Tom Stoppard's Plays : Patterns of Plenitude and Parsimony [1 ed.] 9789004319653, 9789004318366

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Tom Stoppard’s Plays

Costerus New Series Editors C.C. Barfoot László Sándor Chardonnens Theo D’haen

VOLUME 217

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cos

Tom Stoppard’s Plays Patterns of Plenitude and Parsimony By

Nigel Purse

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Tom Stoppard at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London by Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Limited Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Purse, Nigel, author. Title: Tom Stoppard’s plays : patterns of plenitude and parsimony / by Nigel Purse. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, [2016] | Series: Costerus new series ; 217 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016034423 (print) | LCCN 2016044701 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004318366 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004319653 (E-book) Subjects: LCSH: Stoppard, Tom--Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PR6069.t6 z846 2016 (print) | LCC PR6069.t6 (ebook) | DDC 822/.914--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034423

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0165-9618 isbn 978-90-04-31836-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-31965-3 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To my family

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It’s no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst. The Real Thing

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Contents Preface xi Acknowledgements xv Prologue xxii Plenitude xxiv Patterns xxvii Parsimony xxx 1 Occam’s Razor 1 Stoppard and Occam’s Razor 3 Occam’s Razor Applied Structurally 5 Occam’s Razor Applied to Writing 15 Occam’s Razor Applied to an Argument–Metaphysical 19 Occam’s Razor Applied to an Argument–Methodological 22 Storm in a Teacup 23 ‘You don’t have to be Einstein’ 37 Defining the Question 41 The Language of Symbols’ 47 Anti-razor 52 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 53 Parsimony 55 2 The Stoppardian Stage Debate 57 Intellectual Ping-Pong 62 Internal Debate 70 The Debate in the Vehicle 74 The Multi-Faceted Debate 79 Internal Contradictions 84 Skirmishes 117 The Multi-Play Debate 121 Parsimony 125 3 The Vehicle versus the Idea 126 ‘Et in Arcadia ego!’ 136 ‘Mental Acrobatics’ 152 The Play-Within-A-Play 159 The Vehicle Comes First 182 The Worked Example 185

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The Vehicle as Man 193 Misalignment? 222 Too Complicated? 225 Parsimony 234 4 Ethics 235 Absolutism versus Relativism–Morality 238 God 249 Truth 261 Free Speech 277 Freedom 298 Fate 308 Art 324 Absolutism versus Relativism–General 336 Parsimony 360 5 Dualism–Illusion and Reality 361 Illusion and Reality 362 Duality 397 Parsimony 423 6 Stoppard’s Theatricality 427 Comedy 431 The Pun 436 The Intellectual Joke 438 The Double Entendre 440 Malapropisms 442 The Cheap Gag 443 Farce 446 The Cross Purpose 451 The Running Gag 454 Satire 458 Parody 463 Straightforward Wit 468 Visual Effects 470 Poetry 473 Music 477 Opening Scenes 490 Nudity 497 Mystery 498

Contents

Art 504 Adaptations 509 Literary Influences 513 Beckett 527 Chekhov 537 Shakespeare 547 Parsimony 559 7 Stoppard’s Time Shifts 560 Emotional Recall 561 Perspective 566 Integrating the Idea 569 Reprising the Debate 576 Narrative Recall 578 Parsimony 578 8 Coda 580 Appendix 1: Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 585 Appendix 2: Indian Ink – Timeline 604 Appendix 3: The Coast of Utopia – Timeline 606 Bibliography 609 Index Works by Tom Stoppard 628 Characters in Stoppard’s Works 631 General Index 638

ix

Preface …he just wants to hear what you’re thinking.1 ursula, The Hard Problem

∵ I wrote a play once. It was an appalling experience, both for me and the handful of unfortunate souls whom I allowed to read it. ‘Undramatic’ was one of the kindest verdicts on it. For me, the baring of my innermost intellect and creative thoughts, such as they are, was truly painful, particularly in exchange for no beneficial gain at all. I was reminded of the adage: ‘Those who can, do; those who cannot, talk about it’. In this case, substitute ‘write’ for ‘talk’. But, why Stoppard and why write yet another book about his work? Stoppard once said, in reference to his admiration for Hemingway, ‘One gets badly bitten by writers perhaps only two or three times, between the ages of eight and eighteen’.2 In my case it was when I was sixteen and my English master, John Davison, gave the class a copy of Jumpers. That play was a revelation to me. It was dynamite in the hands of a young man with an enquiring mind, eager to awaken his intellect to risk and experimentation. No matter that Stoppard intends his plays to be played, not read – ‘I don’t write plays for discussion…I think of a play as an event in the theatre’,3 he told Janet Watts in 1973 – as we read it round in class I was seduced. Seduced by the mental and linguistic gymnastics, yes. Seduced by the dramatic effect of the theatrical 1 The Hard Problem, page 21. 2 Stoppard, ‘Reflections on Ernest Hemingway’, page 2. 3 Stoppard, in an interview with J.Watts, Guardian, 21 March 1973, page 12 in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 34, in P.  Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 49. Stoppard told Jon Bradshaw that, ‘No plays are written to be studied and discussed any more than pictures are painted to be discussed’. – J. Bradshaw, ‘Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 98. Stoppard told Mel Gussow, ‘Plays are events rather than texts. They’re written to happen, not to be read’. – “The dissident is a discordant note in a highly orchestrated society” in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 37. See also Stoppard, ‘Playwrights and professors’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 October 1972, page 1219: ‘I have never written anything for discussion’.

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machinations, for sure. But, above all, entranced by the ability to express, explore and articulate ideas and arguments. I never looked back and have eagerly awaited Stoppard’s every next offering ever since. A good deal of literature about Stoppard and his works is intimidatingly good. The scholarship of Fleming, Delaney, Nadel, Demastes and Gussow is particularly fine and unsurpassable. But, I still feel that there is room for another book. Most of the work on Stoppard takes a vertical approach. It runs through plays one by one or takes a chronological approach. There is nothing wrong with that and I have enjoyed huge amounts of it. This book takes the road less travelled; in every sense. It tries to address Stoppard’s work horizontally: that is to say, by picking out the patterns of the key themes across all his works. More ambitiously, it also tries to work them into an overall context. A loose context – one of patterns and, ultimately, that of Occam’s razor – but an overall context nevertheless. I also feel that there is a need to explain much of Stoppard’s work. He admits that, ‘I’ve always been stingy with information in my plays’.4 It is not just a case of filling out quantum mechanical arguments or Chaos Theory. Relating some of the ideas in The Coast of Utopia to Herzen’s own writing or identifying the link between Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Orwell’s 1984 can be illuminating. Given that so many of the ideas that Stoppard covers are embodied in the action or plot in some way, understanding how Travesties relates to The Importance of Being Earnest, for example, adds to the understanding of the arguments Stoppard is making. Sometimes it is even revealing to see what Stoppard leaves out. However, I hope that I have done rather more than simply produce a series of ‘useless truths’5 that so roundly irritate Stoppard. In terms of the book’s research into what lies behind the plays, rather than just focussing on what the plays achieve in production on stage, I am aware that it flies in the face of even Stoppard himself.6 I am aware, too, of the disdain 4 Stoppard, in an interview with N. Hytner, 6 February 2015. In an interview with Roger Bolton Stoppard argued, ‘I like to do as little as possible, in other words give as little information out as possible.…I am much more frightened of being over-explicit than under-explicit’. – Feedback, bbc Radio 4, 5 January 2016. These statements are to be contrasted with his comment that, ‘Nothing I’ve ever done is supposed to be remotely bewildering’, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994. 5 Stoppard, ‘Playwrights and Professors’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 October 1972, page 1219. 6 Other commentators have noted the need for background information. For example, see Jim Hunter’s verdict on Travesties: ‘Though generally seen as one of Stoppard’s best plays, it does present a basic difficulty: it assumes considerable advance knowledge in its audience’. – J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 105. He cites a need to be cognizant with

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there is in Stoppard’s plays for researchers, such as Eldon Pike in Indian Ink and Bernard Nightingale in Arcadia. But, I genuinely believe that Stoppard reserves his frustration merely for bad researchers. In fact, he once wrote, ‘I don’t have any disdain for the prestige of criticism’.7 I hope, too, that the satire he vents on critics is directed at hacks rather than serious commentators.8 So, perhaps, this book, too, will turn out to be an appalling experience for both the author and the reader. I do hope not. For the duration of its writing I felt like Father McKenzie, ‘writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear’. But, I was impelled by Hannah’s words, spoken in Arcadia, to finish the task no matter what the outcome – ‘Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final’.9 I was never lucky enough to meet Stoppard. This is probably for the best. I am sure I would either have been overwhelmed by fear of what to say to such a great mind or uttered something embarrassingly obsequious. My wife and daughters did meet him, briefly, at the stage door of The Old Vic. I, sensibly, shied away. I have seen him several times. He typically turns up unannounced at productions of his plays. I first saw him at the Aldwych in 1985, his back turned in the corner of the crush bar, trying very hard not to be recognised, in the interval during a production of Jumpers with Paul Eddington and Felicity Kendal. He realised as he caught my eye that I, unlike everyone else in the bar, knew who he was. I would never have betrayed his privacy. We next encountered each other by eyesight at the ticket desk of the Piccadilly Theatre where both he and my wife and I were collecting tickets for that night’s performance of, again, Jumpers; this time with Simon Russell Beale. He was, mercifully, in a hurry and not lingering. Again, he realised that I knew who he was. I fancied to myself that he was formulating a play in which a famous playwright keeps meeting at productions of his plays an admirer who never has the courage to The Importance of Being Earnest, Ulysses, Dadaism and twentieth-century Russian history. Hunter’s comment that, ‘Nobody watching Travesties or Arcadia picks up every allusion or textual intricacy’, (About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 42) might well be applied to all Stoppard’s plays. 7 Stoppard, ‘Unidentified lecture re. Rough Crossing and translation’. 8 Stoppard admitted in reference to Night And Day that, ‘I admire good professionals’, and that, ‘I admire Wagner as a person because he takes his job seriously and is good at it and isn’t a hack’. – Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, pages 162 and 163. On 13 June 2015 Stoppard was reported in The Times as saying that he had invented a quotation and its source in the programme notes for Arcadia at the Royal National Theatre in 1993. The attribution was to JF. Shade (1898–1959) who may well be a reference to the fictional author in Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire. A poem, also entitled ‘Pale Fire’, in the book contains elements of duality. 9 Arcadia, page 100.

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introduce himself but still keeps accidentally bumping into him. Further unintroduced encounters occurred at productions of The Real Thing and Arcadia. I was encouraged by many people to seek an interview with Stoppard but I declined to pursue such a route on the advice of Stoppard himself. When asked what it is like having experts and academics analyse his work he replied: The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me. I have a stock reply which is that ‘the examiner wants to know what you think, not what I think’. I write polite little notes, which say: ‘Honestly, you do not need me, you think you do but I am irrelevant to what you are doing’. Obviously, the yes or no factual questions I can answer, but the interpretations…The whole thing derives from a misapprehension about creative writing, which is that the writer is working from a set of principles or a thesis and the play is the end product of that predisposition, but, actually, the idea turns out to be the end product of the play, and the less I know about this play I am ­trying to write, the better.10 I took to heart the advice at the top of this Preface, given to Hilary by Ursula in The Hard Problem. So, this book is unashamedly what I think. By its very nature literary analysis is derivative but, notwithstanding all the help I have received from various people and sources, the ideas in this book remain my thoughts and conclusions. Any errors and omissions are mine, too. Living close to London has accorded me the most wonderful privilege of seeing the original productions of such plays as Arcadia, Rock ‘N’ Roll and The Coast of Utopia trilogy. It has also enabled me to see revivals of some of his less frequently produced or harder to stage plays, such as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, After Magritte, New-Found-Land and Artist Descending a Staircase (in a room above a pub in Islington). Having been too young to have heard his early radio plays I was delighted to be able to hear his fine return to the medium, Darkside, on its first broadcast in 2013. I have even directed a production of The Real Inspector Hound (when I was nineteen and still at school) – actually, it was more a case of the cast directing itself. It is my fervent hope that one day, somebody, somewhere will establish an annual Stoppard festival at which his works are continually revived and produced. Nigel Purse 10

Stoppard, in an interview with N. Farndale, The Telegraph, 19 January 2010.

Acknowledgements Permission to quote from the Stoppard plays worldwide excluding the usa, the Philippines and its Dependencies as detailed in the attached schedule: A SEPARATE PEACE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1966) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). AFTER MAGRITTE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1970) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). ALBERT’S BRIDGE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1969) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). ANOTHER MOON CALLED EARTH by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1967) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). ARCADIA by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1993) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). ARTIST DESCENDING A STAIRCASE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1972) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). DALLIANCE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1986) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). DARKSIDE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2013) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). DIRTY LINEN by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1976) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). DOGG’S HAMLET, CAHOOT’S MACBETH by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1979) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents .co.uk). ENTER A FREE MAN by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1977) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents. co.uk). HAPGOOD by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1988) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). IF YOU’RE GLAD I’LL BE FRANK by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1969) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). IN THE NATIVE STATE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1991) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). INDIAN INK by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1995) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk).

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IVANOV by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2008) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). JUMPERS by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1972) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). LARGO DESOLATO by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 198) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). LORD MALQUIST AND MR MOON by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1966) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents .co.uk). ‘M’ IS FOR MOON AMONG OTHER THINGS by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1964) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). NEUTRAL GROUND by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). NEW-FOUND-LAND by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1976) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). NIGHT AND DAY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1978) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). ON ‘DOVER BEACH’ by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2007) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). ON THE RAZZLE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1981) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). PIRANDELLO’S HENRY iv by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2004) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). PROFESSIONAL FOUL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1977) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). ROCK ‘N’ ROLL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2006) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1966) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). ROUGH CROSSING by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1984) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). SALVAGE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2002) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). SHIPWRECK by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2002) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). SQUARING THE CIRCLE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1984) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). TEETH by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1967) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk).

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THE BOUNDARY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1975) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). THE CHERRY ORCHARD by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2009) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). THE DISSOLUTION OF DOMINIC BOOT by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1964) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents. co.uk). THE DOG IT WAS THAT DIED by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1982) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). THE FIFTEEN MINUTE HAMLET by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1976) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). THE HARD PROBLEM by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2015) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). THE INVENTION OF LOVE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1997) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). THE REAL THING by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1982) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). THE SEAGULL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1997) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). TRAVESTIES by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1975) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1979) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). VOYAGE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2002) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). WHERE ARE THEY NOW? By Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk). Permission to quote from the Stoppard plays in the usa, the Philippines and its Dependencies as detailed in the attached schedule: A SEPARATE PEACE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1966) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). AFTER MAGRITTE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1970) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). ALBERT’S BRIDGE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1969) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). ANOTHER MOON CALLED EARTH by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1967) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).

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ARCADIA by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1993) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). ARTIST DESCENDING A STAIRCASE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1972) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). DALLIANCE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1986) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). DARKSIDE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2013) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). DIRTY LINEN by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1976) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). DOGG’S HAMLET, CAHOOT’S MACBETH by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1979) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). ENTER A FREE MAN by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1977) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). HAPGOOD by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1988) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). IF YOU’RE GLAD I’LL BE FRANK by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1969) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). IN THE NATIVE STATE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1991) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). INDIAN INK by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1995) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). IVANOV by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2008) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). JUMPERS by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1972) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). LARGO DESOLATO by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 198) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). LORD MALQUIST AND MR MOON by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1966) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). ‘M’ IS FOR MOON AMONG OTHER THINGS by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1964) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic. com). NEUTRAL GROUND by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). NEW-FOUND-LAND by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1976) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). NIGHT AND DAY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1978) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).

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ON ‘DOVER BEACH’ by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2007) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). ON THE RAZZLE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1981) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). PIRANDELLO’S HENRY IV by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2004) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). PROFESSIONAL FOUL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1977) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). ROCK ‘N’ ROLL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2006) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1966) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). ROUGH CROSSING by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1984) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). SALVAGE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2002) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). SHIPWRECK by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2002) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). SQUARING THE CIRCLE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1984) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). TEETH by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1967) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). THE BOUNDARY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1975) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). THE CHERRY ORCHARD by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2009) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). THE DISSOLUTION OF DOMINIC BOOT by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1964) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). THE DOG IT WAS THAT DIED by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1982) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). THE FIFTEEN MINUTE HAMLET by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1976) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). THE HARD PROBLEM by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2015) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). THE INVENTION OF LOVE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1997) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). THE REAL THING by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1982) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).

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Acknowledgements

THE SEAGULL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1997) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). TRAVESTIES by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1975) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1979) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). VOYAGE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2002) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). WHERE ARE THEY NOW? By Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com). Permission to quote from the Stoppard papers at the Harry Ransom Center and the British Library. From Tango by Slawomir Mrozek (translated by Bethell, N and adapted by Stoppard, T) Published by Jonathan Cape Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. Extracts from Some Thoughts On The Russian Personality by Helen Rappaport are reproduced with the permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of Helen Rappaport. Extracts from papers contained in the Glyndebourne Archives are reproduced with the permission of the archive of Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Extracts from manuscripts contained in the Harry Ransom Center are reproduced with the permission of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Extracts from manuscripts contained in The British Library are reproduced with the permission of The British Library Board. Extracts from material contained in the library of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust are reproduced with the permission of the Collections of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Extracts from ‘The Ominousness of Chekhovian Idyll: The Role of Intertextuality in Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia’ are reproduced with the permission of Nina Wieda. Extracts from ‘Wittgenstein’s Language-games, Stoppard’s Building-blocks and context-based learning in a corpus’ are reproduced with the permission of Sabina Rehman. Copyright permission to reproduce extracts from Conversations with Stoppard has been granted by Nick Hern Books, London whose website is www.nickhernbooks.co.uk. Extracts from ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3) 1995 are reproduced with the permission of David Chalmers. Extracts from Dr Aileen Kelly’s works are reproduced with

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the permission of Dr Aileen Kelly. Extracts from The Love for Three Oranges are reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Limited. My thanks go to: the Royal National Theatre Archive; Dick Mowbray, Classics Master at Berkhamsted School, for unlocking Housman’s ancient Greek; Odile Williams, for discovering the source of George Sand’s quotation; The Bodleian Library and its staff; Victoria Fox of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, llc; Charlotte King; Keelan Pacot of Grove Atlantic; David Pearce, for teaching me that drama is conflict; The British Library; John Fleming, for being an enthusiastic Stoppard friend for many years and for his constant and invaluable advice and support and for painstakingly proof reading my manuscript; the archive of Glyndebourne Productions Ltd, in particular Julia Aries; the Blythe House Archive & Library and Study Room of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Rose Cobbe and Abigail Darling of United Agents llp, for their kindness and diligence in securing copyright approvals; Brett Savill, for friendship and encouragement and many shared Stoppardian experiences; Almar (Tring) Limited, for printing my drafts; Armand Marie Leroi; Blanca Martin, the Librarian, and the staff of the library of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford; Naomi Vanloo, the Librarian, and the staff of the library of New College, Oxford; the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Collections of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; Tim Kirtley, the Librarian, and the staff of the library of Wadham College, Oxford; Bob Brace, my neighbour and it angel; the English Faculty Library, Oxford University; John Davison, for kindly reviewing, providing suggestions for improvement and giving me that initial inspiration; James Jackson, for legal advice; the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, and its staff…and my publisher, Brill Rodopi, for having faith in me when no other publisher did.

Prologue I am not consciously playing this hand of cards at all. Every play seems a new start for me.1 stoppard

∵ Despite Stoppard’s assertion that every play is a new start, this book attempts to provide an overall and unifying pattern in which to assess and evaluate the whole Stoppardian canon. It is not a revisionist attempt, with the easy benefit of hindsight, to make all the facts of Stoppard’s works fit a tightly bound intellectual straightjacket. Rather, it is an attempt to provide a framework or, more accurately, identify the patterns behind a context, not into which all the facts have to fit but against which the vast expanse of Stoppard’s ideas, themes and works can be explained, evaluated, compared and followed. It is a context which must be capable of encompassing the overflowing, anarchic variety, or plenitude, within Stoppard’s works: Russian intellectual thought of the nineteenth century, the music of Pink Floyd, the lectures of Richard Feynman and the plays of Oscar Wilde to name but a few. It must cover the various media of stage plays, radio plays and a novel plus numerous interviews and other thoughts of Stoppard ranging over a time period running from the 1960s to the 2010s.2 Furthermore, it must also allow consideration of a plethora of ideas like freedom of speech, the nature of God, the source of morality, romanticism and the concept of fate. Just as the Chaos Theory which dominates both the ideas and structure of Arcadia identifies an order out of the apparent chaos of phenomena, so there are patterns which emerge in Stoppard’s works. There are patterns of method: 1 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Fleming, ‘A Talk With Tom Stoppard’ in Theatre Insight (Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Texas at Austin), Issue 10, volume 5, number one (December 1993). See also Terry Hodgson who suggested in 2001 that, ‘Stoppard’s future work may well confound the academic tracer of patterns’. – T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, page 13. 2 In 2010 W. Baker and G. Wachs, in Tom Stoppard A Bibliographical History, listed 30 plays for stage, radio and television, 30 screenplays, 12 adaptations and translations for the stage, 2 works of fiction, 33 published letters, 320 articles, 42 lectures, 519 interviews, 7 audio-visual materials and 15 unpublished items.

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the plays generally comprise some form of stage debate which is based upon the union of a vehicle and an idea – Jumpers, for example, is a play which explores two opposing views of the nature of morality through the vehicle of an academic rehearsing a lecture, entitled ‘Is God?’. Underlying the two-fold nature of the methods is the pattern of themes, the first of which is duality, both of individuals, such as the two Ruths in Night And Day, and of the persistent recurrence of examples of illusion and reality, not only in his own creations but in those of the works Stoppard elects to adapt, such as Dalliance, On the Razzle and Rough Crossing. Founded upon the bedrock of another duality is Stoppard’s second main theme, that of ethics; the Stoppardian dichotomy of moral absolutism and relativism. It flows into such areas as the freedom of the individual within society, the role of the artist, determinism and the nature of truth. But, the sense of plenitude is reinforced by the operation of a third pattern: dramatic devices, of theatricality and time shifts. Stoppard employs across his works just about every conceivable visual and aural effect from the coin tossing opening of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to the wordplay of Travesties to the music of Rock ‘N’ Roll. He also takes enormous dramatic licence with the concept of time in plays such as Artist Descending a Staircase, Indian Ink and in The Invention of Love when the action reverberates back and forth between time periods, often in the same bifurcating manner as Chaos Theory suggests. The inaugural London production of The Hard Problem was accompanied by Bach’s exercise in counterpoint – the Preludes, which to Stoppard are but a musical metaphor of duality – and the counterpoint to Stoppard’s plenitude is his application of the principle of parsimony; Occam’s razor. The idea, attributed to William of Ockham, that when a multiplicity of possible explanations may be applied to a complicated problem it is usually the simplest one which provides the most satisfactory answer is the foundation upon which the edifice of the complex arrays of ideas and events that comprise the sensory and intellectual onslaught of Stoppard’s plays is built. It involves stripping away all the theatrical devices and Stoppardian methods, thereby reducing, in some way or other, Stoppard’s core themes to their essence. Various applications of this reduction of complicated ideas – expressed either verbally or allegorically through stage events – to a basic issue or argument explain in some way or other most of the major plays; plays as diverse as The Real Thing, Travesties, Rock ‘N’ Roll and Indian Ink and the vast intellectual patchwork of social behaviour that is The Coast of Utopia trilogy. Furthermore, the principle of parsimony is also central to a distinctive feature of Stoppard’s drama – the yoking together in an unlikely way of disparate subject matters, such as those of spying and quantum mechanical theory in Hapgood. The manifest plenitude of Stoppard’s

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plays belies the broad patterns beneath his drama and, ultimately, the parsimony of Occam’s razor. Plenitude The only way I really work is to assemble a strange pig’s breakfast of visual images and thoughts and try to shake them into some form of coherent pattern.3 stoppard

∵ For Stoppard a visit to the theatre to see one of his plays is an event. The plenitude of Stoppard is the ‘pig’s breakfast’ to which he admits and is typically a forthright assault on the aural and visual senses; a plethora of ideas and wordplay. In most cases the subject matter is wrapped in the paraphernalia of comedy – Stoppardian audiences rarely fail to laugh, no matter that Stoppard complained in 2015 that audiences do not get his jokes any more.4 While Stoppard has been heavily influenced by other styles and literary precedents, he has crafted a distinctive a style all of his own. The allusions may be stylistic in the form of Night And Day’s Shavian format or the Wildean and Joycean homage that is Travesties. Shakespeare is repeatedly referenced, either in quotation, as in the dialogue of Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth and the title of Undiscovered Country, or, more significantly, in structure and theme, as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. While The Real Inspector Hound is indebted to both Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes and Hapgood to le Carré, Arcadia nods in the direction of Byron, Caroline Lamb and the Gothic novel. Jumpers acknowledges the debt to Beckett whilst Voyage is, in part, an evocation of the Chekhovian style which Stoppard was to adapt in full in his versions of The Cherry Orchard, Ivanov and The Seagull. Stoppard’s other adaptations invoke authors as diverse as Pirandello, Molnar, Sibleyras and Mrozek. The Invention of Love is inspired by the poetry of Housman and 3 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, “Seriousness compromised by my frivolity or… frivolity redeemed by my seriousness” in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 18. 4 Stoppard, quoted in J. Malvern, Stoppard: ‘They don’t get my jokes any more’ in The Times, 9 February 2015.

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On ‘Dover Beach’ by Arnold’s while The Dog It Was That Died is derived from reference to Goldsmith. In Indian Ink/In the Native State one glimpses EM. Forster and hears Louis MacNeice whereas New-Found-Land provides a taste of American literature and The Real Thing contains reference to Strindberg and Ford. More complex is the myriad of literary references woven into Stoppard’s texts. In order to get a full appreciation of Stoppard’s argument his audience must understand the relevance of the phrase ‘Everything can be all right’ in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour or the significance of quoting both from Virgil’s Aeneid and Theocritus at the culmination of The Invention of Love. A  more than passing knowledge of Herzen’s From the Other Shore and My Past And Thoughts will enhance an appreciation of The Coast of Utopia. Likewise, a study of Sappho’s poetry will illuminate Rock ‘N’ Roll. Conversely, appreciating what Stoppard left out of his screenplay of Anna Karenina from Tolstoy’s novel has relevance for Stoppard’s audience to his views on the source of morality. What he does not translate from Theocritus has significance for the duality contained in The Invention of Love. Who amongst Stoppard’s audience will know what Hobson-Jobson is? What is the significance of the Ithaca catechism to the wordplay of Travesties? Does it matter that Neutral Ground is based upon Philoctetes, what is the relevance of the name of Septimus’ tortoise in Arcadia and what is the link between Teeth and Roald Dahl? The maze of references extends far beyond literature. The audience really does need to understand the importance of Herzen’s reference to the Decembrists in Voyage. Whilst most of Stoppard’s audience probably understands the references in Jumpers to Captain Oates’ Antarctic sacrifice how many get the implications of the cricketing references to Bedser and Bradman? A full appreciation of the baffling briefcase switching scene which opens Hapgood requires an acquaintance with the mathematical problem of the seven bridges of Konigsberg. Similarly, it helps to know about Fermat’s last theorem in order to realise why Thomasina scribbles a margin note in Arcadia. What, indeed, is the significance of the Ginger Cat in Voyage and Salvage or ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ in The Real Thing and why does Anderson’s catastrophic reversal in Professional Foul matter? For a playwright considered by many to be short on characterisation Stoppard gives his audience a surprisingly large array of real people. The Coast of Utopia trilogy is the most obvious example, telling the saga of the Bakunins and the Herzens and their contemporaries, such as Ogarev, Turgenev and Belinsky, in nineteenth century Europe. Travesties yields Tzara, Joyce, Lenin and a consular official, Henry Carr, whilst two of his plays are based around two versions of the same poet; Housman in The Invention of Love and Arnold in On

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‘Dover Beach’. An appreciation of other plays benefits from a knowledge of real individuals: Emily Eden in Indian Ink, for example, or the inspiration for Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, the dissident Victor Fainberg, or even Galileo. Stoppard’s greatest source of abundance is, above all, the volume and variety of ideas. What he has described as ‘a fairly complicated intellectual argument’5 characterises plays which encompass the science of Chaos and Newtonian theory in Arcadia, the physics of Einstein and Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics in Hapgood and David Chalmers’ theory of consciousness in The Hard Problem. Jumpers and Darkside explore the source of moral values to which The Hard Problem attempts to apply the concept of value and against which Professional Foul provides a worked example. Stoppard is passionate about the role of art which he considers in Artist Descending a Staircase and Travesties. He gives even more extensive time to an analysis of the role of the individual within society as he addresses theories of social and political thought as diverse as those of Hegel, Schelling, Kant, Rousseau, Marx and the nineteenth century Russian intelligentsia in The Coast of Utopia, Marx again in Rock ‘N’ Roll and the ethics of empire in Indian Ink/In the Native State. This leads to a debate about the freedom of the individual, principally in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Professional Foul and the right to freedom of expression in Night And Day and Rock ‘N’ Roll and, to a lesser extent, in The Invention of Love. Not satisfied with simply evaluating what the individual may say one should not be surprised to see a man as accomplished at the manipulation of words as Stoppard is be interested in the nature of expression and write a play, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, about Wittgenstein’s theory of language. The plenitude becomes more diverse and more complex because Stoppard marries the ideas to theatricality in a test of the physical limits of the stage. His plays include such devices as a stripper on a swing, acrobats, charades, a magician and turning the stage into a snowstorm. The inaugural London production of The Coast of Utopia made extensive use of a revolving stage and video projections – Salvage alone required 56 phases.6 With music as varied as that of The Rolling Stones in Rock ‘N’ Roll, Herman’s Hermits in The Real Thing and both music hall and Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata in ­Travesties – not to mention the sound of a trumpet falling down a flight of stone stairs in

5 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin, and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the ­Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 59. 6 On the video cue sheet – see Salvage, RNT/SM/1/483 Prompt ‘Bible’ Scripts and Production Notes.

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Jumpers – his works cover the full musical panoply. His interest in art does not end there. Paintings by Duchamp, Poussin, Raphael and Magritte have all ­influenced Stoppard’s works and Shipwreck contains a tableau of Manet’s ­Dejeuner sur l’herbe. There are walk-on parts for a hare (Jumpers), a tortoise (one in Jumpers and two in Arcadia), a dog (The Invention of Love) and even a donkey (The Dog It Was That Died). And, then there is the comedy. Moon, one of the hapless critics in The Real Inspector Hound laments, ‘You’re turning it into a complete farce!’,7 which might equally well describe On the Razzle and Rough Crossing. Stoppard is home to the donnish jokes of George in Jumpers and the intellectual wit of Housman and the near pantomime humour of cheap gags, running gags, numerous double entendres, limericks and malapropisms aplenty. There are frequent examples of cross purpose and puns too numerous to mention. He proves to be capable of both satire – in his romp amongst the political classes, Dirty Linen, and his sending-up of theatre critics in The Real Inspector Hound – and parody as his pastiche of comic books in Darkside demonstrates. The plenitude can be intimidating as a Stoppardian audience often has difficulty in deciding whether to be amused, confused, educated – or all three. Patterns I’m discovering the patterns.8

bone, Another Moon Called Earth

∵ The pig’s breakfast, as Stoppard concedes, is intended to form a coherent pattern. The patterns, however, are formed not just within a particular play but across the plays which is why this book adopts a horizontal view of Stoppard’s plays and, where relevant, other works, rather than taking a play by play approach. In the process of so doing it also attempts to explain many of the key allusions and references. Rather like the premise of the Chaos Theory in Arcadia there is a pattern within the theatrical chaos of Stoppard’s plays. His craft can, broadly ­speaking, 7 The Real Inspector Hound, page 43. 8 Another Moon Called Earth, page 59.

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be summarised in three categories:9 methods – first, the stage debate and, secondly, the manner by which he integrates the vehicle of each play with the ideas they present; the dominant themes – of both ethics and duality (with a particular emphasis on illusion and reality); and, the devices – of theatricality, which despite its role in creating the froth of plenitude contains patterns of its own, and of time shifts. Stoppard acknowledges that his plays generally contain some form of stage debate – ‘I have written plays which are more in the nature of an argument between ideas, or an argument between people who have different views over a particular abstract question’.10 In virtually all cases he does not express his own opinion which leads to what looks like contradictions. As he reveals, ‘…there’s that line in Walt Whitman which, when I first came across it, rang all kinds of bells for me: “Do I contradict myself? – Very well, I contradict myself”’.11 There is rarely a message to preach. Instead, the audience, having been presented with both sides of the argument is, generally, left to make its own mind up. But, the arguments behind the ideas can be better illustrated if they are cloaked in the vestments of a vehicle which demonstrates in dramatic form the subjects under discussion. The plot of Professional Foul, for instance, hinges on a worked example of a moral dilemma that the play is exploring. The structure of Arcadia reflects the Chaos Theory that the play presents as one explanation of natural phenomena. In Hapgood the spying plot is the narrative overlaid upon a consideration of the duality inherent in quantum mechanical theory. A discussion about determinism occurs in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which is a mirror image of a Shakespearean play about destiny. Throughout most of Stoppard’s works the recurrent theme is that of duality which manifests itself structurally in the two sides of a stage debate and in the fusion of the vehicle of a Stoppard play to its underlying idea. Stoppard’s greatest metaphor for duality is that of illusion and reality. At its heart Stoppard’s world is a moral landscape which is divided in two; the on-going debate about morality is whether it is absolute or relative. It is the perspective in the latter which accounts for the difference between illusion and reality. Hence, the two great themes running through Stoppard’s plays are inextricably linked. Thus, one is presented with the ambiguity of the opening scene of The Real Thing, 9

10 11

Jim Hunter identifies three elements – brilliant language, absurd yet inspired theatrical ideas, and an intellectual frame of reference – see J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 4. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. Stoppard, in conversation with P. Wood, programme notes to 1976 production of Jumpers at the Royal National Theatre.

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with the split personalities of Elizabeth Hapgood, Herzen, Arnold and Housman and with the bilateral nature of one of Stoppard’s most frequently occurring phenomena, the play-within-a-play. For Stoppard ‘The text is a means towards an event’12 and the theatricality of the event both surrounds and enhances the intellectual content. He is producing an evening out, not a lecture, the consequence of which may be a series of coin tosses with a highly unlikely outcome or a curiously perceptive Secretary losing her garments. But, even both the comedy and theatricality can be categorised into patterns. This is especially so when considering the impact of the main literary influences on Stoppard – in particular, Shakespeare, Beckett and Chekhov. The theatricality is designed, in part, to keep the audience in their seats. Notice how a Stoppard play usually commences with an arresting opening scene. It is no accident that so many plays involve a mystery: not just a murder mystery, as in The Real Inspector Hound, but the mystery of why Anderson is going to Prague or whether there really was a second painting of Flora Crewe. The impact is both visual – ranging from boating down the Styx to a display of the night sky – and aural, such as a car chase relayed via walkietalkie radios and the beating sound of helicopter rotor blades. The theatricality can be part of the vehicle: as the Prisoner in The Gamblers puts it, ‘It’s a bit dramatic – isn’t it’.13 It is no coincidence that Jumpers, a play about moral gymnastics, contains a troupe of acrobats. The theatricality also enhances the argument. The rhymed advice that Alexander gives to Sacha in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour mimics the mnemonics Russian prisoners of conscience used. Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe is reminiscent of a scene in one of Herzen’s political essays. Much of the music performs similar roles. In Darkside Stoppard uses extracts from Pink Floyd’s music to underline points in the dialogue while in Arcadia he uses the waltz as a visual proxy for deterministic chaos. On occasions Stoppard also employs within his plays a series of time shifts which are best summed up by his own observation that, ‘It’s back and forth in time’.14 The oscillations of time permit Stoppard the luxury of revisiting or recapitulating arguments and positions or changing the perspective. Thus, in 12

13 14

Stoppard, in an interview with ­rofessors: An Interview With P Number 4, Winter 1994. The Gamblers, page 3. Stoppard, in an interview with Professors: An Interview With ­ Number 4, Winter 1994.

K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11,

K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11,

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Indian Ink/In the Native State the ethics of Empire can be debated from both the standpoint of England and India and pre- and post-colonial periods. The intellectual debate in the first act of Travesties is also enhanced by the repeated opportunities to cover the ground from slightly different perspectives. Time shifts also permit Stoppard to fuse the idea and the vehicle of his plays more tightly. The oscillations of time in Arcadia reflect the bifurcations of the Chaos process while the old and the young Housmans enable Stoppard to underline the duality of his character. That is not to say that each of his plays can be reduced to a simple formula. One will not necessarily find each theme or attribute in every play. But, at the bottom of all Stoppard’s plays, it must never be forgotten, are the voluminous and varied outpourings of a single mind and across the totality of his work there is an underlying recurrence of ideas, methods and devices which exhibit a consistency of thought. Parsimony There is no safe point around which everything takes its proper place, so that you see things flat and see how they relate to each other.15 stoppard

∵ It is the contention of this book that, in contrast to Stoppard’s statement that there is no fulcrum to his output, there is an eye in the Stoppardian theatrical vortex which appears in most of the major plays: an application of a device of parsimony known as Occam’s razor. It is a process of elimination which reduces arguments to their bare essence based upon the concept that when faced with a range of possible explanations for a complex problem or situation it is usually the simplest one which prevails. The use of the principle of parsimony removes all the Stoppardian plenitude – the fizz of the theatricality and the complexity of the intellectual ping-pong – so that the audience is left with the core of Stoppard’s argument.

15

Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, ‘Second Interview’ in R. Hayman, Tom S­ toppard, page 144.

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The effect of the process of the parsimony principle is the removal of all extraneous information and is, therefore, one of reduction to simplicity.16 It is, perhaps, most obvious in The Fifteen Minute Hamlet, Stoppard’s two-stage reduction of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to its key events. The end product of the application of parsimony is frequently a speech; often a concluding one. Carr’s semi-amnesic statement at the end of Travesties is one such example, Herzen’s argument for the chance of history at the end of Salvage is another. Nevertheless, Henry’s analysis of the essence of The Real Thing demonstrates that the key summation need not necessarily be the play’s final one. The parsimony, however, need not even be a speech. In Rock ‘N’ Roll it is a song. In Indian Ink/In the Native State it is a painting. In The Hard Problem it is an altruistic decision by Hilary. Occam’s razor may be applied in several ways and Stoppard’s works make use of the variety. Jumpers is an example of its application in a metaphysical manner to an argument. Most of the other applications are methodological – The Invention of Love, Travesties and The Coast of Utopia stand out. One of ­Stoppard’s plays, After Magritte, shows the process of parsimony in three worked examples: first, explaining an unusual situation (the opening scene) with its only possible solution; secondly, creating an unusual situation (the closing scene) out of a unique combination of actions; and, thirdly, the operation of the application of parsimony to a range of possible explanations to resolve another unusual scene all witnessed and interpreted differently by the passers-by. A similarly parsimonious solution to a conundrum of situation may be found in the dramatic vignette that is Stoppard’s co-written play, The Boundary. The process of parsimony also explains how Stoppard writes and thinks by juxtaposing what, at face value, are unlikely unions of ideas and vehicles. There is only one way they can fit together. Probably the best example is how he presents the arguments of Chaos theory and Newtonian physics against the background of a story about the supplanting of a garden built along classical principles with one of a Romantic concept. The action of Occam’s razor also accounts for how he unites the poems of Sappho and the music of Syd Barrett 16

John Fleming also emphasises Stoppard’s reduction to simplicity: ‘What is noteworthy is the manner in which Stoppard executes his ideas, the ways in which he uses metaphors to make the complex comprehensible. These intellectual ideas, which are difficult but which also have a more simple level to them, are expressed not only via artful language and complex dramatic structures but also through engaging staging elements that are as theatrically stimulating as they are entertaining’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 246.

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in Rock ‘N’ Roll or the action of brain consciousness and financial markets in The Hard Problem. Who else would have forced together the works of Joyce into the structure of a play by Wilde in a debate about whether an artist can be a revolutionary? In many cases it explains how the vehicle and the idea of a play are interwoven. By applying the principle of parsimony to the majority of Stoppard’s main plays one arrives at the concept of Occam’s razor itself. It is, therefore, with Occam’s razor that one should begin this analysis of Stoppard’s canon before examining the patterns behind the plenitude.

