoppard appears to become more
political, is that each of the plays makes a direct, unambiguous
statement. For the time, he abandons his intellectual "leap-frog",
or rather his leap-frogging arrives at a distinctive terminus.
Here, Tom Stoppard does know things which before he had only
suggested.
That the next full-length play, Night and Day, 1I also happened to
be naturalistic seemed to confirm the idea of his "movement from
withdrawal to involvement, as some have i t . . . as if you were covering
your cleverness in order to force it to serve a more serious moral

142
purpose". 12 Stoppard's move towards realism blinded his commen-
tators to that play's return to an open-ended debate in which one
argument overtops its predecessor, and on to infinity.
Yet arguably, and here we are back to the impenetrabilities of a
writer's self-conscious intent, his standpoint in this script is the most
alien, the most un-English, the one where his origins show more
pointedly than in either of the two previous plays dealing more or less
directly with injustice in the Eastern Bloc. The point, and the prob-
lem, of Night and Day derives from the conviction which drives the
play and cuts through its arguments about the press: "People do
awful things to each other. But it's worse in places where everybody is
kept in the dark. It really is. Information is light. Information, in itself,
about anything, is light. That's all you can say, really" (92). To
anyone less close to the state of things in a totalitarian society, in other
words to the cosy majority of his West End or Broadway audience, an
idea like that does not burn on the brain. As an ex-journalist and as
someone whom recent events in Czechoslovakia must have filled
with a sense of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God, Stoppard embarks
on a debate whose pros and cons affect him deeply but which his
audience would be apt to regard somewhat coolly. Stoppard seems
not to have allowed for that. For him, freedom of information is so
vital an issue that he assumes debate in itself will be dramatic enough
to provoke an equally passionate interest.
English audiences have always loathed being lectured to in the
theatre. This is not to say that they are scared of ideas, but that those
ideas must be dramatized with a vivacity that intrigues, surprises,
persuades. Shaw knew that, yet, curiously enough, Night andDayr, the
one instance where Stoppard does not lure his audiences' intellect,
has frequently been labelled "Shavian". It is true that no other
playwright since Shaw has made ideas so exciting as Stoppard does at
his playful best. But that playfulness is not much like Shaw's, which is
energized by rhetorically heightened dialogue and an appetite for the
clash of mighty opposites. Outrageously disruptive of social compla-
cence on both sides of the footlights, that energy, an essentially
dramatic one, crackles from the stage and invests the ideas with a
dynamic it is hard to capture when reading the printed text. Stoppard
at play is more conscious of the stage as a stage, more intellectually
bizarre, more Central European. Any such literary affiliation is a
matter of temperament, as Stoppard himself stresses when discus-
sing the way he writes. Yet one can, for instance, see something of
Kafka in the bewilderment which imprisons Rosencrantz and Guil-
denstern or of Brecht in the overt theatricality of Travesties or of
Nabokov in his delight at word-games. Several commentators note
resemblances to the style and themes of Havel's plays, a "kinship"
Stoppard readily admits to:

When I read The Garden Party about twelve years ago, I just thought he was
somebody who wrote like I would like to write if I was writing on the same
subject. There are playwrights one admires because one could never do what
they do, and there are those one admires because one could do exactly what
they do and would wish to. 13

Havel and Stoppard share a way of seizing on a certain situation, a

particular place, a premise which, though quite ordinary in itself, acts
as an oddly arresting frame around the play's ideas and becomes a
metaphor which controls and colours the way we see. The Players of
Hamlet, the plot-line of Earnest, the Rad-Libs' victory party, the
orchestra in Every Good Boy all work in that manner. In the more
realistic plays, the same can be said of the quiet hospital in A Separate
Peace or the congress of philosophers which affects how we view the
collective behaviour of the footballers and the police in Professional
Foul. No such metaphor governs the ideas of Night and Day, an
absence which has nothing to do with the nature of realism but which
might account for a disappointing flatness.
Night and Day develops many of Dirty Linen's ideas about journal-
ists and journalism, but does so less successfully. However frivolous
Dirty Linen is,'its opening premise - everyone but Mr French, male
and female, has bedded Maddie - makes us see the workings of the
Committee in a peculiar light and enlivens each member's attitude to
the press. For example, Maddie's opinion of a free press has much to
do with her personal relationships on Fleet Street; to put things
crassly, she knows how these men live:

They're not writing it for the people, they're writing it for the writers writing
it on the other papers. "Look what I've got that you haven't got." There don't
have to be any people reading it at all so long as there's a few journalists around
to say, "Old Bill got a good one there!" That's what they're doing it for. I
thought you'd have worked that out by now. (42)

In Night and Day, Dick Wagner says much the same thing; as a
hard-bitten journalist, he too knows the territory, but that rationale
does not seem as invitingly off-kilter as Maddie's. He thinks as we
might expect him to, and his opinion strikes us with straight-faced
authority:

It's good stuff but it's too much I-was-there. It's somebody who wants to
impress the world and doesn't know that the world isn't impressed by
reporters . . . except other reporters - who can work out that you were there
without having it rammed down their throats. (30)

144
This directness has little allure. Wagner tells us what to think;
Maddie's personality allows us to share her thoughts. As a conse-
quence, Night and Day seems to deposit a report of a serious and
witty debate into the middle of a well-tailored and less earnest
psychodrama.
Yet Night and Day starts with a typically disarming prelude. It at
first seems real but turns out to be a bad dream. The stage is
deserted; a gorgeous sky fades rapidly at sunset; suddenly out of the
silence and the gathering dark comes the whirr of a helicopter. Soon
it hovers directly overhead; its blades shake the trees and form
shadows in a spotlight which rakes the stage before the machine
moves away. From nowhere, a vehicle swerves onto the dark stage,
blinding us with the glare of its lights. All hell breaks loose: a
machine-gun clatters, the helicopter roars above, its searchlight
catches a figure leaping from the jeep, which speeds away; the figure
crouches down in the blackness:

Then the spotlightfindshim. He stands up into the light with his arms spread out,
shouting. The gun is firing bursts. He moves away from the corner. A burst
catches him and knocks him over.
A late afternoon light reveals G U T H R I E stretched out on a long garden chair.
Sundown. The steps to the verandah and the room are behind him.
(15-16)

Such a beginning obviously has an arresting and ultimately disorient-

ing effect, but it does not order our way of looking at journalism other
than to remind us that it can sometimes be dangerous. This distinc-
tion becomes striking if we think of the similarly deceptive prologue
to Jumpers, which surrounds the certainty of the logical-positivists in
irony just as, in quieter vein, the initial coin-spinning in Rosencrantz
organizes a relationship between games of chance and fatal play. For
all its legerdemain, Guthrie's dream simply organizes the plot. At the
end of the first episode, a helicopter swoops low over the garden so
that Guthrie is again made to cower. Buzzing the house turns out to
be Carson's signal to his servant to collect him in the car from the
landing-pad. A third replay, reported to us in Act 2, describes the
death of Milne and not of Guthrie himself.
The dream may also help to establish the reality of interior
thoughts, but in doing so it points us directly to Stoppard's character-
ization of Ruth. It is she who arouses most interest, because we are
party to thoughts she prefers to hide from those around her. To
permit that, Stoppard employs the simple, but none the less provoca-
tive and dramatic device of having Ruth Carson voice things that go
through her mind at moments of social or emotional embarrassment.
Outwardly, she defends herself with a dry mockery which she has
adopted over the years so that it has become automatic. However,
hers is a performance, even when she thinks she is alone (hence the
role's attractiveness to star actresses and their audience). Her first
entrance catches that mannered style as she makes to turn off the
African rock band on her servant's cassette-player with a melo-
dramatic "Oh, those drums, those damned drums", and so explodes
the cliche neurosis of white -heroine -beset-by-pounding-Heart-of-
Darkness. Her next remark, on noticing Guthrie lying out in the
garden, is just as posed: "Francis, there's a man under that tree"
(i 6).
One might expect to see behind those defences when Ruth gives
voice to her inner thoughts, but on that level, too, she continues to act
a part, though her mockery tends to be directed towards herself as
much as to others. Characteristically, when she learns that Dick
Wagner, the journalist whom she had allowed a one-night-stand in
London, will soon be at her home in Kambawe, the outer Ruth skips
a beat then asks, "Is he a composer?" (17). When the inner Ruth
takes over, her first "Help" is followed by a commentary upon her
public self, a stance which is just as protective: "Just what you
needed, Ruth, and serve you right. Nothing is for free, you always
pay, and Guthrie has brought the bill. Silly Woman!" (18). Even this
part of her assumes a role while admitting "I don't feel up to being
witty today." So Stoppard defuses her second "Help" with the sound
of a piano chord which, when repeated after "I need somebody",
turns what might have been a moment of genuine panic into the
Beatles' song, "Help!" The fact that we never do reach the bed-rock
of Ruth's self, despite appearances on stage, makes her an especially
fascinating character.
That the "two" Ruths are not unlike each other leads also to the
play's most inventive episode, one which deceives us for some
minutes as to which Ruth is which. The second Act opens on the
darkened room, where an apparently 'interior' Ruth acts out a
romantic welcome to Jacob Milne after his dangerous assignment
with Guthrie. When Milne appears from the shadows, we quickly
revise that picture and, given the play's established conventions,
understand this as Milne's actual return and Ruth's acknowledged
attraction to him as part of her double dialogue until, that is, he
responds to an invitation to kiss her. Now it seems she can tell her
thoughts and, though still self-mocking, her guard slips to reveal
glimpses of a franker self as when her cheery account of her first
marriage fails to cover over all of its unhappiness:

146
I was almost a tart with my first husband, but he was a rotter in his own way.
He was frankly proud of his left-hook . . . Unjustifiably so. You could slip it
quite easily and get him with aright-cross.What a way to live. To get me, all
Geoffrey had to do was clear his throat and hold the door. (67-8)
The scene ends in what looks like complete surrender. As Milne
leaves, Ruth lets her kaftan fall away and, trailing it behind her,
follows him naked into the dark. Carson enters and watches 'her5 go
until Ruth, still elegantly gowned, appears behind him and asks for a
cigarette. Everything we had seen and heard since the Act began had
been a performance of the interior Ruth's. Milne had not returned;
Ruth's new frankness was imaginary and, thanks to a 'double', she
had never left the room; Carson had been simply musing into space.
In the words Ruth imagines for Milne on his last exit, "You're
really something, Ruth. I don't know what" (69). Stoppard keeps us
guessing as to what lies behind her double act. Although the two
levels she speaks on make her seem the riven sister of Gladys Jenkins
or Dotty Moore, neither of her aspects reveals their kind of despair.
The nearest we come to an answer is at the play's end, when she
wearily suggests that Wagner should take her to bed: "I want to be
hammered out, disjointed, folded up and put away like linen in a
drawer" (94). Stoppard enfolds even this in theatricality as Ruth
coolly smashes an empty whisky bottle against the mantelpiece and,
seeing Wagner at the telex keyboard, croons out "The Lady is a
Tramp", as we hear 'his' piano accompaniment at the keyboard. The
artifice makes for a neat ending but, because Ruth's motives have
continually defied analysis, we are unlikely to feel she acts out of
character, despite her having sworn never to go to bed with Wagner a
second time.
Ruth's real feelings have little to do with what she says and does.
Her performance keeps her afloat, and her life in Kambawe, her
marriage to Carson, her brush with Milne, her interior conversations
are all part of that act: "I don't share with strangers. All you're saying
is, 'Who do you think you are?' Well, I don't have to be anybody" (54).
Rare moments do force her to take stock of her behaviour. When she
realized that her son had not written home for name tapes for his
school uniform because he instinctively knew she was not the sort of
mother who would order them, she wept "buckets" on her own in
London, and the memory provokes "a sniff, the nearest she gets to a
tear" in the whole play (50). Otherwise, she presses on with the show,
and if that means a second bout with Wagner, "That's it" (95). Ruth
is an extended version of Lady Malquist. Both of them behave
irresponsibly in order not to have to stop and look, and the imper-
sonal abandon of the play's last moments exactly captures that.

147
 That we never know precisely what Ruth would see, were she to
stop and look, stimulates a curiosity towards her which has but the
slenderest connection with the rest of the play; as she herself says
jokingly, "I'm in the wrong movie, I think" (51). For though she
keeps us entertained, that pleasure has nothing to do with how we are
asked to think about journalism. Stoppard tries to bind those two
strands together by making Ruth the past victim of scandal-hungry
journalists during her divorce proceedings. That she should "de-
spise" them and instantly coyer over that feeling with a sophisticated
cynicism is to be expected. That she should express this disinterested
contempt at some length (the lady doth protest too much) is of more
than passing interest, but one which focuses us on her rather than on
what she says. Her attitude to the popular press, however she tries to
mask it, is emotional, and yet the objections she ultimately arrives at
are stylistic, "that Lego-set language they have", and moral. So her
words put Stoppard's arguments briskly, but their logic works loose
from her mood of the moment:

. . . Heartbreak Parrot Woman In Plea for Earl's Brother. Earl's brother.

That's the bit. Of all the husbands who ran off with somebody's wife that
week, Geoffrey qualified because he had a measly-title and if therightthree-
hundred people went down on the Royal Yacht he'd be Duke of Bognor. Has
anybody ever bothered to find out whether anybody really cares? The populace and
the popular press. What a grubby symbiosis it is. (48)

Her separation from the politics of Night and Day shows clearly in
the climactic scene with President Mageeba. Stoppard uses her
flippant asides to lighten the talk about rebel armies, Globe inter-
views, and "uninvited foreigners". Then, somewhat desperately,
since Ruth has had less and less to do, he has her break in with a
'thought' about the label on her grandmother's packet of salt to show
she "was miles away" (80). Given that detachment and the dangerous
electricity of Mageeba's presence, her subsequent attack on Wag-
ner's opinion of press lords, amusingly acted out as a discussion she
has had with her son, is not an entirely convincing moment. Later
still, her final outburst is motivated only if we allow that her "thing"
for Milne was strong enough to provoke it; even then, the emotion
and the ideas jostle each other:

As far as I'm concerned, Jake died for the product. He died for the women's
page, and the crossword, and the racing results, and the heartbreak
beauty queens and somewhere at the end of a long list I suppose he died
for the leading article too, but it's never worth that -
{She has started to swipe at G u T H R1E with a newspaper and she ends upflingingit
at him . . .) (91-2)

148
 If Ruth sails away on her own, the debate about the function of the
press and the ethics of journalists is not sufficiently dramatized to vie
for our attention. Dick Wagner, around whom those arguments
gather, has little of her appeal, so the play does not achieve the
balance of a Jumpers, where two separate worlds both relate to the
same central pain and intellectual confusion. Not that philosophers
are intrinsically more dramatic than journalists. George Moore (and
Professor Anderson, too) is defined first as a struggling, thinking
human being whose profession is incidental, whereas Wagner (and
Guthrie, his photographer) is a journalist first and last. Like Ruth,
Wagner acts a role much of the time, for Stoppard was "interested by
the way journalists tend to ape their fictitious models. It's a certain
way of behaving which derives from 'tough' films."14 But when
Wagner stops performing, he still lives only for his job, and his
character admits none of the human question-marks Ruth's does.
Consequently, unless we too happen to be journalists, we react
dispassionately to a figure who is substantial enough to carry the
events of the plot but who makes a cardboard-thin spokesman of
ideas. He and Guthrie represent a failure of imagination on Stop-
pard's part. He can project his own humanity onto his professors and
female neurotics but, familiar with the jargon and lifestyle of the
press, he takes his journalists for granted, makes no such leap, and so
they lack a dimension we too can enter.
This is not the case with Jacob Milne. As innocent abroad, his
persona had been part of Stoppard's imagination from the very start in
Bristol, and later when he wrote the Scene articles under the
pseudonym William Boot. As Stoppard said, Evelyn Waugh's orig-
inal "is really a Moon too", 15 a n d the archetype appears in a host of
Stoppard's characters from Mr Moon to Professor Anderson either
as a naive failure (a Moon) or as the innocent who succeeds in spite of
himself (a Boot). In going back to his own early memories, while
writing Night and Day, Stoppard naturally returned to that parody of
his journalistic experience, "I'm a Moon myself", and to Waugh's
novel, Scoop, details from which he scatters through the play.
Stoppard once described Waugh's William Boot as "a journalist
who brought a kind of innocent incompetence and contempt to what
he was doing". 16 Ruth describes Milne as someone with "a way of
being gauche which suggests that you've got the edge on people who
know the ground and prepare their effects" (68), and when he first
stumbles onto the stage he seems to be exactly as Wagner and
Guthrie had imagined the amateur reporter who somehow scooped
the lot of them with "one of those cameras with a little picture of a
cloud and a little picture of the sun and you slide it across according