…

…there is a pattern, a chaotic system isn’t really random, it just looks random.17 amal, The Hard Problem

17

The Hard Problem, page 25.

chapter 1

Occam’s Razor

Occam’s Razor I think you owe us all an explanation1 foot, After Magritte

∵ If anything can be said to be the keystone in the arch of a general thesis of Stoppardianism it is Occam’s razor or, as it is otherwise known, the principle of parsimony. William of Ockham was a fourteenth century (c. 1288–13472) English Franciscan friar. In 1324 he was summoned by Pope John xxii to Avignon where he concluded, in a controversy over the concept of ‘apostolic property’ between his order and the papacy, that the Pope was in heresy. He subsequently fled Avignon in 1328 and lived for the rest of his life in Munich where he enjoyed the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor, Louis of Bavaria. During his exile in Munich he composed most of his political writings and died an excommunicant.3 He certainly did not invent the razor. Many philosophers before him discussed the idea – for instance, Aristotle, who said: ‘God and nature do nothing that is pointless’.4 However, he has given his name to the concept known as Occam’s razor.5 The razor is frequently expressed as ‘beings (or  ­entities) should not be multiplied beyond necessity’.6 In fact, there is no 1 After Magritte, page 72. 2 PV. Spade, The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, page 1. See also R. Keele, Ockham Explained From Razor To Rebellion, page 175. 3 PV. Spade, The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, page 3. 4 Aristotle, On The Heavens i.4, quoted in R. Keele, Ockham Explained From Razor To Rebellion, page 91. 5 R. Wood, ‘Ockham’s Repudiation of Pelagianism’ in PV. Spade, The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, page 358. 6 PV. Spade, ‘Ockham’s Nominalist Metaphysics: Some Main Themes’ in PV. Spade, The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, page 101.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_002

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CHAPTER 1

record that he said exactly that.7 He used other ways to express what is now considered to be equivalent to the conventionally accepted form of the razor – viz: Plurality is not to be posited without necessity.8 What can happen through fewer (principles) happens in vain through more.9 When a proposition is verified of things, more (things) are superfluous if fewer suffice.10 There are many forms of the razor, but they can be broadly classified as two kinds: methodological, which presumes to explain the correct method by which to select the most likely explanation of a problem or situation from a universe of otherwise attractive theories; and, metaphysical, which presumes to explain the metaphysical simplicity of the world.11 The principle of parsimony has a logical dual, or anti-razor: the principle of plenitude, which is the razor in its reciprocal form. Ockham and his razor is a philosophical subject in its own right and commentators, rightly, insist upon very precise definitions. However, in common parlance the French spelling of Occam seems to be more commonly used and the idea that one should prefer the simplest explanation to a variety of possible explanations of a puzzle (ie: the methodological razor) seems to be the most common – if, technically, semantically and philosophically incorrect – understanding of the principle of parsimony.12 William’s concept has been applied variously throughout history to aspects of science, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, religion, philosophy and pro­ bability theory. Interestingly, a number of individuals who have concerned themselves with Occam’s razor have also been of interest to Stoppard: Richard Feynman (in his consideration of quantum mechanics);13 Isaac Newton, who stated that, ‘We are to admit to no more causes of natural things than such as

7

8 9 10 11 12 13

See reference to A. Maurer, ‘Ockham’s Razor and Chatton’s Anti-Razor’ in Mediaeval Studies, 46, 463–475 1984 quoted in in PV. Spade, The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, pages 101 and 113. William of Ockham, i Libros Sententiarum i, Prol I/I.30.2 and Quodlibeta septem VI.10. William of Ockham, i Libros Sententiarum i, Prol I.17.3/I.26.1/I26.2/II.12–13. William of Ockham, Quodlibeta septem, VII.8. See R. Keele, Ockham Explained From Razor To Rebellion, page 92 for an explanation of these classifications. See R. Keele, Ockham Explained From Razor To Rebellion, especially Chapter 5. I. Duck and ECG. Sudarshan, 100 Years of Planck’s Quantum, page 472 – ‘Feynman solved (a) problem by application of Occam’s razor’.

3

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are both true and sufficient to explain their differences’;14 and, Galileo, who represented the principle in his Dialogue: ‘Nature does not multiply things unnecessarily’.15 In essence, Occam’s razor can be reduced to the idea that ‘other things being equal – the simplest hypothesis proposed as an explanation of phenomena is more likely to be the true one than is any other available hypothesis’.16

Stoppard and Occam’s Razor Occam’s razor is a good instinct.17 stoppard

∵ In so far as it is a process which reduces an entity to its bare essence the application of the principle of parsimony is not dissimilar to the way Shakespeare takes the person of King Lear and reduces him to his quintessential self: Is man no more than this? Consider him well.…Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.18 What Shakespeare does to the human entity is largely what Stoppard does to ideas or arguments or complex issues in his plays – except that in Stoppard’s case the process rarely takes either a linear or direct form. The very nature of his plays, in which his ideas and arguments are usually intricately interwoven into the vehicles of his plays, coupled with dramatic devices such as chaotic theatricality, time shifts and a view of a subject which often comes from an unusual perspective precludes such an easy application of the principle

14 Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, vol ii, page 202. 15 Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, page 397. 16 R. Swinburne, Simplicity As Evidence of Truth, page 1. 17 Stoppard, in an interview with W. Mortimer, in the programme of the 2015 production of Hapgood at the Hampstead Theatre. 18 King Lear, Act iii, scene iv, lines 97–102.

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of parsimony.19 With Stoppard the process can often work in reverse, too – building the puzzle up rather than resolving it. In Stoppard’s plays both the playwright and his audience have to do a lot of work.20 Stoppard is well aware of Occam’s razor and the impact it has on his work. In an interview with Nigel Farndale in 2010 he said, ‘I’m not a theoretician about playwriting but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched, the scene, the line, the word, at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It’s like Occam’s razor’.21 This is not the first time Stoppard has expounded such a view or, at least, something which is clearly closely derived from an interpretation of Occam’s razor. Shortly after The Real Thing was first performed, in 1982, Stoppard was interviewed by Brian Firth and the interview was published in a literary magazine, Strawberry Fare.22 Stoppard was quoted as saying, ‘What sophistication I pretend to usually takes the form of resolving various complex versions of the world and arriving at a really simple view of the world’.23 Only a few years afterwards, during rehearsals for Hapgood he recognised how the problem in the work of others related to that of his own: ‘I watched a documentary about Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of dna – the double helix. There was only one way all the information they had could fit but they couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt the same (about rewriting part of Hapgood)’.24 This theme is similarly reflected in

19

20

21 22 23 24

Kenneth Tynan summarised the issue with his comment that, ‘Simplicity of thought … quite often underlies complexity of style’. – K. Tynan, Withdrawing with Style from Chaos. John Fleming makes a similar point about simplicity, but juxtaposed against the overall play rather than Stoppard’s style: ‘While Stoppard’s plays are known for their complexity, their fundamental theses are often rather simple’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 245. Stoppard’s expectations of his audience reflect what he admires in Hemingway. He said, in ‘Reflections on Ernest Hemingway’, page 4, that ‘It seems to me that Hemingway’s achievement whether calculated or instinctive, was to get his effects by making the reader do the work’. Stoppard, in an interview with N. Farndale, The Telegraph, 19 January 2010. Stoppard, in an ‘Interview with Brian Firth’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 8. Stoppard, in an ‘Interview with Brian Firth’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 10. Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater vii’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 178. W. Demastes notices the same point – see Theatre Of Chaos, page 42.

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Stoppard’s article on James Thurber in which he refers to what he calls Thurber’s speciality – ‘the fantasy with the logical explanation’.25 The application of the parsimony principle is not visible in every play that has been formed by Stoppard’s mind and this book both acknowledges that observation and does not seek to retrofit a theory which does not apply onto every one of Stoppard’s works. Moreover, Stoppard’s canon contains a large number of adaptations of other playwright’s works and searching for evidence of parsimony in those works where Stoppard is not the originator of the play garners very thin pickings. Nevertheless, in very nearly all of the major stage plays and in many of his other works there is noticeable evidence of the application of the form of reduction credited to Occam, either in terms of a play’s structure or its argument. Intriguingly, even Stoppard’s normal method of writing a play seems to conform to a process which is analogous to the application of the razor.

Occam’s Razor Applied Structurally

Occam’s razor was present in Stoppard’s thinking right in the earliest days of his playwriting. When he was interviewed by Mel Gussow in April 1972 Stoppard was asked about the genesis of After Magritte. He responded, ‘I went to see a man who had two peacocks.26 They tend to run away. He was shaving one morning and he looked out the window and saw a peacock leap over the hedge into the road. Expensive animals, peacocks, so he threw down his razor and ran out and caught the peacock and brought it back home. I had been looking for a short piece and I had some vague idea of what I wanted to do. I didn’t write about the man or the peacock but about two people who just go by, and, boom, they see this man in his pyjamas, with bare feet, shaving foam on his face, carrying a peacock. They see this man for five-eighths of a second – and that’s what I write about’.27

25

26 27

J. Fleming, ‘Tom Stoppard: A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man’, in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 40 (quoted from Stoppard, ‘Double Focus’, page 8). See P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of The Major Plays, note 21, page 162 for an analysis of the various versions of the peacock story. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 7.

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It was actually in Jumpers that Stoppard did just that. The stage directions for the moment when George opens the door to Bones, the policeman, read thus: The door is opened to him by a man holding a bow-and-arrow in one hand and a tortoise in the other, his face covered in shaving foam. BONES recoils from the spectacle…28 It is Bones’ perspective that matters.29 It is worth noting, in the context of Occam’s razor, that just as Stoppard looks at situations from an unusual perspective30 and unravels them so, in a similar vein, he also presents situations based around their less obvious participants and builds up a narrative which, complicated because of its unexpected perspective, also requires explanation. Michael Coveney noticed the point: The elevation of footnotes in cultural history is all part of Stoppard’s humanist instinct as a writer. He installs pride in people’s identity, moves them centre stage, be they Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,31 or the minor­ 28 29

30

31

Jumpers, page 43. Stoppard sees this ‘trick’ (as he refers to it) repeating in his work, although his interest appears to be in its dramatic effect. ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is about Hamlet as seen by two people driving past Elsinore. It’s a favourite thing of mine: the idea of an absolutely bizarre image which has a total rationale to it being seen by different people. And everybody is absolutely certain about what they see. There are tiny bits of that in Jumpers: a man carrying a tortoise in one hand and a bow and arrow in the other, his face covered in shaving foam. A trick I enjoy very much is when, bit by bit, you build up something ludicrous – and then someone walks in’ – Stoppard, in an interview with M. G ­ ussow, ‘Writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, pages 7–8. Michael Billington comments on Travesties, ‘What is significant is Stoppard’s delight – as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – in glimpsing major events from the sidelong perspective of someone only marginally involved with them’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 98. Anthony Jenkins also comments on Stoppard’s alternative sense of perception: ‘Stoppard does share a kinship with (Magritte). Both of them question the nature of perception’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 56. Irving Wardle’s review of the first production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by the Royal National Theatre in 1967 underlines Coveney’s point: ‘From the labyrinthine picture of Elsinore Mr Stoppard has blown up a single detail and wrenched enough material from it to create a drama’. – The Times, 12 April 1967. H. Sudkamp also observes the point in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: ‘Stoppard exchanges periphery and ­centre’. – Tom Stoppard’s Biographical Drama, page 329.

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British consular official Henry Carr in Travesties, or Flora Crewe who apparently just failed to sit for Modigliani, or poor old insignificant and cuckolded Ezra Chater.32 Perhaps that is what interested Stoppard in adapting a book to the screenplay of Empire of the Sun in which the story of the Japanese invasion of China in World War ii is seen through the eyes of a small boy, Jamie Graham. Stoppard’s linking narrative for the Glyndebourne Opera’s production of a concert version of The Merry Widow provides an insight into Stoppard’s approach. The traditional libretto struck him, according to Michael Billington as ‘both convoluted and illogical’.33 Stoppard continues: Initially there was a suggestion of making Baron Zeta, the head of the Pontevedrian legation in Paris, the narrator of events. But that wouldn’t work since the story depends on the Baron’s belief that his wife is carrying on an illicit affaire with a young officer – Zeta gets it all wrong but you can’t have a narrator who is both deluded and apparently omniscient at the same time.34 Billington explains: ‘The answer, Stoppard decided, was to make Njegus, an embassy secretary who has a marginal part in the action, the on-stage narrator’.35 Stoppard adds, ‘We’ll see Njegus talking about past events in which he imagines he is the principal player and everyone else is secondary: he believes he is the centre of a drama called The Confidential Secretary in which the Merry Widow constantly got in the way’.36 If all this sounds very familiar to the audience of Travesties it is because, as Stoppard admits, it is. ‘It doesn’t take too sharp an eye’, he concedes, ‘to spot that it’s very like my own play, Travesties, in which Henry Carr, who was a minor consular official in Zurich in 1917, saw Lenin, Joyce and Tristan Tzara as incidental to his personal story’.37 32 33 34 35 36 37

M. Coveney, in The Observer 18 April 1993. M. Billington, ‘Prima Le Parole?’ in the Glyndebourne Festival Opera programme 1993, page 65. Stoppard, in an interview with Billington, M – quoted in ‘Prima Le Parole?’ in the Glyndebourne Festival Opera programme 1993, page 65. M. Billington, ‘Prima Le Parole?’ in the Glyndebourne Festival Opera programme 1993, page 65. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Billington, quoted in ‘Prima Le Parole?’ in the Glyndebourne Festival Opera programme 1993, page 65. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Billington, quoted in ‘Prima Le Parole?’ in the Glyndebourne Festival Opera programme 1993, page 65.

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After Magritte is a triple version of the Occam’s razor principle – that in a complicated situation or argument, of all the plethora of possible explanations that could exist it is the simplest that is the most likely to satisfy.38 It offers a tantalising insight into the way Stoppard’s mind works as he demonstrates in the play Occam’s principle: both backward looking (its usual form) and forward looking (in the act of construction) and in the act of operation. The opening scene39 requires a most precise set of stage directions to set up a surreal scene in a room, with furniture piled up against the front door, in which a woman in a ball gown is crawling around on the floor, a man in fishing waders and black evening dress trousers is blowing into a lampshade which is suspended on a rope counterbalanced by a bowl of fruit and an old lady is lying on her back on an ironing board. A policeman is gaping at the scene through a window. Both he and the audience are effectively invited to come up with an explanation for the scene; in other words, to apply Occam’s razor retrospectively to come up with the most plausible answer.40 The audience is in the same position as 38

39 40

Michael Billington gets very close to the concept of Occam’s razor when he writes, ‘Stoppard’s After Magritte is based on a straightforward proposition: that behind the most bizarre, unlikely, surreal image there is often a logical explanation’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 77. Jeffrey Mason describes After Magritte as, ‘an apparent chaos which finally submits to the tidy explanations that we all cherish but which Stoppard knows are impossible’. – J. Mason, ‘Footprints to the Moon: Detectives as Suspects in Hound and Magritte’ in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook, page 118. Anthony Jenkins ascribes Stoppard’s inspiration for this scene to Magritte’s L’Assassin menace – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 55. John Bull notices the structure of the tableau but sees in it a paradigm for another Stoppardian trait – the fusion of unlikely themes: ‘Detective Inspector Foot seeks to explain the opening tableau, announcing a series of increasingly bizarre theories that are capped only by the real explanation. What is here used playfully, elsewhere in Stoppard’s work takes on more serious dimensions.…From Stoppard’s very earliest work, audiences were drawn into worlds that declared themselves as rationally coherent, even as the events of the plays set out to demolish the evidence. This dualistic structuring is reflected in the way in which Stoppard balances and opposes thematic material in his plays: classicism and romanticism; imagination and science; free-will and determinism; and so on’. – J. Bull, ‘Tom Stoppard and politics’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 136. CWE. Bigsby remarks upon Stoppard’s resolution of seemingly bizarre scenes in both After Magritte and Jumpers: ‘The apparent absurdity of the opening scene (of Jumpers) during which a stripper flies across the stage on a trapeze, Dotty flounders her way through a bewildering melody of “moon” songs, and the yellow uniformed gymnasts perform their feats until the death of one of their number precipitates an abrupt end, resembles the bizarre opening of After Magritte. Indeed, as in that play, these impossibly incongruous elements are shown to be capable of a perfectly rational explanation; but whereas in the earlier work Stoppard was largely content with his

Occam’s Razor

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Bones or the two people who saw the man holding the peacock. Entirely in keeping with the principle of Occam’s razor, of the many possible answers to display of ingenuity, here the unravelling of confusions is endemic to the style and purpose of the play’s protagonist’. – CWE. Bigsby, Tom Stoppard, page 23. Daniel Jernigan has noticed the same Stoppardian trait but applies it to his contention that, ‘Stoppard’s career is dominated by a commitment to “Bucking the Postmodern”, to critiquing and rejecting postmodern attitudes at every turn.…(It) has followed a trajectory that runs counter to that of the 20th century generally, moving in turn from the postmodernism of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) to the modernism of The Real Thing (1984) to the realism of The Coast of Utopia (2002) and Rock “N” Roll (2002)’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 1. Jernigan deduces from the resolution of the puzzles of the Magrittean tableaux in After Magritte part of his argument for Stoppard defying postmodernity and ascribes to it the resolution of conflicting local perspectives with universal ones – eg: ‘(Stoppard’s) tendency to discredit locally held beliefs in favour of more universally shared ones helps to explain a number of similar nonsensical images found throughout the play’. (op cit, page 41). Jernigan appears to suggest that what I call one of Stoppard’s methods of applying Occam’s razor is what he calls the empirical method – eg: ‘Stoppard’s response to a Magrittean perspective of the world is to make sense of it, as each of the various visual anomalies is made sense of within the context of a larger narrative…After Magritte doesn’t just privilege coherence, but also privileges the idea that the empirical method helps to yield such coherence (and…the empirical method is privileged time and again during Stoppard’s career)’. (op cit, page 32). Whilst Jernigan is correct in noticing that Stoppard repeats this technique his interpretation fails to recognise that the technique Stoppard is employing throughout many of his plays is the application of Occam’s razor to resolve complex questions to their simplest, and most satisfactory, solutions. ‘Stoppard strives to instill a homogeneity of thought. Everyone in the audience is to agree that Inspector Foot was the impetus behind the strange scene witnessed by Thelma and Harris. Everyone in the audience is also to agree that the opening and closing Magrittean images can be rationally explained. Thus, Stoppard doesn’t encourage the factional disagreement that…is the very mark of the postmodern era and is part and parcel of the proliferation of local narratives. Rather after Magritte has left the building, Stoppard steps in to encourage his audience to leave the theatre with epistemological and ontological attitudes that are so steeped in empiricism that they actually defy postmodernity. According to this reading, After Magritte becomes a veritable guidebook, designed to help people see through heterotopias in such a way that they can make sense of them according to more traditional and epistemological and ontological perspectives.…this theatrical technique will show up again in Stoppard’s work, in Jumpers, but even more tellingly in Arcadia and Indian Ink, as situations that, on their surface entail empirical conundrums resolve themselves in such a way that epistemological stability is maintained’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, pages 41–42. Jernigan also refers to the process of the empirical method as ‘normalization’. (eg: see op cit, pages 32, 42, 164 (Jernigan cites the penknife incident in Voyage as an example of Stoppard’s normalization process) and 171 (the Dejeuner sur l’herbe tableau in Shipwreck)).

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the puzzle the correct one is of ‘a mundane and domestic nature bordering on a cliché’.41 The man, Harris, and his wife, Thelma, are about to go ballroom dancing. The light has just blown and Harris is attempting to replace it whilst insulating himself from possible shock by wearing the nearest rubber insulation he has to hand. The counterweight to the light, a porcelain bowl containing 150 lead slugs from a .22 calibre pistol, has cracked necessitating a replacement weight – the fruit bowl which was to hand – and Thelma is crawling around on the floor, having moved the furniture out of the way, trying to collect the spilt slugs. Meanwhile, Harris’ mother, who is staying with them, has been receiving massage on her troublesome back on the most convenient flat surface which could be found, the ironing board on which Thelma was about to iron Harris’ dress shirt. Of course, one tableau puzzle was never going to be enough for Stoppard and After Magritte delivers two more. The second puzzle demonstrates Occam’s principle in action and concerns the reason why the policeman has turned up at Harris’ house in the first place; a suspicion that his car was used in the getaway of a robbery. After Thelma and Harris have taken his mother to a Magritte exhibition all three of them see a one legged man in the street, wearing a striped shirt, carrying something and holding a stick, as they are driving away. This time Stoppard produces the confusion of possible explanations of the scene they see. Thelma believes she saw a bearded, one legged footballer in a striped football shirt carrying a football and an ivory cane. To Harris he was an old man with a white beard, dressed in pyjamas, carrying a tortoise and a white stick. Harris’ mother provides a third version: she believes it was a man wearing a prisoner’s uniform carrying a handbag and a cricket bat, playing hopscotch. Then Stoppard applies Occam’s razor and delivers the answer. The man is none other than Inspector Foot who had overslept and did not want to get a parking ticket. With a migraine overcoming him as he was half way through shaving he had pulled up his pyjamas in a hurry (putting both feet into the same leg), grabbing his wife’s handbag (which contained change for the parking meter) and her parasol to keep off the rain. Stoppard finishes the play by showing Occam’s razor in reverse – the forward looking creation of the puzzle. As events in the play proceed Stoppard develops – piece by piece, over a period of time and not always in such a way that the ultimate significance of a particular action is obvious – the 41

After Magritte, page 70.

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11

constituent parts of the final tableau: Harris is trying to prove a point by demonstrating that a blind man can balance on one leg; Foot dons his sunglasses because of a migraine, having taken his sock off to enable a hot bulb to be held as it is changed, and eats a banana, on Mother’s advice, as it is good for headaches; the tuba playing Mother is trying to change the light bulb, using the chair and table to reach, whilst trying to avoid standing on one of her feet which she earlier burnt (on an iron); Thelma searches on the floor for a needle she has dropped, having removed her dress to adjust the hem. As the lightbulb is changed the set goes dark until the light is switched back on. The closing image the audience is left with is of Inspector Foot, in dark glasses, with one sock off, eating a banana, Harris ‘gowned, blindfolded with a cushion over his head, arms outstretched, on one leg, counting’,42 Thelma crawling around the floor in her underwear and Harris’ mother standing on one foot, on a chair placed on a table, with a sock on one hand and playing the tuba. All the while the lampshade is slowly descending (because Foot has removed the banana from the counterweight). As Harris has noted earlier, encapsulating the application of Occam’s razor, ‘There is obviously a perfectly logical reason for everything’.43 The process by which Stoppard creates problems and then resolves them in a method that adapts the principle of parsimony is, to some extent, a self-­ conscious one. In a comment concerning the origin of Artist Descending a Staircase Stoppard reveals the internal creative and intellectual process by which he creates the puzzle and then reveals the answer using Occam’s razor: I had this thought about this tape gag where we play a tape at the beginning and 75 minutes later we’d peg it off by showing that the whole thing had been, as it were, misinterpreted. So there was the need for 74 minutes of padding or brilliant improvisation, if you like, or very carefully structured and meticulously built-up plot. A bit of all that. And bit by bit you assemble things which you drag out without really inspecting them for their resonance or what they speak of one’s own predilections. In other words the question perhaps assumes a much more self-conscious process than I’m aware of when I write.44

42 43 44

After Magritte, page 72. After Magritte, page 63. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Mayne, ‘Arts Commentary’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 36.

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Artist Descending a Staircase begins with playing of a recording of a sequence of events which appear to record the death of an artist called Donner: We hear, on a continuous loop of tape, a sequence of sounds which is to be interpreted by MARTELLO and BEAUCHAMP thus: (a) DONNER dozing: an irregular droning noise. (b) Careful footsteps approach. The effect is stealthy. A board creeks. (c) This wakes DONNER, i.e. the droning stops in mid-beat. (d) The footsteps freeze. (e) DONNER’s voice, unalarmed: ‘Ah! There you are…’ (f) Two more quick steps, and then Thump! (g) DONNER cries out. (h) Wood cracks as he falls through a balustrade. (i) He falls heavily down the stairs, with a final sickening thump when he hits the bottom. Silence.45 The two listening participants – and the audience – reasonably conclude that Donner, confronted by someone he knows is hit, falls as a consequence and dies at the bottom of some stairs. The subsequent behaviour of and comments by Martello and Beauchamp in the immediate aftermath of hearing the recording and two flashbacks to a couple of hours ago and last week merely serve to fuel the suspicion that one or other of the two remaining artists is the murderer. ‘I’m going to get the police’,46 says Beauchamp. Martello retorts, ‘…you, however wrongly and for whatever reason, came to grips with life at least this once, and killed Donner’.47 The audience is left to choose between the two of them: Martello: I came home to find Donner dead, and you at the top of the stairs, fiddling with your tape recorder. It is quite clear that I arrived just in time to stop you wiping out the evidence. Beauchamp: But it was I who came home and found Donner dead – with your footsteps on the machine. My first thought was to preserve any evidence it had picked up.48 74 minutes later, as Stoppard puts it – after the audience has heard the story of how the three friends met a blind girl called Sophie, fell for her and she for one of them, suffered the anguish of her death and lived out their lives 45 46 47 48

Artist, page 113. Artist, page 115. Artist, page 116. Artist, page 118.

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as artists creating ever more outré examples of modern art and defending its merits – one gets the resolution of the puzzle. The clue to the method is part of the process of applying Occam’s razor: ‘Let’s try looking at it backwards’,49 suggests Beauchamp. Naturally, Martello and Beauchamp still get it all wrong. The answer is, when all other extraneous bits of information and detail has been stripped away, the only one that fits the circumstances. Donner had fallen over in the act of trying to swat a fly, which is revealed at the end of the play as Beauchamp goes through the same process – without the fatal ending – all of which is recorded on his loop tape: Beauchamp: Hang on… (Fly) That fly has been driving me mad. Where is he? Martello: Somewhere over there... Beauchamp: Right The original loop of TAPE is hereby reproduced: (a) Fly Droning (b) Careful footsteps approach. A board creaks. (c) The fly settles. (d) BEAUCHAMP halts. (e) BEAUCHAMP: ‘Ah! There you are’. (f) Two more quick steps and then: Thump! Beauchamp: Got him!50 There is a small example of the structural use of the razor in The Boundary, a short television play whose authorship is credited to Stoppard and Clive Exton51 but which, nevertheless, exhibits many facets of Stoppard’s style. The play begins with a scene of chaos in a lexicographer’s library which two characters, Johnson and Bunyans, are using to compile a dictionary and where Johnson’s wife, Brenda – Stoppard’s greatest exponent of the malapropism – is acting as their secretary: The room is cluttered with the paraphernalia of the life work of our heroes. Paper is everywhere but the disorder seems exaggerated; in fact, chaos reigns. It seems that the place has been turned over. There are piles 49 50 51

Artist, page 155. Artist, page 156. Exton’s obituary in The Telegraph of 20 August 2007 refers to Exton’s ‘love of precision in language and his understanding of how people express themselves, as well as his ability to spin out and knit together plotlines from often scanty material’.

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of paper on the floor and over the furniture, beneath which are hidden a television set, a telescope on a tripod, a telephone, a typewriter and a woman. Against the door is a drift of paper like a snowdrift. Through the French windows we see a cricketer who figures intermittently throughout the play as a white flannelled sentinel. A pane of glass in the French window is broken.52 The scene is virtually begging for an explanation which, like Artist Descending a Staircase, comes right at the end and is described thus: Johnson: We entered and found you (Brenda) lying under the papers. The whole place was in chaos. Brenda: It was perfectly tidy when I entered this room in search of the crampon (= crumpet – one of Brenda’s malapropisms) which I recalled leaving half-finished with my elevenses. Ah, I remember now. I stood on the bookshelf. (She moves towards the bookshelf) I took one pace towards it and suddenly… There is a crash of breaking glass  All three heads jerk towards the French window; there is now a second broken pane and Brenda is lying on the floor as the ball rolls to a stop. … The cricketer from before is opening the window  Immediately there is a noise of wind, and papers begin blowing everywhere as in a snowstorm  The cricketer has, meanwhile, walked into the room and picked up the ball with a furtive look at the chaos he has ( for the second time) unwittingly caused He leaves the room by the window, which he closes behind him53 Once again, the simplest explanation prevails. The varied application of ­ ccam’s razor can be seen in many of Stoppard’s other plays. The semi-­ O conscious dramatic construction – both of the structure and the ideas and the arguments of a play – using the parsimony principle in one form or another is rarely far away from Stoppard’s intellectual process. It is part of the way Stoppard’s mind works.

52 53

The Boundary, page 1. The Boundary, page 18.

Occam’s Razor



15

Occam’s Razor Applied to Writing

Stoppard employs an aspect of the Occam’s razor process when he writes his plays – because his plays are based on ideas and, more often than not, the juxtaposition or combination of ideas that are not normally associated with each other.54 What other playwright would write a play linking the poems of Sappho, the human rights referred to in Charter 77 and the music of Syd Barrett, as Stoppard does in Rock ‘N’ Roll, or the works of James Joyce, Lenin, Tristan Tzara and Oscar Wilde, as he does in Travesties? Perhaps the most extreme combination of all is the yoking together of financial markets and consciousness in The Hard Problem. Stoppard’s ability to find links between disparate themes as the basis of his plays is one of the distinguishing features of Stoppardianism and what marks him out as an original thinker in his own right, not just a regurgitator of the ideas of others. In order to understand how and why Occam’s razor is applied to Stoppard’s method of writing his plays it is necessary to understand the process by which he creates his works. In almost all cases he begins with an idea, not a plot or any idea of characters. He explains that, ‘Arcadia started with no situation, no characters, no story. Its true origin was just out of nowhere – the notion that romanticism and classicism were interesting concepts that would revolve around the playing between two different kinds of temperament’.55 The situation and the characters are a matter for the future. For instance, Stoppard believes that he began Travesties before he was aware of Henry Carr: ‘You see’, he recalls, ‘I think I knew I was going to deal with Dada and to deal with Joyce, and I think I was putting this together. And while I was reading this and reading that, I came across Henry Carr, and that became a new way of using Joyce and Dada’.56 Instead, Stoppard sees what he refers to as potential: ‘The subject matter of the play exists before the story and it is always something abstract. I get interested by a notion of some kind and see that it has dramatic possibilities. Gradually I see how a pure idea can be married with a dramatic event. But it 54

55

56

Jim Hunter refers to ‘absurd juxtapositions, cleverly rationalised’ as Stoppard’s ‘stock-intrade’ in his works up to and including Travesties – see J. Hunter, J, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 65. Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994. Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994.

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is still not a play until you invent a plausible narrative. Sometimes this is not too hard – The Real Thing was fairly straightforward. For Hapgood, the thing I wanted to write about seemed to suit the form of an espionage thriller. It’s not the sort of thing I read or write’.57 He goes on, ‘I am not a mathematician but I was aware that for centuries mathematics was considered the queen of sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties – axioms – which led to others. But then, in a sense, it all started to go wrong, with concepts like non-Euclidean geometry – I mean, looking at it from Euclid’s point of view. The mathematics of physics turned out to be grounded on uncertainties, on probability and chance. And if you’re me, you think – there’s a play in that’.58 The particular significance of Stoppard is that his potential lies, more often than not, in the combination of ideas around a central theme. ‘When ideas combine’, he says, ‘then it begins to feel like the possibility of a play’.59 Sometimes the combination is purely fortuitous – for example James Joyce’s second name is Augustine (mistakenly registered as Augusta) while his Wildean counterpart in Travesties is Lady Augusta Bracknell.60 Trevor Nunn also provides some insight into Stoppard’s process of seemingly unnatural adjacency: I asked Tom…how did he arrive at such unexpected juxtapositions of ideas.61 His reply was, I thought, very revealing. “I begin the play I think I want to write. And then quite early on in the process, I discover that there is a quite different play I want to write, about a different set of ideas. So I write both of them and I allow them to collide – or even smash into each other like two trains meeting head on”. So I think often the structure of his work, which is seemingly fragmented and very rarely linear, arises out of his delight in creating controlled accidents. The wreckage spreads far 57 58 59 60

61

Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater vii’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 179. Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater vii’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 179. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Twisk, ‘Stoppard Basks in a Late Indian Summer’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 254. ‘The figure of Joyce seems to correspond to Lady Bracknell who is Lady Augusta. Joyce’s middle name was Augustus and through a clerical error he was registered at birth under the name James Augusta Joyce’. – Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘What is your greatest superstition?’ ‘It’s bad luck to talk about it’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 30. Richard Corballis argues for a different kind of juxtaposition in Stoppard: ‘the juxtaposition of “mystery” and “clockwork”’. – see R. Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork (for example, page 17).

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and wide and he discovers altogether unpredictable juxtapositions, relationships, reflections and contrasts between all the pieces, as they land.62 Stoppard accepts that the process of combining what are prima facie disparate ideas is one which is unnatural and requires force: ‘I think all my plays are defective to one degree or another…They are so because what I’m doing is forcing something that isn’t quite natural.63 What Johnson says about metaphysical conceits, you know – yoking together by violence. There’s quite a lot of that going on’.64 What Stoppard is referring to is Johnson’s Life of Cowley in which Johnson contends that in the works of the metaphysical poets, ‘The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises’.65 Stoppard uses Arcadia as a way of explaining how his writing process incorporates the application of Occam’s razor to a seemingly unlikely union of ideas, in this case linking the concepts of classicism and romanticism, Newtonian science and Chaos Theory and the changing nature of landscape gardening. Chaos is very interesting, he says, but unfortunately I’m a playwright, so how can I force my interest in chaos to become part of what I do? So, I was looking for ways of seeing chaos as a metaphor for some human activity or social organisation. And that was a thought which was quite separate from and much earlier than the thought I had about the classical and romantic temperaments. So I wasn’t thinking that this was all part of that play. On the contrary, as far as anything happening, I forced these things together.66

62 63

64

65 66

T. Nunn in J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 209. Stoppard’s description of Travesties is instructive in that he refers to a collision: ‘Travesties is a work of fiction which makes use, and misuse, of history.…People who were hardly aware of each other are made to collide’. – Stoppard, ‘Lenin, Joyce, Tzara and Henry Carr’ in the programme notes to the 1974 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Travesties at the Aldwych Theatre, London. Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994. S. Johnson, ‘The Life of Cowley’, 56, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G.B. Hill, 3 vols. ­(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905). Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994.

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But, the process of forcing must arrive at a form of combination of the ideas which is the only way possible for them to be understandable together. In other words, Stoppard’s creative process employs a form of Occam’s razor which he describes with reference to an account of how dna was discovered. I often think in terms of a novel form – there’s that book The Double Helix67 – they know what the components are, they have to fit together in a way that makes sense. It has its elegance. They have to figure out how to fit it all together when suddenly out of nowhere came the notion that if you put the spine down the middle and two strands winding around it, that then nothing was missing. It was the only possible formation for the components which they had to include. And I think that writing is often like that. You have the components and you want them in there and you’re looking for this only possible structure so that you can make use of all the components you want to be there – assemble them in a way which is comprehensible.68 The process is highly applicable to the act of writing for the theatre because of the drama of revelation, often at the finale. Stoppard continues to explain: Just metaphorically, I was reminded rather forcibly by the few pages of the book because one of the elements revealed is that you seem as far away as ever from the solution just prior to the instant of discovery.69 At its heart is an ambush for the audience. Stoppard relates how this applies to After Magritte: A succession of barely explicable, small domestic events occur and furthermore the conversation is largely about some equally inexplicable events witnessed in the past. And it is all to do with using what you call the well made play bit – because I think theatre ought to be a series of

67 68

69

JD. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of dna. Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994. Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994.

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ambushes and you can’t sort of ambush anybody by just sort of laying about in all directions.70 The process is reflected both in the structure of his plays – so that, for example, Magnus reveals how he comes to be the real Inspector Hound just before the curtain falls – and in the argument of his plays – such as when aeh arrives at his summary of Oxford’s emotional storm in a tiny teacup at the end of The Invention of Love or when Herzen concludes Salvage with his speech on the nature of history.

Occam’s Razor Applied to an Argument – Metaphysical

George Moore’s case for the existence of God in Jumpers is an outstanding example of the metaphysical razor. Not only does it fulfil Rondo Keele’s criterion that such a razor should ‘make a claim about the nature of the world’,71 but it also contains supporting evidence for Keele’s suggestion that, ‘generally… a  metaphysical razor strongly suggests (or even perhaps entails) the corresponding methodological razor’.72 In Jumpers Stoppard effectively uses Occam’s razor as a tool to distil the ‘hardy perennial’73 argument about whether God exists into two fundamental aspects: God’s role as Creator; and, God’s role as the source of morality. George, a Professor of Moral Philosophy, is in the process of writing a paper, entitled ‘Is God?’, to be given at a symposium on the subject of ‘Man – good, bad or indifferent?’. As he himself admits, ‘to attempt to sustain the attention of rival schools of academics by argument alone is tantamount to constructing a Gothic arch out of junket’.74 Stoppard, through George, sets up the complexity of the problem: To begin at the beginning: Is God? (Pause.) I prefer to put the question in this form because to ask, ‘Does God exist?’ appears to presuppose the existence of a God who may not…but until the difficulty is pointed out it does not have the same propensity to confuse language with meaning 70 71 72 73 74

Stoppard, in an interview with JR. Taylor, ‘Our Changing Theatre, No. 3: Changes in Writing’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 27. R. Keele, Ockham Explained From Razor To Rebellion, page 92. R. Keele, Ockham Explained From Razor To Rebellion, page 92. Jumpers, page 27. Jumpers, page 27.

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and to conjure up a God who may have any number of predicates including omniscience, perfection and four-wheel drive but not, as it happens, existence.75 It is a confusion which ‘began with Plato and was not ended by Bertrand Russell’s theory that existence could only be asserted of descriptions and not of individuals…’.76 But, as if one is not confused enough already, Stoppard has George add, A small number of men, by the exercise of their intellects and by the study of the works both of nature and of other intellects before them, have been able to argue coherently against the existence of God. A much larger number of men, by the existence of their emotional and psychological states, have affirmed that this is the correct view.77 The argument about whether God exists is threatening to become a moral maze. In order to enable centuries’ worth of debate to be refined into the material for a play Stoppard applies Occam’s razor in a metaphysical way: I sometimes wonder whether the question ought not to be, ‘Are God?’ Because it is to account for two quite unconnected mysteries that the human mind looks beyond humanity and it is two of him that philosophy obligingly provides. There is, first, the God of Creation to account for existence, and, second, the God of Goodness to account for moral values.78 Having identified a duality Stoppard, then, takes each theme separately, be­ ginning through George: Putting aside the God of Goodness, to whom we will return, and taking first the God of Creation – or to give him his chief philosophical raison d’etre, the First Cause – we see that a supernatural or divine origin is the 75 Jumpers, page 24. 76 Jumpers, page 24. 77 Jumpers, page 25. 78 Jumpers, pages 25–26. See R. Dworkin, Religion Without God, Chapter i : ‘There is no direct bridge from any story about the creation of the firmament, or the heavens or the earth, or the animals of the sea and the land, or the delights of Heaven, or the fires of Hell, or the parting of any sea or the raising of any dead, to the enduring value of friendship and family or the importance of charity or the sublimity of a sunset or the appropriateness of awe in the face of the universe or even a duty of reverence for a creator god’.

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21

logical consequence of the assumption that one thing leads to another, and that this series must have had a first term…79 George canters around a whole paddock of mathematical arguments about series, including references to chickens and eggs, dominoes and arrows in flight. Not surprisingly, the debate gets rather complicated and Stoppard applies ­Occam’s razor, once again, to get to the core of the argument as to the proof of God’s existence: There is in mathematics a concept known as a limiting curve, that is the curve defined as the limit of a polygon with an infinite number of sides. For example, if I had never seen a circle and didn’t know how to draw one, I could nevertheless postulate the existence of circles by thinking of them as regular polygons with numberless edges, so that an old threepenny-­bit would be a bumpy imperfect circle which would approach perfection if I kept doubling the number of its sides: at infinity the result would be the circle which I have never seen and do not know how to draw, and which is logically implied by the existence of polygons…it seems to me that life itself is the mundane figure which argues perfection at its limiting curve.80 The second leg of the God theory has to wait until Dotty introduces it, quoting Archie, Things and actions, you understand, can have any number of real and verifiable properties. But good and bad, better and worse, these are not real properties of things, they are just expressions of our feelings about them.81 Jumpers is at that point launched into a debate about the nature of morality: is it relative or absolute (the fount of the absolutism being God in his second role)? The debate covers such issues as what makes a good bacon sandwich, the rules of tennis, Mozart’s music, why a tribe might eat its elders and how the quality of a cricket pitch depends upon whether you look at it from a bowler’s (Bedser’s) perspective or a batsman’s (Bradman) – ‘…. A spell with the heavy roller would improve it from Bradman’s point of view and worsen it from

79 80 81

Jumpers, page 27. Jumpers, pages 71–72. Jumpers, page 41.