149
to the weather" (24). Waugh's innocent is actually more of a bungler
and his "contempt" is far less conscious. The reclusive author of
Lush Places, a "bi-weekly half-column devoted to Nature...'Feather-
footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole* " , I ? Boot lives in the
country with his eccentric aunts and uncles and their equally dotty
retainers. Mistaken for John Boot, novelist and writer of "modish
works on history and travel", he finds himself reporting a revolution
in Africa for The Beast and muddles on to glory, all the while pro-
tected by an obliviousness to what goes on both in Ishmaelia and back
in Fleet Street. Boot is so naive that he believes reporters send their
stories by native runners with cleft sticks, supplied by the Army and
Navy Stores; in Stoppard's Jeddu, "the hotel doesn't have cleft
sticks", let alone a telex (23). And there are other reminders of Scoop
in the play: lying official-press-officers; dumpy hotels with "journal-
ists hanging out of the windows"; the competition on the wrong trail,
"following armoured car patrols into the bush in broken-down taxis"
(26). Stoppard's most affectionate nods take the form of two in-jokes.
Milne's Christian name, Jake, links him to "the fabulous Wenlock
Jakes" of Scoop, and Wagner quotes one of the novel's catch-phrases,
"Up to a point, Lord Copper" (72), which TheBeasfs foreign editor
always uses when he disagrees with his lordly employer. Scoop and
Boot had been the comic side of Stoppard's journalist fantasies
when "I wanted to be Noel Barber on the Daily Mail or Sefton
Delmer on the Daily Express - that kind of big-name, roving
reporter." 18 Remembering those days, he projects that young
self into Jacob Milne, the reporter from the provinces whose "idea
was to get myself in on a good foreign story without too much com-
petition" (32).
Human though Milne is, he is not dominant enough to be the twin
centre of Night and Day, particularly since he only exists in Ruth's
imagination by the second Act. But when he speaks of the ethics and
manners of the press, we are apt to listen less passively than to
Wagner's Aussie version of the hard-bitten reporter. Milne has a
history of moral decision-making behind him. In Grimsby he had
refused to join a strike against the Evening Messenger. Once the
dispute was settled, he was expelled by his Union, which then
threatened a further shut-down since Milne had decided to "give
them a problem" by not appealing against his expulsion. The man-
agement stood by him, but he resigned in order to head off another
strike (38-9). Wagner condemns him as "the Grimsby scab", and
through their confrontation Stoppard derails the old class conflicts -
the Messenger is "not a private coal-mine sending somebody's son to
Eton" - and introduces what is to be his major point when Milne

150
sneers at the strikers' "pique" over the printers' higher pay-scale as
he flicks through the captions in the popular papers:

It's crap. And it's written by grown men earning maybe ten thousand a year. If
I was a printer, I'd look at some of the stuff I'm given to print, and I'd ask
myself what is supposed to be so special about the people who write i t . . .
(39)
Although Milne does not make his ultimate point until first meet-
ing Ruth, Stoppard already loads the dice his way. Wagner is so much
the jargon-ridden, hard-nosed Union man, the sort who earns
Milne's contemptuous reaction: "it was as if their brains had been
taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in
electric typewriters" (37). Stoppard has confessed to an ambivalence
towards Wagner: "I would admire him if he existed. I admire good
professionals."19 Wagner is good at what he does, but the play makes
it hard to remember that. Less morally alive than Milne, he is not
allowed a flicker of self-wonder when he respects a "bloody useless"
reporter because "he's bloody good at squeezing the management"
and he is made the butt of Ruth's more lacerating attacks. Milne, on
the other hand, grows from the comic amateur who misunderstands
the professionals' lingo - "Apigeon? No, we've got a little beyond that
in Fleet Street" (32) - into a debater whose sincerity stands firm
against Ruth's wit.
The play argues many sides of the issue, but Milne becomes the
major spokesman for Stoppard's own views about a free press:
"Milne has my prejudice if you like. Somehow, unconsciously, I
wanted him to be known to be speaking the truth." 20 The Globe and
its competitors represent more than just "a million packets of jour-
nalism manufactured every week by businessmen using journalists
for their labour" (58). Milne objects to Wagner's assumption that all
journalists should unite solidly behind their union; for him, "a free
press, free expression - it's the last line of defence for all the other
freedoms", and the play itself underlines the relationship between
those two freedoms in that Wagner, refusing to work with a scab, also
quashes a rival's story and the public's right to know the latest
developments in Kambawe. For Milne (and Stoppard) a free press
ensures the defeat of all unjust power groups.
Milne dies amidst panicked bursts of crossfire on his way back
to the rebels and the latest scoop, but his death comes from his
desire for a story as well as from his wish to tell that story. Wagner
is even more ambitious and has no scruples about how he gets
his story through, yet those reports also proclaim the freedom to
know. The ambiguities surrounding those motives and freedoms
crystallize in the figure of President Mageeba during the play's
second Act.
The President can quote chapter and verse concerning the princi-
ples of free expression from his student days at the London School of
Economics. As old-school-tie as Milne, as unscrupulous as Wagner,
Mageeba exudes "the power to dictate", whereas the newspapers'
power to expose is less certain. Time and circumstance weigh
heavily: he cannot afford to dabble with ethical theories any more than
Lenin could give room to artistic ones. Stoppard mixes the comedy of
Ruth's asides, "Compose yourself, Wagner" (75), with Mageeba's
dangerous suavity to create the tensest moment of the play, but the
longer that tension lasts the more the ideas get in the way. Wagner is
again made an ass of when he tries to ingratiate himself with
Mageeba, congratulating him on his "determined stand against Rus-
sian imperialism in Africa" and allying himself with the President's
dislike of press lords: "a newspaper is too important to be merely a
rich man's property" (82). But there is really no contest. Mageeba
has no need for argument. We await the inevitable and, as the talk
goes on, we listen somewhat distractedly to Mageeba's explanation of
his circumstances, however cleverly put:
The population cannot yet support a number of competing papers offering a
natural balance of opinion . . . You may smile, but does freedom of the press
mean freedom to choose its own standards? . . . No, no - freedom with
responsibility, that was the elusive formula we pondered all those years ago at
the LSE. And that is what I found. From the ashes there arose, by public
subscription, a new Daily Citizen, responsible and relatively free . . . Do you
know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr Wagner?... I mean a free
press which is edited by one of my relatives. (84-5)

This debate seems imposed, halting the action until Mageeba finally
explodes, smashing his stick down on Wagner's head and ranting
about the rebellious Colonel Shimbu: "I'll give him equal space. Six
foot long and six foot deep, just like any other traitor and communist
jackal" (86). Stoppard feels he must put the case for Mageeba's point
of view, but the President does not need to justify his sophisticated
brutishness. That power alone gives sufficient urgency to Guthrie's
final rallying cry: "Information is light."
Night and Day is both entertaining and thought-provoking, a rare
enough combination in the commercial theatre, but it fails to bond
those qualities into a satisfying whole. Ruth's enigmatic perform-
ances pull us one way and the play's ideas, which do not vitally involve
her, are not presented dynamically enough to pull us back. Ruth's
two voices move us closer to her than to any other character, Milne
included, and the fact that she will never share with strangers makes
us want to move still closer. Like all the major characters, she is
frequently undermined by the comedy, but that subversive laughter
rarely detaches our sympathies, as it does from the others; since it
nearly always rises out of her own self-mockery, we laugh with her.
And Stoppard seems not to have realized that debate about a free
press is not dramatic in itself. Animated as he is by that issue, he has
not found a way of bringing the majority of his audience
wholeheartedly along with him.

153
Chapter 7

The real thing?

Whatever its problems, Night and Day more than held its own in the
West End. Responding to Diana Rigg's elegantly cool Ruth or to the
mannered frenzy of Maggie Smith, who succeeded to the part in the
second year of the run, audiences came away delighting in a sophis-
tication made all the more challenging by those knotty interludes of
undisguised talk; as Stoppard puts it, "one's appeal to an audience is
less to do with what one is saying than how one is saying it".1 Yet the
critics were more leery. Bernard Levin, for whom, after Every Good
Boy, "this man could write a comedy about Auschwitz, at which we
would sit laughing helplessly until we cried with inextinguishable
anger",2 found the play "deeply disappointing" and, striking nearer
the heart of things, suggested that Stoppard "has put his viewpoint
before his drama". 3 The favourably inclined praised the way that
viewpoint could evolve within the limitations of a well-crafted plot:
"even for him it is a signal triumph to have related such remote
subjects within the discipline of a nuts and bolts naturalistic play".4
Mixed or lukewarm reviews and enthusiastic queues at the box office
have become something of a norm for the later plays, a phenomenon
which is less interesting for what it says about the relative perceptive-
ness of critics and audiences than for the reaction it provokes in
Stoppard himself: "I find that people . . . are divided along [sic] those
who congratulate me on getting past the 'hummingbird' phase and
those who say 'What are you doing? It's all naturalistic, with a
beginning, a middle, and an end!' But there's no external position
where you say, 'I think that in view of what so-and-so's been writing
about me I'd better get to grips with something recognisable and do it
properly.' " 5 From die very beginning he had "written what appealed
to me . . . with the assumption that it would appeal to everybody
else", 6 but as he grew confident in his own powers as a writer so he
became less reluctant to reveal his private self.
All Stoppard's plays come from the core of himself, but at oblique
angles. However, as his style gained simplicity, his personality (in-
directly ever present in his idiosyncratic way of looking at things and
at the words we find to describe them) drives those recurring themes
and ideas more directly. Every Good Boy and Professional Foul relate
closely to his work for the Committee Against Psychiatric Abuse,
with whom he marched to the Soviet Embassy in 1976, or to his
commitment to Amnesty International, and each of those plays

154
makes an explicit statement. Though the intellectual leapfrog re-
sumes in Night and Day, Milne, Stoppard's serio-comic portrait of
himself when young, proclaims the same moral absolutes. And here
Stoppard no longer depends on other writers or on phrases and
situations which have passed into popular lore, like "Lloyd George
knew my father" or painting the Forth Bridge. Although Waugh's
Scoop and Idi Amin (as popularly imagined) flicker through the script,
neither matt/becomes a means of distancing the ideas. Instead, those
ideas are sustained by a plot which is woven from old dreams 7 and
doubts and from the sort of people he met as a journalist, so that he
runs the risk of forgetting what "would appeal to everybody else".
The emergence of that self was not a specifically political journey,
though his moral and social principles were bound to approach the
surface of the plays along with the rest of him, for even his adapta-
tions and translations, which obviously contain no immediate state-
ment of his own, reveal a growing self-assurance as he journeyed
from the colourless and literal Tango (1966) to the free-wheeling
verve of On theRazzle (1981) and the idiosyncratic counterpoint of
Dalliance (1986).
Over the years, Stoppard has also made new adaptations of his own
earlier ideas, and his personal development in the seventies shows
nowhere more clearly than in Dogg's Hamlet\ Cahoot's Macbeth
(1979).8 This was another of his pieces for Ed Berman, and the play's
first Act reworks Dogg's Our Pet so as to free it from its original
occasion, the inauguration of a theatre. Stoppard had hoped "one
day... to make full use of that little idea", 9 and he now combines his
lesson in Dogg with its articulate opposite, the language of Hamlet
selected so that it relates all the shifts of Shakespeare's plot in
approximately fifteen minutes. That mini-version also had an inde-
pendent existence. Arranged for seven actors to perform on the top
deck of Berman's Fun Art Bus, the script was somehow mislaid for
four years until, in 1976, it was presented by Dogg's Troupe on the
esplanade outside the National Theatre. 10 During his 1977 visit to
Czechoslovakia, Stoppard met Pavel Kohout, a playwright who was
forbidden to work in the theatre, and Pavel Landovsky, the actor who
had been arrested with Havel. The impetus for combining his two
independent scripts came in a letter from Kohout in the following
year:

As one of them who cannot live without theatre I was searching for a
possibility to do theatre in spite of circumstances. Now I am glad to tell you
that in a few days, after eight weeks rehearsals - a Living-Room Theatre is
opening, with nothing smaller but Macbeth.
What is LRT? A call-group. Everybody, who wants to have Macbeth at

155
home with two great and forbidden Czech actors, Pavel Landovsky and
Vlasta Chramostova, can invite his friends and call us. Five people will come
with one suitcase. (8)

Reminded of his own condensed Hamlet and the improvised sur-

roundings of Dogg's Troupe, Stoppard dovetailed his scripts into
one panel of a diptych whose other half showed his own idea of
living-room Shakespeare behind The Wall.
This conjunction represents something more than a move from
the abstract word-games of the first panel to the emotionally charged
farce of the second or from passionless intellect to passionate in-
volvement. Its major significance lies in the fact that for Stoppard
there is no divide between those two aspects and that Kohout's letter
should have prompted him to connect the linguistic curlicues of
Dogg to those of the Czech police. The confusion of words and what
they signify had its dark side from Rosencrantz on, and Stoppard had
always dealt passionately, if objectively, with those undertones. At
two years' distance from Prague and Professional Foul, which explores
the same confusion, he reassumes an antic disposition, but that guise
shows no less feeling than unmasked naturalism does, for, as the play
grows directly political, its heartless dialogue strikes at both the
Czech actuality and its seemingly harmless twin in the first Act.
T o effect this mirror-image which dominates his subsequent
plays, Stoppard reorganizes Dogg's Our Pet. Charlie, once the school
caretaker, becomes another of the schoolboys and, having implanted
the basics of a new language code through their ball game and an
exchange of sandwiches, the boys begin to rehearse a school play
though, from their toneless recitation, the words of Hamlet appear to
be as half-perceived a mystery to them as Dogg's are to us. In the
middle of all this, a lorry drives up and Baker, signalling towards the
wings, directs the driver in Dogg: "Cauliflower . . . cauliflower . . .
hardly . . . onyx hardly" (19). Easy, the odd-man-out linguistically,
has come to deliver blocks, slabs, and so forth with which to build a
stage for the boys' play. His verbal building-blocks are certainly ours,
and yet their construct is Pinteresque, a cross between Davies and
Mick of The Caretaker-, to appreciate that parody we therefore depend
on yet another code:

I'll need a bit of a hand, being as Pm on my own, seeing as my mate got struck
down in a thunderstorm on the A412 near Rickmansworth - a bizarre
accident... a bolt from the blue, zig-zagged right on to the perforated snout
of his Micky Mouse gas mask. He was delivering five of them at the
bacteriological research children's party - entering into the spirit of it -
when, shazam! - it was an electrifying moment . . . (20)

156
After misunderstandings about the platform, the red carpet, and the
bouquet for The Lady who now presides at a prize-giving, and
having gone through the wall like his earlier counterpart, Easy begins
to grapple with Dogg although, as Cahoot remarks later, "You don't
learn it, you catch it" (74). This part of the play ends with the boys'
synopsis of "Hamlet bedsocks Denmark. Yeti William Shakespeare"
(31)-
A prologue made up of a fairly coherent jumble of the best-known
quotations from Hamlet underlines what we have already been shown
in the Dogg sequence: that the full meaning and nuance of language
depend on a particular frame of reference. Performed on its own, the
abridged Hamlet would present an ingenious account of the basic
plot, an instructive exercise for school audiences and a pre-
performance curiosity for adults, but it conveys nothing more. In this
new context, the redaction, a welcoming island in a sea of Dogg,
turns out to be completely barren. The familiar phrases have been
squeezed dry, and this is still more evident in a final encore, which
races through the essentials of the story in roughly one minute. The
same can be said of the Inspector in Cahoot's Macbeth, who fires off
volleys of well-worn metaphors which are dead to all feeling.
In reversing the previous action, that second part of the play takes
Shakespeare as its basic language, which then disintegrates into
Dogg. Unlike the boys' playlet, the living-room version of Macbeth
admits emotion, mood, and motive: connotations of feeling in addi-
tion to the denotations of plot. Within the particular context of an
oppressed society, Shakespeare also takes on new meanings. At Lady
Macbeth's "I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry", a police-
siren is heard nearing the house, and the knocking at the gate turns
out to be the Inspector at the apartment door. These correspond-
ences turn farcical when Easy enters and in trying to find someone to
receive his consignment of"cake hops . . . almost Leamington Spa"
(Dogg for "blocks and that . . . from Leamington") unwittingly
appears as the third murderer and then as Banquo's ghost. But the
essential message of this living-room performance, as the Inspector
very well knows, is defiance, which in turn gives added savour to the
downfall of the tyrant Macbeth:
The fact is, when you get a universal and timeless writer like Shakespeare,
there's a strong feeling that he could be spitting in the eyes of the beholder
when he should.be keeping his mind on Verona - hanging around the 'gents'.
You know what I mean? Unwittingly, of course. He didn't know he was doing
it, at least you couldn't prove he did, . . . (60)
He and his superiors would much prefer that the actors protested
their lack of freedom unequivocally. If they continue to claim that

157
they are only speaking as Macbeth or Banquo, the State will put them
in an institution just as it would do to people "who say they are Napo-
leon" (61). Once the actors all catch Dogg, the Inspector panics at
what might be another dangerous code, though he cannot prove it.
Easy builds a second platform which the Inspector mounts to give
fresh significance to words like "Scabs! Stinking slobs - crooks.
You're nicked", which The Lady had previously used when con-
gratulating the prize-winners in Dogg. Then he and his two hench-
men stand by to receive grey slabs that come flying through the door
and which they turn into a wall that, because of the political context,
says more than the one the schoolboys built. This wall eloquently
blocks up the proscenium and the actors disappear behind it.
The key figure in all this is the Inspector. His arrival at the
apartment reflects Easy's at the school in the first part, for both
confront a language (Dogg and Shakespeare) which, they come to
realize, has some hidden meaning. Easy therefore becomes a refer-
ence point in taking the measure of this second intruder. Where the
former feels bewildered, the Inspector asserts his own brand of talk,
"because if I walk out of this show I take it with me" (56), and these
cheery platitudes create an entirely different effect from those of the
well-meaning Easy. An air of parody surrounds the Inspector, too,
and affects the way we see him; a fiercer version of Inspector Hound
(Hound meets Dogg), he has all the smiling brutality of Orton's
Inspector Truscott:

The law? I've got the Penal Code tattooed on my whistle, Landovsky, and
there's a lot about you in it. Section 98, subversion - anyone acting out of
hostility to the state . . . Section 100, incitement - anyone acting out of
hostility to the state . . . I could nick you just for acting - and the sentence is
double for an organized group, which I can make stick on Robinson Crusoe
and his man any day of the week. So don't tell me about the laws. (61)

Beneath those levels of meaning, the Inspector pursues his own

imperturbable vision. He speaks in shop-soiled metaphors, pictures
which have either no significance for him at all or which, like a
Magritte painting, assume deliberately peculiar notations, as in his
warning against public performances: "That would be acting without
authority - acting without authority! - you'd never believe I make it
up as I go along" (56). In a sinister way, the empty space beneath the
glib pictures can, in an instant, take on any title or meaning he wishes
and, like Dogg, this cynical use of words is catching. 'Macbeth'
explains that Cahoot/Banquo growls like a dog because he has
become a "non-person" and then begins to talk in the Inspector's
own crazy metaphors:

158
' M A C B E T H ' : Your system could do with a few antibodies. If you're afraid to
risk the infection of an uncontrolled idea, the first time a new one gets
in, it'll run through your system like a rogue bacillus. Remember the last
time. (62)

Shunted from one menial job to another, the actors have them-
selves become surreal portraits which the State labels 'mortuary
porter', 'night-watchman', or 'newsvendor'. The Inspector's re-
marks about the Constitution, which supposedly protects these
people, satirizes the system with an exaggeration that equals his and
its monstrosity:

The way I see it, life is lived off the record. It's altogether too human for the
written word, it happens in pictures . . . metaphors . . . A few years ago you
suddenly had it on toast, but when they gave you an inch you overplayed your
hand and rocked the boat so they pulled the rug from under you, and now
you're in the doghouse... I mean, that is pure fact. Metaphorically speaking.
It describes what happened to you in a way that anybody can understand.
(61)

Understanding what language can do is therefore no mere intel-

lectual exercise, yet Stoppard's critics frequently misunderstand that
preoccupation and dismiss him as a clever, but essentially arid stylist.
His interviews had shown his sensitivity to the critical industry that
surrounds him, but now he was ready to take on those attitudes in the
theatre itself. With The Real Thing (1982), " Stoppard comes nearer
than he ever has to baring his breast in public. And what of the heart
beneath - or is there one? Not according to those who see him as a
glittering wordsmith who puts style before feeling, theatrical trickery
before genuine emotion, and who never could write about women.
So Stoppard gives them Henry, a playwright in his forties, who thinks
words are "sacred", writes and talks with style, is not immune to a
theatrical trick or two, and who never could write about women. But
in torpedoing that view of himself, as Henry's self-assurance falls
apart, Stoppard may still not have exposed his entire and actual self.
The Real Thing may be his most direct confessional but it is also a hall
of mirrors. As usual, honest statement and deceiving appearances go
together; neither one cancels the other, and so the play becomes a
guessing-game to which there might or might not be a 'real' answer.
In the London production, Peter Wood and his designer hung a
painting of Henry on the back wall of his living-room, a portrait
which exactly reproduced the characteristically stooped-shouldered
stance of Roger Rees so that, when he stood in front of it, there was
an actor whose own mannerisms inscribed Henry, who was then
reflected in the picture behind him. This sequence of images illus-

159
trates the way Stoppard lures us in to The Real Thing, which begins
with what seems like an actual showdown between an architect and
his wife. Their reality is hypnotically persuasive as Max concentrates
on his pyramid of playing-cards, which collapses when Charlotte
comes through the door. Yet the dialogue also implants the idea of
image-within-image and of deception beneath a surface banter:

MAX: Hello, lover.

CHARLOTTE: That's nice. You used to call me lover.
{She drops the airport bag on his lap and returns towards the suitcase.)
MAX: Oh, it's you. I thought it was my lover. (10)

Charlotte has supposedly been to an auction sale in Geneva for

Sotheby's - or was it Christie's? Max has found her passport while
rifling through her things but begs her pardon for violating her
privacy: "I think I just apologized for finding out that you've deceived
me" (13). As part of that 'deception', his wife has brought him a
Swiss memento, one of those paperweights which make a snowstorm
when shaken. In the second episode, which we at first assume to be
the continuation of the action, Charlotte appears to have run to her
lover, Henry: she emerges from the bedroom wearing his dressing-
gown, things are "a mess", and she does not want to see Max.
However, we eventually realize that Charlotte is married to Henry
and that the first scene was part of his latest play and, later still, that
the character Charlotte was playing had really been to Switzerland on
a temporary passport but was too affronted to explain away her
husband's suspicions.
In betraying one 'reality' after another, Stoppard toys with the very
nature of theatrical illusion - as in Rosencrantz and Hound we are
made to wonder how any part of it can be real — especially as the
second scene's 'real-life' conversation parodies the situation be-
tween Eliot and Amanda in Noel Coward's Private Lives when Henry
tries to recall the insidious little tune played "in some place like
Bournemouth or Deauville, and there was an open-air dance floor
outside our window . . . and there was this bloody orchestra which
kept coming back to the same tune every twenty minutes" (16). This
scene, supposedly the real thing between Henry, Charlotte, Max and
Annie, his actress wife, sounds more artificial than the previous
excerpt from Henry's play. Coward's style continues to flavour their
"smart talk" about the Norfolk Broads and the way Henry and Annie
act out a normality in front of their respective partners while teetering
on the verge of their actual feelings for each other.
These interconnecting pictures dictate the structure of the entire
play, so that we continually challenge the reality of one such picture

160
in relation to another. Scene 3 takes place in a living-room, whose
layout is somewhat similar to the stage-set Max first appeared in.
Now Annie, his 'real' wife, comes through the door to be confronted
with the evidence of her own deception with Henry. But there
the similarities end, because Max meets this situation with none
of his stage-character's wit and polish; his emotions will not let
him:

You're filthy.
You filthy cow.
You rotten filthy -
{He starts to cry, barely audible, immobile. ANN IE waits. He recovers his voice.)
It's not true, is it? (37)

So the scene ends messily as he kicks the radio, from which can be
heard his rival's "Desert Island Discs" interview, and flings himself
at his wife, who endures his violent embrace with a blank coldness.
The alterations establish a difference between life and art, or at least
between art as created by Henry in that first betrayal scene which,
after the husband's discovery, rolled urbanely on to a gracefully
pointed conclusion: the front door closes and, laughing at his wife's
ingenuity, the architect pulls the deceiving souvenir from the duty-
free airport bag and shakes it.
After Annie has married Henry, there occurs a second variation of
this betrayal scene. He, too, has stormed through her things in search
of evidence. But when he forces her to admit she has come down on
the overnight train from Scotland with her current leading man, he
remains articulate, though brusquely and desperately so. Less in-
coherent than Max's and less debonair than his stage counterpart's,
Henry's reaction seems no less probable. Their interconnection
reminds us that each of these versions is in fact staged, yet each
remains convincing and true at the time.
Other connecting scenes create a similar game of hide-and-seek.
Early in the play we hear how Annie had met Private Brodie on a train
to London on their way to the same anti-nuclear demonstration. She
now serves on the Justice for Brodie Committee after he had been
sentenced to six years for burning the memorial wreaths at the
Cenotaph and then attacking the two policemen who arrested him,
although "they're now both up for perjury on a previous case" (33),
so they might have rigged the evidence against him. Eager to keep his
name in the public eye, Annie and a TV producer have encouraged
Brodie to write a play about his experiences, but when Henry reads
the script he finds it one-sided and lifeless. Brodie may have lived
through all that, but his version stultifies the real thing:

161
HENRY: He's got something to say. It happens to be something extremely
silly and bigoted. But leaving that aside, there is still the problem that he
can't write. He can burn things down, but he can't write. (50)

Life and art continue to clash in the adjacent Scene 6, which seems
to show a televised exchange between Annie and 'Brodie' but quickly
turns into an actual train ride where she meets Billy, who is to play
opposite her in Glasgow and who is being considered for the Brodie
role. Five scenes later, after Annie has told Henry about her 'thing'
for Billy, we see the same encounter all over again, but this time, as
the lights pull back to reveal the surrounding cameras, she and
'Brodie' are performing a script, one which sounds much more
probable because Henry has reworked it for Annie's sake.
Finally, the actual Brodie, after his release from prison, watches a
tape of that telecast and "liked it better before" Henry went to work
on the script. Artistically pruned and shaped though it is, the play did
not even effect Brodie's release; according to him, "I'm out because
the missiles I was marching against are using up the money they need
for a prison to put me in" (82). According to Annie, the 'yob' who sits
in her living-room "isn't him", nor was his televised self:

He was helpless, like a three-legged calf, nervous as anything. A boy on the

train. Chatting me up. Nice . . . He didn't know anything about a march. He
didn't know anything about anything, . . . He tagged on.

In mirroring scene against scene, Stoppard not only aims to point

up the odd falsity of 'real' life when compared with art's convincing
fable; he also surveys a no-man's-land between the two, where
genuine and pictured feeling coalesce. On the train up to Glasgow,
Billy, the actor, in trying to attract Annie, soon jettisons his Bill
Brodie manner, briefly becomes himself - with side-swipes at the
Brodie script - and then takes refuge in his role as Giovanni (Italian-
ate Billy) in the forthcoming production of Ford's Tis Pity She's a
Whore. Real feeling intertwines at first with the scripted version: ' T
faith, I mean no harm, sister. I'm just scared sick of you. How is 't
with ye?" (59). But to push farther, he embroils himself in his
Renaissance persona and his actions become increasingly artificial.
Annie is reduced to giggles - "you daft idiot" (60) - but he emotes on
until the episode ends in melodramatic tatters and more giggles from
her. Later we do see a rehearsal which goes strictly according to Ford
until he kisses her and Annabella/Annie "returns his kiss in earnest"
as she whispers, "Billy" (64). In that way, Stoppard hits at those who
complain that his characters' self-conscious role-playing betrays a
lack of feeling.

162
 To those same ends, he dangles Henry in front of us as a sort of
in-joke version of Stoppard-according-to-his-critics. His play about
the architect is called House of Cards in response to those who see
Stoppard's own elaborate structures as airy nothings. Tynan, for
instance, once diagnosed the stasis he perceived in Travesties with a
phrase borrowed from Jumpers: it was "tantamount to constructing a
Gothic arch out of junket". 12 With tongue in cheek, Henry rues "the
fate of all us artists . . . People saying they preferred the early stuff
(66-7) - a sop to those who liked Stoppard's early hummingbird
style. And since friends have characterized him as one for whom
"words always precede thoughts. Phrases come first, ideas later", 13
Stoppard makes Henry into someone who is always "going on" and
whose way with words allows him to pass "as an ironist in public
though a prig in private" (66). Priggish he may seem, but his insist-
ence on the right word in the right place comes from a passion about
words in themselves, their use and abuse, so he is apt to correct
friends who mix their metaphors or slip on a gerund because what
others might consider a trivial error "actually hurts' (35). That ex-
planation is not likely to alter their opinion of his unfeeling intellect:

There's something wrong with you.

You've got something missing. You may have all the answers, but having all
the answers is not what life's about.