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Bedser’s …’.82 The argument is ultimately concisely condensed by the relativist McFee’s confession from beyond the grave that, ‘if altruism is a possibility… my argument is up a gum tree…’,83 and reinforced by the symbolic image of the collapse of the human pyramid of gymnast relativists when McFee is shot out of it. Stoppard has George make a self-deprecating remark that simply describes the principle of parsimony: The fact that I cut a ludicrous figure in the academic world is largely due to my aptitude for traducing a complex and logical thesis to a mysticism of staggering banality.84 In doing so George is describing the use of Occam’s razor in a methodological way.85

Occam’s Razor Applied to an Argument – Methodological Something which has preoccupied me for a long time is the desire to simplify questions and take the sophistication out.86 stoppard

∵ 82 83 84 85

86

Jumpers, page 66. Jumpers, page 80. Jumpers, page 72. Other commentators see evidence in Jumpers (and in other early Stoppard plays) for the application of Occam’s razor in a methodological sense, although they do not use the term ‘Occam’s razor’. For example, see J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 86: ‘Jumpers begins with a favourite device of Stoppard’s early career: a melange of provocative and seemingly disconnected images that jolt the audience. The succeeding action then proceeds to dispel the initial confusion as logical reasons will be provided for the bizarre occurrences’. Michael Billington makes a similar case for Stoppard’s book, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon: ‘Stoppard’s first chapter, ‘Dramatis Personae and Other Coincidences’, doesn’t simply establish the characters. It presents us with a series of apparently unconnected, surreal events all of which, it transpires, have a rational explanation: a technique Stoppard was to develop later’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 40. Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 164.

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Occam’s razor is encountered most frequently in Stoppard’s plays as a methodological means of reducing arguments to an understandable and concise conclusion, thereby applying parsimony. Even then, Stoppard deploys its use to varied effect. It can be used to distil a whole play into a few sentences, as it does in Travesties or The Invention of Love, or it can condense the scale of The Coast of Utopia into a single speech. But, Stoppard is extremely creative in its application. In Arcadia the application of the parsimony principle wraps the vehicle of the play into the ideas behind it, incorporating Chaos Theory which is, itself, an exercise in the use of the razor. In The Real Thing Occam’s razor is used quite subtly to allow the key issue in the play to emerge from behind the more obvious discussion about the nature of love. Whilst the razor, when applied to arguments, invariably appears in the form of a speech Stoppard’s audience should take care to be aware that, as in Indian Ink, he finds another medium in which to apply it. Even more obscurely, in Hapgood, the play is prompted by an example of the use of Occam’s razor which Stoppard is keen to emphasise. Most startling of all in the context of the razor is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which, in keeping with the theme of duality which recurs so often in Stoppard’s works, can be interpreted to demonstrate the razor both in isolation and in the context of the broad sweep of all Stoppard’s works. Storm in a Teacup A way of explaining the use of Occam’s razor is to ask oneself how one would explain something complicated to a child. The beauty of this approach is that it forces both simplicity and elimination of extraneous elements. It also benefits from a child’s almost natural aversion to artifice and obfuscation. Stoppard’s way of expressing his use of the razor to condense, and thereby, explain what are complicated arguments into their simplest form is to believe that the concept of right and wrong ‘would be recognizable not merely to intellectuals but to an intelligent child’.87 Professional Foul becomes Stoppard’s attempt to demonstrate exactly this point by getting Anderson, a Professor of Ethics, to revise his argument about the absolute morality behind the relationship between the rights of individual within the state as a result of his encounter with a child, Hollar’s son. In response to a question about Anderson’s speech Stoppard explains how, using the Occam’s razor, he achieves this outcome: …taking…Anderson’s lecture and the change it goes through and (your idea) about there being something emblematic in this, that’s not really so 87

Stoppard, in an interview with D. Henninger, ‘Tom Stoppard and the Politics of Morality’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 143.

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clear because we don’t know what his speech would have been. What we do know is derived from his conversation in the hotel corridor with the Czech boy – in other words Anderson produces his arguments about why he shouldn’t act, why he shouldn’t interfere in Czech politics, and then what happens is something extremely simple…he just brushes up against the specific reality of the mother and the child, especially the child. You can make a case for what you’re saying, but wielding Occam’s razor upon it, the same thing can be said in a much simpler way. What happens is that he’s got a perfectly respectable philosophical thesis and he encounters a mother and a child who are victims of this society, and it cuts through all the theory.88 Stoppard has Anderson complete his point for him by expressing what he sees as the purpose of applying the process of Occam’s razor to an argument: Now a philosopher exploring the difficult terrain of right and wrong should not be over impressed by the argument ‘a child would know the difference’. But when, let us say, we are being persuaded that it is ethical to put someone in prison for reading or writing the wrong books, it is well to be reminded that you can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.89 In Night and Day Stoppard uses the principle of parsimony to draw together the basis of his argument for freedom of the press, again employing the idea that it needs to be explicable to a child. To do so Ruth clashes with Wagner, her sometime lover, based on an invented conversation Ruth has had with her eight year-old son, Alastair, whom Wagner (Dick), the punch bag in the encounter, knows is really a proxy for Milne, his journalistic rival, both in terms of the next copy deadline but also philosophically. In a conversation of seven ripostes and using just two protagonists instead of the five in the story who principally partake in the debate (Ruth, Wagner, Guthrie, Milne and Mageeba), Stoppard summarises the case for press freedom: Ruth: How strange. I had no idea that it was the millionaires who were threatening your freedom to report, Dick. I thought it was a ­millionaire who was picking up the bill for your freedom to 88 89

Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney, (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, pages 154–155. Professional Foul, page 90.

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report. In fact, I was discussing this very thing with somebody only yesterday – who could it have been? – oh, yes, it was little Alastair…(She smiles broadly at Wagner) Wagner: (sarcastically) Alastair, was it? Ruth: ‘Allie’, I said, ‘how are things in London with all those millionaires controlling the freedom to report?’. ‘I don’t think I quite follow you, mummy’, he said. ‘The whole country is littered with papers pushing every political line from Hitler to Saint Francis of Assisi’. His theory – Alastair’s theory – is that it’s the very free for-all which guarantees the freedom of each. ‘You see, mummy’, he said, ‘you don’t have to be a millionaire to contradict one. It isn’t the millionaires who are going to stop you, it’s the Wagners who don’t trust the public to choose the marked card’. Do you think he’s got something, Dick? Wagner: I was talking about national papers. Ruth:  (eagerly) That’s just what I said to him. ‘Allie’, I said, as I spread his Marmite, ‘it’s absurd to equate the freedom of millionaires to push their line with the freedom of a basement pamphleteer to challenge them’. ‘Oh, Mummy’, he said, ‘don’t be so silly. You are confusing freedom with capability. The Flat Earth News is free to sell a million copies. What it lacks is the capability of finding a million people with four pence and a conviction that the earth is flat. ‘You see, Mummy’, he said, ‘people don’t buy rich men’s papers because men are rich: the rich men are rich because people buy their papers’. Honestly, the things they teach them at Ascot Heath. Wagner: You pointed out, did you, that a man can be rich from oil or real estate and subsidize a paper on the profits? Ruth: Of course. But he was ready for that one – apparently some of the chaps were thrashing it out in the bootroom after footer, and the general consensus of opinion among the Lower Third is that freedom is neutral. Free expression includes a state of affairs where any millionaire can have a national newspaper if that’s what it costs. A state of affairs, Allie says, where only a particular, approved, licensed, and supervised non-­millionaire can have a newspaper is called, for example, Russia90

90

Night and Day, pages 47–48. Jernigan regards this episode as a, ‘parody, with Ruth simply parroting a conversation that she claims to have had with her son’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 91.

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The act of applying Occam’s razor is to remove any unnecessary detail. In a piece of pure parsimony Stoppard set himself the task of reducing H ­ amlet to its  basic constituents in Dogg’s Hamlet in which the pupils at a school prize-­giving ceremony give a performance of Hamlet pared down to its core elements, deriving with only very small adjustments from The Fifteen Minute Hamlet. In language redolent of Occam’s razor Sabina Rehman describes the resulting play thus: ‘The performed version is a remarkably ingenious compression, extracting only the most essential exchanges of Shakespeare’s play to create ten unbelievably fast scenes. In these scenes all the extraneous descriptions, explanations or poetic embellishments are removed…’.91 In what is almost an intellectual toccata Stoppard, then, in both plays provides an encore in which the story of Hamlet is further compressed into just two pages of text, lasting about two minutes. The sharpest cuts of Occam’s razor are applied in Travesties and The Invention of Love as, in both cases, right at the end of the plays the central character looks back and sums up the argument. Stoppard applies the principle of parsimony twice in Travesties, although in neither case in a wholly pure way. The purpose of the play, as he puts it, is to ask, ‘whether the words “revolutionary” and “artist” are capable of being synonymous, or whether they are mutually exclusive, or something in between’.92 The two acts of the play broadly debate a sub division of that question: the first act, taking up the debate Stoppard had run in Artist Descending a Staircase, considers the issue of what is the nature and purpose of art (with slightly less emphasis this time on whether modern art has any merit); the second act bolts that debate onto the overall question through Lenin’s own views on art and, consequently, their implications for revolution. In a display of the outcome of the Occam’s razor process Stoppard allows Carr to summarise, from all the mayhem and argument of the play, the answer to his primary question: I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. ­Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary… I forget the third thing93 91 92 93

S. Rehman, ‘Wittgenstein’s Language-games, Stoppard’s Building-blocks and context based learning in a Corpus’. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Wetzsteon, ‘Tom Stoppard Eats Steak Tartare with Chocolate Sauce’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 81. Travesties, page 71. Anthony Jenkins has a different interpretation, saying that, ‘Stoppard does not intend to show that position A is better than B, for both Joyce and Lenin’s views

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But, the principle of parsimony falters somewhat against Carr’s haphazard memory. Stoppard also applies the principle of parsimony in a looser way to the arguments in Act 1 about the nature and purpose of art in society. He has written a quick-fire debate on the subject, between Carr and Tzara, which is notable for its intense nature and intellectual sparring. But, in the one set-piece encounter near the end of Act 1, between Joyce and Tzara, he pulls most of it together, in quite thrilling language, in a broad distillation of the debate on the justification of art in terms of its effect of the long term nature of its impact rather than its ability to affect the immediate situation: Tzara: Your art has failed. You’ve turned literature into a religion and it’s as dead as the rest, it’s an overripe corpse and you’re cutting fancy figures at the wake. It’s too late for geniuses! Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist! Dada! Dada! Dada! Joyce:  …An artist is the magician put among men to gratify – capriciously – their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. 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.… are simply different attitudes to the same problem: how the artist serves society for the common good’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 119. Paul Delaney’s interpretation is: ‘On the question of whether art must be an ideological attack on class structure as Lenin propounds, or part of an equally polemical attack on cultural heritage as Tzara petulantly screams, there is no question but that Joyce’s celebration of art which is not committed to a cause is also Stoppard’s celebration and the play’s celebration. Among the historical heavyweights in the play, Joyce wins the debate’. – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 60. Delaney goes on to comment thus (op cit, page 81) on Carr’s final speech: ‘Although Carr’s closing speech has been brushed aside by several critics, implicit in the first two points Carr remembers is the answer to the germinal question that evoked Travesties. Can the artist and the revolutionary be one and the same person? Quite clearly the final words of Travesties answer in the negative’. Michael Coveney, reviewing the premiere of Travesties in London in 1974, wrote, ‘(Carr’s) conclusions from the whole adventure are that if you can’t be a revolutionary, you should be an artist, and vice versa’. – M. Coveney, Financial Times, 11 June 1974.

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But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes…above all, of Ulysses…the most human, the most complete of all heroes – husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer…And yet I with my Dublin Odyssey will double that immortality, yes by God there’s a corpse that will dance for some time yet and leave the world precisely as it finds it – and if you hope to shame it into the grave with your fashionable magic, I would advise you to try to acquire some genius and if possible some subtlety before the season is quite over. Top o’ the morning, Mr Tzara.94 Just as Carr briefly summarises the arguments in a short monologue at the end of Travesties, so aeh effects a similar summary, across a wider and more complex range of subject matter, at the climax of The Invention of Love: Oxford in the Golden Age! – the hairshirts versus the Aesthetes; the neoChristians versus the neo-pagans: the study of classics for advancement in the fair of the world versus the study of classics for the advancement of classical studies – what emotional storms, and oh what a tiny teacup.95 Uttered by the elder half of one man standing on the shore that marks the cusp of the boundary between two worlds, those of the living and the dead, it covers the main ground of the play: the different attitudes to love and art, the dichotomy of the new Victorian moral orthodoxy of Oxford versus the revived morality of classical antiquity now also being practised there, the relativism of the ethical perspective, the scholarship of one Golden Age versus the poetry of another, the purpose of the search for knowledge – and, by all the contrasts, the duality inherent in the play. Perhaps Stoppard has even invented a metaphor for Occam’s razor: a storm in a teacup. Stoppard affords Herzen a similar précis at the climax of The Coast of Utopia. But the task is so much bigger and, in order to appreciate just how big, it is necessary to reprise at some length the story and subject matter of the trilogy. It addresses a wide panorama of issues, including the questions of what is truth, what is the nature of love and what is the purpose of art. But the three plays are principally dominated by the attempts of the nineteenth century Russian intelligentsia to answer a socio-political question with a moral dimension – as Ogarev puts it, ‘…what is the best society for everyone everywhere?’.96 Herzen, 94 95 96

Travesties, pages 41–42. The Invention of Love, page 102. Salvage, page 77.

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ever the pragmatist, focusses the issue on his mother country. ‘What are we going to do about Russia….what is to be done?’,97 he asks. The river of Russian intelligentsia sprang from two sources of grievance. Russia under the rule of Nicholas I is an autocratic society. It is a world of censorship and arbitrary arrest. Herzen himself is exiled to Perm, as Ketscher explains, ‘All for some loose talk at a supper party Herzen wasn’t even at’.98 It is also a society which is perceived to be both bankrupt of development and ideas and, crucially, different. In a ‘dark denunciation of Russia’99 Chaadaev concluded, ‘We are alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have taught it nothing … While the entire world was rebuilding itself, we constructed nothing, but went on squatting in our thatched huts’.100 The trilogy derives from the domestic sagas of the Bakunin and Herzen families the response of the Russian intelligentsia to Ogarev’s question and Chaadaev’s analysis, which Herzen described as ‘a shot that rang out in the dark night’.101 But it becomes increasingly focussed on Herzen and one issue which acts as the touchstone for the socio-political issues in Russia: whether history is deterministic. If it is, it implies there is no freedom of the individual and it has consequences for how change in society is to be effected. The Russian philosophers looked to the rest of Europe for ideas and Germany (because of its similarly autocratic government) and France102 (because of its recent revolutionary credentials), in particular, provided inspiration. German philosophers, like Schelling and Fichte, believed that the mundane backwardness Chaadaev saw was an irrelevant manifestation and that individuals should seek to achieve oneness with a concept known as the Absolute (an idea that the universe has a harmony of which individuals are part). Michael Bakunin admits he was a disciple: ‘I got led astray by Schelling. He tried to make the Self part of nature – but now Fichte shows that nature is simply non-Self – there is nothing but Self – the soul must become its own object!’.103 Another German, Hegel, provided the key addition to the sociopolitical landscape which, by adding a dose of rationality to the loftiness of 97 98 99 100 101 102

Voyage, page 59. Voyage, page 67. A. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, page 293. P. Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters Addressed to a Lady (1829). A. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, pages 292–293. cf A. Herzen, Sobranie Sochinenii, 20:43 and 18:322: by studying French history the young Russians acquired ‘another homeland, another tradition, that of the great struggle of the eighteenth century…we bowed our heads in reverence before those powerful and sombre figures – the Holy Fathers of your great Republican Church who came to install the era of reason and freedom’. 103 Voyage, page 27.

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the Absolute, drove much of the Russian intelligentsia’s approach and drives much of Stoppard’s trilogy. He argued that, in the words of Aileen Kelly, ‘the Absolute manifested itself in history through humanity’s ascent by a predetermined succession of stages toward a society founded on reason’.104 The effect of this philosophy was profound,105 as is evident from Bakunin’s admission at Premukhino: ‘Stankevich and I are engaged in a life or death struggle over material forces to unite our spirit with the Universal’.106 Hegel’s rationality initially led Belinsky and Bakunin to ‘the recognition of the sovereign authorities’107 As Herzen put it to Belinsky, ‘You can prove that the monstrous tyranny (ie: Tsarist rule) under which we live is rational and ought to exist’.108 Herzen adopted a revolutionary position, fuelled partly also by his reaction to the failed Decembrists revolt in 1825 and tinged with a belief in socialism which he got from looking westwards towards Europe.109 But, Bakunin’s ‘sound revolutionary judgement pushed him in another direction’,110 and he becomes a revolutionary zealot, advocating his belief that, ‘The passion for destruction is also a creative passion’,111 while Belinsky eventually followed a more humanist path. The Russian intelligentsia split broadly into two camps. On the one hand, the Westernisers, like Herzen and Belinsky. On the other, The Slavophiles, like Aksakov, who believed that Western civilisation had been accompanied by spiritual ­decline – ‘France is a moral cesspit but you can publish anything you like’112 – and saw the solution as a return to traditional Russian values, uncorrupted by the West. He admonishes Herzen and his Western European influences, saying, ‘It’s all of you. Jacobins and German sentimentalists. Destroyers and dreamers.­

104 A. Kelly, in the programme notes of the Royal National Theatre production of The Coast of Utopia, 2002. Stoppard notes his debt to Aileen Kelly’s ‘kindness as well as her scholarship’ (Acknowledgements to all three of The Coast of Utopia plays). Her three articles in the programme notes provide a terrific explanation and insight into the Russian intelligentsia and Stoppard’s plays and were indispensable in the writing of this book. 105 cf A. Herzen, Sobranie Sochinenii, 1:25: Herzen describes the French Revolution as, ‘that colossal fiery eruption…whose bloody lava flowed from the guillotine of the Place de la Revolution to the foot of our own Kremlin’. 106 Voyage, page 20. 107 A. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, pages 235–236. 108 A. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, page 236. 109 A. Kelly, ‘“A Glowing Footprint”: Herzen, Proudhon And The Role Of The Intellectual Revolutionary’ in Modern Intellectual History Vol 2, number 2, August 2005, page 183. 110 A. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, page 236. 111 M. Bakunin, The Reaction In Germany, 1842. 112 Shipwreck, page 14.

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You turned your back on your own people, the real Russians abandoned a hundred and fifty years ago by Peter the Great Westerniser!’.113 The failed revolutions throughout many European cities in 1848 change everything, particularly for Herzen.114 Attracted by the revolutionary credentials of France – where he says, ‘The future is being scrawled on the factory walls of Paris’115 – he goes to live in exile in Paris in 1847.116 While Herzen witnesses the bloodshed of the barricades Marx is adopting and adapting the deterministic view of history which sees it, using Herzen’s characterisation, as ‘the march of history’117 and as part of a struggle leading to an inevitable culmination. In Marx’s view, ‘when it comes the cataclysm will be glorious…Every stage leads to a higher stage in the permanent conflict which is the march of history’.118 In contrast, Herzen comes to believe that history works in a haphazard way and that each individual can affect the course of events. He evokes the idea of a Ginger Cat which Stoppard himself explains: ‘Herzen feels that there is lying in wait for all of us a nemesis which is completely arbitrary in so far as it has no motive or purpose. It’s just terrifyingly, casually arbitrary. It will just come and get you at any moment. It could be anything. It could lay you low, or move you to another country’.119 Herzen continues the explanation: ‘the Cat has no plan, no favourites or resentments, no memory, no mind, no rhyme or reason. It kills without purpose, and spares without purpose, too. So, when it catches your eye, what happens next is not up to the Cat, it’s up to you’.120 To Herzen this implied, as he describes in My Past and Thoughts, an optimistic world full of 113 Shipwreck, page 14. 114 See A. Kelly, ‘“A Glowing Footprint”: Herzen, Proudhon And The Role Of The Intellectual Revolutionary’ in Modern Intellectual History Vol 2, number 2, August 2005, pages 180–181. Kelly argues that ‘Herzen’s rejection of the ‘grand narratives’ that endow history with a rational direction and a goal resulted from his observations on the gulf between the programmes of the French radical elite and the aspirations of the masses’. Kelly’s argument is that, ‘the conclusions that Herzen drew from the defeat of 1848 did not deprive him of his role as an intellectual revolutionary: they merely forced him to redefine it’. 115 Shipwreck, page 19. 116 See A. Kelly, ‘“A Glowing Footprint”: Herzen, Proudhon And The Role Of The Intellectual Revolutionary’ in Modern Intellectual History Vol 2, number 2, August 2005, pages 185–186. In Paris he ‘was recognised as the principal representative abroad of the opposition to the Russian autocracy’. 117 Voyage, page 104. 118 Salvage, page 117. 119 Stoppard – in an interview in the Lincoln Center Theater’s Platform Series 14 February 2007. 120 Voyage, page 105.

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possibilities: ‘Both nature and history are going nowhere, and therefore, they are ready to go anywhere to which they are directed’.121 Herzen realises, above all, that the ideals of the intellectuals and the needs of the masses are not connected.122 The people are not interested in abstract principles. A consequence is that Herzen both adopts a much more pragmatic approach and rejects the idea of the sacrifice by the present generation for the attainment of an unspecified benefit by a future one123 – what he called in From the Other Shore, ‘the crucifixion of the innocent for the sake of the guilty’.124 ‘Man lives not for the fulfilment of his destiny’, he argued in My Past And Thoughts, ‘not for the incarnation of an idea, not for progress, but solely because he was born; and he was born…for the present’.125 He recognises, having seen the workers march on the National Assembly which was elected by universal suffrage that followed the overthrow of Louis Philippe, that revolution, by human nature, merely begets more revolution as governing forces quickly develop a tendency to conservatism (note Stoppard’s reference to ‘the life cycle of government’ in The Gamblers):126 121 A. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, page 519. cf A. Herzen, From the Other Shore, page 40: ‘In nature, as in the souls of men, there slumber countless forces and possibilities; under suitable conditions they develop – and develop furiously; they may fill the whole world, or they may fall by the wayside, take a new direction, stop, collapse’. 122 See A. Kelly, ‘“A Glowing Footprint”: Herzen, Proudhon And The Role Of The Intellectual Revolutionary’ in Modern Intellectual History Vol 2, number 2, August 2005, page 193: ‘The revolutionaries had shown themselves to be conservatives, speaking a “moral gibberish” unrelated to experience. All their concepts of freedom were imbued with a dualism rooted in Christian culture, which subjected human beings to the goals of abstract principles and transcendent powers – whether God, reason, humanity, or progress’. See also A. Herzen, Sobranie Sochinenii, 5:306, 175–176: ‘Read George Sand and Pierre Leroux, Louis Blanc and Michelet…on every page you will find Christianity and romanticism adapted to suit the customs of our time; everywhere there is dualism…abstract concepts of duty, obligatory virtues, official, rhetorical morality without any relation to practical life’. 123 cf A. Herzen, Sobranie Sochinenii, 3:97: each stage in history ‘has contained within itself its own end, and consequently its reward and satisfaction’. Sobranie Sochinenii, 2:217: ‘There is nothing in the world more foolish than despising the present for the sake of the future. The present is the true sphere of existence. One must grasp every moment, every pleasure. The soul must be constantly open to the surrounding world, absorbing it and suffering it with its own being’. 124 A. Herzen, From the Other Shore, page 135. 125 A. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, page 521. 126 cf the Prisoner in The Gamblers, page 16: ‘They’re two parts of the same wheel, and the wheel just goes on spinning…I mean that our beloved president who has just been so nearly deposed by one popular uprising achieved his position by a similar one ten years

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It’s government by slogan for the sake of power, and if anyone objects there’s always the police. The police are the realists in a pseudo-­ democracy. From one regime to the next, power passes down the system until it puts its thumbprint on every policeman’s forehead like the dab of holy oil at an emperor’s coronation. The conservatives…know the whole thing was a confidence trick. The liberals wanted a republic for their own cultivated circle.…Well, now we know what the reactionaries have always known: liberty, equality, and fraternity are like three rotten apples in their barrel of privilege, even a pip could prove fatal…127 Kuron, the intellectual conscience of the Polish workers in Squaring the Circle, draws attention to a very similar point: ‘I said it was revolution’, he says to his fellow campaigners, ‘The trick is to make it a self-limiting revolution’.128 Instead, Herzen foresees social disaster, telling Turgenev, ‘When the lid blows off this kettle it’ll take the kitchen with it. All your civilized pursuits and refinements which you call the triumph of order will be firewood and pisspots once the workers kick down the doors and come into their kingdom. Do I regret it? Yes, I regret it. But we’ve enjoyed the feast, we can’t complain when the waiter says, “L’addition, messieurs!”’.129 Herzen moves to London where he sets up a ‘Free Russian and Polish press’130 which he intends as a means of publishing persuasive articles, removed from the censorship of the Tsar’s repressive machine, to sponsor reform, in particular the end of serfdom, back in Russia. As Edward Acton explains, ‘His primary purpose was not to proclaim the truth, to preach the ultimate justice, but rather to provide a forum and a stimulant for the whole range of progressive opinion’.131 By now his philosophy has come to rest on two pillars. The first is his notion of the freedom of the individual within society, which he sees as an act of balance between the minimum of ownership necessary to protect an individual’s independence against the encroachment of the state: ‘What freedom means is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere

127 128 129 130 131

ago. That’s the life cycle of government, from the popular to the unpopular. The wheel goes slowly round until you get back to the starting point, and it’s time for another… revolution. It just goes on repeating itself, round and round. You can’t break out of the circle, least of all by idealism. Ideals are impracticable without discipline and universal integrity’. Shipwreck, page 55. Squaring the Circle, page 220. Shipwreck, pages 47–48. Salvage, page 21. E. Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary, page 131.

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with my neighbour’s freedom to sing a different tune in his. But above all, let my neighbour and I be free to join or not join the revolutionary opera, the state orchestra, the Committee of Public Harmony…’.132 The second is his solution to Russia’s governance which is a form of organisation based around a collection of peasant communes. This implies the liberation of Russian serfs which, when it occurs, in March 1861, leads Herzen to cry out, ‘We won!’,133 popping a champagne cork as he does so. Before the year is out his joy turns to disillusionment as the reality in Russia is little changed, as Natalie points out that, ‘freedom bears an uncanny resemblance to serfdom’.134 Claiming that ‘We have system, no doctrine’,135 Herzen rejects the various utopian systems offered up by his contemporaries in The Coast of Utopia which range from the Blanc’s pharaonic organisation of labour to nihilism to Aksakov’s ‘mutual non-interference’136 to Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Chernyshevsky’s communistic socialism. Herzen’s point is that there is no universal answer. Each society has particular circumstances and requires a specific solution: ‘There’s no such thing as “everyone everywhere”. For Russia – now – the answer is communal socialism’,137 he tells both Ogarev and Chernyshevsky, having also told Turgenev, who compared Russian peasants with those of other European countries, ‘So what if we are cousins in the European family? – It doesn’t mean we have to develop in the same way’.138 In passing, it is worth noting that Rock ‘N’ Roll almost sets out to prove Herzen’s point. Max, the Cambridge professor, sees the Communist solution he believes in collapse: ‘What remains of those bright days of certainty? 132 Shipwreck, page 36. cf A. Herzen, Sobranie Sochinenii, 5 :62 : ‘to grasp all the breadth and reality of the rights of the personality and not to destroy society…this is the most difficult of social tasks…it has never been accomplished in the past’. 133 Salvage, page 89. 134 Salvage, page 89. 135 A. Herzen, Polar Star, first edition. Quoted in E. Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary, page 131. See A. Kelly, ‘“A Glowing Footprint”: Herzen, Proudhon And The Role Of The Intellectual Revolutionary’ in Modern Intellectual History Vol 2, number 2, August 2005, page 197: ‘His position was based on the belief that he shared with Proudhon: that the true revolutionary has no doctrines, no blueprint for progress, and no fixed and final goal’. cf A. Herzen, From the Other Shore, page 140: ‘The harmony between society and the individual is not established once and for all. It comes into being in each period, almost in each country, and it changes with circumstances, like everything living. There can be no universal norm, no universal decision in the matter’. 136 K. Aksakov, Memo to the Tsar (March 1855). 137 Salvage, page 77. 138 Salvage, page 66.

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The Trotskyites squabble over their place at the front of the march without noticing there’s no one behind. The New Left is an ivory ghetto where the defeat of capitalism is supposed to follow from correct analysis.…The Party is losing confidence in its creed. If capitalism can be destroyed by anti-racism, feminism, gay rights, ecological good practice and every special interest already c­ overed by the Social Democrats, is there a lot of point in being Communist?’.139 Jan has to remind him that, ‘Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler’.140 Stephen confronts Max with the brutal truth that, ‘When Soviet Communism collapsed it was further away from the theory than when it started’.141 Jan’s ideal of ‘socialism with a human face’142 also evaporates and he is forced to admit – as, in Max’s words, ‘Czechoslovakia takes her knickers off to welcome capitalism’143 – that, ‘Changing one system for another is not what the Velvet Revolution was for’.144 Herzen’s London home becomes a refuge and open house for revolutionary intelligentsia (not just Russians) in exile. Bakunin turns up, having lost none of his revolutionary fanaticism: ‘our first task will be to destroy authority’, he tells Herzen, ‘There is no second task’.145 Bakunin sets off to foment rebellion in Slavic Europe in the hope it will spark revolution in Russia. Herzen is disillusioned by the exiles, whom he describes as, ‘Men who can’t get their shoes mended sending agents with earth-shaking instructions to Marseilles, Lisbon, Cologne…men who walk across London to give a piano lesson redrawing the frontiers of Europe on oilskin table-tops of back-street restaurants, toppling emperors like so many sauce bottles’.146 In return Herzen loses touch with the new generation of Russian intelligentsia. As Sleptsov rather bluntly informs him, ‘We don’t care about your tedious, hackneyed, sentimental addiction to reminiscence, and to ideas which are extinct. The young generation has understood you, and we have turned away in disgust.…To us, Tsar Alexander and Herzen are the dance that’s outlived its time’.147 Eventually, at the end of a story encompassing a period of 35 years in an odyssey across countries as diverse as Russia, France, England, Switzerland and, briefly, Germany with a cast of over 80 characters and after a theatrical drama 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

Rock ‘N’ Roll, pages 61–62. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 37. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 92. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 31. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 90. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 110. Salvage, page 114. Salvage, page 16. Salvage, pages 109–110.

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involving three plays, nearly nine hours of stage time and over 300 pages of text Stoppard allows Herzen to apply Occam’s razor to the socio-political questions of the trilogy, thus confirming that these are, indeed, the real focus of the play. It comes to Herzen in the form of a dream. …history has no culmination! There is always as much in front as behind. There is no libretto. History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance.148 We shout into the mist for this one or that to be opened, but through every gate there are a thousand more. We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us. But that is our dignity as human beings, and we rob ourselves if we pardon us by the absolution of historical necessity. What kind of beast is it, this Ginger Cat with its insatiable appetite for human sacrifice after we’re dead? A distant end is not an end but a trap. The end we work for must be closer, the labourer’s wage, the pleasure in the work done, the summer lightning of personal happiness… … Summer lightning …149 The stage effect of the lightning reinforces the final metaphor. In the dream Stoppard draws together very concisely all the socio-political questions – the nature of governance of society and the role of individual within it and the means of reform – using the process of history to define all aspects of the problem in an example of parsimony at its most extreme. Not all examples of Stoppard’s use of the parsimony principle involve reducing the argument of a whole play. Sometimes they just pop up in minor ways as part of the theatrical spectacle. For example, Jumpers contains a quite delicious vignette of Occam’s razor in a comedy form. George is allowing his suspicions of what Archie is doing when he attends, in his role of psychiatrist, to Dotty (George’s mentally disintegrating wife) at her bedside to encourage his belief that they are having an affair. Dotty provides a simple explanation: George: …We have on the one hand, that is to say in bed, an attractive married woman whose relationship with her husband stops short only of the issue of a ration book; we have on the other hand daily visits by a celebrated ladies’ 148 cf A. Herzen, From the Other Shore, page 34: ‘History improvises, she rarely repeats herself…she uses every chance, every coincidence, she knocks simultaneously at a thousand gates…Who knows which may open?’. 149 Salvage, pages 118–119.

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man who rings the doorbell, is admitted by Mrs. Thing who shows him into the bedroom, whence he emerges an hour later looking more than a little complacent and crying, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll let myself out!’. (He lapsed into a calm suavity.) Now let us see. What can we make of it all? Wife in bed, daily visits by a gentlemen caller. Does anything suggest itself? Dotty (calmly): Sounds to me he’s the doctor.150 Of course, the razor is not quite as genuine or as simple as it seems because the audience is given plenty of suggestions that there is more afoot between Dotty and Archie than they would like George to know, particularly when Archie later in the play answers (as does George) to Dotty’s exclamation of ‘Darling’.151 ‘You don’t have to be Einstein’ Arcadia gives Stoppard the opportunity to use Occam’s razor to weave the vehicle of his play into the idea behind it. And do not forget that part of that idea, Chaos Theory, is itself a method of reducing complex structures to basic mathematical algorithms, as Valentine explains. It should not, therefore, come as any great surprise that Chaos Theory should have piqued Stoppard’s interest. The worlds of Jumpers and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in particular, but also the general linguistic and dramatic mayhem of many of his plays prior to Arcadia, are chaotic out of which emerges the sort of bifurcating presentation of ideas that reflects a kind of philosophical version of Chaos Theory. He presents in one of his adaptations, Undiscovered Country, a society in which chaos appears to be the natural order, as von Aigner, the libertine doctor, explains in a reference to the play’s title (derived as it is from Hamlet’s reference to death as that ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’,152), thereby raising an instant connection with another of Stoppard’s themes; fate. Haven’t you ever thought what a strange uncharted country is human behaviour. So many contradictions find room in us – love and deceit… loyalty and betrayal…worshipping one woman, yet longing for another, or several others. We try to bring order into our lives as best we can; but 150 Jumpers, page 32. cf a virtually identical encounter between Penelope and Bone in Another Moon Called Earth, page 52. 151 Jumpers, page 69. 152 Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, lines 79–80.

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that very order has something unnatural about it. The natural condition is chaos…the soul…is an undiscovered country.153 Arcadia was Stoppard’s chance to marry his philosophical version to an exploration of the real scientific theory. James Gleick, whose book, Chaos, raised awareness of the subject and sowed the seeds of an idea for a play in Stoppard’s mind,154 describes very clearly how the Occam’s razor process is at the heart of Chaos Theory: Traditionally, when physicists saw complex results, they looked for complex causes. When they saw a random relationship between what goes into a system and what comes out, they assumed that they would have to build randomness into any realistic theory, by artificially adding noise or error. The modern study of chaos began with the creeping realisation in the 1960s that quite simple mathematical equations could model systems every bit as violent as a waterfall.155 One of the leading exponents of Chaos Theory, Mitchell Feigenbaum, provides a link between Chaos Theory and part of what Stoppard does in his plays: In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious that one doesn’t know the world around us in detail. What artists have accomplished is realizing that there’s only a small amount of stuff that’s important.156 In Arcadia, just as in his other plays, Stoppard reduces extremely complex ideas – such as Newtonian theory – to simpler, core components – such as what happens when jam is stirred into rice – and runs argument against counter argument in the form of a dramatized debate. In Arcadia it just so happens that the science Stoppard is arguing for and against is the very science, Chaos Theory, that espouses the process which he uses – the reduction, in a form of Occam’s razor, of the complex to the simple using an iterative process. ‘You don’t have to be Einstein’,157 Hannah realises. Valentine comments, ‘The maths isn’t 153 Undiscovered Country, page 144. 154 ‘Stoppard has been reading James Gleick’s book, Chaos…There’s a play in that somewhere’. Stephen Schiff, ‘Full Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 224. 155 J. Gleick, Chaos, page 8. 156 J. Gleick quoting Feigenbaum in Chaos, page 186. 157 Arcadia, page 67.

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difficult. It’s what you did at school’.158 Furthermore, just as the razor excludes extraneous information to get to the key point, ‘it isn’t necessary to know the details’.159 Whatever the complexity of something – for instance the way Sidley Park’s grouse population behaves (with its myriad possibilities) – at the end of it all is an equation. ‘When they are all put together it turns out the population is obeying a mathematical rule’.160 Similar to the way Occam’s razor points to the reduction of a complex point to the simplest of all explanations, so Chaos Theory reduces the complexities of the natural world to basic mathematics that is taught, in this case to Thomasina, at school. Just as with the forwards and backwards operation of Occam’s razor (as demonstrated in After Magritte), so the process of Chaos theory can operate from both ends of the problem: Valentine describes the duality of the process, ‘I’m doing it from the other end. (Thomasina) started with an equation and turned it into a graph. I’ve got a graph – real data – and I’m trying to find the equation which would give you the graph if you used it the way she’s used hers’.161 Arcadia contains a metaphor for Chaos Theory which is also an example of Occam’s razor in practice. The table in the classroom accumulates objects during the course of the play. They are the visible products of the bifurcation process (the device by which the structure of the play is a metaphor of Chaos Theory) of the flipping backwards and forwards between time periods. By the end of the play the objects comprise: the geometrical solids, the computer, the decanter, glasses, tea mug, Hannah’s research books, Septimus’s books, two portfolios, Thomasina’s candlestick, the oil lamp, the dahlia, the Sunday papers…162 The process of the accumulation of the objects and the state of the table at the end are an example of the same forward looking creation of the puzzle seen in the last tableau of After Magritte. Paul Edwards expresses the same point from the perspective of Stoppard’s scientific metaphor: At the end of the play, the table has accumulated a variety of objects that, if one saw them without having seen the play, would seem completely random and disordered. Entropy (a Newtonian measure of chaos) is high. 158 159 160 161 162

Arcadia, page 57. Arcadia, page 60. Arcadia, page 60. Arcadia, page 59. Arcadia, page 129.

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But if one had seen the play, one has full information about the objects and the hidden ‘order’ of their arrangement, brought about by the performance itself. Entropy is low.163 In an example of how Stoppard integrates the vehicle of his play into the ideas he is discussing the process of Occam’s razor, in addition, applies to the principal puzzle within Arcadia. Byron, despite Bernard’s best efforts to prove otherwise, did not shoot Chater in a duel. The only thing Byron has successfully shot, one is told by Lady Croom, is his foot. It is Septimus, not Byron, who has written the review of Chater’s poem – his brother turns out to be the editor of The Piccadilly Recreation in which it appeared. As Bernard himself points out, ‘There is only one Chater in the British Library database’.164 Unfortunately, he did not make the connection of Chater the botanist who died in Martinique, bitten by a monkey after describing a dwarf dahlia, with the Chater the poet, author of The Couch of Eros, at Sidley Park in 1809. The pencilled superscription in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers on which Bernard pins so much faith to be in Byron’s hand does not stand up to Hannah’s scrutiny. With too much evidence to the contrary and absolutely no evidence of any duel at Sidley Park Bernard eschews what any application of Occam’s razor would have led him to deduce: the simplest explanation – Byron did not kill Chater. Hannah notes, ‘Chater could have died of anything, anywhere…You haven’t established (a duel) was fought. You haven’t established it was Byron’.165 Instead, Bernard does in his research precisely the opposite of Occam’s razor. He piles fact upon fact to make them fit his prior conclusion/conviction – ‘Proof, proof? You’d have to be there’,166 he blurts out in exasperation.167 In Hapgood, Stoppard works as a result not of his own use of the parsimony principle but on the basis of someone else’s. The frontispiece to Hapgood contains a quotation from one of Richard Feynman’s lectures, entitled ‘The Character of Physical Law’. It is a fine example of the application of Occam’s razor: 163 P. Edwards, ‘Science in Hapgood and Arcadia’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 181. See also (op cit, pages 180–181) for Edwards’ observation about how Stoppard deals with loss of information in Arcadia. 164 Arcadia, page 28. 165 Arcadia, page 66. 166 Arcadia, page 64. 167 Jernigan notes that Chaos Theory also, when applied backwards, demonstrates that totally accurate historical research is impossible because small differences can affect the result of enquiry and analysis. ‘(Arcadia) also uses chaos theory to reject the idea that biographical recovery might ever result in absolute accuracy’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 121.