What Henry appears to lack, and what Stoppard's detractors accuse

him of lacking, is an ability to commit himself unequivocally to public
issues and private emotions.
Regarding public issues, Charlotte maintains that "when Henry
comes across a phrase like 'the caring society' he scrunches up the
Guardian and draws his knees up into his chest" (33). And, like his
creator, Henry defends himself with a chiselled wit which could
make him sound like an amused dilettante. He cringes from 'the
caring society' as a phrase in itself; his reaction is purely aesthetic:
"Like the Bauhaus meeting in an Indian restaurant, it's got nothing
to do with the food." He goes on to toy with the various motives
behind a person's commitment, just as Stoppard likes to argue out
loud with himself, so he could be seen to have all the questions rather
than "all the answers".
But although Henry continues to put correct language before
political slogans, his genuine concern for what words do becomes
increasingly apparent. When Annie argues that the importance of
Brodie's play, however rough and ready, comes from its having been
written in prison by a man whose symbolic protest brought him up

163
against the establishments savage retribution, Henry sweeps that
aside. Politics have nothing to do with his opinion that Brodie is
simply "a lout with language" and that words are the way to under-
standing what life is about:

They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, mean-
ing the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incom-
prehension and chaos . . . They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in
the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which
children will speak for you when you're dead. (55)

This appeal to the children of the future verges on joke-vicar

earnestness, so Stoppard has Annie read out part of a jerry-built
filmscript Henry has been churning out on his typewriter in order to
detonate that sententious sentimentality.
But stylish phrases would only get in the way of the images he has
to think in when writing for the film producers' money - "alimony
doesn't count". Words also tend to flatten out at moments of impas-
sioned argument. Yet true feeling does not necessarily exclude
eloquence. In the play's most memorable sequence, just before the
outburst about words as bridges, Henry talks with stylish intensity
about the way style itself can strike to the centre of things. That
intensity gives a peculiar energy to the elegant simplicity of his
demonstration. Seizing a cricket bat, so that Annie thinks he might
hit her with it in his excitement, Henry hits her with words. The bat, a
mundane object in itself, has been put together so that it "is sprung,
like a dance floor" (53). If the combination works, the ball will fly; if
not, it "will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance
about shouting 'Ouch!' with your hands stuck into your armpits".
Henry tries "to write cricket bats", whereas Brodie's script goes
"ooh, ouch!" The analogy is provocatively snobbish and would drive
someone like McKendrick (of Professional Foul) into a fury. It is also
as passionate as it is logical. Through Henry, Stoppard pads up at the
crease to defend elegance against those who confuse it with Malquis-
tian phrase-making.
As for the sloganeering of the partisan writer, "it's like being run
over very slowly by a travelling freak show" (54). The stylist, in his
seeming detachment, knows that words like "politics, justice, patriot-
ism" are abstract entities which ought not to be twisted from angle to
angle as one can move a concrete thing like a coffee mug. Justice is
justice, and trying to call it something else, "as though there were
something there to change... willfinallymake you violent". To know
that, and to approach words "with humility", will not alter the way
things are, but "you may perhaps alter people's perceptions so that

164
they behave a little differently at that axis of behaviour where we locate
politics or justice". The arguments go back to the beginnings of
Stoppard's career, but Henry voices them with an animus that is
quite foreign to Stoppard the interviewee who, fifteen years before,
was "not impressed by art because it's political,... if you are angered
or disgusted by a particular injustice or immorality, and you want to
do something about it, now, at once, then you can hardly do worse than
write a play about it". 14 However, he immediately adds the caveat
that without plays, bad and good, "the injustice will never be eradi-
cated".
Similarly, in this play's next scene, he undercuts Henry's thesis
about abstract entities when Annie tries to show Billy how he misuses
a phrase like 'the class system': "There's nothing really there- it's just
the way you see it. Your perception" (58). Yet although Billy laughs
away her smugness - "I prefer Brodie. He sounds like rubbish, but
you know he's right. You sound all right, but you know it's rubbish"
(59) - Henry's ardent polemic is only slightly diminished by this
defeat of a half-hearted imitator. And the play's shaping also vindi-
cates Henry's impatience with slogans when Annie finally admits that
the 'real' Brodie was an innocent mooncalf who "would have fol-
lowed me into the Ku Klux Klan" (82). He was her "recruit", so she
felt in honour bound to champion him while persuading herself that
he was indeed a martyr to the cause. As Henry remarks, "That one I
would have known how to write" (84), for early on in the play, with an
eye to his own desire for Annie, he had sneered at the motivations of
'the caring society':

One of us is probably kicking his father, a policeman. Another is worried that

his image is getting a bit too right-of-centre. Another is in love with a
committee member and wishes to gain her approbation . . . (34)
Brodie's bedazzlement with Annie, the former television star, had led
to the Cenotaph, and her sense of obligation led to the Justice for
Brodie Committee. In Henry's overblown summation, "Public post-
ures have the configuration of private derangement."
Stoppard's 'public posture' in The Real Thingis the paradigm of his
long-held feelings about detachment and politics which, while never
exactly private, now emerge boldly into direct light. What seems
entirely new is the play's special picture of 'private derangement'
which, unlike George and Dotty's or Ruth's or Glad's, appears to
project Stoppard's own. Henry, the intellectual word-spinner, whose
emotions are so well guarded, collapses when Annie embarks on an
affair with Billy. Though he struggles to retain a modicum of poise,
whereas Max goes to pieces in a similar circumstance, the play's

165
penultimate scene shows that the battle to reason himself into "digni-
fied cuckoldry" is a losing one. Alone in the house, after Annie leaves
to meet Billy, he dissolves into a cry of deranged anguish: "Oh,
please, please, please, please, donY (80).
Seduced by the resemblances between Henry and his creator, and
forgetting the inarticulate cries in many of the plays, commentators
pounced on the fact that "the Tin Man had a heart after all". 15
Resisting such an autobiographical interpretation, what one sees is a
more direct but, once again, familiar conflict between reason and
feeling and the latter's ultimate victory: Ros and Guil's mounting
panic, George's final plea for help and his self-accusing dream,
Alexander's refusal to be reasonable, Anderson's volte face, Ruth's
what-the-hell reprise with Wagner are all part of that pattern. What is
new is that those emotions are essentially sexual and lead Stoppard
into territory he had previously shied away from, except in the
cartoon-like Dirty Linen, because the vocabulary of love, like political
catch-phrases, tends towards platitude. The central issue of The Real
Thing is not the dissolution of the self-assured Henry into a fool of
love; that is simply another of Stoppard's arch games with those who
say "You've got something missing", a non-issue because, as Henry
himself says, he will either continue to endure whatever Annie does
to him or he will quite suddenly stop: his love will "go on or it will flip
into its opposite" (79). Instead, Stoppard uses that story to explore
whether a playwright can write interestingly and truthfully about love.
Henry can certainly write about it amusingly. When his architect
character confronts his wife with her passport, he bombards her with
witty and wordy salvoes:
I notice that you never went to Amsterdam when you went to Amsterdam. I
must say I take my hat off to you, coming home with Rembrandt place mats
for your mother. It's those little touches that lift adultery out of the moral
arena and make it a matter of style. (13)
His very wordiness may hold some truth as an instinctive way of
covering over his pain, but though his jokes do turn bitter, the scene
ends artfully and shows Henry's concern for his theatre audience.
The actors are also concerned with the effect they make; Max, for
instance, was pleased that someone came round after the perform-
ance to say how moving the reconciliation scene was. But Charlotte's
annoyance at the nightly "groan" she gets when the audience "find
out. . . she hasn't got a lover at a l l . . . And they lose interest in me
totally" (20) adds spice to her critique of Henry's version of love:
You don't really think that if Henry caught me out with a lover, he'd sit
around being witty about place mats? Like hell he would. He'd come apart

166
like pick-a-sticks. His sentence structure would go to pot, closely followed by
his sphincter. You know that, don't you, Henry? Henry? No answer. Are you
there, Henry? Say something witty. (22)
Yet when we arrive at the real thing between Henry and Annie, once
their partners are out of the room, their feelings may be true, but their
dialogue goes round in repeated banalities: I love you - 1 love you - 1
love you (26-7).
Stoppard makes this point directly in Scene 4, when Henry reads
out from Miss Julie to help Annie learn the script. The Strindberg
lines overlap with their own conversation about how Henry made
love when she was "totally zonked" after a sleeping-pill. Compared
with that, Miss jfulie sounds matter-of-fact, but both sets of dialogue
depend on a context of feeling which may not come explicitly through
the words themselves. Annie explains Strindberg's effectiveness:
"You'll have to learn to do sub-text. Mine is supposed to be steaming
with lust, but there is nothing rude on the page" (41). But Henry has
said that "I don't know how to write love . . . it just comes out
embarrassing. It's either childish or it's rude . . . Perhaps I should
write it completely artificial. Blank verse. Poetic imagery" (40).
Stoppard's train scene does have snatches of blank verse when
Billy, chatting Annie up, breaks into Ford's Carolinian imagery and
rips open his shirt to expose "A heart in which is writ the truth I
speak" (60). But that, too, depends on a context; baring one's "afflic-
tion" on British Rail's upholstery is hardly conducive to 'the truth', so
the scene ends in giggles. That same "Music . . . In the ear" sounds
more magical at a rehearsal, although it is a simple kiss rather than
words which leads Annie to respond as herself to the actor not the
brother (64). Love escapes words:
HENRY: I don't know. Loving and being loved is unliterary. It's happiness
expressed in banality and lust. It makes me nervous to see three-
quarters of a page and no writing on it. I mean, I talk better than this.
(41)
The divide between Stoppard and his persona is tauntingly thin
here, as if he were admitting that, because of the "unliterary" nature
of love in bloom, he has nowhere to go, save for excursions into
Strindberg and Ford, without sounding "childish or rude". Accor-
dingly, to be interesting, the play has to concentrate on the shifts in
Henry's feelings. This is again prepared for early on when Annie
remarks upon the "gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon
expended on the misery of the unrequited lover; not a word about the
utter tedium of the unrequiting" (39).
Two crucial episodes in the second Act delineate Henry's fall from

167
assurance to the raw pain of unrequited love. Charlotte, his ex-wife,
congratulates him on his sang-froid, although it used to distress her
when they were married. Henry takes love for granted, yet Charlotte
explains "there are no commitments, only bargains. And they have to
be made again every day" (62). Henry can afford to take love easy, to
be glib or acid about it, Charlotte says, because he thinks "it sets like a
concrete platform, and it'll take any strain". But when the strains
come and Annie insists on her freedom to love Billy, Henry feels as if
he had "been careless, left a door open somewhere while preoccu-
pied" (78), and unaccustomed doubt invades him unawares. He tries
to behave generously, covering up for her to directors when she is
delayed by Billy. Although she tells him that her affair is "quite
separate . . . You're not replaceable. I love you", he does not dare to
tell her to stop because that would be pathetic and "unattractive".
Even to question her would feel "a little vulgar". Trying to stay
reasonable, he can find no part of himself which does not include her.
Love knows no reason:
There was a tribe, wasn't there, which worshipped Charlie Chaplin. It
worked just as well as any other theology, apparently. They loved Charlie
Chaplin. I love you. (79)

So Henry becomes will-less and his story comes to a dead end.

Words cannot describe his feelings. He must either worship Annie or
"flip", although in the mean time he instinctively tries to find
"equilibrium", to shift his weight in order to attain some sort of
happiness.
If love is difficult to capture in words, playwrights can write
interestingly if not always truthfully about the process of love.
Henry's daughter, Debbie, thinks that his House of Cards "wasn't
about anything, except did she have it off or didn't she? What a crisis.
Infidelity among the architect class. Again" (67). But though The Real
Thing seems to offer a similar plot — will she stop having it off or won't
she? - what Stoppard actually writes about and holds up for inves-
tigation is the nature of sexual fidelity. Debbie, for instance, simply
wants to be happy, "like a warm puppy" (66). And if Henry complains
about her T-shirt philosophy, she is content to take her boy friend,
Ben, as she finds him. Sometimes she follows him to the fairgrounds
he works at, and sometimes she stays at "the squat" they occupy.
Tearing down the mystery with which the middle classes enshroud
love and sex, she maintains that "most people think not having it off
is fidelity", as exemplified by the hypocrisy of the man from the
Council, who spent a lascivious hour or so at the squat discussing his
wife's sexual preferences, "but at the last moment he panicked,

168
denied himself, went away. Faithful, you see?" (67). For such
people, "all relationships hinge in the middle. Sex or no sex", and
she recalls her own obsession at school when every subject except
biology gave off the wicked aura of forbidden sex. But when
she goes on to describe her idea of love, words fail her, too, and
she falls back on T-shirt slogans: "That's what free love is free of -
propaganda" (68).
For Henry, relationships hinge on "a sort of knowledge. Personal,
final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having
that is being rich" (69). But his faith in that shared bond makes him
deaf to what Charlotte says about commitment being an on-going
bargain. His reverence for this private knowledge between two peo-
ple makes him more than a trifle smug. In the first weeks of his life
with Annie, that confidence annoys her and convinces her he does
not "care enough to care" that actors she works with often make
passes at her (44). But, being in love, Henry revels in "the insularity
of passion" which unites the two of them securely amidst a world of
anonymous others (45). He describes that same assured possession
several years later:
Knowledge is . . . the undealt card, and while it's held, it makes you free and
easy and nice to know, and when it's gone, everything is pain. Every single
thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster...
Pain. (69)

The irony of this lies not only in the fact that Henry begins to
experience this loss in the very next scene but that his foreknowledge
of pain and the words he finds to describe it offer no defence when it
actually strikes him down. Once again, words fail to convey what love
is like. Stoppard leads us along these various paths to show how we
never can arrive at the real thing, the experience itself. Try to capture
it, and it turns out to be a childish imitation or it falls to pieces in your
hands, as it does in Henry's.
Yet playwrights continue to write about love, tying it down with
words and shaping it to the two-hour traffic on the stage. And that
creates the major problem in The Real Thing. Love is untidy, ir-
rational, undefinable yet, in saying that quite brilliantly, Stoppard has
ordered, rationalized, and defined certain limits through the struc-
ture of the play itself. He gets trapped in Catch 22: a lover's be-
haviour is inexplicable, but by moulding that idea into a sequential,
realist plot he invites questions about his lovers' motivations. This is
not too damaging as regards Henry, around whom idea and story fit
together in a dramatically satisfying way. When Annie's affair with
Billy forces him to deal "the undealt card", he comes toppling down

169
like his own House of Cards, which he describes as a play "about
self-knowledge through pain" (67). Henry's pain teaches him that
nothing he can say or do will bring order to his feelings: he must
either sit the situation out, shifting his weight as best he may, or his
feelings will suddenly alter.
However, idea and form jostle each other uncomfortably where
Annie is concerned. As part of an argument about what love 'really'
is, her arbitrary behaviour helps build the case for love's unreason.
But when her illogic is embodied in a likable, flesh-and-blood char-
acter on stage, we are apt to ask how she can behave that way if she
really loves Henry or, still more damagingly, how Henry could put up
with such cruel behaviour. The notion that love has nothing to do
with her feeling for Billy and that Henry cannot do other than bear
because he loves has less force in the theatre than does the bewildering
power of the staged action. As a consequence, the ideas Annie voices
are often memorable but she makes less sense as a person, and a large
part of our reaction to The Real Thing resembles Debbie's to House of
Cards: when will she stop having it off?
Not that Annie exists merely to further the argument or the plot; in
fact, had she been more of a functionary the play might have achieved
a more satisfying totality. She is not one of Henry's female characters
who exist to serve "drinks and feeds". Annie belongs with Stoppard's
other feminine enigmas even though she at first appears so frank and
open, and this contradiction makes her difficult to come to terms
with. When she arrives at Henry and Charlotte's with her offering of
vegetables for crudites, her directness - "Quick one on the carpet
then" (27) - does seem a crude contrast to the prevailing "smart talk"
but it also establishes our sympathy with her forthright energy,
especially when she exposes Henry's procrastination for what it is:
"you want to give it time . . . to go wrong, change, spoil. Then you'll
know it wasn't the real t h i n g . . . you love me but you don't want it to
get around" (27-8). She is equally honest with and about Max: "he
wants to punish me with his pain, but I can't come up with the proper
guilt . . . It's so tiring and so uninteresting' (39).
Since we are not party to that extended anguish, we are unlikely to
see it from his viewpoint. But when the same thing happens to Henry,
Annie appears to want to have her cake and eat it too, loving Henry
but being unable to resist Billy. Partly the problem is that we see
Henry's pain and very little of Billy's counter-attractions, and partly
that Annie can hardly be excused as passion's slave. Her motives are
in fact extremely dubious, since only by continuing her affair can she
prove to herself it was more than a one-night stand: "But I didn't start
it casually, and I can't stop it casually" (79). Her obligation to her

170
relationship with Billy is very like her loyalty to Bill Brodie, a self-
deceiving justification for what she would otherwise have to admit
were mistakes. Meanwhile Henry pays, and her gratitude and sym-
pathy for him seem cruel, not to say insensitive: "so I'm grateful and I
say thank you. I need you. Please don't let it wear away what you feel
for me. It won't, will it?" The final scene resolves both those rela-
tionships when she slams a bowl of dip into the 'real' Brodie's face
and refuses to answer what she thinks to be a phone-call from Billy.
But our own ambiguous feelings towards Annie can not be tidied
away so neatly. If this is the real thing between herself and Henry,
there appear to be rocky times ahead.
For all its craftily angled mirrors and its originality as a play about
the inadequacy of plays about love, The Real Thing runs into trouble in
the last two scenes because they insist on motives, demand an
awkward change of sympathy, and invite cosy smiles at the final
curtain which are not quite earned. The difficulties are those of
focus. Stoppard has always presented women as imponderable, and
Annie is no less so than Gladys, Lady Malquist, Dotty, and Ruth, or
her nearest counterpart, the unnamed woman in "Reunion". But
these other women puzzle us from the outset, a view that one or other
of the men around them usually shares: Moon's view of Lady Mal-
quist is our view, and we perceive Dotty first as George sees her and
then more sympathetically with the glamorous pathos which some-
one like Inspector Bones gives her. Annie, however, appears first as
an open book, and Henry patronizes her because she is so knowable;
then, in those last scenes she seems suddenly to be someone else and,
while this points the irony of Henry's trust in his knowledge of her, it
causes us a dislocating jolt, though Henry soldiers on with her to a
supposedly happy ending. The other women in the play remain for us
as Henry sees them, even if we listen harder to their views on love and
loyalty than he does: Charlotte's exasperated sarcasm sparks against
his priggish self-confidence and makes her a more interesting figure
than Debbie, a fairly standard teenage drop-out except that she talks
cleverly, with whom Henry can be wise, loving, and irritated.
Conversely, when Brodie arrives in the final scene, the fact that he
behaves exactly as the 'yob' that Henry had thought him to be makes
him an inadequate opponent in the debate about writing and politics.
Other than provoking the play's last visual surprise, the bowl of dip,
there is no necessity for him to appear at all: Annie's confession about
the boy he once was could have arisen equally well out of Henry's
telescript, which in its way is just as much a caricature.
Whatever the problems of those concluding episodes, The Real
Thing stands as a major achievement. Stoppard continues to play

171
games with stage illusion but the tricks have a subtlety which matches
the reticence of his post-Travesties style. At the same time, he faces
his critics with a new directness, taunting them with Henry's ele-
gance, which seems so smug but which is transparently the express-
ion of a deeply felt attitude to life. Although that attitude is the
consummation of nearly everything Stoppard stands for, Henry pre-
sents a chimerical version of his creator's public self and behind that
lies a vulnerability, a rawness which Stoppard had not felt able to
expose - and mock - since "Reunion", that early short story read by
the few:
For better or worse, that's it - the love play! I've been aware of the process
that's lasted 25 years, of shedding inhibitions about self-revelation. I
wouldn't have dreamed of writing about it 10 years ago, but as you get older,
you think, who cares?16
At first glance there are no self-revelations in the radio script he
was working on at the same time. The Dog It Was That Died (1982)17
seems like a return to an earlier style, particularly to the studied
zaniness of LordMalquist. But the play also offers a comic cartoon of a
search for 'the real thing', just as Artist Descending and Dirty Linen
were "dry runs" for Travesties and Night and Day. Rupert Purvis has
worked as a double-agent for so many years that he no longer
remembers what his original loyalties were, and neither the Russians
nor the British who have knowingly used him in that double game are
able to enlighten him:
They set me going between them like one of those canisters in a department
store, and they disappeared leaving me to go back and forth, back and forth, a
canister between us and you, or us and them. (32)
The real thing Purvis eventually clings to is his affinity with the
English character, an eccentric individualism which accounts for the
play's style and madcap assortment of characters and to which Stop-
pard pays fond tribute. The Dog turns out to be a personal thank-you
card (of the funny sort) to his adopted country.
That Englishness emerges at once as Purvis walks through the
night city singing World War I goodbye songs while his inner voice
rehearses the letter of farewell he has just posted to Blair, his superior
in Q6. About to jump off Chelsea Bridge, he can still chortle over a
pun or two, "I'm getting out but before I take the plunge" (11), or
revel in the comfort of the national idiom: "your good lady", "pulling
the wool over your eyes", "brouhaha", "splendid girl", "quiet as the
grave and black as your hat" (11-12). Stoppard again plays with a
cliche to which there still clings a mite of truth: British phlegm, a
crossword-puzzle delight in word-play and idiosyncratic turns of

172
phrase, a fascination with the weather even at times of crisis, as Purvis
climbs the parapet and notes a "nice breeze anyway". The funniest
twist of the cliche occurs at the end of the scene "with the sound of a
quite large dog in sudden and short-lived pain" (13): in his plunge
towards the Thames, Purvis has landed on a passing barge and
broken the back of the Englishman's best friend. And the letter itself
which contains wild references to opium dens, marital infidelity, a
belly dancer at Buckingham Palace, and some "savoury business"
between Purvis, his vicar, and the choir, "especially Hoskins, third
from the end with the eyelashes", seems utterly mad, although the
well-trained nose of Hogbin, the man from Q9, sniffs "something
funny" about it: "And that's what it was - it's all true" (40). Stop-
pard's gambit resembles the openings of Lord Malquist and After
Magritte where a seemingly implausible collection of characters or
images or, as in Purvis' letter, events, instigates an action designed to
explain how 'normal' their combination was. Such an opening works
particularly well here because of its overt eccentricity, the keynote of
the play's Englishness.
The letter also serves to introduce the idea of appearances which
so confuses Purvis, and Stoppard turns cold-war espionage into a
fun-fair game in The House of Mirrors. We never hear the Russian
side of things directly, but the British approach "the game" as they do
all sports (except soccer!) with a mixture of earnest involvement and
gentlemanly disdain, a blend which varies according to one's social
class. Hogbin has much to learn about sang-froid. Arriving "on the
dot" in St James's Park for an assignation with Blair, he insists on the
password, which his colleague can only vaguely recall, so he refuses
to recognize a man he knows perfectly well. Caught in the middle of
this mad game, Purvis has stumbled from one side to the other in
search of some sign which would tell him what he is playing for, what
he really believes in, so he tries saying Communist slogans out loud;
sometimes they sound convincing and sometimes not.
One ideology is the other's mirror-image, and beyond them the
rules of the game have grown into a riddling maze over the years:

CHIEF: ... This is where it gets tricky... because if they kept drawing these
wrong conclusions while the other thing kept happening... they would
realize that we had got to Purvis after a l l . . . So to keep Purvis in the
game we would have to not do some of the things which Purvis told them
we would be doing, . . . (44)

Lurching from one illusion to the next, having told his Russian
contact what he was told by his British contact and then telling the
British contact that he had told the Russian contact what he was told

173
by his British contact, Purvis has "a bit of a crise" at finding himself
"like one of those Russian dolls - how appropriate!... which fit into
one another as they get smaller" (34). Only in the rest-home for
similarly afflicted agents does he discover the final doll, the inner part
of himself "which isn't hollow", his essential Englishness.
The play's centre point, both mathematically and thematically, is
the scene at Clifftops. This "funny farm", as Hogbin puts it, repre-
sents the lunacy of the secret service writ large. Having gone there to
visit Purvis, Blair encounters a bluff figure on a motor-mower whom
he takes to be a patient but who soon introduces himself as the head
man: "I prefer the term keeper, just as I prefer the term loony. Let's
call things by their proper name, eh?" (25). But a minute or two later
it becomes evident from the way the old boy blusters on about "the
Arlons [who] have been gentlefolk in Middlesex for five generations"
(26) that he is indeed one of the inmates. In the process, Stoppard
thrusts a comic shaft into the romantic image of "the firm" by means
of Commodore Arlon's rambling story of a quarrel over cards at the
Naval and Military club, which ends with talk of a manly shoot-out:
"if you want to do a chap a favour the next time you find yourself in
Pall Mall, I'd like you to take out your service revolver and go straight
up to Greenslade and — ". Another false mirage then looms up in the
person of 'Matron' whose manner seems convincing until she pulls
Blair into a coat cupboard to demand her next mission: "I'm match fit
and ready to go - parachute, midget submarine, you name it. The last
show wasn't my fault, the maps were out of date" (27). After two such
contretemps, Blair not surprisingly asks his rescuer, Dr Seddon, for
some identification, and though the doctor's story about his code-
making in Qio may sound mad to the listener, the tangled ingenuity
of "consonantal transposition" is the sort of complex nonsense Blair
lives by. However, when the doctor invites him up to the belfry to see
his bats, Blair makes a hasty getaway, only to learn from Purvis that
the man really was Dr Seddon, "up in the bell tower collecting guano
for the rose-beds" (29). As Seddon has explained, "My time with the
firm was excellent preparation for Clifftops" (28).
The rest-home also presents "the English character, a curious
bloom which at Clifftops merely appears in its overblown form"
(41-2), and there Purvis realizes that everyone he worked with, except
his Russian contact, had a minor form of the same madness. He finds
this "reassuring". Recollecting his British contact who wore "hunt-
ing pink to the office" and grumbled that the butter dripped when he
ate asparagus after breaking his neck, he knows that he never could
have lied to him: "The man was so much himself that one would have
been betraying him instead of the system" (42). So all the play's

174
characters are gorgeously themselves and endearingly loony: Blair
with his clock collection and his private Folly; Mrs Blair with her
donkey sanctuary and first aid in the drawing-room for "poor
Empy"; the Chief with his bubble-pipe; the vicar with his love for
cheeses. Their personal eccentricities add up to a comic-cuts
assemblage of what are popularly thought of as the nation's foibles.
Strange hobbies, a passion for animals, the tang of the sea and of
Empire go together with a desire to look the other way when a chap
has a crise or a wife has a tryst in Eaton Square. Vague and unflapp-
able, the gentlemen of "the firm" are amateurs, in the finest sense,
who will always muddle through.
Stoppard has always had a fondness for eccentrics, and much has
been written about his own English guise, "plus anglais que les
anglais": his "costly-casual dandyism",18 his love of cricket, his
Home-Counties lifestyle. Colleagues have even suggested its con-
nection with his unwillingness to take sides: "He's basically a dis-
placed person. Therefore, he doesn't want to stick his neck out. He
feels grateful to Britain, because he sees himself as a guest here, and
that makes it hard for him to criticize Britain."19 Partly he is laughing
at that lurid picture of himself when he laughs at these mad dogs of
Englishmen (the play's title comes from Goldsmith's "Elegy on the
Death of a Mad Dog"). The whole play turns on this fellow-feeling
for the English; no malice waits to pounce from behind the farce.
Instead, individualism is revealed as England's saving grace, more
powerful than any "system". Consequently his eccentrics are all
well-meaning: "the firm" has been completely defanged; the Blairs'
marriage ambles along despite Pamela's liaison with the Chief; a
general regard for the right of other people to live their own lives
prevails.
Talking about his travels abroad, Stoppard once said, "I was very,
very pleased to get back to England, and I still am, and I feel at home
here in a way which I couldn't feel anywhere else." 20 Respect for the
individual has much to do with that feeling of home and underpins
his trust in the country's public institutions:

... there is a way of behaving towards people which is good and a way which is
bad . . . and alongside that different theories about attaining the common
good - in other words, [the political parties] each have different economic
theories each designed literally to achieve the maximum general good for
everybody... merely a disagreement about tactic ... All I know is that I want
to live in a country where that dispute can take place, and not where it's
forbidden.21

In The Dog, Stoppard delivers a paean to the way Englishness absorbs

175
differing styles, modes, and systems into itself. As Blair sits on his
park bench he looks out at London:
The view north from St James's Park is utterly astonishing, I always think.
Domes and cupolas, strange pinnacles and spires. A distant prospect of St
Petersburg, one imagines . . . Where does it all go when one is in the middle
of it, standing in Trafalgar Square with Englishness on every side?
Monumental Albion, giving credit where credit is due to some sketchbook of
a Grand Tour, but all as English as a 49 bus. (13)
Stoppard's attitude to England includes the implication that things
might have been otherwise. In The Dog everyone except the Russian
contact man radiates an enviable insularity to which even the de-
mented Purvis can cling, and this distinction haunts Stoppard. In his
preface to Every Good Boy he remarks that "although British society is
not free of abuses, we are not used to meeting courage because
conditions do not demand it" (7), by which he means the social
conditions men like Victor Fainberg had to face up to rather than the
personal trials which require courage from all of us. Such a contrast
must have been much on his mind while writing the radio play, since
he had also begun work on a television film about the Solidarity
movement in Poland.
Owing to a Byzantine power-struggle between the British and
American production companies, not unlike the tangle between
Solidarity and Polish authority, Squaring the Circle2* was not broad-
cast on television until May 1984 and not without suffering com-
promises which amply vindicate Stoppard's chariness towards film-
making: "There's a lot of technicians, and a lot of money, and little
time, and a lot of muscle, and a lot of people over the title and, you
know, the position of the writer in films is notorious, i.e., supine." 23
The biggest change involved the narrator, whom Stoppard had
conceived as the author himself; he became an American commenta-
tor, so that "what was supposed to have been a kind of personal
dramatized essay turned into a kind of play about an unexplained
American in Poland" (14). Naturally this led to a confusion which,
along with Stoppard's deliberate refusal to slant the events in one
particular way or to interpret the character of the main protagonists,
resulted in the play's relative failure. Yet the script is a remarkable
one, an artistic if not a popular triumph, a sort of blueprint of the
writer Stoppard has become since his epiphany in the waters off
Capri.
Here, for instance, is the writer whose fascination with the power
of fiction to impress its simpler and therefore clearer version of
reality upon the imagination regulates his approach to any topic.
Faced with thousands of facts about Polish history, ancient and

176
modern, with documents and tapes, Stoppard responds first to the
magnetism of documentary drama, which imposes itself on the
viewer as the real thing but which cannot, however well researched,
hope to present history as it actually happened. So he invents the
narrator and, some time later, the Witness, a common man in various
hats, in order to break the hypnotic power of the televised pictures
and to establish the story as a personal and (thanks to the Witness)
fallible view. The narrator talks to us on camera and as a disembodied
voice, continually reminding us that what we see is one man's recon-
struction, a Western one at that.
The first image of fraternal greeting between two ageing men on a
bench, their topcoats and hats, their suits and laced shoes, and
particularly their jargon - "inevitable triumph of Marxist-
Leninism", "revisionist element", "allies in the proletariat's strug-
gle" (27) - deliberately plays to our preconceptions about how such a
meeting between Communist leaders would be. The narrator then
steps into the frame - "Everything is true except the words and the
pictures" - to subvert anything a writer can tell us. So the image
changes to bright umbrellas, technicolour drinks, Hawaiian shirts,
sun-glasses, as Brezhnev harangues the First Secretary of Poland's
Politburo in gangster style: "What the hell is going on with you guys?
Who's running the country? You or the engine drivers?" (28). In
juxtaposing one image upon another, as in The Real Thing, Stoppard
projects onto the screen the theatricality he has always felt most
comfortable with and which he had not been able to capture for any
length of time in his previous telescripts. Here the meeting by the
Black Sea becomes part of an ironic thread which binds the script
together, for Brezhnev meets succeeding First Secretaries every
August and their third encounter ends the play with wry casualness.
"So, how's tricks?" asks Brezhnev of Jaruzelski, whose trickery has
just destroyed the workers' solidarity, and then the Russian leader
(dead by the time of the television broadcast) replies to a like enquiry,
"To tell you the truth, I haven't been feeling too well", as they stroll
off harmoniously down the beach (96).
That framing device affects our view despite the narrator's scep-
ticism towards 'truth' so, as he fits events into this circular frame, the
Witness keeps bobbing up with alternative perspectives or with
sardonic comments about the way writers select or mould facts for
artistic effect. One of the most inventive uses of this convention
occurs when the Politburo congratulate each other on having split the
leadership of the Free Unions. The jubilant picture suddenly freezes
and is then torn in two like paper to reveal the narrator writing away at
a cafe table. As the latter crumples up his efforts and throws them