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We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality it contains the only mystery…Any other situation in quantum mechanics, it turns out, can always be explained by saying, ‘You remember the case of the experiment with the two holes? It’s the same thing’.168 Stoppard has taken that reduction of the highly complex subject of quantum mechanics to one simple experiment, the passing of light through two holes, and turned it into a play. The simple experiment reduces quantum mechanics to just two key points. It demonstrates the wave/particle theory which is the basis of quantum mechanics and highlights the one problem in atomic theory that it does not answer: the uncertainty – Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – that arises through the act of observance of electrons which causes disturbance in their behaviour. Such disturbance implies, for Stoppard, two things: duality; and, relativism. It is the former that interested him enough to conceive Hapgood. The whole play, therefore, is based upon a reduction of quantum mechanical theory in the manner of Occam’s razor. Defining the Question Applying Occam’s razor can sometimes help the audience to define what a Stoppard play is really about. Ostensibly, The Real Thing poses the question, through countless examples of illusion and reality, of what is real? In doing so it is asking the audience to use its own Occam’s razor to sift illusion from reality, usually in a rapid way. Very soon into Act 1, scene 2 one needs to have worked out that scene 1 is not real; it’s a play. It is necessary to note the deliberate similarities between the appearance of Annie and Charlotte, when both enter dressed in Henry’s clothes, and the self-referral between the real and the illusory in Henry’s jealous rifling of Annie’s possessions versus that of Max’s search through Charlotte’s things in House Of Cards. Brodie’s play about two people meeting is on a train is similar to that of Annie and Billy actually meeting on a train. Annie and Billy rehearse. But, when they rehearse Tis Pity She’s A Whore and Brodie’s play it’s because they are really in love. While talking on the train Annie and Billy suddenly get transposed into Ford’s Giovanni and Annabella. Furthermore, Charlotte’s virginity is lost in real life to the actor who 168 Hapgood, frontispiece/R. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, page 130/RF. Feynman, RB. Leighton, M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 37–2. Feynman’s spellbinding lecture on ‘Probability And Uncertainty’ (later published as The Character of Physical Law), part of the Cornell University’s Messenger Lectures in 1964 is available on video.

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took the virginity of her character, Annabella, in a touring production of Tis Pity She’s A Whore. At first glance, if one pursues the arguments and ideas in The Real Thing by interpreting the ‘real thing’ to be a euphemism for love they far less obviously fit into any form or part of a process of parsimony. The Real Thing appears to be a play asking Henry to sift illusion from reality when it comes to finding the real thing, the true meaning of love. But, he does not find it easily because he gets confused with all different sorts of love (from carnal knowledge to free love to being ‘the last romantic’169), mostly in conversation with his ex-wife Charlotte and their daughter: In response to Annie’s challenge that, ‘You have to find a part of yourself where I’m not important to you’170 Henry is forced to realise that what love really means to him is that, ‘I can’t find a part of myself where you’re not important’.171 There is no apparent agreement at the end as to what the real thing is in terms love. The resolution of the meaning of the real thing, as love, seems to come down to one thing: Debbie’s claim that, ‘Exclusive rights isn’t love. It’s colonization’.172 Henry appears to accept this view when confronting Annie over Billy: Dignified cuckoldry is a difficult trick, but it can be done. Think of it as a modern marriage. We have got beyond hypocrisy, you and I. Exclusive rights isn’t love, it’s colonization.173 Stoppard reinforces the point in a letter to Gordon Davidson, at the same time noting that most actresses find Annie’s decision on which of her lovers she should hurt counter intuitive: 169 The Real Thing, page 44. Interestingly, Stoppard pursues (perhaps accidentally) the range of definitions of love in several of his adaptations. Lucy, in Largo Desolato, page 14, comments to Leopold, ‘You need love – real love – mad passionate love – not that theoretical one, the one you write about’. In Dalliance, page 68, Herr Weiring warns Christine when she asserts that love is madness that, ‘true love is something else’. 170 The Real Thing, page 49. 171 The Real Thing, page 52. Lucy, in Largo Desolato, page 13, develops this point further by saying that, ‘love is actually a dimension of being – it gives fulfilment and meaning to existence’. Lucy later expands upon the point on page 23 – ‘Without love no one is a ­complete person! We only achieve an identity through the person next to us!’. Natter in U ­ ndiscovered Country, page 172, agrees when he says, ‘To me life without Adele would mean absolutely nothing at all’. 172 The Real Thing, page 43. 173 The Real Thing, page 52. See also Largo Desolato, page 23 – Leopold criticises Lucy’s love for him, saying, ‘I have been compensating for a subconscious fear of being manipulated, if not actually colonized’.

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…the reason this scene is difficult is that most Annies would have said, ‘I have to choose who I hurt and I choose Billy because I am Henry’s’. This one does the opposite, a moral position which makes sense to me.…You could say that it’s a way of Henry learning that exclusivity isn’t love it’s colonization.174 A negative explanation is not particularly satisfactory. But it is surely significant that Stoppard uses it twice in the play and refers to it in the Davidson letter and that he takes the unexpected approach to it. Why, otherwise, would he do that? It allows Henry to have an affair (albeit at the expense of Annie having one, too). It fits with Henry’s view of ‘what you do is right’. But, whilst the point has caused division amongst critics175 the reality at the end of all the illusions about love and relationships is that Annie admits to Henry, ‘I’m yours’.176 The razor has not been applied. However, there is one issue in The Real Thing which does reduce to a clear and simple conclusion and it addresses what Stoppard says was his original motivation for writing the play. In two interviews with Mel Gussow he reveals that: The genesis of the play was a thing I came across in wh Auden’s chapbook.177 In the play, Henry says that public postures have the configuration of private derangement. That’s a version of a sentence I read in this Auden chapbook.178 and, public attitudes are a kind of mirror of a private disturbance. People in the play take certain public postures which are connected with what the play calls a private derangement.179 174 Stoppard letter to Gordon Davidson 17 April 1986 in the Tom Stoppard Archive at the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin (Identified by and quoted in J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 169). 175 J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, pages 169–170. Fleming notes that whilst R. Corballis and J. Barber argue that Henry comes to Debbie’s point of view, P. Delaney believes that Henry’s quotation of Debbie is ironic. 176 The Real Thing, page 53. 177 Henry’s slightly contrived assertion to Annie that, ‘I’m your chap’ (The Real Thing, page 57) is perhaps a punned clue by Stoppard to the genesis. 178 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight’. in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 40. 179 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight’. in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 65.

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It is not clear what passage in Auden Stoppard is referring to, although Nadel speculates – plausibly if one accepts the reference to political movements in the context of Brodie’s superficially ‘political’ act – that it is to be found under a heading of ‘Commitment’180 and is a quotation by Auden himself from Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher of the twentieth century: during periods of crisis, positions which are false or feigned are very common. Entire generations falsify themselves; that is to say, they wrap themselves up in artistic styles, in doctrines, in political movements, which are insincere and which fill the lack of genuine conviction.181 The principle of parsimony does apply to The Real Thing if one accepts that this is what the key issue in the play is – because its resolution is very concise, when stripped of all the extraneous noise of relationships and the complications inherent in the mask of illusion and reality that derives from it. The play very clearly questions the sincerity of the motivations of the publicly held (especially political) positions and beliefs of its protagonists. They are shown in The Real Thing to be a sham. (It is worth remembering, at this juncture, that Stoppard’s adaptation of Parade’s End also carries within it a similar exploration of the contrast between the public postures and private feelings of its principal characters: Christopher and Sylvia Tietjens and Valentine Wannop). Henry does, indeed, say, ‘public postures have the configuration of private derangement’,182 significantly just after Max’s ironic recognition that Brodie ‘didn’t have our motivation’183 and Charlotte has pointed out, in the context of a discussion about Annie’s membership of and Max’s support for the Justice for Brodie Committee, that, ‘you have to be properly motivated, like Annie’.184 In relation to the campaign to free Brodie from jail for joining an anti-missile demonstration and setting fire to a wreath on the cenotaph, nobody is properly motivated and their public posturings have private motivations that are anything but idealistic.185 Annie and Max’s opposition to the missiles is because 180 The references in The Real Thing to ‘no commitments, only bargains’, (pages 44 and 45) are, thereby, one of Stoppard’s fused coincidences. 181 WH. Auden, A Certain World A Commonplace Book, pages 86–87. See I. Nadel, Double Act A Life of Tom Stoppard, page 323. 182 The Real Thing, page 19. 183 The Real Thing, page 18. 184 The Real Thing, page 19. 185 Stoppard explores a similar contrast in Professional Foul when McKendrick objects to Anderson hiding Hollar’s thesis in his luggage in order to smuggle it through airport security unnoticed. McKendrick’s objection is contrary to the philosophical arguments he has

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they ‘own a weekend cottage in Little Barmouth’186 which would be affected by the siting of the American missiles. Max’s support for the cause is not such that he would attend a meeting of the committee if it ‘would mean letting down my squash partner’.187 For Annie, Brodie’s cause is not so important that she can miss a committee meeting in order to have an assignation with Henry – ‘What about Brodie?’, Henry asks. ‘Let him rot’,188 Annie replies. Billy, the object of Annie’s next fling, only takes a part in Brodie’s play to be near Annie: Annie: Billy: Annie: Billy:

Why won’t you do his play, then? I didn’t say I wouldn’t. I’ll do it if you’re doing it. You shouldn’t do things for the wrong reasons. Why not?189

Annie’s sentiment is in contrast to Henry’s pragmatism – ‘What does (Brodie) care if we’re motivated by the wrong reasons’.190 Billy is not the only person whom Annie cautions against doing things for the wrong reasons. Henry eventually ‘tarts up’ Brodie’s script but admits that he only did it for Annie. ‘You shouldn’t have done it if you didn’t think it was right’,191 she tells him. Brodie is described as, ‘a man divided against himself, a pacifist hooligan’.192 His motivation for setting fire to a wreath on the cenotaph and joining the anti-missile demonstration is described as ‘pure moral conscience’.193 But, at the end of the play it is revealed that actually ‘he was helpless’ and ‘didn’t know anything about anything’.194 He simply met Annie in a chance encounter, fancied her and, as Annie knew all along, just ‘did it to impress me’.195

186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195

been running, thereby proving Anderson’s earlier contention that, ‘we don’t always mean what we say’. (Professional Foul, page 44). Stoppard comments, ‘(McKendrick) makes the…discovery that it’s all very well in the bloody textbooks, but this is me, I could be in jail, this is my briefcase, you bastard!’. – Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 155. The Real Thing, page 18. The Real Thing, page 19. The Real Thing, page 20. The Real Thing, page 38. The Real Thing, page 19. The Real Thing, page 52. The Real Thing, page 20. The Real Thing, page 18. The Real Thing, page 55. The Real Thing, page 55.

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The point of the contrast between the actions of the public image and the internal feelings of the individual is actually what Henry sees as the core of love; the real thing. For once, the Stoppardian summary does not occur at the play’s climax: It’s to do with knowing and being known…It’s what lovers trust each o­ ther with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public.196 The application of Occam’s razor suggests that the illusion of the public persona when contrasted against the reality of the self and the morality of its motivation – and not the web of love affairs and relationships – is the play’s key topic. As if to prove the point Stoppard offers up a symbolic cameo of the principle of parsimony right at the start of the play. It opens with Max building a pyramid of playing cards which collapses as Charlotte slams the door when she walks in. Ten years after Stoppard had collapsed a pyramid of gymnasts, in the opening scene of Jumpers, by shooting McFee out of it, thereby symbolising the undermining of relativist morality (the core of the play’s moral analysis), he repeats the same pyramidical trick of a symbolic Occam’s razor in the libretto of The Real Thing. Charlotte, who has been having an affair and is, thus, presenting an outward persona to Max which is different from her inward one, destroys the pyramid by her action. Reinforcing the point, the play which the audience later learns is being performed in scene 1 is called House of Cards. By the same process of parsimony one finds the essence of The Hard Problem. Superficially it is about the duality of brain consciousness and its fusion with hedge fund trading. But there is no obvious example of Occam’s razor in operation on those subjects. The very first scene, however, introduces Game Theory197 and altruism. But, this time, unlike in Jumpers, Stoppard’s altruism comes with a value attached. Significantly, it is Stoppard’s motivation for writing the play: ‘the centre of what engaged me was value’,198 he said when interviewed by the director of the play’s first run. And herein Occam’s razor is found. In an act of altruism Hilary takes responsibility for Bo’s manipulation of sample data and pays a price for it in the form of losing her job. The Hard Problem has become, despite Spike’s opening scene exhortation to Hilary, an 196 The Real Thing, page 42. 197 The Hard Problem, page 4. 198 Stoppard, in an interview with N. Hytner, The Royal National Theatre, 6 February 2015.

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example of altruism in action and a valuation of its consequences. Hilary’s decision in front of Leo is Occam’s razor in action because it crystallises as simply as possible the whole argument about motivation and morality that the play has been debating, proving McFee’s point, in Jumpers, that even though, in Spike’s words, ‘altruism is an outlier’,199 its mere existence means that the relativist argument is ‘up a gum tree’.200 At the same time the razor reduces the centre of the play’s mystery to its explanation – Jerry Krohl’s decision to adopt Cathy in another example of altruism. Because Hilary had unofficially kept the questionnaires it enables her to discover that Cathy is the daughter she had given up for adoption. ‘The Language of Symbols’ In Indian Ink the product of the application of Occam’s razor is neither a speech nor an action. It is a painting: ‘A portrait’, painted by an Indian painter, ‘of a woman, nude, but in a composition in the old Rajasthani style. Even more amazing, a European woman’. The woman concerned is the subject of the play, Flora Crewe, a poet who has gone to India for health reasons. Stoppard explains the idea behind the relationship between painter and subject: I had this tiny notion that I could write a conversation between a poet and a painter. While the poet was having her portrait painted, she would be writing a poem about having her portrait painted.201 Flora’s letter confirms that this is exactly what the audience sees: ‘I’m having my portrait painted, I mean the painter is at it as I write’.202 The encounter between poet and painter is the catalyst for a debate about what Stoppard refers to as, ‘the Empire, and more particularly the ethics of empire’.203 It also leads to a second important discussion as to ‘What is rasa?’,204 an interactive Hindi emotional process between artist and audience which, in its turn, allows Stoppard to run the theme of duality through the play. The watercolour picture itself is the play’s foremost example of duality, being Indian in style but European in its nude subject matter and ‘as particular as an 199 The Hard Problem, page 5. 200 Jumpers, page 80. 201 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 120. 202 Indian Ink, page 31. 203 Stoppard, in an interview with P. Allen, ‘Third Ear’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 240. 204 Indian Ink, page 29.

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English miniature’.205 It is also one of a pair Das painted, the other being ‘on canvas’ in which ‘Flora is wearing her cornflower dress’.206 Even its Indian-ness is ambiguous as it is a miniature. Anish explains, ‘The Mughals brought miniature painting from Persia, but Muslim art and Hindu art are different. The Muslim artists were realists’.207 The reason why the picture is an example of Occam’s razor is explained by Anish as he tells Mrs Swan two things about the painting which, taken together, illustrate the principle of parsimony. The first is to explain that in contrast to Muslim art, ‘to a Hindu, every object has an inner meaning, everything is to be interpreted in the language of symbols’.208 The second comment Anish makes to Mrs Swan is that, ‘Underneath everything was this painting’.209 The symbolism in the painting is the distillation of the play. Flora’s sister describes the ‘watercolour and gouache’210 image: He hasn’t made her Indian.…I mean he hasn’t painted her flat. Everything else looks Indian, like enamel…the moon and stars done with a pastry cutter. The birds singing in the border…and the tree in bloom, so bright. Is it day or night? And everything on different scales. You can’t tell if the painter is in the house or outside looking in.211 The overall image of an Englishwoman in an Indian painting but not herself in Indian styles represents the British in India. The uncertainty as to what time of day it is reflects the play’s theme of duality as does the question of the perspective of the painter. The different scales allude to a quotation from Emily which ends the play and reflects the ambiguity of empire: ‘I sometimes wonder they (the Indians) do not cut all our (the British) heads off and say nothing more about it’.212 There is a ‘book on (Flora’s) pillow’, which Mrs Swan explains, ‘is Emily Eden’.213 The painting is in a stylized Hindi format with Flora depicted ‘in an empty house…like…Radha’,214 one of Krishna’s lovers. The style evokes 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214

Indian Ink, page 68. Indian Ink, page 9. Indian Ink, page 68. In the Native State, page 248: Indian Ink, page 68 – ‘to us Hindus, everything is to be interpreted in the language of symbols’. Indian Ink, page 67. Indian Ink, page 68. Indian Ink, page 68. Indian Ink, page 83. Indian Ink, page 68. Indian Ink, page 9.

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the concept of rasa with its reference to the moon and an empty house, both prime examples of Shringara’s (the rasa of erotic love) ability to arouse its audience. Anish notices that, ‘she is in a house within a house’,215 which, in this case, is fulfilled by the symbolism of a mosquito net. Also symbolic is ‘the flowering vine’.216 According to Anish it shows that the picture ‘was painted with love. The vine embraces the dark trunk of the tree’.217 It reflects upon one of the play’s mysteries; the nature of Das’ relationship with Flora. It also alludes to Flora’s illness and, thereby, reason for being in India. Anish concludes, ‘…look where it sheds its leaves and petals, they are falling to the ground. I think my father knew your sister was dying’.218 Flora muses in a letter as to whether ‘my soul will stay behind as a smudge of paint on paper’,219 which recalls her own erotic poetry, full of its own rasa, and her own physical dalliance in India, akin to that between Krishna and Radha: A satin that stops at nothing, Not the squeezed gates or soft gutters, it slicks into the press That prints me to the sheet …220 In the symbolism and physical qualities of that small painting can be found the essence of the whole play. A similarly symbolic act regarding a song forms the product of Occam’s razor in Rock ‘N’ Roll. The curtain comes down on Stoppard’s play as the first guitar chords of the Rolling Stones live album No Security are heard.221 Stoppard has used snatches of music throughout Rock ‘N’ Roll, as he also does in both The Real Thing and Darkside, to reflect particular points or moods in the argument or narrative that he is making. In Rock ‘N’ Roll Stoppard has presided 215 216 217 218 219 220 221

Indian Ink, page 68. Indian Ink, page 68. Indian Ink, page 68. Indian Ink, page 68. Indian Ink, page 9. Indian Ink, page 11. On 18 August 1990 The Rolling Stones played a concert, at the request of President Havel, at the Stadion Strahov, Prague. Apart from the Intro the first song on the No Security album is You Got Me Rocking. The set list, according to www.setlist.fm, did not include the song You Got Me Rocking. No Security is a live album which was recorded on The Rolling Stones’ Bridges to Babylon tour in 1997–1998. Ira Nadel records that, ‘Stoppard came up with the name for Jagger’s 1997 tour, “Bridges to Babylon”’. – I. Nadel, Double Act A Life of Tom Stoppard, page 393.

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over a debate – in some senses a live exercise against a real world backdrop of Cold War totalitarianism – about the freedom of the individual, particularly the right of freedom of expression, within society. Part of the vehicle of the play is the symbolic and actual role of a Czech band, The Plastic People of the Universe, in the movement for free speech in the totalitarian, Czech state. Stoppard draws a specific alignment between the Czech band and The Rolling Stones and the title of the final album, therefore, is a most concise summary of the argument within the play for the rights of the individual within the state. Keith Richards’ analysis of the significance of the concert is worth reciting: Who knows what we’d have had to face if we had come in the past. Jail? Arrest on charges of subversion? It’s always suspect if a government starts to be afraid of a rock & roll group. Rock & roll is a feeling, a spiritual condition. As soon as you start hacking away at it and warning that someone might be jailed for a song, the music gains other dimensions and becomes an important force. But that isn’t normal.222 At the culmination of Rock ‘N’ Roll the compression is almost too severe to be held up as a methodological deployment of parsimony – were it not for the location of the concert The Rolling Stones are giving, which enhances the symbolic nature of Stoppard’s point. Jan reports that, ‘President Havel showed the Stones round the castle’,223 which is the President of the Czech Republic’s official residence. Stoppard’s apostles of free speech have arrived at what was the inner temple of the totalitarian regime – the offices of the Communist Czech government.224 To complete the symbolic significance of the scene the concert is attended by Jan and Ferdinand, agitators/proponents of free speech under the Communist repression and Esme, the daughter of Communist apologist Max. The symbolic triumph of free expression over totalitarianism provides another example of the application of Occam’s razor in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. Nothing Stoppard writes is ever anything other than deliberate, considered and with meaning. One of the things he learned from Beckett was to waste nothing. The stage directions for the final scene in Stoppard’s play for a symphony orchestra are very precise and should command attention. Sacha’s teacher, a tool of the Party, joins the orchestra, as do the Doctor of the mental 222 R. Lipcik, ‘The Rolling Stones’ Czech Invasion’, Rolling Stone, 4 October 1990. 223 Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 118. Havel is the dedicatee of Rock ‘N’ Roll. 224 Although not referred to in the play the castle has a further totalitarian significance as it was the headquarters of Heydrich’s Nazi regime.

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institute where the dissident Alexander has been held and ‘treated’ and Ivanov (the true mental patient with whom Alexander has shared a cell), who is now beating out the rhythm of percussion in a real, rather than his imaginary, orchestra: SACHA comes across to the middle of the platform at the bottom. These directions assume a centre aisle going up the middle of the orchestra towards the organ. ALEXANDER and SACHA move up this aisle, SACHA running ahead. At the top he turns and sings to the same tune as before.225 What Sacha, the dissident Alexander’s son, sings is, ‘Everything can be all right!’.226 Like the painting in Indian Ink the image of the final scene in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is a visual representation of the product of the application of Occam’s razor to the argument of the play. The orchestra, in which everyone plays in harmony the same tune under the unquestioned direction of a single conductor is a representation of the power and methodology of the totalitarian state. Alexander and his son cleave it metaphorically in two. They proceed towards an organ, the music from which is associated with (and, hence, symbolic of) the entrance and exit of the Colonel who, in an act of political expediency, has orchestrated Alexander’s release because the dissident has become an embarrassment to the regime. Sacha’s song echoes the ambiguous words of the ending of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, reflecting Winston Smith’s ‘victory over himself’.227 Reflecting the duality inherent in much of Stoppard’s work the phrase could be interpreted to mean that Alexander’s dissident freedom of expression will triumph. Alternatively, it could mean that the Colonel’s cynical trick228 has ensured the face-saving survival of the regime. Thus, the scene is 225 226 227 228

egbdf, page 37. egbdf, page 37. Nineteen Eighty-Four, page 311. The Colonel’s action has been the subject of critical debate and misunderstanding. The Colonel, who is described by the Doctor as ‘a genius’ (page 32), has ‘insisted’ (page 32) that the political dissident Alexander Ivanov be put in the same cell as a real mental patient with the same name, Alexander Ivanov, who believes he is the triangle player in an imaginary orchestra. It enables the Colonel to address both men and ask one Alexander Ivanov, the mental patient, whether he thinks the Soviet regime would, ‘put a sane man into a lunatic asylum’, and get an honest negative answer and to ask the other Alexander Ivanov, the dissident, whether he thinks he has an imaginary orchestra and get a similarly honest negative answer. The Colonel is, thus, able to declare, ‘There is absolutely nothing wrong with these men. Get them out of here’, (page 37) thereby having the justification

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yet another visual manifestation, crafted by Stoppard, of the application of the parsimony principle to the content of one of his plays. Anti-razor Perhaps just to be cantankerous Stoppard, on rare occasions, deliberately flies in the face of the principle of parsimony. A particularly fine example occurs in The Dog It Was That Died. In his radio play about spies Stoppard has a dry run at the concept of illusion and reality,229 which is the essence of the business of spying, to which he was to give much greater vent later on in Hapgood. Purvis, a retiring spy, has been apparently working for both the British and the Soviets. At issue for his British handlers is why he has committed suicide. Stoppard sets up the opportunity to apply the razor when an investigative British spy, Hogbin, tells one of his superiors that ‘the facts would fit more than one set of possibilities’.230 Various explanations are dangled in front of the audience – P ­ urvis had damaging information about the Chief’s private life; the Russians may have rumbled him; there is the whiff of a scandal at the church where Purvis is a church warden; he has possibly been overworked. The radio stage is set for one of Stoppard’s usual last scene unravellings of his stock in trade mayhem. However, the listener is surprised to find that, in the words of the British spy Chief, ‘These double and triple bluffs can be a bit of a headache’.231 The explanation is not at all simple and, if anything, demonstrates the antirazor. Purvis had been set up to provide the Russians with information, but in order to maintain his cover the British did not always behave in a way which the Russians – believing Purvis to be their man – would expect (allowing for a double bluff) which implied that Purvis be fed with the wrong information to free the dissident Alexander. Michael Billington is honest enough to admit the confusion: ‘Like many people seeing the first production at the Royal Festival Hall, I myopically concluded that the Colonel himself was acting out of confusion. Of course, the real point is that he has deliberately put the two prisoners together and knows full well what he is doing in asking them inappropriate questions.…What (the ending) actually shows is the discharge both of a genuine lunatic…and of a prisoner of conscience forced to bend the knee to a system he has knowingly defied’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 114. I made the same initial mistake. See also J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, pages 124 and 126–127. 229 Billington plays down the significance of illusion and reality in the play. He believes, ‘(The Dog It Was That Died) is less about the deceptiveness of appearances than about the futility of espionage and the craziness of English’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, pages 157–158. 230 The Dog It Was That Died, pages 171–172. 231 The Dog It Was That Died, page 191.

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so that the Russians would draw the right conclusion even though this meant (because of what is by this stage a triple bluff) the Russians would know what the British were going to do. As the Chief summarises: In other words, Purvis was acting, in effect, as a genuine Russian spy in order to maintain his usefulness as a bogus Russian spy…The only reason why this wasn’t entirely disastrous for us was that, of course, during the whole of this time, the Russians, believing us to believe that Purvis was in their confidence, had been giving Purvis information designed to mislead us…and in order to maintain Purvis’s credibility they have been forced to do some of the things which they told Purvis they would do, although their first reason for telling him was that they didn’t wish to do them.232 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead exhibits the application of the razor but it also stands, unintentionally, as a condensation of many of the main themes in Stoppard’s subsequent output. It is a play about four main themes.233 The first is a search for the nature of truth. Right at the end of the play Rosencrantz utters to Guildenstern, ‘To tell the truth’,234 which is what he and his companion have been trying to do throughout the play. The second is an exploration of the concept of illusion and reality through the practice of acting. Reflecting upon what they have, at Claudius’ request, gleaned from Hamlet about his state of mind, Rosencrantz admits one is talking about ‘some shadow-play’235 which Stoppard uses to explore aspects of the nature of reality. Thirdly, the play makes considerable mention of death, regarding human mortality as a destination in itself. As the Player observes, the play he is in (reflecting also Hamlet) is ‘a slaughterhouse – eight corpses all told. It brings out the best in us’.236 But, the most significant theme of the whole play is that of the random versus the deterministic nature of destiny. Guildenstern’s’ analysis of the possible explanations as to why the tossed coins have come up continuously heads illustrates the issue: One. I’m willing it.…Two. Time has stopped dead, and the single experience of one coin being spun once has been repeated ninety times…On 232 233 234 235 236

The Dog It Was That Died, page 192. cf J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 53. RosGuil, page 117. RosGuil, page 48. RosGuil, page 75.

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the whole, doubtful. Three. Divine intervention…Four. A spectacular vindication of the principle that each coin spun individually…is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise each individual time it does.237 In yet another example of Stoppard applying Occam’s razor to summarize the themes and arguments of a play he gives Guildenstern a dramatic speech (during which he also, seemingly, commits an act of murder), as he confronts the Player at the end of the play, to remind the audience of the four topics, all of which are reflected and interwoven into each other in the text: I’m talking about death – and you’ve never experienced that. And you cannot act it. You die a thousand casual deaths – with none of that intensity which squeezes out life…and no blood runs cold anywhere. Because even as you die you know that you will come back in a different hat. But no one gets up after death – there is no applause – there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that’s – death – And he pushes the blade in up to the hilt. The Player stands with huge, terrible eyes, clutches at the wound as the blade withdraws…While he is dying… If we had destiny, then so had he – and if this is ours, then that was his – and if there are no explanations for us, then let there be none for him –238 Stoppard’s version of this speech in the film is even more clipped, leaving out principally the specific reference to acting, no doubt considering that the theme is still covered by the presence of the Player. But, there is a further way of viewing the application of Occam’s razor which is more of a reductio ad minimum of the principle of parsimony. And one will be hard pressed to find a tighter, more concise example of its application in Stoppard’s terms. The title of the play itself – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – as a quotation from Hamlet alerts the audience both to the structure of the play239 and also to the themes Stoppard reflects from those found in 237 RosGuil, page 6. 238 RosGuil, pages 114–115. 239 William Gruber comments, however, ‘it is impossible to assess accurately the extent to which the audience will recognize allusions to Hamlet’. – W. Gruber, ‘Wheels within wheels, etcetera: Artistic Design in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook, page 22. Dennis Huston discusses the possible

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Shakespeare’s play: destiny, death, language, play acting with reality. It also emphasises the key theme, determinism: the audience knows right at the start of the play that its two main characters are going to their doom. It underlines the play’s emphasis on human mortality and since the audience knows it is dealing with characters from a well-known play, then it realises that this is a play about the illusion of playing. One knows, too, that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are, in Hamlet, liars when asked to spy on the prince and, so, the title alerts one to the concept of truth. Paradoxically, in its entirety Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead also serves as a form of route map for most of Stoppard’s other main plays and, in that loose sense, is the inadvertent result of the application of Occam’s razor to most of his principal stage works. Its focus on the debate of determinism versus randomness foresees the science-philosophy of Arcadia and Hapgood while its emphasis on the deterministic journey is reflected in the historical journey which takes Russian historical thought to The Coast of Utopia. It’s exploration of illusion and reality, largely through the process of acting, resonates later in Hapgood and The Real Thing and the duality inherent therein foreshadows the two sides of Housman and Arnold, the rasa inspired doublesidedness of the British in India and the problem of consciousness dualism. Its exploration of truth leads to a point of departure from which Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Rock ‘N’ Roll commence their analysis of the basis of free expression. The play’s constant consideration of its themes in terms of absolutist and relativist perspectives foreshadows similar approaches in Jumpers, The Hard Problem, Darkside and Professional Foul. Its play-within-a-play structure would lead later to Travesties, The Real Inspector Hound, On the Razzle, Dalliance, Shakespeare in Love and Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth. In a duality that only Stoppard could produce Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is much easier to understand if put in the context of the plays that Stoppard wrote after it. Parsimony Stoppard’s description of After Magritte is of itself an example of the parsimony of Occam’s razor:

i­nterpretations of the title of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in ‘“Misreading” Hamlet: Problems of Perspective in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook, pages 48–51.

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After Magritte is a short, 25 minute playlet which begins with a tableau which appears to be completely surreal and inexplicable. And by the end of the play, 25 minutes later, the audience has seen how it is accounted for, and all the steps towards it are absolutely reasonable, logical steps.240 It reduces the play to two sentences which illustrate that the play itself is a demonstration of the parsimony principle. Stoppard chooses to apply the principle most frequently in a methodological manner, usually in the form of a speech, in order to summarise an argument or debate, as in Travesties or The Coast of Utopia. Just occasionally, as in Indian Ink, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour or Rock ‘N’ Roll, he accomplishes the same effect more emblematically. Stoppard takes the application of the razor a stage further when he applies it, still using the methodological process, in a metaphysical way to the debate in Jumpers about what is the source of moral values. But, the act of reduction is not the only aspect of Occam’s razor which applies to Stoppard’s works. One of the defining characteristics of his plays is the collision of disparate ideas, such as those of spying and quantum mechanics in Hapgood. In the unlikely unions of ideas and narrative vehicles which populate his plays there is only one explanation for each of the fusions – and that is the result of applying the principle of parsimony. The patterns of the themes, methods and devices that Stoppard uses to infuse and envelop his works are as consistent as his use of Occam’s razor. Since the application of the parsimony principle is the removal of unnecessary material in order to provide explanations in his plays, any consideration of how he does so implies an assessment of what he is reducing or eliminating by his use of parsimony. One should begin with the first of these patterns: the Stoppardian stage debates that present the arguments that Occam’s razor simplifies.

240 Stoppard, ‘A Play In Three Acts’, The Pennsylvania Gazette, April 1996, page 29.

chapter 2

The Stoppardian Stage Debate I’ve always enjoyed scenes where there are two people with bats, banging this ball across a net at each other.1 stoppard

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I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting yourself.2 stoppard

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Every drama must present a conflict. The end may be reconciliation or destruction; or, as in life itself, there may be no end; but the conflict is indispensable: no conflict, no drama.3 George Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface (1898)’ to Plays Pleasant

∵ The power and impact of a Tom Stoppard play rests on two clearly identifiable patterns: the twin pillars of the drama of the stage debate he creates in the context of the vehicle on which he carries it. The drama is drama of the Shavian definition: conflict.4 The conflict Stoppard produces is rarely of situation­or 1 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight’. in M. Gussow, M Conversations with Stoppard, page 56. 2 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 3. 3 GB. Shaw, ‘Preface (1898)’, Plays Pleasant: Arms and the Man; Candida; the Man of Destiny; You Never Can Tell. 4 Michael Billington observes the same point: ‘One of the keys to real drama is the presentation of equally balanced arguments: Shaw was a master of it and used the technique most brilliantly in Saint Joan where Cauchon’s arguments as to why Joan cannot be the private interceptor between the Church and God are matched by Joan’s passionate defence of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_003

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narrative. Neither are they the product of character, as Stoppard admits: ‘My plays, generally speaking, derive from a desire to discuss and dispute a certain subject. My plays are not about the interaction of character’.5 Characters6 are generally vehicles for his ideas – ‘I’m a playwright interested in ideas and forced to invent characters to express those ideas’,7 he emphasises. It is those ideas, often complex and profound, which the application of Occam’s razor refines, after all the interchanges and perspectives, to a single summary or position; as in Ruth’s conversation with her son, aeh’s final retrospection or Flora’s painting. What Stoppard’s approach produces is a debate which is, by its nature, the conflict of ideas presented in the form of arguments. ‘I don’t write plays with heroes who express my point of view. I write argument plays’,8 he says. In an interview with Angeline Goreau Stoppard acknowledges both that the drama of his plays is the drama of ideas and that a play may not be the best medium for so doing: One of the built-in ironies of being a playwright at all is that one is constantly trying to put into dramatic form questions and answers that

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nonconformist individualism. Stoppard (in Travesties) also starts with a private collision of the function of art and then extends it, almost imperceptibly, to take on board the subjectivity of language and the origins of war. The point is neither Carr nor Tzara is exclusively right or wrong’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 100. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Berkvist, ‘This Time, Stoppard Plays It (Almost) Straight’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 139. ‘I don’t write character parts on a conscious level’. – Stoppard, in an interview with T. O’Connor, ‘Welcome to the World of Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 229. Stoppard even goes as far as saying, ‘It doesn’t interest me in any way to create characters’. – Stoppard, in an interview with J. Bradshaw, ‘Tom Stoppard, Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 96. He goes on to argue to Bradshaw that, ‘perhaps characters in a play are never real. Have you seen anybody who’s reminded you of Oedipus Rex lately?’. Jim Hunter qualifies Stoppard’s confession by arguing that, ‘For years…Stoppard was in the habit of saying he wasn’t interested in characterisation. But by this he meant psychological realism’. – J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 52. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The dissident is a discordant note in a highly orchestrated society’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 35. John Fleming describes how some dialogue in Hapgood is not character specific and is more important as part of an argument – see J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, Note 7, page 287. See also J. Fleming, (op cit, Note 10, page 273) for an argument as to why Archie in Jumpers should not be played as a villain. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The dissident is a discordant note in a highly orchestrated society’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 35.