177
away, the Witness, here an habitue of the cafe, advises him to "Try the
other one" (72). Whereupon the cameras roll again for a revised
version of the Politburo sequence only to freeze and tear once more.
Back in the cafe, the Witness hints that the writer still has things
wrong, and a final version shows the Politburo's alarm at the way
Party unity has been split by the workers. As regards the artistic
shaping of facts, the narrator introduces Lech Walesa's children to
sing a play-song about one of their father's intellectual friends who
has just left the house in a rage. The Witness cuts in - "a cheap trick"
- and asks why he did not pull out all the emotional stops by giving the
kids a dog: "it's a little late to be scrupulous about detail" (84).
Another replay then returns the intellectual to the point where he
rose to leave, and this time he does so in conciliatory fashion.
Such exchanges between the two commentators and between one
or another travestied version of events distance us from pictured
history. This estrangement has become a standard device on the
modern stage, less so on television, and in itself provides a way of
cutting through, and giving order to, a mass of unwieldy fact; the
controlling narrator and the interplay between the aristocratic and
the military version of things in the musical, Evita> are cases in point.
But Stoppard's method again reveals his characteristic temperament.
The narrator in Evita selects and organizes events into an acid
commentary upon the oh-so-innocent heroine's rise to power and
sainthood, unlike the Brechtian teller-of-the-tale who posits one
decision or attitude against the next and encourages us to judge
between them, though the shape of the whole narrative affects that
choice. Stoppard's commentator offers a slant while confessing his
fallibility and presents events or attitudes as opposing fictions rather
than truths so that we cannot choose one above the other. The debate
is much more open-ended, a variant of his talking the issues out loud.
It infuriates those who believe one must take sides over Solidarity in
no uncertain terms, and it bored many television viewers, who
wanted a decisive verdict on events in Poland or a clearly drawn clash
of character and motive.
And since he provides few solids to hold on to, no call to arms, no
revelations about the 'real' Walesa or Jaruzelski, no actual 'charac-
ters' at all, the play can seem cold and inhuman. For the one hard fact
Stoppard sees is as impersonal and inevitable as the Titanic and the
Iceberg, and his story unfolds with a mathematical precision:
. . . an attempt was made in Poland to put together two ideas which wouldn't
fit, the idea of freedom as it is understood in the West, and the idea of
socialism as it is understood in the Soviet empire. The attempt failed because
it was impossible, in the same sense as it is impossible in geometry to turn a

178
circle into a square with the same area - not because no one has found out
how to do it, but because there is no way in which it can be done. What
happened in Poland was that a number of people tried for sixteen months to
change the shape of the system without changing the area covered by the
original shape. They failed. (29)
Yet from the loaded wording of speeches like this there can be no
doubt as to Stoppard's opinion of "the system", and had he been on
screen (instead of the American persona) these words would have
been undisputably his and more like an "essay", a try at gathering his
thoughts about what happened in Poland. Instead, a journalist's cool
stance works against the playful way the script tries out one idea and
then another and so it threatens the bond of Stoppard's serious-play.
For, over the years, the 'serious' has become more directly personal
while the 'play' no longer "breaks its neck to be funny", and the script
as originally conceived unites the two with the daring and tact of his
mature style.
It takes daring to be funny about the crushing of Solidarity and the
suppression of a nation, especially to audiences who expect serious
subjects to have straight faces and forget that one of the ways to
discomfit a devil is to laugh at him. The comedy works because
Stoppard quickly breaks the illusion of actuality and then aims "the
quirky bits" at the techniques of documentary television or at the
leaders of the regime whom we sometimes laugh with (in the grim
style of Cahoofs Inspector) but more usually laugh at. We do so
because the narrator and the Witness keep us distanced from the
story's emotional impact, and if some of the jokes against the leaders
are broad, they have the effect of political cartoons in cutting pom-
posity down to size or in making an obvious madness even more
so.
Stoppard acknowledges that lampoon style at the beginning of Part
3 when the caption "Courtesy of Prague Radio" comes up under a
picture of Walesa writing intense notes at the grille of a confessional;
the Party line declares that his instructions to destroy socialism come
"straight from the Pope" (68). Play as a metaphor pokes fun at both
the documentary and the Party. Stoppard himself is no stranger to
the games motif, nor are writers of documentary dramas, since
politics and gamesmanship go so readily together. "Why is it always
chess}" asks the Witness as he ponders his next move on the board
before him and his opponent informs us that the Central Committee
did not think the time was ripe "to attack on the left" (57). By
admitting "ugh, well, you know, it symbolizes", the writer exposes
the tricks of his trade and the Witness ruins things by moving his
knight improperly, but, in seeming to undermine the symbol, Stop-

179
pard neatly prepares us for the way Jaruzelski will make his own sort
of move with the army. Stoppard manipulates a card game in the
same way, betraying the symbol through the writer and the Witness -
"Don't tell me, let me guess. Cards on the table . . . Writers" (88) -
and then immediately using it to shape a conference between State,
Church, and Unions.
Most of the explicit jokes hit at the politicians' hypocrisy and
gangster tactics. First Secretary Gierek goes on television to confess
"mistakes in economic policy"; the solid-looking bookcase behind
his desk turns out to be a deceptive piece of studio scenery and,
during his speech, the camera shows us an exchange between two
electricians on a gantry above him: "I think I've seen this before . . .
Typical bloody August. . . nothing but repeats" (38). The gangster
jokes are also exposed as "a metaphor", nevertheless they recur
throughout the script to emphasize the leaders' greed and treachery
to each other and to the workers. Enlarging these gangster types to
farcical proportions, Stoppard ensures that we see his monsters as
cardboard shams. Like an image from an old movie, First Secretary
Kania, smothered in his barber's shaving lather, inveighs against
"people who think that the Party boss can run the operation like a
Chicago gangster" (64) and lists off a string of disasters ("Al Capone
wouldn't have lasted out the week") as if he were in some sort of
farce. But the social circumstances make it a bitter one.
The "quirky bits" provide Stoppard with a way of saying what he
thinks about the regime, because simply to blast them as gangsters,
cheats, shams and liars would have sounded as banal as love did to
Henry. But the quirkiness also provides him with a way of threading
together a vast amount of factual material, as it did in Jumpers and
Travesties. One of the wonders of this script is the economy with
which he moves from scene to scene, using his comedy and the
vocabulary of film with a sense of design that has grown more subtle
and supple since the days of Neutral Ground. To convey the unyield-
ing circle around the reformists' zeal, a large conference table inter-
spersed with flags gives a quick sketch of a Warsaw Pact meeting
which we come in on as the East German minister concludes his
fulminations against the Polish government's weak reaction to "an
attack on socialism, an attack on everyone here" (66). A pause adjusts
the rhythm of the scene and, out of that, Brezhnev, seated across
from the Polish delegation, explains "in a fairly friendly manner" that
Russia once had its own free trade union - "He is in a lunatic asylum
now, poor fellow" - and that if the Polish Party "cannot defend itself
... it must be defended". The picture instantly dissolves to a group of
high-ranking officers in greatcoats who casually watch their armies'

180
off-screen manoeuvres. Marshal Kulikov turns to Jaruzelski and adds
the punchline to this cartoon: "Well, I don't know what all this is
doing to the Poles but it's scaring the hell out of the Americans"

The laconic rhythms, pictures, and words add to the narrative's

inevitability. General Jaruzelski, in particular, plays a waiting game
through the first three-quarters of the script. But "when the time
comes", the camera shows a number of "crisp separate close ups on a
man putting on military uniform" ending with a "pair of tinted
glasses worn by Jaruzelski" (81). The scene changes to the First
Secretary's office where a flunky arranges files on the empty desk;
the General walks in, takes possession and, pleased with what he
sees, flicks at his uniform: "You don't think the effect is . . . a bit
South American?"
Theatrical illusionist, serious gamester, fence-sitter, master tacti-
cian, cold formalist: the old labels could all be applied to the Stop-
pard of Squaring the Circle without accounting for their changing
combination from scene to scene and without getting him quite right.
That they describe the way he writes rather than what he writes points
up the unarguable fact that it is the style of each play that hits us first.
But to stop there is to ignore the man who makes the stylish strokes
with each well-made cricket bat. Behind his dash, finesse, and
complexity, Stoppard's values are small-'c' conservative and surpri-
singly simple. Endlessly curious about seeming and being, the way
people misunderstand each other, the words that entrap or betray
them, and humbled by those confusions, Stoppard distrusts slogans
yet loves to pick at cliches. He is essentially benevolent, though wary
of sentiment, and his truths are self-evident and inviolate: individuals
have a right to be happy and free, and to mistreat people or to
persuade them that happiness and freedom are other than they know
them to be is wrong.24
His attitude to Solidarity comes from that centre of himself. For all
its quirkiness, the script contains remarkably little word-play, parti-
cularly in those scenes which involve the freedom fighters. There his
restrained, almost neutral tone shows him shying away from these
men as individuals, for were he to listen too closely he would find
them as jargon-ruled as their masters. What interests him is not their
politics - methods are disputable - but their determination to be free
and the way their efforts collapse before an unscrupulous, brute
power and a confusion amongst themselves. So their particular
demands are incidental to their battle for a human right. George
Moore, young Sacha, Professor Anderson stand behind the words of
the Witness:

181
Theories don't guarantee social justice, social justice tells you if a theory is
any good. Right and wrong are not complicated -when a child cries, "That's
not fair!" the child can be believed. (84)
Those in power "lie... cheat... kick and bite and scratch before they
give an inch" (92), and the shipyard workers also fall apart because
they play politics against experts, envy the personality cult around
Walesa, disagree about methods, lose sight of their basic ideal. In one
scene, Walesa sits atop the Soviet war memorial in Warsaw trying to
scrub off the painted graffiti just as he vainly tries to erase the scrawl
from his revolution's monumental idea.
Stoppard's radical values have always confused the political radic-
als and, like his own Walesa, he sometimes used to "feel a sort of
shame. How brave it sounds, to be a radical" (92). Stoppard has not
become more political. Ros and Guil, like the Polish workers and the
intellectuals, also wanted to be free but found themselves encircled
by an unyielding system and could not say "no" to Elsinore's game.
However, Stoppard's humanism has become more insistent as he has
seen how systems "kick and bite and scratch". And throughout his
career words have been his vital mainstay because by using them with
style he can say "That's not fair!" more disruptively than any child
can. So it matters to write, and write well.
KURON: The written word - I believe in it. When this tower of Babel
collapses upon itself you'll need to be reminded what the noise was all
about. (83)

182
After words

... The particle world is the dream world of the intelligence officer. An
electron can be here or there at the same moment. . . . It defeats
surveillance because when you know what it's doing you can't be certain
where it is, and when you know where it is you can't be certain what it's
doing: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle; . . .*
Despite its apparent solidity, each particle of Stoppard's latest play
"can be here or there at the same moment". What starts as a spy story
becomes, as you look at it, a metaphor that illustrates the tricksy
dreamworld of spies and counter-spies, "sleepers" and "joes"; look
longer, and Hapgood depicts the unpredictabilities in every human
being. The naturalistic dialogue also has its quantum leaps when
words, like many of the characters who speak them, become twins,
puns, "double agents". As Clive James noticed, years ago, "the
appropriate analogies to Stoppard's vision lie just as much in modern
physics as in modern philosophy".2
In its elegant ingenuity, Hapgood is like a * thought experiment'
designed to probe the randomness behind our perceived realities.
The first scene, for example, introduces us subversively to Heisen-
berg's uncertainty principle.3 Once the houselights go down, a street
map projected onto three hexagonal panels above the empty stage
allows us to plot the route of a Russian agent whose Peugeot (red
lights on the map) moves through the London streets and stops at a
municipal swimming-bath. The set now assembles in semi-
darkness; disembodied voices over a two-way radio note, with some
alarm, that the agent in question is "not Georgi". They cannot place
him, but his route remains predictable as he enters the lobby, nods to
the man shaving at a sink (down right), and crosses to one of four
changing-cubicles (stage left). What follows next is a playful ballet -
choreographed to a whistled tune and jaunty drum beats - in which,
as per Heisenberg, we cannot track the actors' movements and
positions simultaneously, as they exchange briefcases amongst the
four cubicles.
For instance, the actor who plays the Russian must also appear as
his twin brother, a trick done with doors and fur hats rather than
mirrors. Coming from the pool, he re-enters his cubicle: his wet hair
identifies him, and we know his position. But we cannot trace his
movements when (presumably) he exits through the back of that

183
cubicle, appears again from the lobby dressed, as his "brother" had
been, in a blue tracksuit and fur hat, crosses the stage to another
cubicle, leaves through the back of that, and emerges from the first
cubicle as the wet-haired twin who, carrying the fur hat, now leaves
the building, "in two places at once".
Throughout the rest of the play, the characters' behaviour
obscures their actual 'position' at a given moment in the spy plot. By
the beginning of Act Two, we know that those Russians with their
attention-getting hats were "stooges" and that the double-agent
Elizabeth Hapgood must track down is her own assistant, Ridley, and
his twin brother. 4 However, we cannot be sure of Joseph Kerner's
exact place in all this. A nuclear scientist planted in the West by the
Russians, he had long ago been "turned" by Hapgood. Blair, the
chief of British Intelligence, and Wates, from the CIA, suspect him of
passing genuine secrets along with the misinformation he gives his
KGB control. Hapgood, who has a son by Kerner, needs to believe
that Joseph is still her "joe". Yet, in the first scene of Act Two, the
behaviour of the characters deceives us into mistaking the situation
they invent to trap Ridley. As in quantum physics, "the act of
observing determines the reality".
Again the staging has much to do with this. From the very begin-
ning we share Ridley's focus, since the music that starts the Act does
not fade with the lights but becomes what he hears through the
headphones of his transistor as he sits waiting with Hapgood (oppo-
site him) and Blair (at Hapgood's desk) for Kerner's arrival. Since
Blair spends some time meticulously adjusting the empty chair be-
side the desk, it would appear that Kerner is to undergo some sort of
interrogation. That assessment seems justified when Kerner enters
and, perversely ignoring Blair's invitation to "sit here, won't you?",
moves the chair downstage. Blair's amusing chat, as he presents the
damning evidence against Kerner, also seems random, unplanned,
particularly when words slither:
KERNER: May I ask a question?
BLAIR: Yes, do.
KERNER: Why are you sitting in Mrs Hapgood's chair?
BLAIR: That is a very fair question. The answer is that Mrs Hapgood
isn't here. Mr Ridley isn't here either. They are on paid leave, which
is why they can't be with us this evening, and which is why this is a
friendly interview. (53)
Observing that, we are lured into the reality of the 'scam': to protect
his son, Kerner intended to pass his research to the KGB but,
because that delivery went awry at the Baths, little Joe has been
kidnapped and Hapgood, ever one to "break the rules", needs
184
Ridley's help to deliver the material in exchange for the boy. Only at
the end of the scene, once Ridley has gone, does that reality dissolve
as we watch Hapgood talking on the phone to Joe (perfectly safe at
school) while Blair and Kerner drink a toast to their successful trap.
Stoppard's ambush here is reminiscent of the lurch into Ruth's
fantasy that begins Act Two ofNight and Day. However, as befits the
particle world ofHapgood, the traps keep coming in this play for, like
his own Alexander Ivanov, Stoppard does "something really crazy"
by taunting his audience with the possibility that Hapgood herself has
an identical twin. In the printed text, all "Celia's" lines are given
unequivocally to Hapgood, but on stage the effect of this double-act
grows increasingly disturbing. When Ridley first meets "Celia", she
is so obviously an arty cliche that, having been tricked once, we are
unlikely to be taken in again, particularly since Ridley can only
contact Hapgood on his radio when her comic persona is out of the
room. Yet, ironically, once "Celia" arrives at Half Moon Street in the
sort of efficient suit that looks like Hapgood, the more unnerving she
becomes: her behaviour, as she bluffs her way through the office
routine for her secretary, Mr Maggs, makes her 'real' identity diffi-
cult to place. This is especially true when she reacts as Celia might to
the unexpected blow Ridley deals her so that she will answer the
"kidnapper's" phone-call in tears or, at 11.5, when she allows Ridley
to make love to her. Of course, to be Hapgood and carry off the scam,
she must have nerves of steel, yet her actions seem so unlike Hap-
good's (who would never let "her bodice up past [her] brain", 1.5)
that she remains a teasing enigma until the final showdown at the
Baths.
This restless unpredictability makes unusual demands of the audi-
ence, and Stoppard carefully prepares for that in Act One. The ballet
with the briefcases is a comparatively subdued opening gambit: it
neither disorientates (as the first moments of Jumpers or Night and
Day do) nor deceives (as scene one of The Real Thing does). It
presents a comic version of the spy game which verges on the surreal
when the Russians enter in those hats or when Wates (by the sink)
flips his soap at the feet of each departing figure (to effect a Geiger
reading on his 'wrist-watch' as the soap is handed back) or when
Hapgood emerges, spry and dry beneath an umbrella, from the men's
shower. The scene does not, as yet, require us to connect its farcical
dance to the careless amorality of international espionage, though it
does open the way to that as the set dissolves around Blair and ("here
or there at the same moment") reassembles for his meeting with
Kerner at Regent's Park Zoo. That episode then demonstrates the
play's controlling metaphor with a Brechtian economy.

185
 The undisguised scene-change and the simplicity of the stylized
units which represent the zoo establish this sequence as a theatrical
set-piece. The dialogue, rather than the action, now dances, but with
none of the first scene's frenzy, as Blair toys coolly with the jargon of
the spy world and Kerner takes a foreigner's delight in all the idioms
of language:
BLAIR: You're blown, Joseph.
KERNER: I love it. She blew it and I'm blown: well, I'll be blowed.
Nobody teaches that, you know . . .
BLAIR: Well . . . you're blowed, Joseph. Your career is over.
KERNER: Except as a scientist, you mean.
BLAIR: Yes, that's what I mean.
KERNER: My career as a joe.
BLAIR: Or as a sleeper. Just an observation. The meet at the pool came
unstuck this morning. We have to consider you blown as our joe. The
Russians must consider you blown as their sleeper. Either way your
career is over. Which way, is perhaps an academic question. (9-10)
This artifice allows for the transition from jocular duet to rhetorical
aria when Kerner moves behind a panel of vertical bars, down right,
to illustrate his thesis: "a double agent is not like a giraffe. A double
agent is more like a trick of the light" (10). Apart from Kerner's
gestures, as he uses the cage and its shadow to explain how light can
be both particles and waves, the action comes to a standstill, and the
ideas are directed out at the audience with clarity and deliberation as
Kerner instructs Blair in layman's terms and halting English. Yet the
lecture is enlivened by the way he plays with Blair's incomprehension
and need for certainties:
KERNER: . . . The act of observing determines the reality.
BLAIR: How?
KERNER: Nobody knows. Einstein didn't know. I don't know. There is
no explanation in classical physics. Somehow light is particle and
wave. The experimenter makes the choice. You get what you interro-
gate for. And you want to know if I'm a wave or a particle. I meet my
Russian friend Georgi, and we exchange material. When the experi-
ment is over, you have a result: I am a British joe with a Russian
source. But they also have a result: because I have given Georgi
enough information to keep him credible as a KGB control who is
running me as a sleeper - which is what he thinks he is. (12)
The set-change which instantly moved Blair from baths to zoo
suggests another duality in that it transposes one idea of his character
over another. Emerging from the shadows of the changing-room
and unperturbed by Wates's drawn revolver, he was brusque, pro-
fessional, in control. At the zoo, however, he seems charming,
detached, pragmatic. Like the two giraffes on stage behind him,
186
whose necks appear to tower from the same body, he is two figures in
one. And, as the scene progresses, Kerner also has two aspects.
Excited by the mystery of scientific theory, he seems peculiarly
untouched by the actual risk and moral dilemmas of the spy game.
Those anomalies are confronted directly in the scene that follows.
The picture again dissolves, and Blair stands downstage of a school-
building suspended in cutout at the rear. Hapgood hurtles in crab-
wise, the lone supporter of her son's Junior Colts B team: neat,
efficient "Mother" from Half Moon Street has become endearing,
scatty Mum at the touchline. These two figures also overlap: Hap-
good never uses "bad language" in either role, talks about her male
subordinates and her son's masters with the same cosy patronage,
and treats the matter of Joe's missing key with intellectual aplomb.
Nevertheless, Hapgood would like to keep them separate; "when the
sugar hits the fan", she can then lose "Mother" and be Mum. But
even as she insists on that separation, her words jump back and forth
between the two images to show how impossible it is to draw a
boundary line:
H A P G O O D : Kerner's all right-1 run him and he's just doing what I tell
him.
BLAIR: Wates made the same point. Don't take it personally.
H A P G O O D : Why should I? It isn't personal. {The referee's whistle - the
conversion of the try) Eighteen. Come on, St Christopher's! Let's get
one back! This is personal, all fifteen of them and the referee, who's
incidentally a sweetheart, he takes Divinity and says if Joe passes
Common Entrance it'll make the loaves and fishes look like a card
trick. Everything else is technical. You're personal sometimes; but
not this minute which is all right, so what can I tell you? - it isn't
Kerner. (17)
With logical precision, Stoppard leads us through each layer of his
theme to its human centre, and the rest of Act One deploys the
uncertainties of espionage, quantum physics, and individual per-
sonality until they interlock at the conclusion of the Act in the play's
crucial equation. It is that unchartable boundary - between KGB and
MI6, microscopic and macroscopic, one role and another - which is
HapgootTs deepest mystery. The properties of the subatomic world
can only be described after they have been measured, but since the
observer and his measuring instruments are also made up of atoms,
where do the unpredictabilities of the particle world become the
tangible and connected "realities" of everyday experience? 5 As Ker-
ner explains to Hapgood, at the most extended moment of rest and
connection between the two of them,
[Einstein] believed in the same God as Newton, causality, nothing
without a reason, but now one thing led to another until causality was

187
 dead. Quantum mechanics made everything finally random, things can
go this way or that way, the mathematics deny certainty, they reveal only
probability and chance, and Einstein couldn't believe in a God who
threw dice.... There is a straight ladder from the atom to the grain of
sand, and the only real mystery in physics is the missing rung. Below it,
particle physics; above it, classical physics; but in between, metaphysics.
All the mystery in life turns out to be this same mystery, the join between
things which are distinct and yet continuous, . . . (49-50)

In his elusive Act Two, Stoppard himself plays dice, having pre-
pared us to stay in the game. The way he deconstructs his characters
is also calculated. He explains they can have no discernible centre,
but the more he involves us in their lives, the more we feel the need to
find that "missing rung". But we can never know them, nor can they
know each other, because the boundary between intellect and feeling
is "distinct yet continuous".
Niels Bohr lived in a house with a horseshoe on the wall. When people
cried, for God's sake, Niels, surely you don't believe a horseshoe brings
you luck!, he said, no, of course not, but I'm told it works even if you
don't believe it. (70)
Just such emotionalism pulls Ridley into the others' con-game.
The "sister thing" works because he is "potty" about Hapgood and
feels he can solve the riddling happenstance of her character in the
seeming predictability of Celia Newton. Waiting in a cheap hotel
(11.5) for the second "meet" at the baths, Hapgood taunts him with
those Newtonian certainties. His intellect tells him that his situation
"smells like a dead mackerel" (82). He knows that Elizabeth's job is
to lie and, given their past relationship, should know he is "not her
type". Yet her attraction makes him want to "get her kid back for her
but it's only personal. If she's set me up I'll kill her". Were he to
"open the box" (that may or may not contain Kerner's computer-
disc), he could take Hapgood's measure, but as she challenges him to
do that, she offers him Celia Newton, his (and her) illusion:
RIDLEY: (Grabbing her) Who the hell are you}
HAPGOOD: I'm your dreamgirl, Ernie - Hapgood without the brains or
the taste.
(She is without resistance, and he takes, without the niceties . . .) (83)
Ridley reaches the missing rung again at the swimming-bath. He has
always been "carrying a torch for her or a gun" (82), and if the one
cannot explain who Hapgood is, the other might. But she eludes him
there, too: " R I D L E Y has got as far as taking his gun out when H A P -
G O O D shoots him" (85).
Hapgood's own emotion makes Kerner unknowable. She wants to

188
marry him, in a half-hearted way: although she no longer needs him
as a joe now his cover has been blown, she still needs him as Joseph,
father ofJoe. Kerner shies away from that. His feelings betrayed him
once; now his "personal" life revolves round quantum theory. Be-
cause she had loved him, Hapgood cannot understand how he felt
used - "If love was like that it would not even be healthy" (50) - and
she too feels betrayed when he talks of returning to Russia. Detached
from that, we see more, but not completely. Kerner is fond of his son,
and his unwillingness to meet him may suggest how much. He keeps
the boy's photograph in the lining of his wallet and sends him
presents. But, in the final scene, he could "go this way or that way".
Having said an affectionate goodbye to Hapgood, he is drawn back by
his son's rugger game and stands, staring out at it, in a moment's
curiosity or a lifetime's affection. Sensing him behind her, Hap-
good's own reaction, as she "comes alive" on the touchline, might be
radiant joy or a brave attempt to hide despair. The tableau is as
volatile as Kerner's atom:
I cannot stand the pictures of atoms they put in schoolbooks, like a little
solar system: Bohr's atom. Forget it. You can't make a picture of what
Bohr proposed, an electron does not go round like a planet, it is like a
moth which was there a moment ago, it gains or loses a quantum of
energy and it jumps, . . . (49)

These kaleidoscopic characters, like the disintegrating realities of

the plot, dramatize HapgoocFs scientific conceits in such a way that the
audience experiences that chimerical world. Hapgood herself remains
as puzzling to us as she is to Ridley. Two things seem certain about
her: she adores her son and values middle-class niceties, even though
"they happen to be shared by a fair number of people you wouldn't
want to be seen dead with, they always were" (23). Yet those certain-
ties evaporate when her lethal efficiency as "Mother" calls them into
question. The story of the kidnap unfolds so convincingly and her
panic seems so genuine (as she discovers Joe has been picked up from
school by a driver who said she had sent him) that the very reality of
her anguish undercuts her maternal image when it turns out to have
been a charade. Suddenly she is not the Mum we felt she was. Nor is
she the conventional lady we took her for when she uses her body as
bait to hook Ridley. We ought, of course, to have known that all
along; but, as we watch her, our emotions subvert that knowledge
(and vice versa) until we cannot be sure whether the "little anarchist"
inside her (63) is the Mum who lets her son call her on the Downing
Street red-line or the Mother who involves him in her dirty games.
Like all of us, she can probably be understood both ways, as Kerner
says:
 So it is with us all, we're not so one-or-the-other. The one who puts on
the clothes in the morning is the working majority, but at night -
perhaps in the moment before unconsciousness - we meet our sleeper -
the priest is visited by the doubter, the Marxist sees the civilising force
of the bourgeoisie, the captain of industry admits the justice of common
ownership. (72)
Hapgood denies the either/or which any audience seeks to pin-
point. Its disappearing certainties of character and plot prove more
bewildering than the ideas, drawn lucidly from espionage and
physics, that they imitate. It offers little to hold on to, defying us
to empathize or trust our senses. Exquisitely dovetailed, intricate,
elusive, each episode recreates the particle world's frustrating
mystery. As an intellectual puzzle, the play succeeds completely.
However, its restless energy also raises a number of social issues
which bob to the surface then disappear again. While it captures the
abstract duplicity of quantum theory, Hapgood lets go of the political
dualities it uncovers and, in consequence, does not connect, passion-
ately and disruptively, with the concrete world.
Yet the play invites such an engagement. By the beginning of Act
Two, the implications behind the caper at the baths come to the fore
when Ridley, caught in the kidnap story, urges Blair to give Kerner's
computer-disc to the Russians: "There's nothing on that disc except
physics and it will stay physics till little Hapgood is a merchant
banker" (59). Even after ten years, the military application of Ker-
ner's research would be insignificant: "It's a joke. I'd trade it for my
cat if I had a cat" (60). An exchange would not betray the actual
secrets of Half Moon Street, the names of agents or of covermen in
the Moscow Embassy: "a kid like that, he should be in bed anyway,
we can all get some sleep" (59). Although Blair acts out a part in the
scam by refusing to give up the disc, a second interview at the zoo
with Kerner reveals his motives. He will use any means to defend his
"values", and Kerner agrees, despite his own "estrangement", that
"The West is morally superior". Through democratic elections "the
system contains the possibility of its own reversal.... Highly theor-
etical, of course" (73). Those values, which presume honesty and
trust, seem still more theoretical when, a moment later, Blair insists
on knowing Kerner's true loyalties in order to protect "one of my
people". Kerner is wryly amused: "One of'yourpeople} Oh, Paul. You
would betray her before I would". Given the intimacies Blair encour-
ages, Hapgood might be surprised that the man who wears her scarf
should speak of her impersonally, but she does trust him as "a friend"
whose views she shares no matter how someone like Ridley perverts
them into "a racket which identifies the national interest with the
interests of the officer class" (82).
190
 These ironies knit together at the point where Hapgood enters the
changing-room to deliver the disc-box. Blair had warned it would
"be tricky doing the swap without a boy to swap" but agreed "to do
the best we can" (63). When Joe does unexpectedly appear, Hapgood
keeps her head. Mission accomplished, and alone with Blair, her
anger rises: "You lied to me . . . I'll never forgive you for that, never
ever" (86). Then, subsiding into "misery", she is gallant enough to
acknowledge her own involvement in the nasty business: "I'm not
blaming you about Joe. The truth is I enjoyed it and now I've
stopped" (87). Blair has betrayed Hapgood's trust and, looked at
another way, done what he can to minimize the risk she takes. Their
relationship ends in typical ambivalence as Blair defends the system
with his "them or us" and Hapgood, seeing the farce that both sides
play, resorts at last to "bad language":
BLAIR:(With asperity) Why am I supposed to feel sorry for Joe? There's
worse things. I'd feel a damn sight sorrier for anyone who didn't know
there was an either-or and we can't afford to lose. One has to pick
oneself up and carry on. It's them or us, isn't it?
HAPGOOD: Who? Us and the KGB? The opposition! We're just keep-
ing each other in business, we should send each other Christmas
cards - oh, f-f-fuck it, Paul!
Oddly, these two speeches, which seem like point and counterpoint,
evade each other. Hapgood's both/and, to Blair's either/or, debunks
espionage as a futile and unending merry-go-round; it does not
attack the methods Blair uses to ensure the system he and she believe
in. And so the fact that this affable charmer and the unpleasant
Ridley are both driven by the same ruthlessness is allowed to slip
away. The final scene completes the process in that Hapgood re-
treats, as is her wont when troubles come, to her son's playing-field
and the "manners maketh man stuff". Blair's manners, too, are
old-school-tie.
In The Dog It Was That Died, another Blair runs a section of Q6
with serene detachment, and the farcical action never reveals the
underside of his well-bred eccentricity. Yet Purvis, shuttled back and
forth in the spy game till he can hardly remember which values he
believes in, clings to Englishness in suicidal despair. Espionage is a
blacker joke in Hapgood, but Stoppard does not allow Elizabeth to
confront that darkness and thereby reassess her values or defend
them knowingly. No chasm yawns for her. Disheartened by the fact
that she "must have been buying nothing but lies and chickenfeed
since Joe was in his pram" (87), she opts "out of it" and turns instead
to her son and his school's conservative standards: a relatively pain-
less escape. Like her, we glimpse the randomness behind those

191
standards without fully experiencing what that implies. The political
and moral dualities of Stoppard's theme slide away beneath the last
scene's gentle, but inadequate pathos. In consequence, Hapgood
rocks our minds and senses but, in all its wondrous symmetry, leaves
life much as we thought it was.