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require perhaps an essay, perhaps a book, but are too important and too subtle, really, to have to account for themselves within the limitations of what’s really happening in the theatre, which is that the story is being told in dialogue.9 Stoppard’s plays present both sides of an argument and, typically, draw no conclusion but leave the audience to make up its own mind on the basis of the evidence they have seen and heard10 – ‘That’s what playmaking is’, he told Thomas O’Connor, ‘you have to take everybody’s side’.11 He acknowledges that, 9 10

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Stoppard, in an interview with A. Goreau, ‘Is The Real Inspector Hound a Shaggy Dog Story?’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 260. There are exceptions. The resolution of the question as to whether an artist can be a revolutionary in Travesties seems to be clear from Carr’s final speech (Travesties, page 71). Apropos of Travesties Shirley Schultz and Russell Astley believe that, ‘there can be little doubt that Travesties illustrates Stoppard’s own view of art and politics’. – S. Schultz and R. Astley, ‘Travesties: Plot and the Moral Tilt’ in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook, page 223. CWE. Bigsby, on the other hand, comments that in Travesties, ‘(Stoppard) is careful to conceal his own commitments by refusing to resolve the contradictory views expressed by his characters’, although he notes that, ‘Stoppard’s detachment slips once or twice…Carr’s rebuttal of Marxist analysis and Cecily’s disingenuous justification for Lenin’s inhumanity are too studied to sustain a credible commitment to ethical distance’. – CWE. Bigsby, Tom Stoppard, pages 27–28. Benedict Nightingale’s review of Night and Day suggests that Stoppard is not detached on the journalistic subject matter: ‘By the end there’s little, perhaps too little, doubt where Stoppard stands on issues that may be more ticklish and equivocal than he allows’. – B. Nightingale, review of Night and Day at the Phoenix theatre, New Statesman, 17 November 1978, page 671. Stoppard himself concluded in 1981, ‘in the last few years I haven’t been writing about questions whose answers I believe to be ambivalent. In Every Good Boy and Professional Foul, the author’s position isn’t ambiguous’. – Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 165. In 1974 Stoppard concluded that, ‘the element I find most valuable is one that other people are put off by – that is, that there is very often no single, clear statement in my plays’. – Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 58. Stoppard, in an interview with T. O’Connor, ‘Welcome to the World of Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 229. Stephen Schiff describes it rather better: ‘What Stoppard seeks in an idea is not a stand to take – he rarely even knows which side of an argument he supports – or even an area of knowledge to navigate. He’s looking for a structure, a little bomb of a notion explosive to generate funny characters and beguiling situations and the kind of paradox-happy logorrhea that makes his plays jingle and sing’. – ‘Full Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 216. Alastair Macaulay sums up Stoppard’s style rather concisely as, ‘It’s a characteristic of

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‘My plays, generally speaking, derive from a desire to discuss and dispute a certain subject’.12 The way he does so is in the form of a debate. Moreover, Stoppard explicitly accepts, in his words, that, ‘I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation’.13 Such is the style of Travesties, Jumpers and, albeit in a more wide-ranging and contradictory process (because of the nature of the characters), The Coast of Utopia. Stoppard goes on to say that, ‘I characteristically write plays for two voices. Obviously I try to be as persuasive as possible on both sides’.14 Two voices – perhaps another clue as to why Stoppard is so interested in duality – does not imply only two people putting the cases. Night And Day, for example, contains a number of protagonists putting both sides of the case for the freedom of the press and Indian Ink illustrates the debate about Empire from multiple perspectives. The two voices are just both sides of an argument, demonstrating, therefore, that Stoppard is writing debates and not polemics. He certainly has his own views. ‘My prejudices were all on Joyce’s side’,15 and ‘Donner is

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a Stoppard play that there’s always another answer’. – A. Macaulay, ‘Tom Stoppard, A.E. Housman, and the Classics’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 153. R. Berkvist, ‘This Time, Tom Stoppard Plays It (Almost) Straight’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 139. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 3. R. Berkvist, ‘This Time, Tom Stoppard Plays It (Almost) Straight’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 137. Stoppard told Mel Gussow, ‘I tend to write plays for two people rather than for One Voice. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were two sides of one temperament’. – ‘The dissident is a discordant note in a highly orchestrated society’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 35. Stoppard, in an interview with O. Kerensky, ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 86. Stoppard told CE. Maves, ‘I have Tzara the Dadaist argue against Joyce the traditionalist, and a lot of the audience decides that Tzara is right. Actually, I empathize with Joyce, though I don’t necessarily give him the last word’. – ‘A Playwright on the Side of Rationality’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 101. He told Stanley Eichelbaum in contradiction, however, ‘Joyce … is an artist I can respect and sympathize with. I happen to be on his side, which is why I’ve given Joyce the last word’. – ‘So Often Produced, He Ranks with Shaw’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 105. He admits elsewhere to the persuasiveness of Dada’s argument – eg: ‘even in Travesties in the argument between James Joyce and Tristan Tzara. Temperamentally and intellectually, I’m very much on Joyce’s side, but I found it persuasive to write Tzara’s speech’. – Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The dissident is discordant note in a highly orchestrated society’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 35. See Paul Delaney’s discussion and resolution of the arguments in Travesties in P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, pages 62–63. Delaney argues

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me’,16 he openly admits.17 But, it does not prevent him from putting Tzara’s case or the counterpoint to any of the other arguments in his plays: When I start writing, I find it difficult, except on simple questions, to know where I stand – even in Travesties in the argument on art between James Joyce and Tristan Tzara. Temperamentally and intellectually, I’m very much on Joyce’s side, but I found it persuasive to write Tzara’s speech.…in Jumpers, George Moore represents a morality that I embrace, rather than that of Archibald Jumper, but both protagonists spoke for me. This is also true of Night and Day. There are various things said by various people that I agree with.18 Stoppard puts his finger on what has been the chief criticism of his craft when he notes that, ‘I’ve been told in the past…that some of my characters are, as it were, spokespeople for a particular point of view’.19 A review of the 2015 production of The Hard Problem at the National Theatre exemplifies such criticism: ‘Stoppard’s characters aren’t people, so much as opposing viewpoints with jobs and characteristics attached.…Every character’s every decision is governed by Stoppard’s thesis. No one has a life of their own. The entire thing is illustrative’.20 The standard charge that Stoppard does not write characters

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at one point that, ‘Carr serves rather transparently as the spokesman for Stoppard’s own views’. (op cit, page 73). Stoppard, in an interview with R. Mayne, ‘Arts Commentary’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 37. In reference to Night And Day Stoppard claims Guthrie is his point of view, saying, ‘the person in the play who says that information, in itself, is light – about anything – does speak for me’. – Stoppard, in an interview with H. Hebert, ‘A Playwright in Undiscovered Country’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 127. By contrast, Stoppard told D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Milne has my prejudice…Somehow unconsciously, I wanted him to be known to be speaking the truth’. – ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 163. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The dissident is a discordant note in a highly orchestrated society’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 35. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. For instance, Gabrielle Scott Robinson in 1977 wrote, ‘Stoppard’s characters are personifications of ideas, always subordinate to a conceit’. – GS. Robinson, ‘Plays Without Plot: The Theatre of Tom Stoppard’, Educational Theatre Journal 29, page 38, quoted in JF. Dean, Tom Stoppard Comedy As A Moral Matrix, page 9. M. Trueman, Variety, 29 January 2015. Michael Billington’s analysis of Dotty in Jumpers is also illustrative: ‘The trouble is Dotty is an idea more than a real person…At one point in the play, she is a spokesperson for Archie’s philosophy’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the

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does not hold water.21 Most obviously, Herzen and Bakunin were real historical characters and Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia trilogy reflects the arguments of their own writings. Many will surely recognise a schoolmaster such as Dobson in Where Are They Now? and anyone who has gone to university will have met an ageing don like George Moore,22 obsessed with the cleverness of his own intellectual brilliance and niggled to the point of near dementia by the academic vigour of his rivals’ arguments. But, characters or not, the point about Stoppard’s plays is that the drama derives from the conflict of ideas. Perhaps some of the most interesting drama comes when the conflict of debate comes from the two sides of the same character, as in The Invention of Love’s Housman and aeh. The Stoppardian stage debate manifests itself in a variety of forms. The intellectual cut and thrust of Travesties is in marked contrast to the nuanced approach of Indian Ink and the sometimes contradictory approach seen in The Coast of Utopia. Night And Day is a debate broken down into several facets while other plays, like Artist Descending a Staircase, deliver up short bursts rather than a grand set-piece. Not all the debates need two protagonists – Jumpers is largely an internal argument George Moore is having with himself. In keeping with the patterns that recur throughout Stoppard’s works some debates begin in one play and end in another. Most noticeable of those arguments are Stoppard’s considerations of modern art or altruism. However it is conducted, the conflict of the ideas is the essence of Stoppard’s drama.

Intellectual Ping-Pong

The most intense debate Stoppard conjures up is in Travesties and Stoppard has not been coy about its purpose. He told Gussow, ‘It’s worth asking whether

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playwright, page 92. Similarly, Benedict Nightingale, in a review of Night and Day comments that, ‘(Milne) is more a set of principles, a series of excited and enthusiastic arguments, than a young man cruelly cut down in his prime’. – B. Nightingale, review of Night and Day at the Phoenix theatre, New Statesman, 17 November 1978, page 671. Anthony Jenkins makes an interesting observation which, he says, ‘has not received much attention from Stoppard or his commentators. The major characters in all his work experience various degrees of agony’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 104. Michael Billington is at variance on this point. Writing in 1987 (and referring to Stoppard’s career before Professional Foul) Billington said, ‘As a dramatist (Stoppard) has tended hitherto to pull back on the brink of depicting real pain, real anguish’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 119. See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, Note 14, page 274 for Stoppard’s justification of George’s speeches.

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the artist and the revolutionary can be the same person or whether the activities are mutually exclusive’.23 What Stoppard actually presents is two arguments. In addition to the question of whether art and revolution are mutually incompatible Stoppard also pursues a subset of that debate with a continuation of the discussion about the morality and purpose of art that he had started in Artist Descending a Staircase. Emphasising both the sub argument and that what Travesties really does offer is polemical theatre, Stoppard says he wrote the play as part of, ‘an ongoing debate with myself over the importance of the artist’.24 In an important insight into how he makes the process work on stage he adds that, ‘I don’t want to give them shallow arguments and then knock them down…It’s like playing chess with yourself’.25 Stoppard said to Ronald Hayman that he wanted the first act of Travesties to have people ‘playing ping-pong with various intellectual ideas’.26 And, Stoppard certainly delivers the ping-pong.27 Apart from the single encounter 23

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Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Seriousness compromised by my frivolity or… frivolity redeemed by my seriousness’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 20. Perhaps this seed was sown in Stoppard’s mind by his adaptation of Tango in which Stomil says art is a form of revolution. Stoppard said to R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler that, ‘(Travesties) puts the question in a more extreme form. It asks whether an artist has to justify himself in political terms at all’. – ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 69. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Wetzsteon, ‘Tom Stoppard eats Steak Tartare with Chocolate Sauce’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 82. The arguments are critically summarized thus by Tim Brassell: ‘(Travesties) does not merely circumnavigate the beliefs of the three main characters: it arranges them in such a fashion as to spotlight the various directions open to twentieth-century art. Joyce, though his art is done scant justice, provides the yardstick by which the more traditional art is continually re-shaped; Tzara, though his own “art” is contradictory and destructive, provides the yardstick by which it is subjected to constant challenge; Lenin, as an absolute dogmatist, provides a yardstick by which art is throttled in the grip of political intolerance’. – T. Brassell, Tom Stoppard: An Assessment, page 160. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Wetzsteon, ‘Tom Stoppard eats Steak Tartare with Chocolate Sauce’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 82. Shallow arguments is exactly what Jernigan accuses Stoppard of in Shipwreck – ‘much of this play continues to devote itself to the buffoonish Michael giving “shallow arguments” so that the bully Herzen can knock them down’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 167. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, ‘First Interview’ in R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 12. Stoppard is quoted by Janet Watts as saying that that the dialogue in his plays is ‘simply stuff which I’ve ping-ponged between me and myself’. – J. Watts, ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 49. Benedict Nightingale’s review of the original production of Travesties in 1974 reads thus: ‘the puns and Wildean mots, the long, sparkling monologues, the limericks and songs, the

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between Joyce and Tzara, which acts as a summary to the debate about the value of art, the tit-for-tat discussion concerning the nature and value of art is conducted between Carr and Tzara. It begins with a quick-fire encounter on what the purpose of art is: Tzara: I am sick of cleverness.…In point of fact, everything is Chance. Carr: That sounds awfully clever. What does it mean? Tzara: It means, my dear Henry, that the causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about. And it is the duty of the artist to jeer and howl and belch at the discussion that infinite generations of real effects can be inferred from the gross expression of apparent cause. Carr: It is the duty of the artist to beautify existence.28 Picking up on a debate that Stoppard had in Artist Descending a Staircase (indeed, repeating some of the argument and, even, the words)29 the discussion moves on to whether there is an objective criterion for art: Tzara: Doing the things by which is meant Art is no longer considered the proper concern of the artist.…Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art, mean the things he does.… Carr: But that is simply to change the meaning of the word Art. Tzara: I see I have made myself clear. Carr: Then you are not actually an artist at all? Tzara: On the contrary. I have just told you I am. Carr: But that does not make you an artist. An artist is someone who is gifted in some way that enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone

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disguises and misunderstandings, all packing the action like pinball machines in a debating chamber’. – B. Nightingale, New Statesman, 14 June 1974. Travesties, pages 19–20. cf Lord Malquist : ‘It is the duty of an artist to leave the world decorated by some trifling and quite useless ornament’. – Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, page 68. Michael Billington notices both how Stoppard’s debate on art runs from Artist Descending a Staircase into Travesties and how the latter play gives much greater time to the subject: ‘what is instantly striking is how Stoppard takes ideas adumbrated in the debate between Donner and Beauchamp in Artist Descending a Staircase and expands them into a five-minute, head-on collision (in Travesties) in which both participants are equally eloquent’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 99.

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who is not thus gifted.…Don’t you see my dear Tristan you are simply asking me to accept that the word Art means whatever you wish it to mean; but I do not accept it. Tzara: Why not? You do exactly the same thing with words like patriotism, duty, love, freedom, king and country, brave little Belgium, saucy little Serbia –30 The crossfire intensifies as Carr and Tzara move on to why wars are fought, allowing Carr a sideswipe at the quality of modern art along the way: Carr: Wars are fought to make the world safe for artists.…The easiest way of knowing whether good has triumphed over evil is to examine the freedom of the artist. The ingratitude of artists, indeed their hostility, not to mention the loss of nerve and failure of talent which accounts for ‘modern art’, merely demonstrate the freedom of the artist to be ungrateful, hostile, self-centred and talentless… Tzara: Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations; for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal; for colonial pickings…War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don’t want to be a hero. It takes courage to sit down and be counted.… Carr: …Think you know it all! – while we poor dupes think we’re fighting for ideals…Do you think your phrases are the true sum of each man’s living of each day?…I went to war because it was my duty, because my country needed me, and that’s patriotism. I went to war because I believed that those boring little Belgians and incompetent Frogs had the right to be defended by German militarism, and that’s love of freedom.…I won’t be told by some yellow-bellied Bolshevik that I ended up in the trenches because there’s a profit in ball-bearings!31 The pyrotechnics culminate in a disagreement about the role of art and the artist in society. It begins with a skirmish about the place of art in revolution: Tzara: …As a Dadaist, I am the natural enemy of bourgeois art and the natural ally of the political left, but the odd thing about revolution­ 30 31

Travesties, page 21. Travesties, pages 22–23.

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is that the further left you go politically the more bourgeois they like their art. Carr: There’s nothing odd about that. Revolution in art is in no way connected with class revolution.32 But, it instantly moves to an impassioned exchange about what role art actually performs in society, which is a more expansive consideration of a point previously raised in Artist Descending a Staircase (again reprising some of the words and in the shadow of what Stoppard described to Janet Watts as, ‘When Auden said his poetry didn’t save one Jew from the gas chamber’):33 Carr: Artists are members of a privileged class. Art is absurdly overrated by artists, which is understandable, but what is strange is that it is absurdly overrated by everyone else. Tzara: Because man cannot live by bread alone. Carr: Yes he can. It’s art he can’t live on. When I was at school on certain afternoons we all had to do what was called Labour…but if you had a chit from Matron you were let off to spend the afternoon messing around in the Art Room. Labour or Art. And you’ve got a chit for life? (Passionately) Where did you get it? What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist. Tzara (Hard): Yes, by Christ! – and when you see the drawings he made on the walls of the cave, and the fingernail patterns he one day pressed into the clay of the cooking pot, then you say, My God, I am of these people! It’s not the hunters and the warriors that put you on the first rung of the ladder to consecutive thought and a rather unusual flair in your poncey trousers. Carr:  Oh yes it was. The hunter decorated the pot, the warrior scrawled the antelope on the wall, the artist came home with the kill. All of a piece. The idea of the

32 33

Travesties, page 28. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Watts, ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 50.

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artist as a special kind of human being is art’s greatest achievement, and it’s a fake!34 Unlike his later encounter with Joyce, Tzara gets the last word on this point: …When the strongest began to fight for the tribe, and the fastest to hunt, it was the artist who became the priest-guardian of the magic that conjured the intelligence out of the appetites. Without him, man would be a coffee-mill…35 Tzara finishes by underlying the credentials of Dadaism: The artist has negated himself.…The difference between being a man and a coffee-mill is art. But that difference has become smaller and smaller and smaller. Art created patrons and was corrupted.…The artist has negated himself…Without art man was a coffee-mill: but with art, man – is a coffee-mill! That is the message of Dada.36 It is exhilarating stuff. Just the sort of stuff, however, that got Stoppard’s plays labelled as a succession of talking heads reciting ideas rather than fully formed characters.37 Which is ironic – because Carr, Tzara, Joyce etc. were all real people. In the second act Travesties moves on to consider Stoppard’s bigger question: ‘whether an artist has to justify himself in political terms at all’.38 It does so without the crossfire intensity of the first act. Against the background of 34 35 36 37

38

Travesties, pages 28–29. Travesties, page 29. Stoppard told ACH. Smith, ‘My justification for art in general is that without art we’re just coffee-mills: eat, grind, shit’. – Flourish, Issue One 1974. Travesties, page 29. ‘Despite their popular success, Jumpers and Travesties sustained the view of Stoppard as an intellectual playwright more to be studied than enjoyed. His characters were bright, witty but emotionless’. I. Nadel, Double Act A Life of Tom Stoppard, page 257. Richard Corballis argues that, ‘For the most part…(Stoppard’s) characters are deliberately two-dimensional’, suggesting that this presentation resembles that in a masque in which two opposites are juxtaposed. See R. Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork, pages 154–157. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 69.

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a quotation from Lenin that, ‘The life is the art’,39 Cecily says, ‘The sole duty and justification for art is social criticism’.40 The debate moves closer still to Lenin’s political territory when Tzara picks up Cecily’s point about art’s role in society and relates it to revolution as he remarks, ‘Artists and intellectuals will be the conscience of the revolution’.41 Carr and Tzara conduct a brief exchange in which the perversity of the status of art in the post revolution society is highlighted: Carr: I don’t think there’ll be a place for Dada in a Communist society. Tzara: That’s what we have against this one. There’s a place for us in it!42 Lenin later, in minatory fashion, demonstrates that Carr is merely showing Tzara the writing on the wall: ‘Today, literature must become party literature’.43 Lenin enters the debate, somewhat belatedly and draws a distinction between modern art and traditional art: ‘Expressionism, futurism, cubism…I don’t understand them and I get no pleasure from them’.44 On the other hand, as Nadya points out, ‘he respected Tolstoy’s traditional values’,45 and Lenin admits that, ‘I don’t know of anything greater than the Appassionata’.46 And here, against the background of Beethoven’s great work (in the words of Chekhov’s Ivanov, ‘like someone carried away by a piece of Beethoven’47), Lenin offers an answer to Stoppard’s question. Art, even the stuff he likes, is not compatible with revolution.48 The problem is that, as Lenin puts it, ‘I can’t listen to music 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Travesties, page 49. Travesties, page 49. Paul Delaney comments: ‘Just as Tzara’s contradictory and unreal notions about the world begin in his own self-absorption in his identity as an artist, the confusions which Lenin and Lenin’s ideological disciple Cecily express about the nature of art and society arise from their failure to apprehend reality in its complex wholeness.’ – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 65. Travesties, page 57. Travesties, page 57. Travesties, page 58. Travesties, page 60. Travesties, page 60. Travesties, page 62. Ivanov, page 56. Michael Billington comes to a slightly different conclusion – art and politics are just different: ‘Stoppard offers us multiple perspectives in Travesties. If he comes to any conclusion, it is that political and artistic revolutions are entirely different entities’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 103.

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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’.49 That sort of behaviour isn’t going to deliver the ‘head-on collision’50 that Cecily says Marx warned about. Instead, Lenin says, ‘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’.51 Carr sees both sides of the argument.52 He uses the chit from matron analogy, which he had flung earlier at Tzara, to make his point in both directions. As Carr rather amusingly puts it, ‘There was nothing wrong with Lenin except his politics’.53 On the politics, Marx got it wrong. He got it wrong for good reasons but he got it wrong just the same.…Marx drew the lesson (from the industrial revolution) that the wealth of the capitalist had been stolen from the worker in the form of unpaid labour.…That false premise was itself added to a false assumption. Marx assumed that people behave according to their class. But they didn’t. In all kinds of ways and for all kinds of reasons, the classes moved closer together instead of further apart.54 A bit like Tzara’s man and the coffee-mill. Carr hammers home his point:

49 50 51 52

53 54

Travesties, page 62. Travesties, page 51. Travesties, page 62. David Rod emphasises that Carr has his own point of view: ‘In the final analysis, Carr supports none of the views represented by the three major historical figures. Instead, he presents an independent position of his own, a position which rejects the various idealisms of Tzara, Joyce and Lenin in favour of a practical consideration of what art has been and what it has accomplished’. – D. Rod, ‘Carr’s View of Art and Politics in Travesties’, Modern Drama, xxvi (1983) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 182. CWE. Bigsby argues that Tzara is the mediator: ‘(Travesties) is a play which brings together the opposite extremes of the debate in the person of James Joyce, whom Stoppard elsewhere quotes as saying that the history of Ireland, troubles and all, was justified because it led to a book such as Ulysses, and Lenin, who felt that the only justification for art lay in its political utility. Mediating between the two is Tristan Tzara, drawn simultaneously in both directions’. – CWE. Bigsby, Tom Stoppard, pages 24–25. Travesties, page 60. Travesties, page 51.

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Furthermore, your Marxism is sheer pretension. You’re an amiable bourgeois with a chit from matron and if the revolution came you wouldn’t know what hit you. You’re nothing. You’re an artist.55 On the inefficacy of the artist and, therefore, (in Lenin’s pragmatic terms) the incompatibility of art and revolution Carr, recalling his earlier argument to Tzara, both reinforces Lenin’s point and makes his own. Lenin: September 15, 1919, to A.M. Gorki,56 Dear Alexei Maximych…‘I recall a remark of yours during our talks in London, on Capri, and later – namely: “We artists are irresponsible people”’. Carr & Lenin: (Simultaneously) Exactly! Lenin: ‘You utter incredibly angry words – about what? About a few dozen (or perhaps even a few hundred) Cadet and near-Cadet gentry spending a few days in jail in order to prevent plots which threaten the lives of tens of thousands of workers and peasants. A calamity indeed. What an injustice! A few days, or even weeks, in jail for intellectuals in order to prevent the massacre of tens of thousands of workers and peasants. “Artists are irresponsible people!”’. Carr: In other words a chit from matron.57

Internal Debate

Stoppard has talked, prompted by reference to Jumpers, of his own ‘internal debate’58 and this is precisely how the debate manifests itself – not between two characters but, largely, in one character delineating both sides of an argument. Similarly, one way of viewing The Invention of Love is to see it as an internal debate which Housman, old and young, is having with himself about the 55 56

57 58

Travesties, page 57. Gorki, an author and playwright, had supported the Bolsheviks. But, he believed that culture would be critical to the success of the revolution and he fell out with Lenin over repression of free speech. Travesties, page 60. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Bragg, ‘The South Bank Show’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 117.

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nature of textual criticism. It is in direct contrast to the crossfire between two individuals in Travesties. The debate in Jumpers is conducted in the context­ of George Moore’s rehearsal of a paper entitled ‘Is God?’ which attempts to prove the existence of God. In it he postulates that there are two aspects to the discussion: God in his role of Creator; and, God as the source of absolute moral values.59 It is to address the second of these components that Stoppard uses the play as a means of having a debate, using his characters to present both sides of an argument, although not always in a direct way. The relativist view of morality is largely McFee’s, although since he is dead his views are relayed by other characters. The relativist argument is introduced by Dotty: Things are one way or they are another way; ‘better’ is how we see them…60 This view she attributes to Archie, who certainly shares it, although it is derived from McFee’s position. Dotty continues: But good and bad, better and worse, these are not real properties of things, they are just expressions of our feelings about them.61 George puts the bulk of the relativist/McFee argument as he is dictating his paper: (McFee) 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, social and psychological conventions which we have evolved in order to make living in groups a practical possibility.62 George counters, employing the absolutist distinction that Anderson draws between rules and rights: ‘My moral conscience is different from the rules of

59

60 61 62

AJ. Ayer summarizes the debate concisely: ‘The argument is between those who believe in absolute values, for which they seek a religious sanction, and those, more frequently to be found among contemporary philosophers, who are subjectivists or relativists in morals, utilitarians in politics, and atheists or at least agnostics’. – AJ. Ayer, ‘Love Among the Logical Positivists’, Sunday Times, 9 April 1972. Jumpers, page 41. Jumpers, page 41. Jumpers, page 48.

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my tribe’.63 Otherwise, as Bones points out, the relativist cannot distinguish between, ‘whether he thinks he’s obeying the Ten Commandments or the rules of tennis’.64 McFee’s position continues to be put by George in a long speech at the end of Act One. McFee’s relativist position is that, ‘goodness…depends upon your point of view’.65 George points out that McFee’s case is that, ‘the word “good” has also meant different things to different people at different times’.66 This ultimately leads to a deft analysis of McFee’s position by George illustrating how a bacon sandwich might be deemed to be good by some because it is ‘crisp, lean and unadulterated by tomato sauce’67 but poor by those who prefer it ‘underdone, fatty and smothered in tomato ketchup’.68 George concludes that the relativists see the concept of goodness not as ‘statements of fact but merely expressions of feeling, taste or vested interest’.69 In the absolutist response70 George uses the example of the savage who honours his dead father by eating him instead of, as in other societies like the Home Counties, burying him in a teak box. Members of both societies believe they are doing good despite the disparate manifestations of their actions. This enables George to start putting the absolutist point of view: Professor McFee succeeds only in showing us that in different situations different actions will be deemed, rightly or wrongly, to be conducive to that good which is independent of time and place and which is knowable but not nameable.71 He goes on to explain how the relativist view allows for no concept of an absolute moral value: By discrediting the idea of beauty as an aesthetic absolute, (McFee) hopes to discredit by association the idea of goodness as a moral absolute.72 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Jumpers, page 68. Jumpers, page 49. Jumpers, page 53. Jumpers, page 54. Jumpers, page 66. Jumpers, page 66. Jumpers, page 66. ‘George is the solitary spokesman for moral absolutes’. – LP. Gabbard, The Stoppard Plays, pages 92–95, quoted in H. Bloom (ed), Tom Stoppard, page 49. Jumpers, page 55. Jumpers, page 53.

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By contrast, the absolutist argument is that ‘kindness is simply good in itself’.73 If, as George notes, ‘the whole point of denying the Absolute was to reduce the scale…to the inconsequential behaviour of inconsequential animals’,74 then what you get is Archie’s ironic view of the world which he sets out in the Coda: Do not despair – many are happy much of the time; more eat than starve, more are healthy than sick, more curable than dying; not so many dying as dead…half the world is at peace with itself, and so is the other half…No laughter is sad and many tears are joyful.75 Ultimately it is, for George and the absolutists, this belief in absolute moral values that convinces them that God exists: I tell you that, now and again, not necessarily in the contemplation of rainbows or new-born babes, nor in the extremities of pain or joy, but more probably ambushed by some quite trivial moment – say in the exchange of signals between two long-distance lorry-drivers in the black sheet of a god-awful night on the old A1 – then, in that dip-flash, dip-flash of headlights in the rain that seems to affirm the common ground that is not animal and not long-distance lorry-driving – then I tell you I know (that God exists)…76 The absolutist argument is forced home in two ways. First of all, by McFee’s confession, related by Crouch (who turns out to be a rather decent philosopher himself), that ‘if altruism is a possibility…my argument is up a gum tree…’.77 Altruism is, as Baggott explains in Darkside, ‘Consideration of the other. Selflessness. The Good in operation’.78 Secondly, it is revealed by George’s belief that ‘there is more in me than meets the microscope’,79 which demonstrates his view that there is within mankind an innate sense of right and wrong which goes beyond mere flesh and blood.

73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Jumpers, page 67. Jumpers, page 69. Jumpers, page 87. Jumpers, page 71. Jumpers, page 80. Darkside, page 34. Jumpers, page 68.

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The Debate in the Vehicle

The most elegant debate Stoppard produces is in Arcadia and its success reflects the way the subject of the play’s debate – old, Newtonian science versus new, Chaos theory – is integrated into the play’s vehicle; ostensibly a discussion about classical versus Romantic landscape gardening. In contrast to Jumpers, where Stoppard presents the debate over moral absolutism and relativity against a world exemplifying one side of the debate, Arcadia makes part of the argument for Chaos Theory through the bifurcating structure of the play. In the context of Arcadia’s metaphors of the old and the new Thomasina, the precocious pupil, comes to symbolise the point at which the debate crystallises: When your Thomasina was doing maths it had been the same maths for a couple of thousand years. Classical. And for a century after Thomasina. Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art really. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the mathematics of the natural world.80 Thomasina asks of Septimus, ‘Do you think God is Newtonian?’.81 In other words, does the universe conform to the laws of Newtonian science? Valentine identifies the particular aspect of Newtonian science which is important in Arcadia – ‘it’s called the second law of thermodynamics’.82 The laws of thermodynamics were not identified by Newton himself – they were mostly developed in the mid nineteenth century – but they grew out of his work on calculus and the laws of physics he propounded. Whereas the first law of thermodynamics states that matter/energy cannot be either created or destroyed his second law states that the quality of matter/energy deteriorates over time as usable energy is inevitably and irretrievably lost to unusable energy. Expanding a little upon James Gleick’s encapsulation of the second law – ‘The universe is a one-way street’.83 – Valentine illustrates the point: Heat goes to cold. It’s a one-way street. Your tea will end up at room temperature. What’s happening to your tea is happening to everything

80 81 82 83

Arcadia, page 59. Arcadia, page 6. Arcadia, page 87. J. Gleick, Chaos, page 308.

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everywhere. It’ll take a while but we’re all going to end up at room temperature.84 Hannah emphasises the endgame implied by the second law of thermodynamics by quoting from Byron’s poem, ‘Darkness’: I had a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air…85 The universe has finally cooled. The second law of thermodynamics has two important implications which Arcadia explores. These implications are contained within Thomasina’s observation which sets out the foundations of the debate right at the start of the play: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before.86 The first consequence of the second law for the Newtonian world is determinism. Thomasina points out that whilst ‘Newton’s equations go forwards and backwards…the heat equation…goes only one way’.87 If everything only goes forwards it follows, as Valentine explains to Chloe, ‘that from Newton’s laws you could predict everything to come’.88 Thomasina has understood, too. ‘If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really, good at algebra you could write a formula for all the future’.89 84 Arcadia, page 104. 85 Arcadia, page 105. 86 Arcadia, page 6. 87 Arcadia, page 116. It recalls Rosencrantz’s view of the world in which, ‘there’s only one direction’. (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, page 63). 88 Arcadia, page 97. 89 Arcadia, page 7.

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The second implication of the second law of thermodynamics concerns the concept of entropy.90 Entropy is the measure of unusable energy within a closed system and as usable energy decreases so entropy increases. Entropy, therefore, is a measure of randomness, or chaos which, according to the law, is increasing just as inexorably as usable energy is being lost. But, Septimus has found ‘a prize essay of the Scientific Academy in Paris’91 which ‘shows that the atoms do not go according to Newton’.92 Instead, the author of the essay ‘demonstrates the equation of the propagation of heat in a solid body’,93 thereby contradicting Newton. Thomasina understands the implications immediately: ‘he contradicts determinism?’,94 she muses. ‘Newton’s machine is incomplete… Determinism leaves the road at every corner’.95 She has worked out that where Newtonian laws break down is ‘the action of bodies in heat’96 A new way of looking at the world/nature is required. Septimus’ equations, the Newtonian world, ‘only describe the shapes of manufacture’97 and state that, ‘mountains are not pyramids and trees are not cones’.98 Other post Newtonian solutions proved unsatisfactory: ‘Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them…But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles’.99 Something is else is needed to explain what Valentine identifies as ‘the ordinary sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – and what happens to a cup of coffee when the cream goes in (note the contrast with the jam in rice)’.100 The new way – ‘the freaky stuff’ – is Chaos Theory. As usual in Arcadia, Thomasina has got there first. She asks Septimus, ‘if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one

90

For a discussion of ‘entropy’ see John Knapp’s analysis in ‘Stoppard’s Arcadia: “This is not Science; this is story-telling”’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, pages 104–106 and, in particular, Knapp’s comment, ‘Heat death is no more necessarily deterministic than it is merely unpredictable’. 91 Arcadia, page 108. 92 Arcadia, page 108. 93 Arcadia, page 108. 94 Arcadia, page 108. 95 Arcadia, page 111. 96 Arcadia, page 111. 97 Arcadia, page 49. 98 Arcadia, page 112. 99 Arcadia, page 62. 100 Arcadia, page 62.

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like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?’.101 Thomasina has, years ahead of her time, found an answer as she tantalisingly reveals, in homage to Fermat’s last theorem,102 by scribbling a note in the margin of her maths primer: ‘I, Thomasina Coverly, have found a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone’.103 The answer, as Valentine recognises and points out to Hannah, is ‘an iterated algorithm’.104 Thomasina has discovered ‘how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm’105 by writing a formula, in which ‘any value for x gives you a value for y’,106 which results in a dot you can plot on a piece of paper using a graph. A key part of the Chaos Theory process is iteration, as Valentine continues: ‘Every time she works out a value for y, she’s using that as her next value for x. And so on. Like a feedback’.107 It is almost as if it is proving Tom Jericho’s assertion in Enigma, in apparent reference to Keats, that numbers provide revelations because of the equivalence in them of truth and beauty108 (although Hilary, in The Hard Problem, picks up the allusion to Keats109 and would disagree: ‘There is no science that says beauty is truth or truth beauty’.110). The process of iteration facilitates the illustration of a number of facets of Chaos Theory, the first of which Arcadia tackles is fractals. Thomasina has realised that what she has discovered is ‘a method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone’111 and, when looking at an apple leaf, that she can ‘plot this leaf and deuce its equation’.112 Valentine explains to Hannah that it works the other way round, too. You can draw the leaf by using the algorithm. Using the 101 Arcadia, page 49. 102 Around 1637, Pierre de Fermat, a French mathematician, wrote in the margin of his copy of Arithmetica, by Diophantus, next to a problem on breaking down a squared number into two squares, the following words: ‘I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which, however, the margin is not large enough to contain’. See A. Aczel, Fermat’s Last Theorem, page 9. 103 Arcadia, page 56. 104 Arcadia, page 57. 105 Arcadia, page 62. 106 Arcadia, page 57. 107 Arcadia, page 57. 108 J. Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’. 109 Hilary uses the quotation to argue that a supreme being, not science, is the basis of ethical values. 110 The Hard Problem, page 49. 111 Arcadia, page 62. 112 Arcadia, page 49.

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power of his computer – he allows Hannah to press they keys – he can iterate algorithms to produce ‘patterns making themselves out of nothing’.113 He has actually done so using Thomasina’s work – ‘I just pushed her equations through the computer a few million times further than she managed to do with her pencil’114 (the actual process that is suggested drove Septimus as the hermit mad). What Valentine’s computer generates are fractals: ‘Each picture is a detail of the previous one, blown up’.115 To Thomasina this is a ‘New Geometry of Irregular Forms’,116 in contrast to Euclid’s geometry – the ‘commonplace geometry’ and the ‘arcs and angles’117 of Septimus’ equations that Thomasina has been drawing in her lessons. But Chaos Theory unlocks other secrets of nature. Valentine develops the argument: ‘This thing works for any phenomenon which eats its own numbers – measles epidemics, rainfall averages, cotton prices, it’s a natural phenomenon in itself’.118 It can be used to look at population changes – ‘nature manipulates the x and turns it into y’119 – and Valentine has been attempting to understand how Sidley Park’s grouse population has behaved by using data derived from the grouse books. ‘The population is obeying a mathematical rule’,120 reflecting Joseph Ford’s aphorism, ‘Evolution is chaos with feedback’.121 In that sense Chaos Theory in Arcadia is providing a practical application of the Narrator’s assertion of Galileo’s view that, ‘mathematics…was the key to man’s understanding of his universe’.122 There is a small reference to the Butterfly Effect, a key part of Chaos Theory in which small variations of input can lead to large variations of output in complex non-linear systems such as weather. ‘The smallest variation blows prediction apart’,123 explains Valentine to Hannah. When countered by Hannah that the weather in the Sahara is ‘fairly predictable’ Valentine shows that over a long

113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122

Arcadia, page 101. Arcadia, page 101. Arcadia, page 101. Arcadia, page 56. Arcadia, page 49. Arcadia, page 60. Arcadia, page 59. Arcadia, page 60. Joseph Ford quoted in J. Gleick, Chaos, page 314. Galileo, Act 1, page 19. See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 72. 123 Arcadia, page 63.

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time period this is a false assumption. ‘Six thousand years in the Sahara looks like six months in Manchester’.124 Chaos Theory also provides a solution to the chaos that increasing levels of entropy lead to under Newtonian theory. Within chaos there is order, for two reasons. Although Lorenz (one of the first proponents of Chaos Theory) ‘had found unpredictability…he had also found pattern’.125 Secondly, inherent in Chaos Theory is the concept of a ‘strange attractor’, which is, during the process of bifurcation, a fixed point around which a dynamic system settles – ‘a fixed point that attracts all others – no matter what the starting “population”’.126 Arcadia illustrates this part of the Chaos argument not by dialogue but by structure. The play itself, as it bounces back and forth between the nineteenth century and present day time periods (in defiance of the determinism consequent from the operation of the second law of thermodynamics), is a bifurcating structure which, despite its journey to the chaos of scene 7 (in which characters and events from both the periods are intermingled), provides the stability of the scenes contained within it.

The Multi-Faceted Debate

Night And Day demonstrates that the Stoppardian stage debate may concern a single issue but it can become dissipated over several constituent parts of the core idea.127 Unlike Jumpers, for example, where he can boil down the debate into two primary issues the subject of press freedom contains many subsets of argument. The central issue of whether there should be an absolute freedom of the press has a vigorous examination. Milne carries the banner for absolute freedom. Wagner carries his union sympathies. Mageeba’s insincere insistence that he ‘did not believe a newspaper should be part of the apparatus of the state’128 is revealed by his nationalisation of the Daily Citizen and physical attack on Wagner to be a straw man in the argument over the state control of the 124 125 126 127

Arcadia, page 63. J. Gleick, Chaos, page 44. J. Gleick, Chaos, page 175. ‘Every position is given a voice’. – T. Zinman, ‘Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 128. Katherine Kelly adds elsewhere, ‘By the 1960s and 1970s, Tom Stoppard had begun writing a discussion play based on the premise that the thinking playwright cannot endorse unqualified opinions about the fundamental questions of his time’. – K. Kelly, ‘Tom Stoppard’s Dramatic Debates: The Case of Night and Day’ in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook, page 282. 128 Night and Day, page 48.

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press. Guthrie at the end demonstrates how Milne’s idealism can be applied to the real world: he points out that ‘we’re not here to be on somebody’s side’129 and that people get away with more awful things in darker societies. Stoppard confronts his audience with the question of what is the real nature of journalism? Milne sees himself as part of ‘a privileged group’130 who is upholding a principle. To Wagner, on the other hand, it is a business. As Milne points out, ‘Dick thinks that the Globe is a million packets of journalism manufactured every week by businessmen using journalists for their labour’.131 Therefore, it’s all about the scoop. In his words ‘it’s up to me to go where I can get ahead of the competition’.132 Rather offensively, given that he took Ruth to bed only a few days earlier in London, he tells her when in her house that he ‘can’t see anything in this room as beautiful as that telex. I am in love with it’.133 His cynicism knows no bounds as, rather like David sending Uriah the Hittite to war,134 he reverses his decision to go to the war zone of Malakuangazi – sending Milne instead – as soon as he hears that Mageeba is due at the Carson’s house the next day. Lying, he gives Guthrie the false reassurance that ‘I’ve arranged a ceasefire’.135 It is clear that the motivation of the journalists is not the cause of press freedom. Once out in the field it becomes a baser instinct. As Wagner observes to Guthrie almost as soon as he arrives at Carson’s house: ‘Our own telex and a helicopter, and the competition writing postcards. If this war starts on a Saturday morning you and I are going to be famous’.136 In the end Ruth sees through it all: You’re all doing it to impress each other and be top dog the next time you’re propping up a bar in Beirut or Bangkok, or Chancery Lane.…It’s all bloody ego. And the winner isn’t democracy, it’s just business.137 Stoppard also tackles the issue of objectivity. He sets the problem up as Wagner relates the story of how he was cornered by a government press officer: 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137

Night and Day, page 52. Night and Day, page 33. Night and Day, page 31. Night and Day, page 22. Night and Day, page 28. Bible, 2 Samuel, Chapter 11, verses 14–15. Night and Day, page 30. Night and Day, page 8. Night and Day, page 53.

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He wants to know which side the Globe thinks it’s on. So, I tell him it’s not on any side, stupid, it’s an objective fact-gathering organization. And he says, yes, but is it objective-for or objective-against?138 As if to make the point Wagner undertakes an entertaining review of the papers. The Sunday Times is dismissed as ‘all facts and no news’ while Newsweek is ‘all writing and no facts’.139 In Dirty Linen Stoppard rather amusingly addresses the same issue in a slightly different way as he has the members of the Select Committee on Promiscuity in High Places read out the same story from the perspective of three different papers – The Times, Daily Mirror and Guardian.140 How the facts are reported depends upon the point of view; Shimbu’s uprising is ‘not a rebellion, it’s a secession’141 unless one is Mageeba, in which case it is ‘a devolution problem’.142 The answer to Wagner’s question as to who is to blame for the war is ‘depends which paper you read’.143 Mageeba cynically invokes the reputations of two famous British journalists renowned for lack of bias – CP. Scott, who is known for his belief that ‘comment is free but facts are sacred’,144 and John Delane – but it is left to Guthrie to make the genuine plea for independence: We try to show what’s happened, and what it was like. That’s all we do, and sometimes people bitch about which side we’re supposed to be on.145 Stoppard returns to the issue of the fact and refines its nature even further in The Invention of Love. He draws an important distinction between facts and truth. Wilde suggests that, ‘truth is…the work of the imagination’146 by which he appears to mean that a fact can tell you what happened but only truth can tell you why it happened. Two examples surface in the play. It is known that the Labouchere Amendment was added to The Criminal Law Amendment Act (= fact) but why Labouchere added it is not clear. Stoppard offers two explanations – either deliberately to ‘scupper the bill’147 or because Stead had 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

Night and Day, page 9. Night and Day, page 10. Dirty Linen, pages 96–97. Night and Day, page 9. Night and Day, page 45. Night and Day, page 21. Night and Day, page 44. Night and Day, page 52. The Invention of Love, page 93. The Invention of Love, page 83.