192
Notes

i A free m a n
1 Tom Stoppard, "The Definite Maybe", The Author LXXVIII (Spring
1967), p. 19.
2 Tom Stoppard, "Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy
of Ideas", Theatre Quarterly rv (May-July 1974), p. 4.
3 Ibid.
4 Kenneth Tynan, Show People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979),
PP- 72-3.
5 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 4.
6 Robert Bolt, Flowering Cherry (London: Heinemann, 1959).
7 Tom Stoppard, Enter A Free Man (New York: Grove Press, 1972), p. 9.
All further references to this edition appear in parentheses.
8 Ronald Hayman, Tom Stoppard, 2nd edn (London: Heinemann, 1978),
p. 6.
9 Compare Hancock's similar unsinkability after being barred from 'The
Poetry Society' (Dec. 1959): "I'll go down to the coffee-house - there's
bound to be another movement started up since yesterday. I'll start one of
me own! . . . A breakaway group! We'll be anti-everything! The new
intellectual movement to shake the world!" Quoted in Roger Wilmut,
Tony Hancock Artiste' (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), p. 80.
10 Compare the climactic scene between Willy and Biff Loman in Act 2 of
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman:
BIFF (Crying, broken): Will you let me go, for Christ's sake? Will you take
that phony dream and burn it before something happens . . .
WILLY (After a long pause, astonished, elevated): Isn't that remarkable? Biff
- he likes me! . . . Oh, Biff! . . . That boy - that boy is going to be
magnificent!
11 This speech is particularly Milleresque and derives from the appeal of
Linda (Willy's wife) to her two boys in Act 1: "He's not to be allowed to
fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid
to such a person."
12 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 5.
13 Milton Shulman, "The Limelight Is Too Strong for these Dreams",
Evening Standard (London), 29 March 1968, p. 4.
14 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 4.
15 In Hayman, Tom Stoppard, pp. 28-31.
16 Ibid., p. 7.
17 Tom Stoppard, The Dog It Was That Died and Other Plays (London: Faber
and Faber, 1983), p. 7. All page references in parentheses are to this
edition.
18 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, pp. 75-6.
19 In The Dog It Was That Died and Other Plays, pp. 59-67.

193
 Notes to pages 1 2 - 3 8
20 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 144.
21 In Albert's Bridge and Other Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1977), pp.
43-69. All page references are to this edition.
22 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 2.
23 In The Dog It Was That Died and Other Plays, pp. 165-83.
24 Ibid., p. 7.
25 Ibid., pp. 109-64.
26 The synopsis is in Tynan, Show People, pp. 67-9.
27 Ibid., p. 69.

2 N o w you see h i m
1 Tynan, Show People, p. 64.
2 Compare Ernest Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain" for a sentence which
mimics the ebb andflowof the ocean: "The sea broke in a long line in the
rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a
long line in the rain." In Our Time (New York: Scribner's, 1925).
3 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 4.
4 Stoppard acknowledges these influences in "Footnote to the Bard",
Observer (London), 9 April 1967, p. 23.
5 Janet Watts, "Tom Stoppard", Guardian (London), 21 March 1973, p.
12.
6 Tom Stoppard, LordMalquist and Mr Moon (London: Faber and Faber,
1974). All page numbers refer to this edition.
7 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 17.
8 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, pp. 143-4.
9 Tynan, Show People, p. 61.
10 To the critic, Robert Cushman. Quoted in Tynan, Show People, p. 67.
11 In a recorded conversation (1976) with Anthony Smith, British Council
Study Aids, Stoppard talks about writing out his early neuroses: "And I
worried about things like that And occasionally, something would go
spectacularly wrong, and I was curiously reassured when New York had a
total blackout. I found great solace in that, because it just worried me that
that many lights kept going on when they were needed." In accompany-
ing booklet, unnumbered, p. 14.
12 Compare Stoppard in "Ambushes", pp. 6-7: " . . . there is very often no
single, clear statement in my plays. What there is, is a series of conflicting
statements made by conflicting characters, and they tend to play a sort of
infinite leap-frog."
13 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 2.
14 "Stoppard's prose is immensely pleased with anything it can come up
with." William Pritchard, "Fiction Chronicle", Hudson Review xxi
(Summer), p. 366.
15 481 copies, according to Tynan, Show People, p. 54.
16 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 12.
17 Ronald Bryden, "Theatre: Wyndy Excitement", Observer (London), 28
August 1966, p. 15.
18 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 12.
19 Tynan, Show People, pp. 69-70.

194
 Notes to pages 38-71
20 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 6.
21 Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber
and Faber, 1968), pp. 57-8. All page numbers refer to this edition.

3 Victims of perspective
1 Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound (London: Faber and Faber,
1968). All page numbers refer to this edition.
2 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 8.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 7.
5 Ibid., p. 8.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., pp. 16-17. I n the National Theatre's 1985 revival, directed by
Stoppard himself, the two critics were seated stage right in the front row
of a 'theatre' which went back into the wings so that they faced the actors
and the audience diagonally. Since the actors faced out through that side
proscenium, much of their business was done on the same diagonal, with
their backs to the actual auditorium. After Simon and Hound had
finished their short stint as critics, a gauze was drawn across, blacking out
the space beyond the false proscenium, and the redundant pair simply
disappeared from the proceedings. Since Hound was performed with
Sheridan's The Critic, its satire on critics seemed much more prominent
than the whodunnit pastiche. In addition, Stoppard and his cast created a
delicious parody of'coarse acting' which helped to extricate the pseudo-
Mousetrap from its comic cul-de-sac.
8 Agatha Christie, The Mousetrap (London: Samuel French, 1954), p. 2.
Hound parodies the plot as well as the gaucheries of The Mousetrap. In the
Christie play, the policeman turns out to be the murderer. Puckeridge
tries to force Moon, as the second Inspector Hound, into that role while
himself assuming the part of Christie's Major, who is finally revealed as
the actual policeman. What then became of the "real" Major Muldoon?
Had Puckeridge bribed him to leave the cast - or worse? The plot
thickens!
9 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 8.
10 Tom Stoppard, After Magritte (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). All
page numbers refer to this edition.
11 Quoted by Suzi Gablik, Magritte (Greenwich, Connecticut: New York
Graphic Society, 1970), p. 12.
12 The painting is illustrated in Gablik, Magritte, p. 49.
13 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books. Quoted in Gablik,
Magritte, p. 96.
14 In The Dog It Was That Died and Other Plays, pp. 69-88.
15 In Albert's Bridge and Other Plays, pp. 7-41.
16 Ibid., pp. 117-39.
17 Stoppard, "Ambushes", pp. 3-4.
18 John Gale, Clean Young Englishman (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1965), pp. 36-58. Gale had interviewed Stoppard for the London

195
 Notes to pages 7 2 - 8 9

Observer: "Writing's my 43rd Priority, Says Tom Stoppard", 17 Decem-

ber 1967, p. 4. For the BBC broadcast, Gale became Dale, though
Stoppard tells me that John Gale was "more than happy to have his name
used". That change meant the disappearance of one minor clue to the
identity of Groucho, whose parents sent him honey from Mexico (p.
123). Gale's Honey, like Crawford's Crackers, is a well-known brand
name.
4 Trapped in language
1 Quoted in Tynan, Show People, p. 90.
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago:
University Press, 1980), p. 50c
3 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 8.
4 In The Dog It Was That Died and Other Plays, pp. 89-108.
5 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1962).
6 These parallels are discussed in Jim Hunter, Tom Stoppard's Plays (Lon-
don: Faber and Faber, 1982), pp. 156-8.
7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), propositions 5.61 and 6.41.
8 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 7.
9 Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 17. All
page numbers refer to this revised edition.
10 Quoted in Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 86, Tynan, Show People, p. 45, and
Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 17.
11 In some ways Jumpers offers a burlesque ofMacbeth. Stoppard will return
to the play in which "Confusion now hath made its masterpiece" in
Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth. The 1976 revival at the National in-
cluded a few lines from Archie at the party which let the audience know
who the murdered jumper was and so clarified Dotty's quotation from
the murder of Duncan. This addition was retained in the 1985 revival at
the Aldwych Theatre (as was a sequence which showed George making
his phone-call of complaint about the goings-on at his flat; to remain
anonymous, he claimed to be Mr Wittgenstein).
12 The "friend" was apparently Professor G. E. M. Anscombe, who recalls
this meeting in her An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (London:
Hutchinson, 1959), p. 151.
13 " 'Duncan,' I said, 'Duncan'" parodies a favourite vocative of Bertrand
Russell's to the actual G. E. Moore: " 'Moore,' I said, 'do you always
speak the truth?'" The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1 (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1967), p. 90. He also thought Moore and Wittgenstein shared a
"kind of purity" of genius and character. Op. cit., 11, p. 99.
14 For the background to logical positivism, see Tim Brassell, "Jumpers: A
Happy Marriage?", Gambit x (1981), pp. 42-59.
15 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, proposition 7.
16 Quoted in Brassell, "Jumpers", pp. 47-8.
17 Ibid., p. 48.
18 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 85c

196
 Notes to pages 9 5 - 1 2 5

19 These variants occur in the play's first pre-performance edition (1972).

Astronaut Scott did fly in, dressed in his space-suit, during the 1985
production. Lord Greystoke, anotherflyingwitness, was also summoned
since, in the African jungle, he retained his altruism as the wild Tarzan.
These additions and the zany pace of the coda necessitated a major - and
drastic - cut at the point where Clegthorpe begs George to help him.
That cry and George's refusal were omitted in order to maintain the
action's frenzy.

5 What did you do, Dada?

1 Reviews of Jumpers reflect these opinions. Harold Clurman, "Theatre",
Nation ccxvn (13 August 1973), p. 124 criticizes its "facile, chirping
'pessimism'" as a "pose". John Barber, "Comedy as Erudite as It Is
Dotty", Daily Telegraph (London), 3 February 1972, p. 11 thinks the play
"lacks the firm underpinning of a sober and powerful myth" and calls it
"flimsy". Richard Watts, "Theatre: Tom Stoppard's Enigma", New York
Post, 3 August 1972, p. 22 calls it "an enigma of infuriating deviousness".
Stoppard himself admitted that his refusal to make clear statements
"gets up a few people's noses", "Ambushes", p. 13.
2 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 14.
3 Tom Stoppard to David Gollob and David Roper, "Trad Tom Pops In",
Gambit x (1981), pp. 10-11.
4 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 12.
5 Ibid.
6 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 142.
7 Tom Stoppard, "Dogg's Our Pet", Ten of the Best: British Short Plays
(London: Inter-Action Inprint, 1979), pp. 79-94. All page numbers
refer to this edition.
8 Ed Berman, "How Long Is An Ephemeron?" introduction to Ten of the
Best, x-xi.
9 Stoppard, Ibid., p. 80.
I o In Albert's Bridge and Other Plays, pp. 71 -116.
II Tom Stoppard, Travesties (New York: Grove Press, 1975). All page
numbers refer to this edition.
12 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 14.
13 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 12.
14 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 13.
15 Ibid., p. 14.
16 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 11.
17 "Trad Tom", p. 16.
18 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 12.
19 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 16.

6 Ethics and manners

1 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 4.
2 Ibid., p. 12.
3 Ibid., p. 138.
197
 Notes to pages 125-63
4 Tom Stoppard, Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (London: Faber and
Faber, 1976), p. 75. All page numbers refer to this edition.
5 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, pp. 143-4.
6 Tom Stoppard, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor and Professional Foul (New
York: Grove Press, 1978). Quotation from both plays is taken from this
edition.
7 The play's title, whose initials E G B D F constitute a mnemonic for the
notes in the treble clef, links music to geometry in that notes and
diagrams can be labelled E G B, etc. In its unabbreviated form, it points
to the way the authorities in the play suggest that if Alexander is "good"
he will "deserve favour" from the State, and that if Sacha is "a good boy"
he will (punningly) "deserve a father" back from 'hospital'.
8 "Trad Tom", pp. 16-17.
9 Ibid., pp. 7-9.
10 Evelyn Cobley, "Catastrophe Theory in Tom Stoppard's Professional
Foul", Contemporary Literature xxv (Spring 1984), pp. 53-65.
11 Tom Stoppard, Night and Day, 2nd edn (London: Faber and Faber,
1979). All page numbers refer to this edition.
12 "Trad Tom", p. 6.
13 Ibid., p. 9.
14 Ibid., p. 6.
15 Tynan, Show People, p. 67.
16 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 17.
17 Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (London: Chapman and Hall, 1948), pp. 14-15.
18 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 4.
19 "Trad Tom", p. 15.
20 Ibid.

7 The real thing?

1 "Trad Tom", p. 11.
2 Bernard Levin, "Theatre: Stoppard's Political Asylum", Sunday Times
(London), 3 July 1977, p. 37.
3 Bernard Levin, "Theatre: Tom Stoppard's African Journey", Sunday
Times (London), 12 November 1978, p. 37.
4 Irving Wardle, "Night and Day: Phoenix", The Times (London), 9
November 1978, p. 11.
5 "Trad Tom", p. 11.
6 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 5.
7 "My ambition then . . . was to be lying on the floor of an African airport
while machine-gun bullets zoomed over my typewriter", "Footnote to
the Bard", p. 23.
8 Tom Stoppard, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth (London: Faber and
Faber, 1980). All page numbers refer to this edition.
9 Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 6.
10 Ed Berman, Ten of the Best, x.
11 Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). All
page numbers refer to this edition.
12 Tynan, Show People, p. n o .
198
 Notes to pages 1 6 3 - 8 7

13 Derek Marlowe, quoted in Tynan, p. 113.

14 Stoppard, "Ambushes", p. 14.
15 John Russell Taylor, "From Rosencrantz to The Real Thing', Plays and
Players (October 1984), p. 13.
16 Mel Gussow, "Plays On Words", Toronto Globe and Mail, 7 January
1984, p. EI.
17 The Dog It Was That Died and Other Plays, pp. 9-45.
18 Tynan, Show People, pp. 46-7.
19 James Saunders, quoted in Tynan, Show People, p. 71.
20 Anthony Smith's taped interview: booklet, p. 15.
21 "Trad Tom", pp. 16-17.
22 Tom Stoppard, Squaring the Circle (London: Faber and Faber, 1984). All
page numbers refer to this edition.
23 Anthony Smith, p. 20.
24 These strands of Stoppard's personality and thought are again inter-
woven in his adaptation of Vaclav HavePs Largo Desolato,firstperformed
at Bristol, 1986. The play concerns a man who struggles to maintain his
own identity since his writings displease the State authorities yet en-
trance his public.

After words
1 Tom Stoppard, Hapgood (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 48. All page
numbers in parentheses refer to this edition. Details of sets and staging,
sketched out lightly in the printed text, reflect those of the first production
at the Aldwych Theatre (8 March 1988) designed by Carl Toms and
directed by Peter Wood.
2 Clive James, "Count Zero Splits the Infinite", Encounter (London), Nov.
!975>P- I1-
3 Heisenberg's principle (1927) "concerns attempts to measure the position
and motion of a quantum object simultaneously . . . The very act of trying
to pin down an electron to a specific place introduces an uncontrollable
and indeterminate disturbance to its motion, and vice versa", P. G. W.
Davies and J. R. Brown, eds., The Ghost in theAtom (Cambridge University
Press, 1986), p. 6.
4 The Ridley twins are not shown together until an "inter-scene" between
11.2 and 11.3 in the printed version. Early in the Aldwych run, Stoppard
inserted that fleeting encounter in between 1.3 and 1.4, just after Hapgood
has deduced the key to Ridley from the grid of past events. Though we
cannot know it at the time, we first 'see' both Ridleys in the opening
sequence; but his two characters look like one, while the Russian looks like
two. Another quantum jump.
5 The mystery has been nicely illustrated by Schrodinger's cat paradox
(I935)- A cat, closed up in a steel chamber with a Geiger device that could
release a toxic acid, is (by the rules of quantum mechanics) both dead and
alive until the box is opened to discover the result. "The paradox becomes
more acute if the cat is replaced by a person,... If the experimenter opens
the box to discover that the subject is still alive,... obviously the friend will
reply that he remained 100% alive at all times. Yet this flies in the face of
199
 Note to page 187
quantum mechanics, which insists that the friend is in a state of live-dead
superposition before the contents of the box were inspected", The Ghost in
the Atom, pp. 28-31. Hapgood, at the hotel, obeys those quantum rules:
she is both Betty and Celia, since Ridley does not open the disc-box, but,
as he says earlier, "Pd trade it for my cat if I had a cat."

200