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convinced him that there was a genuine social problem – and the programme notes to the initial production at the Royal National Theatre give more details on Labouchere’s possible motivation. Likewise, the play says that Housman left Oxford without a degree (= fact)148 but offers vague possible reasons as to why. Pollard ventures, ‘Someone said you ploughed yourself on purpose’.149 Housman’s explanation is merely, ‘I didn’t get what I wanted…but I want what I’ve got’,150 implying (although not for certain) that he deliberately flunked his exams in order to be near Jackson. The nature of the debate in Night and Day gets clouded by the contradictory actions and beliefs of the protagonists. For instance, Ruth claims to Milne that she, ‘is with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand’.151 By which she means that press freedom is all well and good so long as it’s not shining a light into her own private life. Wagner’s business-like approach is all right so long as it’s in pursuit of his own scoops but he scoffs at the journalist ‘on the roof with a telescope’ simply because ‘the ab readership has gone over to astronomy’.152 Wagner is full of contradiction. The man who does not ‘file prose. I only file facts’153 and refuses to use his imagination because it is ‘unprofessional’154 is the same man who wants a press that thinks like him, regulated by membership of the union, and who uncritically adopts an ingratiating attitude towards Mageeba (in exchange for which he gets a crack on the head). In the final analysis Wagner adheres to his principles only when it suits him. When his scoop is spiked by the union strike at his own paper he refuses to strike, too, because to do so would impair his ability to get the next story: Ruth: Aren’t you supposed to be withdrawing your labour? Wagner: (snapping at her) Don’t get clever with me, damn you.155 Even Milne allows the scoop to compromise his ideals as he agrees to take a message to Shimbu: 148 According to Fleming, Housman returned the following year and successfully took a pass degree. See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, Note 1, page 297. 149 The Invention of Love, page 54. 150 The Invention of Love, page 54. 151 Night and Day, page 32. 152 Night and Day, page 24. 153 Night and Day, page 16. 154 Night and Day, page 22. 155 Night and Day, page 54.

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Guthrie: Carson’s using you for something. Milne:   Does it matter?156 The role of the press barons is also complicated by nuance.157 On the one hand they have power over the reporters as employees. But, as Mageeba points out, such power is limited as ‘a proprietor can only dismiss you from his own newspaper’158 while Ruth argues that it is the millionaire owner who finances the journalistic freedom to report. Max in Rock ‘N’ Roll adds a further nuance: ‘Your proprietor is in thrall to the consumer. While profits rise, he will reward you for telling lies; while profits fall he will punish you for telling truth’.159 Ruth sums up the contradictions of it all in an impassioned speech, brought about by the news of Milne’s death, which could be interpreted at a little more than just face value (although she does not realise it): 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…160 It is ironically ambiguous. Yes, he died for the product – and not his ideal of journalistic freedom. But, the items Ruth reels off represent some of the elements of journalism that are all part of the indivisibility of what Milne argues is the price worth paying – the leading article is in the list, albeit in a distant last place. Whilst Stoppard’s discussion of press freedom is wide-ranging it would be intellectually churlish not to point out that there are several sub issues which do not get consideration in Night and Day at all.161 The most obvious is probably whether there are ever circumstances in which the press, in pursuit of the light, should ever be allowed to break the law. Similarly, could national interest be cited as a legitimate fetter? Stoppard gets amusingly close to that 156 Night and Day, page 14. 157 It is less complicated in Stoppard’s television play, The Explorers, about newspaper reporters in a seaside town. Haydon states, on page 19, ‘Newspapers are a business’. His rather cynical approach is summed up by his advice, on page 15, that, ‘The most important thing to learn in journalism is how to do your expenses’. 158 Night and Day, page 47. 159 Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 109. 160 Night and Day, page 53. 161 For a journalist’s analysis of the weaknesses of the arguments in Night And Day, see M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, pages 125–127.

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point when he has Mageeba admit that he ‘would have been obliged to (shut the Daily Citizen down) had it not burned down during the state of emergency which followed independence’.162 One area that I am surprised Stoppard did not seduce himself into pursuing is the question of whether the freedom of the press should be constrained in any way if it were to be in danger of prejudicing a fair trial and he does not use the play to take his own bait that he laid in The Dog It Was That Died in which he wryly observes that ‘freedom of expression advantages the articulate’.163

Internal Contradictions

Stoppard’s stage debates are not always between two clear-cut protagonists or issues. Indian Ink presents a far more nuanced discussion in which the case for Indian independence is argued by Indians who admire Englishness and deliver an India which is, arguably, more chaotic and riven than the one Britain governed. Contrarily, many of the British are seduced by the culture and nature of a people and country whose subjection they seek to justify. Stoppard told Gussow that he ‘had talked about writing a play about the ethos of empire’.164 Elsewhere he refers to the ‘ethics of empire’.165 It is a theme he had addressed in an unpublished television script, How Sir Dudley Lost The Empire,166 and skirted around in Night And Day where he refers to what Mageeba calls the British and American ‘record of cowardice in Africa’.167 Stoppard confesses that he was ‘rather keen not to write a play which was a pair of conflicting polemics or editorials’.168 What Stoppard produces in Indian Ink/In the Native State is a sustained examination of the business of empire, most particularly that of the British in India. The debate it contains is largely conducted between two 162 Night and Day, page 48. 163 The Dog It Was That Died, page 166. 164 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 102. 165 Stoppard, in an interview with G. Reynolds, ‘Tom’s Sound Affects’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 249. 166 For example, Travers comments in How Sir Dudley Lost The Empire, page 8, ‘When the sun never set on the British Empire…we held dominion over a quarter of the surface of the globe, brought British rule and a measure of civilisation to races of every colour – black! brown! We brought wealth, a moral code. And in return we got strength’. 167 Night And Day, page 46. 168 Stoppard, in an interview with P. Allen, ‘Third Ear’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 243.

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characters from each side of the imperial divide: Flora/Mrs Swan (sisters) as British and Das/Anish (father and son) as Indian. But there are sideswipes from other perspectives, too. It is not a ping-pong debate, as in Travesties, or one between two clear-cut positions, like that of Jumpers, but more of a series of reflections upon the issues. Stoppard reveals that, ‘I was interested in writing a play in which these arguments and counterarguments were properly weighed’.169 The main contradiction, although intentional and defensible (because it rings true), is that ‘it’s the Indian who loves things English’.170 Flora asks Das, ‘Why do you like everything English’, adding, ‘You’re enthralled’.171 Das, indeed, hopes ‘to visit London one of these days. The Chelsea of Turner and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood!’ claiming, ‘What an inspiration it would be to me to visit Chelsea!’.172 Flora chides him for his English-ness: ‘…what I meant was for you to be more Indian, or at any rate Indian, not Englished-up’.173 Mrs Swan makes exactly the same point about his son, Anish: ‘I thought you’d be more Indian’.174 Anish, is similarly besotted with England. It is, in his words, ‘my home now’.175 The Rajah’s furniture ‘was from Heals, three-piece suite and all’176 while even Dilip is entranced by the English language: Pike:  Why are you so crazy about English, Dilip? Dilip:  I’m not! Pike:  You love it! Dilip: Yes, I do. I love it.177 169 Stoppard, in an interview with A. Goreau, ‘Is The Real Inspector Hound a Shaggy Dog Story?’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 260. 170 Stoppard, in an interview with P. Allen, ‘Third Ear’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 243. The reverse admiration of Englishness by Indians and vice versa is one of Stoppard’s explorations of duality. He gives a clue to his own attitude in an interview with John Fleming: ‘I tried to complicate the picture. It is the Indian man who is obsessed with Englishness and elevates it onto a pedestal and all that. And it is the English woman who is sceptical about it. Which I think fairly well reflects my own ambivalence about it’. – J. Fleming, ‘A Talk with Tom Stoppard’. 171 Indian Ink, page 43. 172 Indian Ink, page 7. 173 Indian Ink, page 12. 174 Indian Ink, page 13. 175 Indian Ink, page 18. However, Anish says at the time of his father’s death India, ‘was still “home”’. – Indian Ink, page 67. 176 In the Native State, page 264. 177 Indian Ink, page 58.

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Das admits he ‘would like to write like Macaulay’,178 and Anish reports that when his father read aloud to him it was from the works of ‘Browning, Tennyson…and Dickens, of course’.179 It raises the question of what is Indian identity. The answer is complex: Flora: Are you a nationalist, Mr Das? Das (Lightly) Ah, that is a very interesting question!180 Das never answers. Das does say, ‘I cannot be less Indian than I am’.181 Anish describes himself as an Indian who is ‘not a particularly Indian painter’182 just as his father declines to label himself an Indian artist. Elsewhere, however, in one of Stoppard’s internal contradictions Das accepts that he is an Indian artist: Flora: Das Flora: Das:

Are you going to be Indian? Please don’t (Heeding her) I … I am Indian. An Indian artist. Yes.183

Flora implores him, ‘I want you to be with me as you would be if I were Indian’.184 On the other hand, at one stage, she begs him to ‘Stop being Indian’.185 Perhaps the point is that for a subject nation it is difficult to be certain of its identity at all times. The same goes for the ruling nation. In Indian Ink it is Eric and in In the Native State it is Francis, both British, who say, in reference to cricket, ‘We’re going to field a Test team next year’.186 The ‘we’ is India. Conversely, some of the British characters love things Indian. When back in Shepperton Mrs Swan keeps mementos of her time in India on her windowledge and her ‘tea-tray is Nepalese brass’.187 In In the Native State she actually

178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186

Indian Ink, page 19. Indian Ink, page 16. Indian Ink, page 19. Indian Ink, page 12. Indian Ink, page 14. Indian Ink, page 74. Indian Ink, page 12. Indian Ink, page 37. Indian Ink, page 82: In the Native State, page 281. The Rajah had told the Viceroy that Britain would not solve the problems of civil disturbance in India ‘by playing cricket’. – Indian Ink, page 62. 187 Indian Ink, page 25.

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claims that, ‘I always loved the fruit trees at home’,188 and by ‘home’ she means North-West India where her sister now lies buried. Ironically, there are circumstances in which, when forced to choose, the Indian is preferable to the British. Anish asks her views about a possible dalliance by her sister in Jummapur: ‘… would you have disapproved of a British Army Officer…More than of an Indian painter?’, to which her answer is ‘Certainly’.189 ‘I love this country, don’t you?’,190 Durance says to Flora, who agrees with him. Kipling is quoted to highlight that the Indian character was rated highly by some British: ‘Though I’ve belted you and flayed you, by the living Gawd that made you, you’re a better man than I am Gunga Din!’.191 Flora is endowed with a sympathy towards India. She is minded to admonish the Rajah with her view that, ‘one must consider India’s interests’.192 She is certainly sympathetic to the Indian way of life, impressing the Rajah hugely when she eats, with great symbolic significance, his apricot without peeling it: ‘The English ladies came…They drank tea with me and I offered them fruit, but they would only eat the fruit which had a skin they could remove’.193 Flora’s ‘when in Rome’194 attitude, however is an exception. For most ex-patriots the only way to survive was to replicate England rather than to assimilate Indian ways. Dinner at the Club could not have been more incongruously British – ‘soup, boiled fish, lamb cutlets, sherry trifle and sardines on toast’.195 The fact that Indians are attracted to English values does not, however, make them supine. They are subject to English rule, as Flora’s entry into Jummapur epitomises (in a passing reference to one of the leitmotifs of Stoppard’s works; perspective): ‘I came in triumph like Britannia in a carnival float representing Empire – or, depending on how you look at it, the Oppression of the Indian People’.196 Mrs Swan reminds Anish of what appears to be an ironic contradiction: ‘Your father took part in actions against the British Raj and loved English literature, which was perfectly consistent’.197 The Indians may have loved English values but they did not appreciate English rule. Continuing 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196

In the Native State, page 279. Indian Ink, page 79. In the Native State, page 257. Indian Ink, page 47: R. Kipling, ‘Gunga Din’. Indian Ink, page 61. Indian Ink, page 63 This action does not occur in In the Native State. In the Native State, page 253. Indian Ink, page 51. In the Native State, page 228: Indian Ink, page 4 ‘– I felt like a carnival float representing Empire – or, depending how you look at it, the Subjugation of the Indian People’. 197 Indian Ink, page 17.

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the theme of perspective, what the British saw in 1857 as a ‘Mutiny’ the Indians saw as a ‘Rising’.198 Even then, some Indians were loyal to the Empire, as the Rajah points out to Flora: ‘My grandfather stood firm with the British during the First Uprising’.199 Anish observes to Mrs Swan, ‘In Jummapur we were “loyal” as you would say, we have been loyal to the British …’.200 Das, however, became ‘a man who suffered for his belief’,201 as he was imprisoned for the part he took ‘in some actions against the Raj during the Empire Day celebrations in Jummapur’.202 Mrs Swan makes the rather legalistic observation that, ‘he was put in prison for his actions, not his opinions’.203 Jummapur is in a peculiar legal entity; ‘a Native state’,204 as Mrs Swan explains. Technically it is run by a Rajah ‘by treaty’205 with a British Resident representing the British government. Thus: Durance: Jummapur is not British India… Flora: Yes, but it’s all the Empire, isn’t it? Durance: Oh yes. Absolutely.206 Once again Stoppard is dealing with an entity which is not quite one thing or another: the garden in Arcadia, for example, is being altered from a classical form into one designed on Romantic/Gothic principles, but a Romantic one which is Noakes’ further refinement of Brown’s more natural landscape.207 Durance’s job, as he euphemistically puts it, is ‘to make sure that (the Rajahs and Maharajahs and Nabobs) don’t get up to mischief’.208 The legal difference allows Mrs Swan a get-out clause in her discussion with Anish about his father’s imprisonment. It was ‘not the Raj but the Rajah’209 who imprisoned Das for six months.210 It highlights how some Indians co-operated with British rule 198 Indian Ink, page 17. 199 Indian Ink, page 61. 200 Indian Ink, page 17. 201 Indian Ink, page 13. 202 Indian Ink, page 15. 203 Indian Ink, page 15. 204 Indian Ink, page 24. 205 Indian Ink, page 23. 206 Indian Ink, page 23. 207 For an analysis of the gardening styles referred to in Arcadia, see J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, pages 170–173. 208 Indian Ink, page 23. 209 Indian Ink, page 24. 210 Indian Ink, page 24 – Mrs Swan says, ‘So we didn’t put your father in gaol’. In the Native State, page 215 – Mrs Swan says, ‘so your father was put in gaol by his own people’.

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because it suited them. Mrs Swan uses it to make the point that, ‘In British India he would have got a year at least’.211 Jummapur’s interests, as the Rajah accepts to Flora, ‘are not the same thing’,212 as those of India. The play considers the motivations behind British imperialism. The Rajah quotes Churchill as suggesting a political imperative; ‘the loss of India would reduce Britain to be a minor power’.213 The Indian perspective, expressed by Anish, on British motivation is that it was materialistic; ‘…we were rich! After all, that’s why you came’.214 There is, from Durance’s point of view, a practical aspect to Empire: Flora: …polo and knives-and-forks. Is that all you need to govern India? Durance: (Laughs) Oh yes. There’s about four of our chaps for every million Indians. Flora: Why do the Indians let us? Durance: Why not? We are better at it.215 The Resident endows the Empire with an ethical purpose, claiming that, ‘It is our moral duty to remain’.216 Das is more cynical – It is ‘Mr (Joshua) Chamberlain’s theory of Empire’, he says that, ‘England’s imperial adventure is to buy time against revolution at home’.217 Stoppard then addresses the question of what were the benefits of empire to India. The Rajah, with some foresight, believes that, ‘Independence will be the end of the unity of the Subcontinent’, and with not a little vested interest adds, ‘Independence would be the beginning of the end for the Princely States’.218 Events seem to pointing to his conclusion as India riots, but not against the British: Flora: Durance: Flora: Durance: 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219

…The riot in town this morning…does it happen often? Not here, no. The jails are filling up in British India. Well, then. It wasn’t against us, it was Hindu and Moslem.219

Indian Ink, page 24. Indian Ink, page 61. Indian Ink, page 61. Indian Ink, page 18. Indian Ink, page 55: In the Native State, pages 257–258 refers to the ics who are the ‘highest caste of Anglo-India’ who are ‘better at it’ than the Indians. Indian Ink, page 51. Indian Ink, pages 35–36. Indian Ink, page 61. Indian Ink, page 54.

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Durance, with a sense of pragmatic arrogance, sums it up as, ‘We’ve pulled this country together. It’s taken a couple of hundred years with a hiccup or two but the place now works’.220 There is a cost to the Indians. Das complains India is being ‘…robbed. Yes, when the books are balanced. The women here wear saris made in Lancashire. The cotton is Indian but we cannot compete in the weaving’.221 Mr Coomaraswami, as Das explains to Flora, sees a different, rather ironic, economic consequence: ‘His criticism is that you haven’t exploited India enough. “Where are the cotton mills? The steel mills? No investment, no planning. The Empire has failed us!”’.222 In reality, despite claims that Britain manages to make India work, Britain is short-changing India by using second-raters to run it, a point which is recognized even by Flora: ‘…it beats me how we’re getting away with it…I wouldn’t trust some of them to run the Hackney Empire’.223 One of the prices to be paid is that India is run like a quasi-police state by the British. Durance is, in Anish’s words, a ‘Political Agent’224 who, by his own admission, has the responsibility of, ‘Keeping tabs on what His Highness is up to…I mean I write reports to Delhi’.225 It is a society which has a set of accoutrements that Alexander, the Russian dissident in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, might recognise. Das reveals to Flora that ‘A letter from England to Mr Coomaraswami would certainly be opened’226 while the ‘Jummapur branch (of the Theosophical Society) was suppressed’227 on the grounds that it was responsible for ‘the disturbances in the town’.228 The repression is both satirised and explained by Pike and Dilip’s quotation of a poem, Bagpipe Music: ‘It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw …’.229 It is a poem which the author, Louis MacNeice, explains is ‘dealing with the cultural decline of the highlands and islands of Scotland during the 1930s’.230 The key reference in the poem is the line ‘it’s no go the yogi-man, it’s no go Blavatsky’.231 Blavatsky

220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231

Indian Ink, page 55. Indian Ink, page 44. Indian Ink, page 44. Indian Ink, page 51. Indian Ink, page 79. Indian Ink, page 78. Indian Ink, page 72. Indian Ink, page 75. Indian Ink, page 71. Indian Ink, page 75. Louis MacNeice. Indian Ink, page 75.

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was one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, the local branch of which had invited Flora to Jummapur to give a speech on the subject of ‘Literary Life In London’. One of the society’s aims is ‘To form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour’.232 The implications of racial equality do not equate to the concept of empire and, to paraphrase Dilip, that sort of ‘politics is…the baby in the (Imperial) bathwater’233 which the ruling power must throw out. ‘Indianization’ from a British perspective was only allowed to go so far – ‘we have Indian officers in the regiment now. My fellow Junior here is Indian, too, terribly nice… did his year at Cambridge, learned polo and knives-and-forks, and here he is, a pukkah sahib in the Indian Civil Service’;234 but, even so, ‘he can’t come into the Club’235 (physically or metaphorically). Pike, by contrast, is permitted entrance in the 1980s, the only requirement being a jacket and tie. Just to make Stoppard’s point, Dilip procures ‘the skimpy jacket of a servant’236 which suffices for his membership. Does an Indian living under the Raj see the process of British governance any differently from the way the Czech dissident actors in Cahoot’s Macbeth regard ‘normalization’237? How would they, for example, have viewed Macaulay’s ‘idea when he was in the government of India that English should be taught to us all’,238 as Das describes? Like so many imperial powers the British were merely ‘sowing dragon’s teeth’ as, with the relish of irony, Das explains, ‘English is the only language the nationalists can communicate in!’.239 The benefits of empire are contrasted with the consequences of independence. Mrs Swan, almost sneeringly, tells Anish, ‘We made you a proper country! And when we left you fell straight to pieces’.240 Pike paints an unflattering picture of 1980s, independent India: The poverty here is so…Like the beggars at the traffic lights…I started off shoving rupees, you know, through the window…But it gets impossible… But this one, she had this baby at the breast, I mean she looked sixty, 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240

HP. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy. Indian Ink, page 75. Indian Ink, page 53. Indian Ink, page 53. Indian Ink, page 49. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 191. Indian Ink, page 19. Indian Ink, page 19. Indian Ink, page 18.

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and – well, this is the thing, she had a stump, up against the glass, and it was raw…so when the light changed, the stump left this…smear…241 Dilip is equally unimpressed about the consequences of independence, but for the entirely different reason that India, as he sees it, still hasn’t shaken off the British identity: Yes, it’s a disaster for us! Fifty years of independence and we are still hypnotized! Jackets and ties must be worn! English model public schools for the children of the elite, and the voice of Bush House is heard in the land. Gandhi would fast again, I think. Only, this time he’d die. It was not for this India, I think, that your Nirad Das and his friends held up their homemade banner at the Empire Day gymkhana. It was not for this that he threw his mango at the Resident’s car.242 Questions concerning the morality of empire suffer from the same problem that Stoppard identifies with his own play: ‘There are some internal contradictions’,243 he confesses. It is Durance who, displaying his own intellectual limitations, argues that, ‘We’re a reasonably civilised lot’.244 For Anish, in conversation with Mrs Swan, the obverse is the case: ‘We were up to date when you were a backward nation. The foreigners who invaded you found a thirdworld country! Even when you discovered India in the age of Shakespeare, we already had our Shakespeares. And our science – architecture – our literature and art, we had a culture older and more splendid…’.245 Anish’s father is also aware of India’s cultural heritage and how favourably it compares with England’s: ‘…long before Chaucer we had the Chaurapanchasika’.246 The Indians have fallen into a trap, as Flora observes to Das when she complains, ‘I just didn’t like you thinking English was better because it was English’.247 She rather pointedly dispenses some harsh advice, ‘If you don’t start learning to take you’ll never be shot of us’.248 The point is made by Das’ painting of Flora. He is trying to paint it from, as Flora puts it, ‘what you think is my point 241 Indian Ink, pages 57–58. 242 Indian Ink, page 59. 243 Stoppard, in an interview with A. Goreau, ‘Is The Real Inspector Hound a Shaggy Dog Story?’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 260. 244 Indian Ink, page 23. 245 Indian Ink, pages 17–18. 246 Indian Ink, page 45. 247 Indian Ink, page 44. 248 Indian Ink, page 45.

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of view’.249 Therefore, ‘You deserve the bloody Empire!’,250 she tells him. That is why Flora argues, ‘It’s not for me to apologise for the Raj’.251 The brutal result she tells him is that, ‘It’s your country, and we’ve got it. Everything else is bosh’.252 The final word on the irony of the Indian attitude to the British Empire is left with Emily Eden, whose book Up The Country is depicted in Das’ nude portrait of Flora. Flora reads from it: ‘I sometimes wonder why they do not cut all our heads off and say nothing more about it’.253 Anish appears to be about to allude to the point it implies, when he pulls back: ‘imperial history is only the view from…’.254 Stoppard’s decision to end with Eden’s ‘caustic about the British’255 comment makes the point, which is a relativist one, instead: ‘I suppose the flavour of it is that our perspective on India actually distorts our own importance in the long run’.256 Stoppard has one further point to make about empires in general. They are transitory but for one aspect: the art they leave behind (thereby, alluding to Joyce’s view in Travesties of the impact of the Trojan War). Das explains to Flora, ‘the Empire will one day be gone like the Mughal Empire before it, and only their monuments remain – the visions of Shah Jahan! – of Sir Edwin Lutyens!’.257 Quoting (appropriately enough for Das) an English poet, Shelley, Das emphasises the one item which is immune to empire’s ephemerality: ‘Only in art can empires cheat oblivion, because only the artist can say, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”’.258 The Coast of Utopia produces the same kind of granular discussion that Indian Ink conducts, fuelled partly by the contrariness of the individuals as much as their perspective (which is what propels the debate on Empire). To complicate matters even further, unlike Night And Day where the debate is about several facets of a single issue The Coast of Utopia comprises interwoven debates about a multiplicity of ideas. It is an intellectual survey of the views of nineteenth century Russian intelligentsia about how their country should be governed, delivered from both within Russia and while many were in exile. It 249 250 251 252 253 254 255

Indian Ink, page 43. Indian Ink, page 43. Indian Ink, page 35. Indian Ink, page 45. Indian Ink, page 83. In the Native State, page 207: ‘Imperial history is merely…’. – Indian Ink, page 17. Stoppard, in conversation with P. Allen, ‘Third Ear’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 243. 256 Stoppard, in conversation with P. Allen, ‘Third Ear’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 243. 257 Indian Ink, page 44. Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal. Lutyens designed much of New Delhi. 258 Indian Ink, page 44: PB. Shelley, Ozymandias.

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ranges across a political spectrum which includes the questions of what form of governance is desirable, how it should be obtained and how it is located within the historical process. Underlying the spectrum is a moral dimension which explores the nature of freedom and truth. Stoppard also uses the play to expand upon other topics, such as the nature of love, the role of art in society and the nature of morality. Across the three plays, Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage, Stoppard produces not a verbal joust – to sustain such a thing throughout the trilogy for nine hours would be dramatically impossible and undesirable – but an extensive examination of the question of the way in which Russia should be ruled against an historical narrative and the personal lives of its key participants. In order to appreciate both the problem and the solution that the Russian intelligentsia wrestled with it is necessary to understand the political background and situation of Russia. In her notes to the cast of the original Royal National Theatre production of The Coast of Utopia Helen Rappaport explains that, ‘The Russian personality…is encapsulated in the idea of “Everything to excess”. Russians seem constantly to veer between two extremes’.259 Indeed, Turgenev is led to question of Herzen, ‘Do you think there’s something Russian about taking everything to extremes?’.260 However, Helen Rappaport continues, when the Russians, ‘did overdose on ideas and positive experiences, they reacted in a much more vivid, dramatic and messianic way than other nationalities’.261 They exhibited two qualities which are expressed in Russian words: ‘nadryv’ (overstrain); and, ‘razmakh’ (the breadth from exhilaration to despair in the Russian psyche). There is strong sense amongst the intelligentsia that ideas must be ‘“lived through” as solutions to moral demands’262 This approach involves suffering, as Belinsky explains: ‘I also suffer for what I think and write. For me, suffering and thinking are the same thing’.263 And suffering is not just the prerogative of the revolutionaries, it is perceived by less provocative players in Russian society, such as Emma Herwegh, who is led by her domestic dilemma to complain, ‘If you knew how I suffer’.264 It had a profound effect which Herzen’s despairing comment exemplifies: ‘To those who lived through it, it seemed that this dark tunnel was destined to lead nowhere’.265 259 260 261 262 263 264 265

H. Rappaport, Some Thoughts On The Russian Personality, 24 May 2002. Shipwreck, page 55. H. Rappaport, Some Thoughts On The Russian Personality, 24 May 2002. A. Kelly, ‘A Complex Vision’ in I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, page xiv. Voyage, page 105. Shipwreck, page 78. A. Herzen, quoted in I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, page 18.

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At the same time there was an acute sense that Russia was different from the rest of Europe. It was partly a recognition of the vastness of Russia. Chekhov remarked that, ‘There is too much space here, and insignificant man has not the strength to find his way round’.266 Herzen, too, sees geography as a problem, but in a different sense, echoing at the same time one of the themes of the trilogy. ‘Civilisation passed us by, we belonged to geography, not history’,267 is his analysis. But, the perceived differences go much farther than mere geographic scale or location. Belinsky has written an article which is, ‘all about how backward Russia is compared with Europe…the rest of Europe…’.268 He goes on to remark that, ‘Our problem is feudalism and serfdom. What have these Western models got to do with us? We’re so big and backward’.269 It is a view echoed by Chaadaev: ‘…we Russians, belonging neither to East nor West, have never advanced with other people in the march of enlightenment. The Renaissance passed us by while we remained squatting in our hovels…’.270 Russia has been in isolation – according to Belinsky it is, ‘a mother country that has given nothing to the world and taken nothing from it’.271 In a memorable observation he claims that Russia is, ‘The Caliban of Europe’,272 while Belinsky laments that, ‘we’re nothing to the world except an object lesson in what to avoid’.273 Chaadaev, in reality, concluded that, ‘We are one of those nations, which do not seem to be an integral part of the human race, but exist only in order to teach some great lesson to the world’,274 which prompted the Russian thinkers to believe that, first of all, something should be done and, secondly, that Russia needed a solution. In truth, it must be said, not all observers regarded Russia as distinct and Stoppard allows Turgenev to hold a contrary view which deems some aspects of Russia to be simply behind, rather than different: ‘Russian peasantry…they’re no different from Italian, French or German peasants. Conservatives par excellence. Give them time and they’ll be a match

266 A. Chekhov, Diary (quoted in H. Rappaport, Some Thoughts On The Russian Personality, 24 May 2002). 267 Shipwreck, page 102. 268 Voyage, page 32. 269 Shipwreck, pages 37 and 57. 270 Voyage, page 74. 271 Voyage, page 80. 272 Voyage, page 82. 273 Voyage, page 80. 274 P. Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters Addressed to a Lady (1829). Chaadaev suggests this phrase, in French, to Belinsky in Voyage, page 82: ‘…nous sommes du nombre de ces nations qui ne semblent pas faire partie integrante du genre humain, n’est qui existe que pour donner lecon au monde…’.

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for any Frenchman when it comes to bourgeois aspirations and middle class mediocrity. We’re Europeans, we’re just late, that’s all’.275 The Tsars in the nineteenth century ruled Russia with an iron fist. In an exchange with his father, Alexander, Michael Bakunin points out the irony of his father’s view of the Army: Alexander Bakunin: No discipline, that’s the problem! Michael Bakunin:      No, it’s riddled with discipline, that’s the problem.… ‘March here, march there, present arms, where’s your cap?’ – you’ve no idea, the whole Army’s obsessed with playing at soldiers…276 The repression exists across society, as Herzen notes, ‘In the taxonomy of repression, Russia is a genus to itself’.277 This situation had particular consequences for intellectual life: ‘Under Tsar Nicholas it was all or nothing – all ideas were revolutionary when thought itself was subversive’.278 The failed Decembrists insurrection of 1825 had led Nicholas to intensify the repressiveness of his regime and he tightened the autocratic screw even further after the failed revolts elsewhere in Europe in 1848, as Ogarev rather dramatically reports to Herzen in London: ‘…you don’t know what it was like at home after ‘48’ you can’t imagine.…You couldn’t move, it was dangerous to think, to dream – even to show you weren’t afraid – the air we breathed seemed thick with fear. There was a cookbook censored for commending the free circulation of fresh air’.279 The consequence of the combination of Russian isolation and repression led to the emergence of a particularly Russian phenomenon which Ketscher describes as, ‘The intelligentsia.…A uniquely Russian phenomenon, an intellectual opposition considered as a social force’.280 According to Herzen they voraciously consumed vast quantities of modern political thought: ‘We read anything we could get hold of. We took from Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Fourier… From Leroux, from Cabet…Later we took from Proudhon, from Blanc…From Proudhon the abolition of authority…From Rousseau, the nobility of man in his natural state…From Fourier, the harmonious community, the abolition of competition…From Blanc, the central role of the workers…’.281 In particular, 275 276 277 278 279 280 281

Salvage, page 65. Voyage, pages 14–15. Voyage, pages 104–105. Salvage, page 48. Salvage, page 47. Shipwreck, pages 16–17. Salvage, page 59.

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they looked to French and German thinkers for inspiration which ultimately led to Tatiana’s verdict that, ‘(Russia) is…Stuck between dried-up old French reasoning and the new German thought which explains everything’.282 To complicate matters – both in reality and in Stoppard’s trilogy – the beliefs held by the leading Russian intelligentsia changed over time and in reaction to events.283 This tendency is freely admitted, as demonstrated by Chaadaev and Belinsky: Chaadaev: There’s no shame in changing your opinion. Belinsky: Yes, I am good at that, it’s one of my best things.284 The prime example in The Coast of Utopia is Michael Bakunin’s Damascene conversion. He begins by believing in each individual’s freedom in a harmonious world: Once – long ago, at the beginning of history – we were all free. Man was at one with his nature, and so he was good. He was in harmony with the world. Conflict was unknown. Then the serpent entered the garden, and the name of the serpent was – Order. Social organisation! The world was no longer at one with itself. Matter and spirit divided. Man was no longer whole. He was riven by ambition, acquisitiveness, jealousy, fear…Conflict became the condition of his life, the individual against his neighbour, against society, against himself. The Golden Age was ended. How can we make a new Golden Age and set men free again? By destroying everything that destroyed their freedom.285 He ends by insisting on his own autocratic authority: This is where my Secret Alliance comes in – a dedicated group of revolutionaries under iron discipline, answerable to my absolute authority –286 The failure of the revolutions throughout Europe in 1848 proved to be a particularly strong catalyst for the revision of opinions. Turgenev’s realisation that

282 Voyage, page 37. 283 See A. Kelly, Views from the Other Shore, page 17: ‘Alexander Herzen’s thought eludes all attempts at categorisation’. 284 Voyage, page 107. 285 Salvage, page 37. 286 Salvage, page 114.

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the uprising in Paris ‘was an insurrection, and order has triumphed’287 is typical of the disillusionment which led to a significant reappraisal of the Russian situation and what could be done about it. Herzen eventually concludes, allowing for its effects and the passing of time, that, ‘…the tone of dissent has altered. It’s harsh, jaundiced…The gaiety has gone out of opposition’.288 The main subject for discussion in the trilogy is encapsulated in Herzen’s comment: ‘Proudhon is the only one who understands what the question is: why should anyone obey anyone else?’.289 It leads directly to a consideration of what is the best form of society and throughout the trilogy various suggestions are made, many of which are utopian in their nature. It is one of the broadest canvasses on which Stoppard paints in all of his works and is reflected in the title of the series – The Coast of Utopia. Aileen Kelly, in her introduction to Berlin’s Russian Thinkers explains that the primary focus of Berlin’s writings on the Russian intelligentsia was the question of, ‘are all absolute values ultimately compatible with each other, or is there no single final solution to the problem of how to live, no one objective and universal human ideal?’.290 Belinsky suggests to both Alexander and Michael Bakunin that this is the core issue: Michael: Idealism is concerned with questions that lie outside reasoning…reason has triumphed over all the ancient problems of natural science, so the clever fools of France thought they could solve the problem of society – of morality, art – in the same way, by reason and experiment, as if God our maker was a chemist, an astronomer, a clockmaker…

287 Shipwreck, page 47. 288 Salvage, page 73. 289 Shipwreck, page 18. Kelly ascribes Proudhon’s influence on Herzen with great significance, particularly after 1848. ‘The upheaval of 1848 provided (Herzen) with a model for emulation: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon…Proudhon’s writings and actions were a dominant influence on Herzen’s interpretation of the events of 1848 (so much so that the founder of Russian socialism often comes close to seeing the unfolding catastrophe through the eyes of the father of French anarchism) and also on his redefinition of his revolutionary role in his own country’. A. Kelly, ‘“A Glowing Footprint”: Herzen, Proudhon And The Role Of The Intellectual Revolutionary’ in Modern Intellectual History Vol 2, number 2, August 2005, page 181. Herzen himself acknowledges his debt to Proudhon in Sobranie Sochinenii, 10:192: ‘You…have been the first to tell France that there is no salvation within the edifice that is tumbling down, and that there is nothing worth saving from it; that its very notions of freedom and revolution are imbued with conservatism and reaction’. 290 A. Kelly, ‘A Complex Vision’ in I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, page xiv.

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Alexander: God is all those things. That’s the point. Belinsky: No, the point is, the question how to make a clock has the same answer for everybody.291 Stoppard’s three plays show how the intelligentsia tried to answer that question. Alexander Bakunin offers up his view which is the idealised view of life on the family estate at Premukhino:292 ‘The landowner is the protector of all who live on his land. Our mutual obligations are the foundation on which Holy Russia rests. In the way of life at Premukinho there is true liberty. I know about the other kind, if I might say so; I was in France when they had their Revolution’.293 His son, Michael, also begins his philosophical journey at the family home: ‘We were on a journey to this moment. Revolution is the Absolute we pursued at Premukhino, the Universal which contains all the opposites and resolves them. It’s where we were always going’.294 It is derived from his own interpretation of Schelling’s romanticism which suggested that underneath all the minutiae of life’s visible misery was an Absolute (the essence of the universe) whose harmony man could grasp: ‘Schelling doesn’t understand the point of his own philosophy…Transcending to the Universal Idea means to put a bomb under our submission to habit and convention – in short to give ourselves utterly to loving humanity, to love our neighbour and our neighbour’s wife – to release the passion of our nature’.295 But, Michael’s position shifts, forged in the crucible of harsh reality, to his answer to Herzen in 1868: Herzen:   What are your aims precisely? Bakunin: Abolition of the state by liberated workers.296 Turgenev’s answer is to look for a Western solution – ‘The only thing that’ll save Russia is western culture transmitted by…people like us’.297 Blanc prefers to look to the ancients, as Herzen describes: ‘His version of Utopia has come through without a scratch: the organisation of labour on the Ancient Egyptian 291 Voyage, page 37. 292 William Demastes asserts, ‘The estate, Premukhino, is idyllic, an arcadian wonderland where high ideals can blossom in an agrarian dream world’. – W. Demastes, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard, page 118. 293 Voyage, page 38. 294 Shipwreck, page 43. 295 Voyage, page 77. 296 Salvage, page 113. 297 Shipwreck, page 18.

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model, without the Pharaoh’s concern for personal liberties’.298 At one stage Bakunin and Belinsky adopted the Hegelian view that the Absolute eventually arrived through a historical process in a society founded upon reason.299 It followed that the Tsarist rule was part of rational necessity and, therefore, despotism was part of the progressive course of history which produced harmony. Ironically, Belinsky was to attack another Romantic influenced supporter of Tsarism, Gogol, in words which might have described the way many of the rationalist adherents of the regime at the time were seen. He describes Gogol as ‘…this apostle of Tsar Nicholas, this champion of serfdom, corporal punishment, censorship, ignorance and obscurantist piety’.300 But, Belinsky eventually becomes suspicious of systems which demanded the sacrifice of the individual and takes up a humanist position in support of, in his own words, ‘the universal idea (which) speaks through humanity itself, and differently through each nation in each stage of history’.301 Marx’s Communist Manifesto is introduced in Shipwreck, described ambiguously by Turgenev as ‘the ghost of Communism!’302 and ‘the hobgoblin of Communism!’.303 The options keep coming through the trilogy like a tidal wave. According to Ogarev, there is ‘Saint-Simon’s utopia…the organisation of society by experts …’,304 while the Doctor at Ventnor (derived from the character Bazarov in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons who claims, ‘I don’t believe in anything’.305) offers up something rather more obscure and extreme – nihilism: ‘Believing in nothing… means to take nothing on trust, no matter how clothed in authority or tradition…Negation is the thing that’s best for Russia now’.306 298 Salvage, page 38. Stoppard makes a reference to Pharaonic government in Squaring the Circle, page 238 : ‘This whole business has been about as democratic as a Pharoah’s court’. 299 See I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, page 167: ‘in 1839–40 Belinsky proclaimed that might was right; that history itself – the march of the inevitable forces – sanctified the actual; that autocracy was, coming when it did, sacred; that Russia was as it was as part of a divine scheme marching towards an ideal goal; that the government – the representative of power and coercion – was wiser than its citizens; that protests against it were frivolous, wicked and vain’. 300 Shipwreck, page 23. 301 Voyage, page 40. I. Berlin says, in Russian Thinkers, page 173, that, ‘Belinsky in his final phase was a humanist, an enemy of theology and metaphysics, and a radical democrat, and by the extreme force and vehemence of his convictions turned purely literary disputes into the beginnings of social and political movements’. 302 Shipwreck, page 41. 303 Shipwreck, page 43. 304 Salvage, page 59. 305 I. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons. 306 Salvage, page 86.

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Much of the debate devolves towards an answer involving some form of socialism. It is begun by Herzen, whom Kelly describes as ‘the founder of Russian socialism’.307 He explains his belief: ‘I am not saying socialism is history’s secret plan, it just looks like the rational step’.308 Aksakov, a Slavophile who believes Russia’s problems need a Russian, not a Western, solution does not agree, as he explains to Herzen and Granovsky, ‘(To Herzen) Oh, I’ve heard about your socialist utopianism. What use is that to us? This is Russia…(to Granovsky) We haven’t even got a bourgeoisie’.309 Aksakov advocates a political system based around the village commune: We have to reunite ourselves with the masses from whom we became separated when we put on silk breeches and powdered wigs. It’s not too late. From our village communes we can still develop in a Russian way, without socialism or capitalism, without a bourgeoisie…and with our own culture unpolluted by the Renaissance, and our own Church unpolluted by the Popes or by the Reformation.310 And this idea is where Herzen’s philosophical journey ends up, albeit not in Aksakov’s terms. ‘But Russia has a chance’, Herzen argues, ‘The village commune can be the foundation of true populism, not Aksakov’s sentimental paternalism, and not the iron bureaucracy of the socialist elite, but self-government from the ground up’.311 Welding his original enthusiasm for socialism to his belief in the commune he finally claims, ‘For Russia – now – the answer is communal socialism’.312 And he bitterly defends his ultimate belief from an attempt by Chernyshevsky to transmute it into a communist model: Chernyshevsky:  Communal socialism, each household with its own plot, is inefficient. But communistic socialism, with everybody sharing the labour and the harvest – Herzen: (angrily) No! – No! – we haven’t come all this way only to arrive at the utopia of the ant-heap.313 307 A. Kelly, ‘“A Glowing Footprint”: Herzen, Proudhon And The Role Of The Intellectual Revolutionary’ in Modern Intellectual History Vol 2, number 2, August 2005, page 180. In her book, The Discovery of Chance, Kelly describes Herzen as ‘the first Russian socialist’. (page 7). 308 Shipwreck, page 19. 309 Shipwreck, page 14. 310 Shipwreck, page 15. 311 Shipwreck, page 103. 312 Salvage, page 77. 313 Salvage, page 77.

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Turgenev, echoing Herzen’s pragmatism, is dismissive of a universal answer – ‘I’m sick of utopias. I’m tired of hearing about them. I’d trade the lot for one practical difference that owes nothing to anybody’s ideal society, one commonsensical action that puts right an injury to one person’.314 Herzen would agree. For him universal panaceas do not exist. He believes that each situation is unique, requiring its own particular solution. It is worth noting that this is Stoppard’s position, too: ‘I believe’, he says, ‘with Alexander Herzen that Utopia is an incoherent concept’.315 Implicit in any assessment of how a country should be governed is a reconciliation of the freedom of the individual against the rule of the state. The Russian intelligentsia in The Coast of Utopia wrestle with the problem. They note the repressiveness of their own society. Belinsky reminds the Bakunins that Russia is, ‘held together by police informers and fourteen ranks of uniformed flunkys…’,316 and the situation gets progressively worse under Nicolas I. Herzen notes from his exile in 1854 that ‘Tsar Nicholas just tightened the screws – no more passports, no contact, no discussion, perpetual fear, lights out and no whispering!’.317 The Russian situation is compared unfavourably with that of other countries which the exiles witness at first hand. Turgenev observes that, ‘You can publish anything you like in France. It’s quite extraordinary’,318 whilst Herzen marvels at the freedom of expression afforded in England. ‘I’ll never get over this place’, he reports, ‘In the street today there were urchins shouting for Prince Albert to be sent to the Tower…The Times reported a public meeting calling for the Queen of England’s husband to be impeached – and nobody is arrested!’.319 The parade of utopian systems within the trilogy all bring varying degrees of control of the individual in the process of management of society. It is left to Herzen to articulate the best compromise; one of balance: I’m beginning to understand the trick of freedom. Freedom can’t be a residue of what was unfreely given up, divided up like a fought-over loaf. 314 Shipwreck, page 57. 315 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Tusa, bbc Radio 2002 in J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 166. Stoppard goes on to say, ‘there is no overall right answer to all those questions which have puzzled people for several thousand years. What I do believe in is that it should be possible to have a fair society and a just society, without needing to feel that concepts such as justice must have an absolute meaning and application for all people at all times’. 316 Voyage, page 40. 317 Salvage, page 38. 318 Shipwreck, page 14. 319 Salvage, page 31.

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Every giving-up has to be self-willed, unenforceable. Each of us must forgo only what we choose to forgo, balancing our personal freedom of action against our need for the co-operation of other people – who are each making the same balance for themselves.320 The trilogy contains a similar variety of views on the means of achieving the correct solution to Russia’s problem of governance. Ogarev’s question highlights the point: ‘We knew what we were aiming for, but how were we supposed to get it? By revolution? By Imperial decree? – a constitution?’.321 There is some agreement that the means must be internal. Stankevich argues that, ‘Reform can’t come from above or below, only from within’322 and Herzen seems to agree with him on that point: ‘It’s going to have to be up to us.…I mean Russia. The Russian people’.323 The disagreement begins with the source. According to Polevoy, in a direct criticism of Herzen, ‘I’ve been a lone voice for reform…but reform from above, not revolution from below. What can a handful of students do? They’ve destroyed themselves for nothing. Their names will be forgotten’.324 Herzen does not see it that way, believing instead in the masses – ‘We have to go to the people, bring them with us, step by step’.325 Chernyshevsky agrees, but raises the stakes on the type of action required: ‘The case for reform is delusion. Only the axe will do.…First the social revolution, then the political’.326 It is revolution which is the zeitgeist of the Russian intelligentsia. The revolutionary firebrand, Michael Bakunin, is an enthusiastic supporter with his credo, in words that Stoppard allows Herzen to quote in Shipwreck, that, ‘Destruction is a creative passion’,327 He appals Herzen with his fervent commitment to irresponsible agitation. ‘The mistake is to put ideas before action’,

320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327

Shipwreck, pages 65–66. Salvage, page 118. Voyage, page 60. Salvage, page 38. Voyage, page 57. Shipwreck, page 103. Salvage, page 74. Shipwreck, page 103. See M. Bakunin, The Reaction in Germany, 1842: ‘The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!’ (also cited by A. Kelly, in the programme notes to the 2002 Royal National Theatre production of The Coast of Utopia, Voyage). There is an echo of Bakunin’s/Herzen’s words in Tango, when Stomil notes that revolution is the foundation of progress and its initiator; the more revolution, the more progress.

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Bakunin cries, ‘Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not – well, it’s progress’.328 He warms enthusiastically to his theme, advocating brutality and taking aim at Marx along the way: ‘The answer was behind me all the time. A peasant revolution.…(Marx) doesn’t know the Russian peasant! There’s a history of rebellion there, and we forgot it.…I don’t mean your hand-kissing, priest-fearing greybeards…I mean men and women who are ready to burn everything in sight and string up the landlord – with policemen’s heads on their pitchforks!’.329 The intellectuals particularly invoke France for inspiration, as Sazonov does, dressed as a Frenchman: ‘France is the flower of civilization, and also the home of the revolution which will lop off the head of the flower’.330 For the new brigade of Russian revolutionaries which emerge after the failures of 1848, such as Chernyshevsky, ‘Revolution is only a matter of time’.331 Even Herzen once believed in revolution. He acknowledges the need for more than words when he says, ‘To reform this oriental despotism will take more than the oriental tact of the Telegraph’.332 In fact, his earliest beliefs were one of the most intense action, vengeance even: ‘I was thirteen at the time of the December revolt’, he recalls and when his father had taken him and Ogarev up to the Sparrow Hills he and Ogarev ran ahead, overlooking the city, ‘and we suddenly embraced and made a sacred vow to dedicate our lives – yes, sacrifice them if need be – to avenge the Decembrists’.333 He was equally inspired by Bakunin in his early days as he openly admits, ‘When I read Bakunin in Ruge’s Deutsche Jahrbucher I thought, “Yes, this is the language of free men! We’ll make revolution in Berlin, Paris, Brussels!’’’.334 This belief in revolution stays with him, long after the failures of 1848, as he shows when he exhorts his own son, Sasha, at the passing of the year in 1854: ‘Go in your time, preach the revolution at home to our own people’.335 But, as so often in the story of the Russian intelligentsia, his position eventually shifts and he does not see revolution as the answer. Applying his pragmatism he eventually comes to realise that ‘(Revolution) would drive the reformists into the arms of the conservatives’.336 328 329 330 331 332 333

Shipwreck, page 37. Shipwreck, page 103. Voyage, page 55. Salvage, page 73. Voyage, page 58. Voyage, page 60. See A. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, pages 61–62 : ‘We…ran up to the Sparrow Hills…we stood leaning against each other and, suddenly embracing, vowed in sight of all Moscow to sacrifice our lives to struggle we had chosen’. 334 Salvage, page 16. 335 Salvage, page 34. 336 Salvage, page 75.

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Herzen’s pragmatism is one of the themes of his own life and Stoppard reflects it in the three plays. Along with his insistence on the role of chance in human life it is what primarily, but not quite exclusively, distinguishes Herzen from most of the other Russian thinkers and endows him with the moral leadership of the intelligentsia in exile.337 He had been concerned about the practical aspects of change for some time, complaining that, ‘We are revolutionaries with secret arsenals of social theory’,338 whilst noting in the end that, ‘Independence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’.339 He realises that people have a hierarchy of needs and freedom is not at the apex: ‘People are more interested in potatoes than freedom. The people think equality means everybody should be oppressed equally. They love authority. They’re suspicious of talent. They want government to govern for them and not against them. To govern doesn’t enter their heads’.340 He also comes to believe that it’s no good continually sacrificing oneself for someone else’s vaguely defined, better future, as his exchange with Blanc shows: Blanc: It’s our human duty – to sacrifice ourselves for the well-being of society. Herzen: I don’t see how the well-being of society is going to be achieved if everybody is sacrificing themselves and nobody’s enjoying themselves. Worcell had been in exile for twenty-six years. He gave up his wife, his children, his estates, his country. Who has gained by it? Blanc: The future. Herzen: Ah, yes, the future.341 Herzen’s opinion is directly opposite to that of the idealistic student, Trofimov, in The Cherry Orchard: ‘There it is – happiness, here it comes, nearer

337 See A. Kelly, Views from the Other Shore, page 139: ‘Among political thinkers of the nineteenth century Herzen stands out above all for his insistence on the dominant role of chance in human life’. 338 Voyage, page 58. 339 Salvage, page 17. 340 Salvage, page 36. In From the Other Shore, page 133, Herzen argues, ‘The masses want to stay the hand that impudently snatches from them the bread they have earned – that is their fundamental desire. They are indifferent to individual freedom, to freedom of speech; the masses love authority’. 341 Salvage, page 56.

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and nearer – I can hear its footsteps…and if we don’t live to see it, and never know it for ourselves, what does it matter? There’s others who will’.342 Herzen is more concerned about the present. Much of his concern lay in what he actually saw as the consequence of revolution in the streets. His wife, Natalie, describes what Paris looked like after the barricades of 1848 – ‘There were omnibuses full of corpses’.343 His very real experience, coloured by the same event, transformed his opinion of how to effect change: ‘In Paris I saw enough wet blood in the gutters to last me. Progress by peaceful steps’.344 To Marx, by contrast, such a sight was merely an incentive along the road to his dream: ‘I see the Neva lit by flames and running red, the coconut palms hung with corpses all along the shining strand from Kronstadt to the Nevsky Prospekt…’.345 Herzen’s objections went further than merely an aversion to spilt blood. Turgenev notices that in France the 1848 rising turned on itself when he observes the workers march, ‘Invading the National assembly to demand the selfabolition of an elected parliament which happens to be not to their taste’.346 From that moment Herzen sees the inherent risk in revolution because ‘A republic behaving like the monarchy it displaced is not a failure of aesthetics. This is a republic by superstition only…it turns out the Republic makes revolution unnecessary, and, in fact, undesirable. Power is not to be shared with the ignoramuses who built the barricades. They are too poor to have a voice’.347 Rather than history proceeding as if in a deterministic line it can turn into recurring cycles which only perpetuate bloodshed. The result, as he tells Chernyshevsky, will not only be carnage but, worst of all, another tyranny, this time of the intelligentsia: It’s not the belly, it’s the head. Organisation.…Who will do the organising? Oh, but of course! – you will! The revolutionary elite. Because the peasants aren’t to be trusted, they’re too ignorant, too feckless, too drunk. Which they are.…Will you be their Little Father? You might have to have your own police force. Chernyshevsky! – are we ridding the people of their yoke so they can live under the dictatorship of the intellectuals?348 342 343 344 345 346 347 348

The Cherry Orchard, page 44. Shipwreck, page 53. Salvage, page 75. Salvage, page 117. Shipwreck, page 47. Shipwreck, page 47. Salvage, page 75. In From the Other Shore, page 147, Herzen even argues that this process will apply to Socialism as well : ‘…socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities’.

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In much the same way Jan in the politically repressed Czechoslovakia of Rock ‘N’ Roll laments the inability of the people to grasp his brand of socialism. ‘Perhaps we aren’t good enough for this beautiful idea’, he reflects. ‘This is the best we can do with it. Marx knew we couldn’t be trusted. First the dictatorship, till we learned to be good, then the utopia where a man can be a baker in the morning, a lawmaker in the afternoon and a poet in the evening. But we never learned to be good, so look at us’.349 Herzen finishes his life in a considerable sense of disillusionment. France was to be the paradigm of revolution but there it has failed as he laments that, ‘They’re building prisons out of the stones of the Bastille. There’s no country in the world that has shed more blood for liberty and understands it less’.350 He also realises that he is incapable of effecting change through the printing press: ‘With the Free Russian Press I thought I could start people at home thinking again. I imagine Nick Ogarev reading me – I write everything for Nick – but I might as well put it in a bottle and throw it in the sea. I’m left stranded like the sole survivor of a disaster of my own making’.351 There is a personal intellectual price that he pays for all his failed efforts as Chernyshevsky castigates him and his peers: ‘Your generation’, he says to him, ‘were the romantics of the cause, the dilettanti of revolutionary ideas’.352 Herzen’s pragmatism is applied to the debate on the nature of the historical process. Its crux is whether there is a deterministic process behind events. ‘…where are we off to? Who’s got the map?’,353 he asks in a way which can be metaphorically interpreted to apply to the question of what is history. The Hegelian point of view is one of an inexorable journey, as Ketscher describes: ‘it’s the Spirit of History, the ceaseless March of Progress’.354 As Marx later says with one of Stoppard’s most amusing double entendres, ‘It was bound to happen. I was expecting it’.355 George Herwegh emphasises the notion that history is a process, commenting with heavy irony, ‘…if you’re a miserable exploited worker, you’re playing a vital role in a historical process that’ll put you on top as sure as omelettes was eggs’.356 In the shadow of the Parisian uprising of 1848, Herzen recites the Hegelian perspective but introduces a sting in the tail:

349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356

Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 37. Shipwreck, page 32. Salvage, page 38. Salvage, page 74. Shipwreck, page 18. Shipwreck, page 18. Shipwreck, page 40. Shipwreck, page 60.

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…now there’s a completely new idea. History itself is the main character in the drama, and also its author. We are all in the story, which ends with universal bliss. Perhaps not for you. Perhaps not for your children. But universal bliss, you can put your shirt on it…Your personal sacrifice, the sacrifice of countless others on History’s slaughter-bench, all the apparent crimes and lunacies of the hour, which to you may seem irrational, are part of a much bigger story which you probably aren’t in the mood for – let’s just say that this time, as luck would have it, you’re the zig and they’re the zag.357 The zig and zag – the opposing, haphazard view – is explained by George Herweg’s aphorism, ‘History is more like the weather. You never know what it’s going to do’.358 Herzen applies his pragmatism and emphasis on the here and now rather than the future in summing up the case for the ex tempore path of history: Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day.…Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it‘s been danced? It’s only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning of nature’s highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt is carrying us to the place where we’re expected! But there is no such place, that’s why it’s called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy when he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.359 The nineteenth century socio-political thought was part of a greater philosophical approach to life. For many of the intelligentsia the two were indivisible. The Coast of Utopia is a vast work and the three plays afford Stoppard 357 Shipwreck, pages 51–52. 358 Shipwreck, page 63. 359 Shipwreck, pages 100–101.

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plenty of capacity to discuss some of the other aspects of the holistic approach which, in themselves, are themes of his own body of work. One of the most obvious of these themes is love which manifests itself in many forms throughout the trilogy. The spectrum of the issue is defined in a set-piece scene between Maria Ogarev and Natalie Herzen in which Maria sets out her reasons for not acceding to a request for a divorce from Nicholas, her husband and Alexander Herzen’s boyhood friend. Prompted by an aesthetic disagreement over a nude painting of Maria and a practical one as to how Maria should go about her separation from Nicholas, Maria accuses Natalie of having ‘idealised love’, a charge to which Natalie readily admits. At the end of an increasingly intense exchange Natalie’s retort to Maria’s anger is to caricature the sexual nature of Maria’s love through the painting: ‘Your portrait, by the way’, Natalie bitingly tells her, ‘is a failure, no doubt because your friend thinks he can produce the desired effect on canvas in the same way he produces it on you, by calculation…If he dips his brush here and prods it there he’ll get what he got last time, and so on till you’re done’.360 The fraternal love that transcends earthly desires is valued by Natalie and derided by Maria as the former describes a scene in the early days with their new husbands: Natalie: But we all loved each other in the beginning. Don’t you remember how we all joined hands and knelt and thanked God for each other? Maria:    Well, I didn’t want to be the only one standing up.361 In the German Romantic philosophical view of the world the relationship between men and women is part of the hidden harmony that is the Absolute or essence of the universe. Michael Bakunin, defending Natalie Beyer’s love letter in the face of criticism from his sisters alludes to the difference between that form of philosophical love and the more earthly love: ‘I renounce all love except pure philosophical love, your love, the love I have for my sisters. The so-called love of talking animals removes people two by two from the only possibility of happiness, which is the communion of beautiful souls’.362 Maria Ogarev explains it rather more cynically: ‘we had no idea…that people who didn’t know any better were falling in love quite adequately without dragging in the mind of the Universe as dreamt up by some German professor who left

360 Shipwreck, pages 69–70. 361 Shipwreck, page 69. 362 Voyage, page 14.

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out the irritating details. There was also talk of the angels in heaven singing hosannas’.363 But, if the parameters are defined by the encounter between Natalie Herzen and Maria Ogarev, the debate itself is framed by the actual behaviour of Alexander and Natalie Herzen and their romantic liaisons. It is a debate with foundations in nineteenth century literature and, through one of its writers, has a direct link to the political events that so influenced Alexander Herzen. Initially Alexander and Natalie had a love that is of a tender and understanding nature, such as she had with Alexander Herzen when they were young and he was in exile, although, as Natalie admits, that was a long time ago and the nature of their relationship has changed for the worse: ‘I love Alexander with my whole life, but it used to be better, when one was ready to crucify a man or be crucified for him for a word, a glance, a thought…I could look at a star and think of Alexander far away in exile looking at the same star’.364 The lost love with Herzen that she pines for is ‘a love which is greater the more it includes’.365 The second Natalie in Herzen’s life – Ogarev (Tuchkov) – tells Herzen that the first Natalie, ‘worshipped’,366 him. George Sand, the French authoress, redefined the acceptable, philosophical nature of love because, as Natalie Herzen tells Belinsky, she, ‘has freed herself from the slavery of our sex!’.367 Previously, in a view which was coincident with Kant’s philosophy,368 love was regarded as an act of duty which, in the trilogy, is exemplified by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. ‘It’s just like the story’, Alexandra Bakunin tells her sisters, Tatiana, Liubov and Varenka, in a discussion about love-letters they are perusing, ‘perhaps they were friends like Onegin and Lensky’.369 She is referring to Tatyana’s decision in Onegin, as an act of duty, to remain faithful to her husband, the Prince, instead of taking up with Onegin. I love you (why should I dissemble?); But I am now another’s wife, And I’ll be faithful all my life.370 363 364 365 366 367 368

Shipwreck, page 68. Shipwreck, page 6. Shipwreck, page 93. Salvage, page 104. Voyage, page 87. See A. Kelly, Views from the Other Shore, page 49. Kant acknowledged the primacy of the idea of duty in ethics. 369 Voyage, page 43. 370 A. Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, stanza 47, page 210.

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In dutiful love there is no place for the ego. Ogarev points out that if love is to be part of the harmony of the universe then the self has to be divorced from the emotion. He quotes from one of his love-letters: ‘to love you is to love God and His Universe, our love negates egoism in the embrace of all mankind’.371 The conflict between love and duty manifests itself in several relationships in the trilogy. Michael Bakunin draws a distinction about the arrangements their father is making for one of their other sisters, Liubov, to marry Baron Renne even though, in his estimation, she ‘doesn’t love him’. ‘I’m speaking of love and you are speaking of match-making’,372 he tells Varenka and Tatiana. To placate their father Varenka agrees, out of duty, to marry Dyakov, which leads ultimately to a separation. To marry without love is quite acceptable to some as Belinsky confesses to Tatiana about an unknown girl he announces he is going to marry. In response to Tatiana’s surprise, ‘But you’re in love!’, Belinsky retorts, ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that’.373 Michael Bakunin, however, expresses disapproval of such an approach in quite dramatic terms: ‘To give oneself without love is a sin against the inner life’.374 Belinsky explains the point in relation to George Sand: ‘Pushkin’s Tatiana loves Onegin but stays faithful to the dullard she married, a heroine to her creator. Put her into George Sand and she’d be a joke, a dullard herself, faithful to a moribund society’.375 As EH. Carr relates, Sand’s new ‘romantic doctrine which caused so much havoc in the family of Herzen sprang…from the fertile genius of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’,376 which was ironic, given Herzen’s early admiration for Rousseau – ‘I idolised Rousseau when I was young…Man in his natural state, uncorrupted by civilisation, desiring only those things which are good to desire…and everybody free to follow their desires without conflicts because they’d all want the same thing’.377 In Rousseau’s world of natural goodness and unspoilt nature the human emotions are the guide to human conduct. And, the noblest of the emotions is love. Varenka Bakunin encapsulates the philosophy of Sand: ‘To follow our heart wherever it leads us! To love where we may, whomever we may, to let love be our guide to the greater good!’.378 The sense of exaltation and higher purpose to be associated with love is identified by 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378

Shipwreck, page 5. Voyage, page 8. Voyage, page 108. Voyage, page 9. Voyage, page 108. EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 57. Shipwreck, pages 79–80. Voyage, page 16.

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Natalie Beyer, who, in passing, refers to George Sand – ‘In the perfect society, all women will be the object of exalted feelings…Was it George Sand?’.379 The new form of love carries with it a concept of sanctity which Belinsky identifies: ‘Love is a mystery, and a woman’s privilege is to be the priestess of the mystery, vestal of the sacred flame’.380 The notion of association to divinity is repeated by Stankevich who claims that, ‘For me love is a religious experience’.381 This view of the sacred idea of love which, to quote Carr again, ‘made Tatyana and Onegin look like extinct mammals of the Ice Age’382 had received considerable exposure in Russia post Pushkin, whose death in a duel is heard in Voyage, and is adopted by many characters in The Coast of Utopia. It is akin to the philosophy of another German Romantic, Schiller.383 Natalie Herzen describes how idealistic this form of love is: ‘I think our sex is ennobled by idealising love. You say it as if it meant denying love in some way, but it’s you who’s denying its…greatness…which comes from being a universal idea, like a thought in nature…’.384 She sees it as part of nature as a whole as she defends her infidelity to the wife of her lover, Emma Herwegh, ‘All my actions spring from the divine spirit of love, which I feel for all creation. Your logical way of looking at things just shows that you have grown apart from Nature’.385 It also conveys for some of the intellectuals a deeply moral sense as Liubov points out: ‘love is the highest good’.386 The trilogy contains other examples of this school of love. As Maria explains in that rather forced conversation with Natalie, ‘…when I met Nicholas Ogarev…we sat out and talked twaddle at each other, and knew that this was love’.387 Even her husband admits that he was, using Stoppard’s pun, ‘curably romantic’.388 It is a form of all consuming love, as Natalie Herzen observes: ‘When (Marie d’Agoult) fell in love with Liszt she followed her heart. Everything had to give way to love – reputation, society, husband, children…’.389 It is also the blind love with which Turgenev pursues his opera singer. Natalie

379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389

Voyage, page 87. Shipwreck, page 34. Voyage, page 17. EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 58. See A. Kelly, Views from the Other Shore, page 49. Shipwreck, page 68. Shipwreck, page 85. Voyage, page 22. Shipwreck, page 68. Salvage, page 60. Shipwreck, page 50.

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Herzen rather contemptuously describes how he ‘simply trails along in Viardot’s dust’.390 Natalie Herzen draws an interesting distinction between what she calls her ‘affection’ for her lover and her devotional love to her husband. In an attempt to explain to and placate her husband, who accuses her of doubletalk, she argues for her purity, despite her compromising situation, on the grounds that, ‘my affection for George is God-given – if he went away I would sicken – if you went away I would die!’.391 She describes George as her child, whilst she sees Herzen as ‘a grown man’.392 Emma, George’s wounded wife, is dismissive of the nature of the affair, commenting, ‘This is not love, it’s exaltation’.393 Despite Natalie’s wish, expressed to Emma Herwegh, that, ‘Alexander must be spared this’,394 Alexander Herzen is stunned by Natalie’s eventual confession to the affair with what he refers to as ‘that German worm’.395 Carr says, ‘it represented for Herzen the shattering of his dearest illusion, the fall of a woman whose devoted love and immaculate purity had been the cornerstone of his faith’.396 Herzen’s response in the play is, not surprisingly, rather more practical than philosophical. He is aghast at Herwegh, calling him an, ‘unctuous, treacherous lecher – that thief!’,397 and immediately focusses on bodily intimacy rather than feelings, leading Natalie to conclude bitterly that, ‘You have no objection if I take him to my heart, only to my bed’.398 In the words that Stoppard gives Alexander Herzen, ‘Rousseau has a lot to answer for’.399 Whilst it is the application of Sand’s love which causes the situation it is the application of Pushkin’s duty which resolves it. Emma Herwegh says to Natalie that whilst living in Nice ‘upstairs in your house like a lodger’400 is the ultimate humiliation she is ‘glad to do it for George’401 and offers Natalie the chance to make George happy. Herzen offers to step aside and let Natalie go with George and Emma even asks Herzen to intervene with her departing husband and ask

390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401

Shipwreck, page 5. Shipwreck, page 89. Shipwreck, page 88. Shipwreck, page 85. Shipwreck, page 85. Salvage, page 53. EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 82. Shipwreck, page 90. Shipwreck, page 90. Shipwreck, page 79. Shipwreck, page 85. Shipwreck, page 85.

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him to take her with him. The final decision is Natalie’s and it is one of duty: ‘What strength I have I need for Alexander. I will go wherever he goes’.402 Natalie also indulges in another form of love (which exposes Sand’s love to its logical conclusion of its overriding supremacy), this time with a woman, Natasha Tuchkov (who, for the avoidance of confusion, later, somewhat ironically, becomes Natalie Ogarev, Herzen’s future mistress).403 They are depicted, according to the stage directions ‘innocently embraced, reclin(ing) on the couch’.404 The nature of the love of this relationship is not explored in any detail but it is described by Natalie Herzen in a very positive way: ‘anybody would fall in love with Natasha, I fell in love with her myself…I’ve never loved anyone as I loved Natasha, she brought me back to life’.405 It should be noted that Natalie also describes her relationship with George as ‘a love which gave me back my life’.406 Natalie later goes on to emphasise how special her love with Natasha is by insisting that, ‘Natasha is the only one who would understand the purity of my love’.407 What is good for the Herzen goose is good for the Herzen gander. After Natalie’s death Alexander Herzen conducts an affair with Natalie Ogarev virtually in front of her husband, Nicholas, fathering three children by her. Herzen’s own dalliance with the love philosophy of Sand has a highly ambiguous nature. In Salvage it is clearly driven, at least in part, by passion, as Herzen admits to Nicholas Ogarev, ‘The only thing that calms her down is intimate relations’.408 Natalie Ogarev complains, in terms that are reminiscent of the influential German Romantic philosophers, to Herzen that, ‘You love me but it’s not the deep pure love we talked about, not the love which transcends the day-to-day pettiness of normal human failings’.409 It’s a rather ‘on-off’ relationship410 and 402 Shipwreck, page 91. 403 ‘The infatuation was sudden and complete’. – EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 36. Kelly notes, in The Discovery of Chance (page 333), that Natalie had read Sand. 404 Shipwreck, page 49. 405 Shipwreck, page 67. 406 Shipwreck, page 90. 407 Shipwreck, page 89. 408 Salvage, page 61. In reality Herzen wrote to Nicholas Ogarev and talked in terms of more ethereal love, suggesting the passion was on Natalie’s side: ‘I noticed that N’s friendship for me was of a more passionate character than I could have wished. I love her with all my heart, deeply and warmly, but this is not passion’. Quoted in EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 171. Carr quotes a letter Herzen wrote to Nicholas Ogarev in which he wrote, ‘Only intimate relations can put her right for the time’. – The Romantic Exiles, page 226. 409 Salvage, page 68. 410 EH. Carr describes their relationship thus: ‘Herzen and Natalie were drawn and held irresistibly and fatally together by the twin emotions of love and hatred’. – The Romantic

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more obviously a triangle, which Herzen describes thus: ‘I don’t know what she wants. She wanted you, then she wanted me, then for five minutes she was delirious with joy because we all loved each other, then she decided her love for me was a monstrosity for which she’s being punished’.411 She threatens to return to Russia, taking their daughter, Liza, but, instead, goes to visit her sister in Germany. Despite the scratchiness of their relationship and Natalie Ogarev’s difficult relationship with Olga, one of Herzen’s daughters from his marriage, Natalie Ogarev persuades Herzen to move to Switzerland in what amounts to an attempt at a fresh start both for their relationship and Herzen’s failing political journal. But, the truth about this relationship is, as Natalie Ogarev concludes, that she is not, for Herzen, the real Natalie and that he loves her with ‘indifference’.412 Sand’s doctrine is not acceptable to all Russians. Amongst the new generation of intelligentsia Chaadaev prefers Pushkin’s older morality, saying, ‘If I could bring Pushkin back to life by reducing George Sand to a fine powder and sprinkling it on his grave, I’d leave for Paris tonight with a coffee grinder in my luggage’.413 Sand’s rather lofty form of love may appeal to sections of the intelligentsia but it does not readily translate to the more immediate, earthly requirements of the Bakunin daughters. ‘Do you think it’s ever wonderful, apart from in stories, like in George Sand?’,414 Liubov asks. The younger female characters have trouble reconciling her works to the action of love in the real world. Liubov rather frustratingly complains that, ‘Sand doesn’t tell you the things you want to know’,415 while Natalie Beyer laments, ‘it’s all so different in George Sand’.416 The inclusion of references to Sand has a double significance within the The Coast of Utopia because she, like Alexander Herzen, experienced the 1848 revolution in Paris, criticising the rebels in her belief that, ‘I cannot believe in any republic that starts a revolution by killing its own proletariat’417 and establishing her own newspaper.

411 412 413 414 415 416 417

Exiles, page 176. The birth of their daughter, Liza, he argues, reinforced by common love for her, albeit jealous on both sides, their relationship. Carr goes on to describe a vacillating, tempestuous relationship thus: ‘Between such storms of rage and weeping there were flashes of reconciliation’. – The Romantic Exiles, page 226. Salvage, page 60. Salvage, page 68. Voyage, page 108. Voyage, page 16. Voyage, page 16. Voyage, page 77. G. Sand to Charlotte Marliani, July 1848 – Correspondence, vol viii.

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Alexander Herzen has his own formula for the resolution of the conflict between love and duty. He expresses it in his own book, Who Is To Blame?, which includes, in a way that Herzen did not realise at the time of writing was about intrude into his own happiness, its own love triangle. In his book the wife cannot bring herself to leave her husband for her love, as in Pushkin, but she does so not out of duty but her own free sacrifice.418 It was what Herzen described as, ‘an elegant balancing of passion with sacrifice’.419 It preserves the role of the ego which Herzen, ever the pragmatist, cites in Shipwreck, believing that, ‘Love without egoism cheats women of equality and independence, not to mention any other…satisfaction’.420 He even uses it to rationalise his wife’s fall from grace which he explains later on in London to the Ogarevs. The free will which his wife used in submitting to the affair was one which was distorted by Herwegh from her idealised love for him – ‘Her devotion to me’, is countered by, ‘her remorse, her courage when she faced the madness that man infected her mind with…’.421 For him the ego is vital as it is the key to freedom itself. In resolving himself to the consequences of the revelation of Natalie’s affair with Herwegh he argues for his middle way which is part of an overall philosophy which extends far beyond love and into his view of freedom and man’s role in his own future: ‘Why should we damp down everything in us which is our uniqueness, the salt of our personality…Egoism isn’t an acquired vice. It’s not an acquired virtue either. It’s just part of what comes with being human, to keep us free, to create our own destiny, our own values. It’s not the enemy of love! It’s what love feeds on’.422 As Varenka Bakunin notes airily, ‘We can’t all be philosophers when it comes to love’.423 Not all love in The Coast of Utopia is subject to philosophical analysis. Earthly grime and pure lust, in contrast to the ethereal notions of the Romantics, is described by Maria Ogarev when revealing the history of her relationships to Natalie Herzen: ‘the next time I fell in love’, she recounts as she arrives at her estrangement from Nicholas, ‘it stank of turpentine, tobacco smoke, laundry baskets…the musk of love. To arouse and satisfy desire is nature making its point about the sexes, everything else is convention’.424 Nicholas Ogarev, in the face of the fact that, as Bakunin puts it, ‘Natalie is openly 418 419 420 421 422 423 424

See A. Kelly, Views from the Other Shore, page 64. A. Herzen, Sobranie Sochinenii, 10:198. Shipwreck, page 35. Salvage, page 53. Shipwreck, page 92. Voyage, page 15. Shipwreck, page 68.

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living with Herzen’,425 decides to pay for his ‘love’ by starting up a relationship with a prostitute, Mary Sutherland. There is little, if anything, philosophical about Turgenev’s first encounter: ‘My first was a serf’, he relates, ‘I think my mother put her up to it. I was fifteen. It was in the garden.…She was my slave. She took hold of me by the hair and said “Come!”…Unforgettable’.426 Emma Herwegh has a slightly different interpretation: ‘That’s eroticism’427 In the end Natalie’s observation at the end of her row with Maria that, ‘… we fall short at love’,428 summarises the debate on love. The trilogy presents the old and the new philosophies of love. The relationships in the sagas of the Bakunins and the Herzens, most of which end unsatisfactorily, highlight the difference between conceptual and actual forms of love. Natalie even goes so far as to draw a parallel between art and love, insisting that both reveal ‘nature itself’.429 Skirmishes Not all Stoppard’s stage debates are set-piece, grand battles. Some comprise a collection of skirmishes, a few examples of which will suffice. Professional Foul discusses the ethics of the relationship between the state and the individual. The point is introduced in what in Stoppardian terms is a minor intellectual contretemps. It is conducted between Anderson, ‘the J.S. Mill Professor of Ethics at the University of Cambridge’,430 and his former student, Hollar, now a toilet cleaner in Prague in the totalitarian state of Czechoslovakia. Anderson refuses to smuggle Hollar’s thesis about collective behaviour out of Czechoslovakia. Anderson, because he has been invited to a Colloquium in Prague by the Czech government, declines Hollar’s request on the grounds that it would be bad manners. Anderson launches off: ‘…ethics and manners are interestingly related. The history of human calumny is largely a series of breaches of good manners…(Pause.) Perhaps if I said correct behaviour it wouldn’t sound so ridiculous’.431 That is all the incentive Hollar needs. He informs Anderson, ‘Here, you know, individual correctness is defined by what is correct for the State.… 425 426 427 428 429 430 431

Salvage, page 112. Shipwreck, page 79. Shipwreck, page 79. Shipwreck, page 70. Shipwreck, page 70. Professional Foul, page 65. Professional Foul, page 54.

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I ask how collective right can have meaning by itself.…I reply it comes from the individual’.432 Anderson lures his former student on: ‘The collective ethic can only be the individual ethic writ big.…The ethics of the State must be judged against the fundamental ethic of the individual’.433 Having encouraged Hollar to put all his ethical cards on the table Anderson deals his own, considered reply: ‘The difficulty arises when one asks oneself how the individual ethic can have any meaning by itself.…It is much easier to understand how a community of individuals can decide to give each other certain rights’.434 He proposes that the relationship between an individual and the State is contractual ‘and it is the essence of a contract that both parties entered into it freely’.435 The practice of minor skirmishes is repeated in the play, notably with McKendrick’s explanation of the relevance of catastrophe theory and the drunken debate McKendrick has with himself over the ethical dilemma of football’s professional foul which ends with Stoppard’s stereotypical English footballer punching the inebriated professor. In a similar vein The Invention of Love adapts the concept of the Stoppardian stage debate into a series of mini debates underneath the umbrella of the overall discussion on dualities and the nature of love. As an example aeh and his younger self contest the merits of poetry versus scholarship which, at the very highest level, aeh regards as mutually exclusive. ‘There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom?’,436 he asks. Only to the Romans and not us, he answers his own question. But, Housman has his own answer: ‘The poet writes to his mistress how she’s killed his love – “fallen like a flower at the field’s edge where the plough touched it and passed on by” Two thousand years in the tick of a clock…’.437 It has an eternal quality and, Housman goes on (in a belief that Septimus does not share in Arcadia438), ‘I could weep when I think how nearly lost it was…It’s a cry that cannot be ignored’.439 The Invention of Love provides further examples of the short, rather than sustained, exchange of intellectual fire. There is a brief encounter between Jowett and Housman about whether textual criticism has a place: 432 433 434 435 436 437 438

Professional Foul, page 54. Professional Foul, pages 54–55. Professional Foul, page 55. Professional Foul, page 55. The Invention of Love, page 36. The Invention of Love, page 36. ‘The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language’. Arcadia, pages 50–51. 439 The Invention of Love, page 36.

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Jowett: …you, sir, have not been put on earth with an Oxford scholarship so that you may bother your head whether Catullus in such-and-such place wrote ut or et or aut or none of them or whether such-and-such line is spurious or corrupt or on the contrary an example of Catullus’s particular genius. You are here to take the ancient authors as they come from a reputable English printer, and to study them until you can write in the metre. If you cannot write Latin and Greek verse how can you hope to be of any use in the world? Housman: But isn’t it of use to establish what the ancient authors really wrote? Jowett: …anyone with a secretary knows that what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time of the first Roman invasion of Britain and the earliest copy that has come down to us was written about 1,500 years after that. Think of all those secretaries!…finally and at long last – mangled and tattered like a dog that has fought its way home, there falls across the threshold of the Italian Renaissance the sole surviving witness to thirty generations of carelessness and stupidity: the Verona Codex of Catullus; which was almost immediately lost again, but not before being copied with one last opportunity for error.440 Just like the intellectual rivalry of George Moore and McFee, but in shorter bursts, the late nineteenth century dons of Oxford conduct minor spats. Jowett and Pattison clash over the state of Oxford University. Jowett claims that when he came up, ‘Oxford was an utter disgrace. Education rarely interfered with the life of the University’.441 In a quite charming simile, Jowett, continues, ‘Learning was carried on in nooks and corners, like Papism in an Elizabethan manor house’.442 For Jowett, ‘The great reform of the fifties laid the foundations of the educated class that has spread moral and social order to parts of the world where, to take one example, my Plato was formerly quite unknown’.443 Pattison disagrees; ‘The great reform made us into a cramming shop. The railway brings in fools and takes them away with their tickets punched for the

440 441 442 443

The Invention of Love, pages 23–25. The Invention of Love, page 16. The Invention of Love, page 16. The Invention of Love, page 16.

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world outside’.444 Jowett rejoins, ‘The modern university exists by consent of the world outside. We must send out men fitted for that world’.445 Pattison’s view is different; ‘Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it. A university exists to seek the meaning of life by pursuit of scholarship’.446 In Artist Descending a Staircase Stoppard explores the merits of modern art in particular. The play contains one of his most famous aphorisms, uttered by Donner: Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.447 For most of the play the concept of modern art is subjected to criticism, either through comment or implied in the humour. The counterpoint was raised in 1914. Beauchamp was of the view that ‘Art is nothing to do with expertise’.448 Years later Martello gives the rationale for why this should be so, in terms of technique: …painting nature, one way or another, is a technique and can be learned, like playing the piano. But how can you teach someone to think in a certain way? – to 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 –…And what, after all, is the point of excellence in naturalistic art – ? How does one account for, and justify, the very notion of emulating nature? The greater the

444 445 446 447

The Invention of Love, pages 16–17. The Invention of Love, page 17. The Invention of Love, page 15. Artist, page 122. Stoppard explains his views on modern art, and thereby playwriting, to John Russell Taylor in a way which expands upon his epigram. ‘What I can’t take is an anarchic mind – not an anarchic spirit, which I admire, but a mind which has no formality to it when it comes to structuring and communicating its thoughts. And a great deal of modern art, I mean pictorial art, I look at it and what I don’t get is what went in.…I don’t care how far out a writer is, I like to get the feeling that enormous care, enormous feeling for structure and formality, to get its optima out of it, has gone into that work of art’. – Stoppard, in an interview with JR. Taylor, ‘Our Changing Theatre, No. 3: Changes in Writing’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 27. 448 Artist, page 143.

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success, the more false the result. It is only when imagination is dragged away from what the eye sees that a picture becomes interesting.449 Perhaps the brevity of Artist Descending a Staircase, in contrast to his principal works for stage, forces Stoppard to apply the principle of parsimony to the discussion. The debate does not end there, however, for Natalie Herzen in Shipwreck agrees with Martello. ‘Imitation isn’t art’, she tells Maria Ogarev, ‘… Technique by itself can’t create. So where do you think is the rest of the work of art if not in exalted feeling translated into paint or music or poetry…?’.450

The Multi-Play Debate

As is often the case Stoppard’s debates run across more than one of his plays. The discussion about art begins within the confines of Artist Descending a Staircase, broadens out in Travesties, reverberates through Henry’s attitude to writing in The Real Thing and Wilde’s outburst in The Invention of Love and ends in The Coast of Utopia series. The arguments for freedom of speech can be seen in Night and Day and run through both Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Cahoot’s Macbeth, culminating in Rock ‘N’ Roll. To explore a specific example, the fire of the debate about the implications of altruism for morality is kindled in Jumpers by ‘the late Professor McFee’s’451 verdict from beyond the grave and later reignites with Spike and Hilary in The Hard Problem. In truth, the debate is set in the context of Penelope’s observation on morality in Another Moon Called Earth (1967) that the first moon landing, ‘brought everything into question’.452 The same unprecedented perspective leads Dotty in Jumpers (1972) to realise that her previous conceptions of morality had become ‘little – local’.453 Anderson, in Professional Foul (1977), goes on to resolve Dotty’s confusion by distinguishing between local rules and absolute moral rights. In Jumpers the case for George Moore’s moral absolutism rests, in large part, upon Duncan McFee’s realisation that the existence of altruism undermines his case for moral relativity. Observers of The Hard Problem’s inaugural London run in 2015 suggested that the play presents not so much a stage debate as an onslaught – ‘we’re 449 450 451 452 453

Artist, page 140. Shipwreck, page 70. Jumpers, page 79. Another Moon Called Earth, page 50. Jumpers, page 75.

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continually bombarded with gobbets of learning’,454 was one critical verdict. The kernel of the debate is the nature of the hard problem, one of two elements that comprise consciousness. Leo, Hilary’s boss at the institute, summarises the difference between the two types of consciousness while at the same time broadening out the concept of hard problems to include what he calls ‘self-consciousness’: A mouse is a bundle of behavioural responses to physical stimuli. Poking it with a stick is the same thing bigger. Light photons hit the retina, small molecules get the whiskers twitching, and improved technology455 will show the mechanism all the way to cheese response.…But cognition – reasoning, imagining, believing…that’s hard. How does the brain do self-consciousness? – reference? – metaphor? ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’.456 As a what? ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies’.457 Like two what which what? That’s hard. Where is it happening? How?458 But, it is not the hard problem itself which causes the debate. It is what flows from it, either metaphorically or logically. In trying to solve the hard problem Hilary conducts an experiment designed to test motivation which brings into focus the concept of altruism which becomes a subject of fierce exchange between Hilary and her lover Spike. It takes off from where McFee’s ‘up a gum tree’ admission of its consequences left off in Jumpers. Spike, whose approach is best characterised as scientific, has the answer to McFee’s problem: ‘Altruism is always self-interest, it just needs a little working out’,459 citing as he goes the example of vampire bats who soon learn to assist hungry bats.460 He explains it away in the context of evolutionary biology in which organisms are driven by the need to survive. The Witch Finder in Darkside would agree with Spike, claiming that altruism is, ‘selfishness in disguise’.461 Amal leaps to his corner by explaining that ‘Altruism just means increasing someone else’s fitness at 454 D. Cavendish, The Telegraph, 28 January 2015. 455 Chalmers accepts that, ‘“easy” is a relative term. Getting the details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work’. – D. Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3) 1995. 456 W. Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. 457 The Bible – ‘Song of Solomon’, Chapter 4, verse 5. 458 The Hard Problem, page 36. 459 The Hard Problem, page 6. 460 See R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, pages 231 to 233. 461 Darkside, page 34.

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the expense of your own’.462 Hilary objects, accusing Spike of ‘saying there’s no such thing, and I’m saying there is’,463 announcing that, ‘giving something to get something isn’t altruism’.464 Her example of Rose of Sharon’s altruism in giving her breast to a starving man465 echoes Emily’s reference to the unselfishness inherent in the provision of a mother’s milk to her baby in Darkside.466 Just as Professional Foul produces a worked example of an ethical dilemma, so The Hard Problem provides an example of altruism in action. Bo, Hilary’s assistant, in defiance of Hilary’s instructions as to how to conduct an experiment to assess motivation amongst children of different age groups – ‘the reason we don’t look at the questionnaires is, once you look you find the special cases who will skew your precious results’467 – manipulates the results to exclude the responses that, as Hilary points out, ‘were spoiling your result’.468 Bo’s motivation is, apparently, altruistic. ‘I wanted to give you what would please you!’,469 she blurts out to Hilary. Hilary’s reaction is to suggest an answer which proves Spike’s case: ‘…ultimately, you wanted what you wanted’.470 In Bo’s case, this refers to her premature publication of a paper, based on the results, under her name. However, Stoppard offers a twist which suggests that the kind of altruism Hilary believes in is alive and well when Hilary herself takes the blame for the mistake on the grounds that, ‘(Bo) was milking the family buffalo when she was eight, and she’s the best mathematician in the house’.471 ‘Hilary makes altruism sound as if it has something to do with morality’,472 observes Ursula, taking the debate further back into the ethical world of McFee’s adversary, George Moore. This is all the cue Stoppard needs to play with the meanings of the word ‘good’: ‘a good question’,473 ‘damned good’,474 ‘good luck’,475 ‘some sort of good impression’,476 to cite but a few instances. 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476

The Hard Problem, page 63. The Hard Problem, page 6. The Hard Problem, page 6. The Hard Problem, pages 6–7. Darkside, page 29. The Hard Problem, pages 40–41. The Hard Problem, page 68. The Hard Problem, page 69. The Hard Problem, page 69. The Hard Problem, page 71. The Hard Problem, page 63. The Hard Problem, page 58. The Hard Problem, page 55. The Hard Problem, page 19. The Hard Problem, page 40.

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It recalls George’s question, in Jumpers, of ‘What, in short, is so good about good?’.477 Spike’s advice is, ‘…above all don’t use the word good as though it meant something in evolutionary science’.478 Bo, rather naively, chimes in with her observation that, ‘I think it’s good to be good, I don’t see that it matters what makes you good’.479 Hilary’s rejoinder shows that, morally, it does: ‘It might matter if people who are out for themselves think they’re justified by biology’.480 Once again Amal takes Spike’s corner by using the same theory to explain the behaviour of the traders who work for Krohl Capital. ‘The thing about the market is’, he says, ‘it consists entirely of transactions between egoists. An altruistic trader, salesman, broker, customer…I mean, forget black swans, we’re talking African polar bears’.481 The principles of the Stoppardian stage debate – and, indeed, the whole Stoppardian world – are, ironically, encapsulated in his novel Lord Malquist and Mr Moon.482 Moon maintains that, ‘I cannot commit myself to either side of a question. Because if you attach yourself to one or the other you disappear into it’.483 In what sounds suspiciously like the author speaking484 and might seem, in the context of Occam’s razor, like the ultimate distillation of what lies behind all Stoppard’s works, Moon says: I take both parts…leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues, refuting myself and rebutting the refutation towards a truth that must be a compound of two opposite half-truths. And you never reach it because there is always something more to say.485 477 478 479 480 481 482

Jumpers, page 55. The Hard Problem, page 5. The Hard Problem, page 40. The Hard Problem, page 40. The Hard Problem, page 66. Note, however, Tim Hendrickson’s view of Stoppard’s fiction: ‘Stoppard’s fiction, despite its usefulness as a thematic introduction to his later drama, deserves to stand alone’. – T. Hendrickson, ‘Insecurity, Frustration and Disgust in Tom Stoppard’s Fiction’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 196. 483 Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, page 54. 484 cf ‘What there is, is…an argument, a refutation, then a rebuttal of the refutation, then a counter-rebuttal, so that there is never any point in this intellectual leap-frog at which I feel that is the speech to stop it on, that is the last word’. – Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, pages 58–59. 485 Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, page 53.

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Evoking George’s debate in Jumpers, and, with enormous implications for Stoppard’s long-running conversation about the nature of ethics, Moon adds, ‘I can’t even side with the balance of morality because I don’t know whether morality is an instinct or just an imposition’.486 Parsimony Just like Moon’s two-fold concept of morality, the Stoppardian stage debate is part of the pattern of Stoppard’s strongest theme and metaphor: duality. The conflict of ideas recurs in varying forms throughout Stoppard’s works. It does not matter whether the subject matter is art, science, metaphysics or freedom – unlike Guildenstern’s coin Stoppard’s audience always gets to see both sides. Stoppard presents the dichotomy like some form of intellectual pendulum swinging from one extreme of the argument to the other. Often the choice is clear, as between George’s absolute and McFee’s relativist morality. Sometimes the pendulum swings between extremes and comes to rest somewhere near the middle, as when it oscillates from Tzara to Joyce and settles around Carr. There are times when the debate is clear cut, such as the polarity of the discussion in Arcadia between Chaos Theory and Newtonianism. On other occasions the debate is more nuanced, as in Stoppard’s consideration of the ethics of empire in which Das is in thrall to Englishness and Mrs Swan keeps her mementos of India. At its extreme the debate may be contradictory; for example in The Coast of Utopia with Herzen’s progressive reappraisal of revolutionary possibilities and Michael Bakunin’s tendency to be a philosophical grasshopper. On several issues the debate is not even contained within one play but spills across several – as the argument over the moral implications of altruism in Jumpers and The Hard Problem attests. But, Stoppard is not giving lectures. In his words, ‘I suppose a play is a text, but theatre is an event’.487 In order to achieve the event the debate must be carried on a narrative and the debate works best when the subject matter and the vehicle carrying it are most closely intertwined.

486 Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, page 54. 487 Stoppard, ‘Playing With Science’, page 5.

chapter 3

The Vehicle versus the Idea I live a lot longer with the idea in a play than with the story which I’m using to carry them. So I tend to be still trying to get the story right when we are rehearsing or even, God help us, reviving the play.1 stoppard

…

You have to integrate the internal profound subject with the narrative subject.2 stoppard

∵ Stoppard is at his best when the idea of his play fits hand in glove with its vehicle, the second of the pattern of methods that emerges from Stoppard’s plays. Of the two elements it is ideas which form the kernel of the creative process for Stoppard.3 He says, ‘When ideas combine, then it begins to feel like the possibility of a play’.4 This combination of the ideas and what, on the face of it, are some unlikely vehicles in his plays is part of the Stoppardian act of using Occam’s razor in the creative process. In the most successful combinations of vehicle and idea there is one key connection that delivers up the possibilities of the union – the link, for example, in Arcadia connecting the contrast 1 2 3 4

1 Stoppard, in conversation with P. Wood, programme notes to 1976 production of Jumpers at the Royal National Theatre. 2 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Bragg, ‘The South Bank Show’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 121. 3 See Stephen Schiff, ‘Full Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 215: ‘Ideas are what Stoppard’s plays have always been about – or, rather, they’re about the idea of Ideas for the ideas themselves are not so much explored as they are dressed up in exquisite jabber and sent out on parade’. 4 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Twisk, ‘Stoppard Basks in a Late Indian Summer’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 254.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_004

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­between classical and Romantic landscape gardening and the contrast between old, Newtonian science and modern Chaos Theory or the comparison between spying and quantum mechanics in Hapgood. But, the principle of parsimony has a second application to the vehicle. Having produced a fusion to which there is only one satisfactory explanation it also is most frequently applied to remove the vehicle and leave merely the kernel of the idea; most notably in Carr’s memory-impaired conclusion to Travesties, the apotheosis of George Moore’s argument about the existence of God, Housman’s ‘storm in a teacup’ or Herzen’s dream finale in Salvage. Stoppard’s plays tend to arise out of a single, sudden revelatory idea: ‘To put it crudely’, he says, ‘it’s a bit like waiting to be struck by lightning, because in order to invest the amount of energy and time necessary to write a play, one really has to be bowled over by a thought and I stumble about trying to leave myself receptive to this kind of violation almost, but when it actually happens, it’s a moment of sublime bliss’.5 Stoppard explains in the context of Hapgood how he finds his ideas: ‘Finding an idea for a play is like picking up a shell on a beach. I started reading about mathematics without finding what I was looking for. In the end I realized that what I was after was something which any firstyear physics student is familiar with, namely quantum mechanics. So I started reading about that’.6 The subject matter of the play exists before the story and it is always something abstract. I get interested by a notion of some kind and see that it has dramatic possibilities. Gradually I see how a pure idea can be married with a dramatic event. But it is still not a play until you invent a plausible narrative. Sometimes this is not too hard – The Real Thing was fairly straightforward. For Hapgood, the thing I wanted to write about seemed to suit the form of an espionage thriller. It’s not the sort of thing I read or write.7 He goes on, ‘I am not a mathematician but I was aware that for centuries mathematics was considered the queen of sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties – axioms – which 5 6 7

5 Stoppard, in an interview with JR. Taylor, ‘Our Changing Theatre, No. 3: Changes in Writing’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 24. 6 Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater vii’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 179. 7 Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater vii’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 179.

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led to others. But then, in a sense, it all started to go wrong, with concepts like non-Euclidean geometry – I mean, looking at it from Euclid’s point of view. The mathematics of physics turned out to be grounded on uncertainties, on probability and chance. And if you’re me, you think – there’s a play in that’.8 The vehicle nearly always arrives late in Stoppard’s creative process,9 often not being fully formed as he commences. He admits that, ‘…one of the reasons that I tend to deliver plays late, which I do, is that I can’t shake off this idea each time that I can’t possibly write anything until I’ve worked out exactly what’s going to happen and why. I tend to start writing a play at the point where I just give up in despair and just start and hope that something works itself out’.10 8 9 10

8

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Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater vii’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 179. Stoppard gives a similar example for Arcadia: ‘I was thinking about Romanticism and Classicism as opposites in style, taste, temperament, art. I remember talking to a friend of mine, looking at his bookshelves, saying there’s a play, isn’t there, about the way that retrospectively one looks at poetry, painting, gardening, and speaks of classical periods and the romantic revolution and so on’. – Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 90. D. Nathan, ‘In a Country Garden (If It Is a Garden)’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 263: ‘Stoppard has never made a secret of the fact that he finds it very difficult to come up with a plot’. ‘I can’t do plots and have no interest in plots’. – Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theatre vii’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 179. Stoppard, in an interview with P. Allen, ‘Third Ear’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 244. Stoppard admits that starting the process of writing is difficult. He told John Dodd that, ‘I find it difficult to put down the first word in case during the succeeding 24 hours I think of a better one’. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Dodd, ‘Success Is the Only Unusual Thing about Mr. Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 14. Stoppard will commence writing a play even if he does not know all the details of the plot. For example, he told R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler about the writing of The Real Inspector Hound: ‘I didn’t know that the body was Higgs, and I didn’t know that Magnus was going to be Puckeridge’. – ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 60. Stoppard enlarges upon his writing process by referring to a metaphor: ‘…people tend to think that you think up a skeleton and that writing the play then consists of putting flesh on it. But you start with some bones and you work on a finger until the skin and the fingernail are perfect and then you do the next finger and by the time you get to the shoulder, you begin to get a dim idea of whether you’re writing a camel or a horse’. – Stoppard in an interview with R. Hayman, ‘Second Interview’ in R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 140.

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‘You write away into a tunnel’,11 he adds to Ronald Hayman. This flies in the face of Dorn’s precept in The Seagull of how to write: ‘When you write something, you must have a clearly defined thought. You have to know why you’re writing. Otherwise – if you set off along that enchanted path without a definite goal in mind – you’ll lose your way, and your talent will turn on itself and destroy you’.12 Moon, in Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, would also go about it differently from his creator, as he explains: ‘It was all a question of preparing one’s material. There was no point in beginning to write before one’s material had been prepared’.13 However, Stoppard’s approach has produced over fifty plays whereas Moon’s modus scribendi risks, as he fears, ‘absolutely no output whatever’.14 Nevertheless, Stoppard leaves no doubt as to the primacy of the idea. In reference to Hapgood he comments, ‘To be blunt, I don’t think the mechanics of the plot bear scrutiny at all. I don’t think they ever will. The trouble is they don’t remotely interest me, they’re just a necessary nuisance to provide the opportunity to write about this woman who in Blair’s words is “A sort of double”, and the way this bears upon her relationships with Kerner, Blair and Ridley’.15 It is important to emphasise, however, that the process of the idea is a dynamic one for Stoppard as if the initial idea is a seed which germinates in his mind as he writes, eventually working his purpose out.16 ‘You have certain things to start with’, he says, ‘and you start writing a play. And then you get lost in the play a bit, and the play starts doing things which means you’re finding things out, but you don’t know whether that’s the purpose of the play…some of the solutions to some of the problems take the play in directions which you couldn’t have written down…before you started’.17 Because he doesn’t know all the answers the ideas evolve out of the process which began with the single 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

11 12 13 14 15 16

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Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, ‘First Interview’ in R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 2. The Seagull, page 420. Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, page 29. Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, page 29. Hapgood Crib, page 6. The process is not, however, methodical. Stoppard told Mel Gussow, ‘You and I tend to talk about all this as if … there’s this acorn that you find somewhere and put manure around, and water, and hope it grows into some kind of sapling … It doesn’t seem to me to be that kind of orderly natural development’. – Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 90. Stoppard, in an interview with JJ. Buck, Tom Stoppard: ‘Kind Heart and Prickly Mind’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 169.

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idea: ‘…if my plays were the end products of my ideas, they’d have it all more pat, but a lot of the time I’ve ended up trying to work out the ultimate implication of what I have written. My plays are a lot to do with the fact that I just don’t know’.18 The result is, curiously, that in one sense, ‘the ideas are the endproduct of the play, not the other way round’.19 There is, therefore, a sense for Stoppard that ‘plays never quite get finished; they get interrupted by rehearsal. The production impedes a process which then very often continues after that first performance has evolved and gone its way and finished’.20 Stoppard’s creative process continues when a play gets into the theatre. ‘I am much more of a theatre animal than a literary animal’, he says making an interesting comparison: ‘It’s the equivalent of the potter and the clay. I just love getting my hands on it.…I change things to accommodate something in the scenery, or something in the lighting.…I like the text to be part of the clay which is being moulded’.21 He puts it another way, emphasising a more randomly creative process, in his article ‘Pragmatic Theater’: ‘The central paradox of theatre is that something which starts off complete, as true to itself, as selfcontained and subjective as a sonnet, is then thrown into a kind of spin-dryer which is the process of staging the play’.22 Stoppard is always gracious to acknowledge the input of others into his process, in particular when the play gets into rehearsal. His preface to all three plays in The Coast of Utopia trilogy, for 18 19 20 21 22

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20 21 22

Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 65. Stoppard told ACH. Smith, ‘What I think of as being my distinguishing mark is an absolute lack of certainty about almost anything’. – Stoppard, in an interview with ACH. Smith, Flourish, Issue One 1974. Daniel Jernigan does not accept Stoppard’s confession: ‘I am ultimately fairly sceptical of the idea that Stoppard ever gave himself completely over to the sort of epistemological doubt that is so central to the modern condition’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 2. Katherine Kelly sees Stoppard’s agnosticism in Night And Day: ‘Stoppard conceived of his play of ideas as a comedy of uncertainty’. – K. Kelly, ‘Tom Stoppard’s Dramatic Debates: The Case of Night and Day’ in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook, page 282. Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 156. See also Stoppard – ‘Playwrights and professors’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 October 1972, page 1219: ‘a play is not the end product of an idea: the idea is the end product of the play’. Stoppard, ‘The Event and the Text’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 201. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 124. Stoppard, ‘Pragmatic Theater’, page 3.

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example, pays tribute to the influence of its director: ‘I am gratefully indebted to Trevor Nunn for encouraging me towards some additions and subtractions while The Coast of Utopia was in rehearsal’.23 It is particularly important to Stoppard to attend the rehearsals for a new play. ‘The first time a play is done, it’s necessary to be there, in my view’,24 he says. Stoppard believes his role is more passive than interfering: ‘I’m there, but I’m probably silent for ninety per cent of the time. On the other hand experience tells me that things aren’t as clear on the page as you need them to be. So, one is answering questions more than one expects to be for those few days’.25 He also believes that he needs to be at rehearsals to impart his intentions as a playwright in a way that his text cannot. ‘I find it is crucial to be at rehearsals’, he contends, ‘– there is no notation for writing down what one intends to happen on stage. You may think that my stage directions are detailed, but they are a basic minimum to me.…if I’m at rehearsals, the play works according to my prejudices’.26 Watching the actors plays a significant role in the process, as he explains. ‘When you write a play it makes a particular noise in your head and at rehearsals I can see if the actors will reproduce that noise. Sometimes they 23 24 25 26

23

24

25

26

Voyage, Salvage, Shipwreck. Stoppard told Jim Hunter, ‘the first time that Trevor read the first play, the last scene of Voyage didn’t exist, until we were approaching a rehearsal. It ended with the Ginger Cat; and now the last scene is back to Premukhino. And Trevor was desperate for me to bring it back there…I finally wrote several versions of the Premukhino scene…Trevor kept rejecting them until finally I did it the way he wanted it!’. – J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 173. Nunn also believes he had some input to The Invention of Love – see op cit, page 204. See also Stoppard’s acknowledgement of Robin Soans in The Invention of Love, page 17. Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994. Stoppard told ACH. Smith, ‘One writes a play to be done in a certain way, and it saves a great deal of time if you hang about to cut the corners for people. Because however clear you think everything is, it never is that clear’. – Flourish, Issue One 1974. Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994. Stoppard, in an interview quoted in O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 171. For Stoppard it is a process of getting what is in his head onto the stage. ‘When you write a play, it makes a certain kind of noise in your head, and for me rehearsals are largely a process of trying to reproduce that noise’. – Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater vii’ – in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 180.

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have a better noise to offer’.27 It becomes an iterative process, as he notes, ‘While you’re rehearsing actors, there is a lot to be said for dealing with a text which hasn’t crystallized yet, which is still, in some sense, organic – organic to the specific situation, to the particular occasion’.28 Stoppard’s creative process admits considerable empathy for the actor: I also feel quite strongly that the actor is at the sharp end of this, so when an actor says, ‘I’m not quite sure that this phrase is quite comfortable in the middle of this speech’, I almost always try to change it in a way that the actor likes. Mostly, I think, ‘Yes, yes, this actor has got a point’. Occasionally, I think, ‘Well, actually, I wish he’d live with this one, because I like it myself’. But generally, there’s a degree of flexibility.29 The audience is important, too, in the creative process. Stoppard argues that, ‘until you have an audience you don’t really understand what you have got’.30 In a revealing insight Stoppard comments that, ‘the first audience is more interesting than the first night’.31 He rewrites scenes if he thinks that the audience is not getting his point, admitting that, ‘It’s very rare to connect an audience except on a level which is lower than you would want to connect them on’.32 He describes how in The Hard Problem Hilary tells Spike in scene 1 that, ‘If I hear the words “prisoner’s dilemma”, I’m not going to make it to the toilet’,33 suggesting she will vomit. In scene 2 just before Spike answers one of Hilary’s questions with what he knows will be a reference to the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ ‘He brings a bucket-sized bin from under the table and places it on the table in front of her, and stands back’.34 This scene he re-wrote over and again until the audience understood what he calls, ‘Spike’s joke’.35 In a similar vein Ira Nadel recounts a story of a woman who found

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Stoppard, in an interview with R. Twisk, R, ‘Stoppard Basks in a Late Indian Summer’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 253. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. Stoppard, in an interview with N. Hytner, 6 February 2015. Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater vii’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 181. Stoppard, quoted in J. Malvern, ‘Stoppard: They don’t get my jokes any more’ in The Times, 9 February 2015. The Hard Problem, page 3. The Hard Problem, page 15. The Hard Problem, page 15.

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­Stoppard writing furiously on the bonnet of his car outside a theatre in Wimbledon where Hapgood was being tried out. ‘“I didn’t understand it at all”, she complained. “I know, I know”, said an unhappy Stoppard, “but I’m trying to improve it”’.36 Stoppard regards a play as a living thing, capable of evolution and change. ‘…plays go off like fruit. They’re organic things, they’re not mineral’,37 he says, explaining further that, ‘the softest go rotten first’.38 There is an exception – ‘Hound is timeless in the truly pejorative sense…incapable of change’,39 Stoppard believes. Otherwise, Stoppard proves to be remarkably open to adapting his own works for the reasons of theatre, too as Carrie Ryan’s observation about textual revisions to a production of The Invention of Love make clear: ‘(Stoppard) came to the table not as the author of a published, fixed text but as a man of the theatre who was interested in, and committed to, making the East Coast premiere of his play as immediate and effective for a Philadelphia audience as the original production had been for a British audience.…Stoppard was particularly interested in adjusting the text when a joke was at stake’.40 The organic nature of the process, for Stoppard, ensures that each performance is unique. ‘A play in the theatre is an equation which is continuously changing’, he argues, ‘and most of the variables are specific to the performance’.41 His attitude to theatre stands in complete contrast to film, where he sees no such organic nature: ‘Nothing could be further from live theatre – when we got something right it stayed the way we left it. A world in which an actor’s perfect reading, after six imperfect ones, is trapped forever, to be retrieved at the touch of a button, is not a world a playwright works in…The damned thing stays the way you left it’.42 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

36

37 38 39 40

41 42

I. Nadel, Double Act A Life of Tom Stoppard, pages 373 to 374. Nadel credits the anecdote to J. Preston, ‘Stoppard’s Dramatic Turn’ in the Sunday Telegraph, 7 October 1991. D. Cavendish, D refers to it in ‘Tom Stoppard: theatre’s philosopher king’ in The Telegraph, 24 January 2015. Stoppard, in an interview with G. Gordon, ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 22. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 6. Stoppard in an interview with A. Goreau, ‘Is The Real Inspector Hound a Shaggy Dog Story?’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 257. C. Ryan, ‘Translating The Invention of Love: The Journey From Page to Stage for Tom Stoppard’s latest Play’ in Journal of Modern Literature 24, 2 (Winter 2000–2001), pages 199–201, quoted in H. Bloom (ed), Tom Stoppard, page 126. Stoppard, ‘The text’s the thing’. Stoppard, ‘To Film Or Not to Film’, page 5.

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For Stoppard, his approach is just practical: ‘What I love about theatre’, he told John Tusa, ‘is its pragmatism. It’s a pragmatic art form. I love it for being adjustable at every point: there’s no point where theatre gets frozen, unless you walk away from it’.43 The result of such an approach is textual confusion but also some element of directorial licence, as the Author’s Note to an edition of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead demonstrates. Stoppard writes of ‘optional cuts’ and asserts that, ‘There is no definitive text of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead…I doubt that the same text has been performed in two different places anywhere in the world. This seems to me only sensible’.44 Therefore, Stoppard does not regard his plays as if carved into tablets of stone. Few other playwrights would endow their productions with such freedom as Stoppard’s original stage directions for Cecily’s speech at the opening of the second act of Travesties: ‘The performance of the whole of this lecture is not a requirement, but is an option’.45 Similarly, the Author’s note concerning the ‘­almost wordless prologue’46 of Night and Day allows structural flexibility to the nature of the action and set at the start and end of the first act. Other elements of Stoppard’s canon have proved to be equally malleable, most notably demonstrated in the differences between the 1972 and 1986 versions of the Coda in Jumpers,47 the 1975 and 1993 texts of Travesties48 and the 1982 and 1984 texts of The Real Thing.49 Just like Jerry, the hedge fund trader in The Hard Problem, Stoppard believes that information is key. ‘What the dramatist does’, he told Charlie Rose, ‘is to do with the control of information from the stage to the audience. The art of it is to tell the audience so much and no more, at this moment and no other, 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

43 44

45 46 47 48 49

Stoppard, in an interview with Tusa, J, bbc Radio 2002 in Hunter, J, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 163. Author’s Note to Samuel French edition of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Fleming comments, ‘(Stoppard’s) view of the text as a kinetic object has resulted in plays that have evolved over the years and through different productions.…the theatricality of Stoppard’s plays includes the fact that they are flexible objects that have been, and that can be, adapted to the individual circumstances of different productions’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 6. Travesties (1975 version), page 66. Night and Day, Author’s Note. See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, pages 97–98 and Notes 17–19, pages 274–275. See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, pages 103 and 104–105 and Note 2, pages 275–276, Note 2 and Note 5, pages 275–277. See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, pages 157–159 and Notes 2, 4 and 5, page 283.

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in the following order and not in a different order’.50 And in that process the audience has to do some work because, Stoppard argued to Jonathan Biggins, of the specific nature of his work as comedy: It’s because in a polemical piece or a melodramatic piece, a piece where essentially it’s about engaging high emotions…the thing can actually rely on itself…The audience listens, we do what we do and you get there. With comedy it’s not like that at all. You just have to make the perfect pitch in the golf sense…If it lands too close to me the audience can’t find it.…If it goes too far the audience is denied the essential pleasure of reaching forward and grasping something, making an effort of its own to complete this moment between the play and its audience.51 Stoppard is the first to admit that he does not always get the marriage of ­vehicle and idea quite right. One such confession concerns a television play: ‘A  Separate Peace was one half of an hour-long programme consisting of a documentary, Pursuit of Happiness, and a play which were supposed to illuminate each other. The documentary was about chess. I now doubt that chess and the desire to escape from the world are good metaphors for each other’.52 But, such a misalignment is a rarity, as is the overcomplication of the narrative in Hapgood. Unusually for Stoppard, the vehicle of The Real Thing is set at a slight angle to the main question of the play and while Stoppard considers the vehicle of the foreign war and provincial newsdesk appropriate for the discussion of press freedom in Night And Day the play lacks the richness of metaphor emanating from the vehicle that is so evident in many of his other works. An early indication of how Stoppard might marry a vehicle to an idea occurs in The Dissolution Of Dominic Boot. Dominic is a man with money problems. He is ‘forty-three pounds beyond (his) limit’.53 He is in a taxi being driven from place to place in search of money for the fare – the bank, his girlfriend, Vivian, 50 51 52 53

50 51

52 53

Stoppard, in an interview with Charlie Rose, 2007. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Biggins, ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’, Stoppard used a different analogy with Thomas O’Connor: ‘One thing I can’t stand is the sense that food has been cut up on the plate for the person who eats it. You’ve got to let the audience have their own knife and fork. Otherwise, they’re not doing anything’. – ‘Welcome to the World of Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 228. Enoch Brater comments, ‘(Stoppard’s) best stage effects depend on an audience “there” to meet him (at least) half way’. – E. Brater, ‘Tom Stoppard’s Brit/lit/crit’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 212. A Separate Peace, page vii. Tom Stoppard: Plays 2, The Dissolution Of Dominic Boot, page 5.

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his boss, his friend, the gas meter in his house – and all the while the taxi meter is ticking over and the fare rising. Throughout the play Dominic is constantly monitoring the meter, providing a running commentary on the ever rising cost, thereby emphasising his impecunious condition. Eventually, the taxi driver quite literally has the clothes off his back and Dominic loses his job. However, the relatively one-dimensional vehicle of Stoppard’s early radio play leads to much more complicated unions between vehicle and idea in his stage plays. Rather appropriately for a theatrical event Stoppard makes the play-within-a-play, or derivations of it, the vehicle of plays such as Travesties, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Thing. As with much of Stoppard’s output the end result of the union of vehicle and idea can become very complicated. Ostensibly, the single man who is the vehicle for The Invention of Love should make for an easily comprehensible one – were it not for the fact that Housman is two men with the additional facet of homosexuality in his nature. Men, it seems, produce complex vehicles as Herzen and Bakunin only go on to demonstrate in The Coast of Utopia. Some Stoppardian vehicles, as in Professional Foul and The Hard Problem (and the structures of both Hapgood and Arcadia), are actually worked examples of the ideas within the play. Ironically, the one example in which the vehicle came to Stoppard before the idea, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, turns out to be one of the most integrated, if far-fetched, examples of the vehicle and the idea. But, in order to demonstrate how important and beneficial it is for the subject and what carries it to be both united and integrated the best place to start is with what Stoppard considers to be one of his finest examples of the feat.

‘Et in Arcadia ego!’

Stoppard’s most successful exercise in fusing the vehicle of a play to its idea is Arcadia, which contains not only a rich fecundity of metaphor and allegory to reinforce and reflect the argument therein but also is written around a structure which demonstrates the operation of Chaos Theory, the dominant idea of the play. Stoppard explains, ‘I got tremendously interested in a book called Chaos by James Gleick which is about this new kind of mathematics. That sounds fairly daunting if one’s talking about a play. I thought here is a marvellous metaphor. But, as ever, there wasn’t really a play until it had connected with stray thoughts about other things’.54 Stoppard is of the view that, ‘I think (Arcadia’s) 54

54

Stoppard, in an interview with D. Nathan, ‘In a Country Garden (If It Is a Garden)’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 263.

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the first time I’ve got both right, the ideas and the plot’.55 However, Stoppard’s old problem of finding the vehicle for the idea remained. He confessed to AS Byatt that he had ‘pinched’ the plot of Arcadia from her novel Possession.56 At its heart is a debate between the old, Newtonian (deterministic) science and the new science of Chaos Theory.57 It takes the debate about determinism and uncertainty from the sub-atomic level of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that Stoppard explores in Hapgood and conducts it, in scientific terms, at the more observable level of natural phenomena.58 The play tightly intertwines the ideas within the story and uses various metaphors to illustrate the distinction between the two sciences. Underlying it all is a structure which replicates part of Chaos Theory. Stoppard explains the play’s germination to Mel Gussow: You (Mel Gussow) just mentioned the Chaos mathematics book. At the same time I was thinking about Romanticism and Classicism as opposites in style, taste, temperament, art. I remember talking to a friend of mine, looking at his bookshelves, saying there’s a play, isn’t there, about the way that retrospectively one looks at poetry, painting, gardening, and speaks of classical periods and the romantic revolution and so on. Particularly when one starts dividing people up into classical temperaments and romantic temperaments – and I suppose it’s not that far from Hapgood in a way. The romantic temperament has a classical person wildly signalling, and vice versa.59 ‘The history of the garden says it all’.60 The principal metaphor to symbolise the old and the new is the state and nature of the garden at Sidley Park, just

55 56 57 58 59 60

55 56 57

58

59 60

J. Fleming, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, page 1 – quoting from C. Spencer, ‘Stoppard, master of the play on words’, Daily Telegraph, 8 September 1993. I. Nadel, Double Act A Life of Tom Stoppard, page 430. Jernigan sees Arcadia differently: ‘At its very core the play is about the practical impossibility of doing historical research’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 114. See W. Demastes, Re-Inspecting the Crack in the Chimney: Chaos Theory from Ibsen to Stoppard. New Theatre Quarterly, vol 10, number 39 page 244: ‘In the process of developing their determinist system a macro-system discovery was made, equivalent to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle discovery made at the sub-atomic levels of reality. Even the most minor – and initially virtually undetectable – events thousands of miles away can and will affect the overall outcome of events that we are trying to determine’. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 90. Arcadia, page 36.

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outside the room in which all the action of the play takes place. It is a contrast between the classical, orderly garden – representing old, Newtonian science – and the Romantic, chaotic garden – symbolising the new science of Chaos. The garden is, in 1809, already the subject of a redesign by Capability Brown. According to Lady Croom it is ‘nature as God intended’.61 But that is not how it was. In its original, classical style ‘the house had a formal Italian garden until about 1740’.62 Before then the garden was, according to Hannah, ‘Paradise in the age of reason’.63 The process of change began as it was ploughed up by Capability Brown. But, even under Brown’s design it was ‘smooth, undulating, serpentine – open water, clumps of trees, classical boat-house’.64 All that is about to change as Mr Noakes, a ‘philosopher of the picturesque’,65 presents his plans to turn the garden into one of a contemporary style. The ‘familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman’s garden’66 will be replaced by ‘an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins’67 in what Noakes calls ‘the modern style’.68 The change from old to new is clearly delineated: Lady Croom’s ‘hyacinth dell is to become a haunt for hobgoblins, (her) Chinese bridge…is usurped by a fallen obelisk overgrown with briars’.69 Significantly, the new style is ‘irregular’, symbolising Chaos. ‘Irregular is one of the chiefest principles of the picturesque style’.70 Noakes himself is described by Thomasina as ‘The Emperor of Irregularity’.71 In the final scene the new is emphasised by the ‘regular thump’72 of Mr Noakes’ Improved Newcomen steam pump. A second metaphor, linked to the romanticism and classicism of the garden, is that of the new, Romantic literature versus the old, classical literature. Noakes’ garden is described as ‘the Gothic novel expressed in landscape’.73 Lady Croom accuses him of producing ‘a garden for The Castle Of Otranto or The Mysteries of Udolpho’;74 two Gothic novels. Hannah, who is ‘doing l­andscape 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Arcadia, page 16. Arcadia, page 31. Arcadia, page 36. Arcadia, page 34. Arcadia, page 6. Arcadia, page 16. Arcadia, page 16. Arcadia, page 13. Arcadia, page 16. Arcadia, page 16. Arcadia, page 113. Arcadia, page 109. Arcadia, page 34. Arcadia, page 17.

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and literature 1750 to 1834’,75 has written a book about Lady Caroline Lamb who, the audience is not told in the play, wrote a Gothic novel, Glenarvon, which is based on Byron, whose visit to Sidley Park provides the basis for a profound error of scholarship by Bernard in the course of the play. Lamb, symbolising the new literature, is described as ‘Romantic waffle on wheels’76 and the romanticism she stands for as a ‘sham…a century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself’.77 Septimus, on the other hand, teaches ‘classical authors’.78 He champions the classical in contrast to the new authors, such as the poet Chater, whose residence at Sidley Park is to be the cause of the chief mystery of the plot of the play: ‘Ovid would have stayed a lawyer and Virgil a farmer if they had known the bathos to which love would descend in your sportive satyrs and noodle nymphs’.79 Thomasina, Septimus’ pupil, has, according to Lady Croom, ‘a knowledge of the picturesque’ which ‘exceeds anything the rest of us can offer’.80 By contrast, in scene 3, Thomasina is struggling with her Latin lesson. Various aspects of the play act as metaphors for parts of Chaos Theory. The first element of the new science of Chaos Theory is the Butterfly effect. It is the concept of ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’:81 situations in which tiny differences in input can lead to overwhelming differences in output, such as in weather systems. The story of Bernard’s incorrect analysis of what Bryon did while at Sidley Park is an example of the Butterfly effect. He believes he has made ‘Probably the most sensational literary discovery of the century’82 which he sums up as, The aristocratic friend (ie Byron) of the tutor (Septimus) – under the same roof as the poor sod (Chater) whose book he savaged – the first thing he does is seduce Chater’s wife. All is discovered. There is a duel. Chater dead, Byron fled!83 Bernard’s deduction hinges on the consequences of one small action. Via his family bookselling business he has come into possession of Septimus’ copy of 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Arcadia, page 33. Arcadia, page 79. Arcadia, page 36. Arcadia, page 15. Arcadia, page 55. Arcadia, page 15. J. Gleick – Chaos, page 8. Arcadia, page 77. Arcadia, page 65.

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Chater’s book, The Couch of Eros. Tucked into the book are three letters relating to the seduction of Chater’s wife and his desire for a duel to satisfy honour: ‘Sir – we have a matter to settle. I wait on you in the gun room. E Chater, Esq’. ‘My husband has sent to town for pistols. Deny what cannot be proven – for Charity’s sake – I keep my room this day’ Unsigned. ‘Sidley Park, April 11th 1809. Sir – I call you a liar, a lecher, a slanderer in the press and a thief of my honour. I wait upon your arrangements for giving me satisfaction as a man and a poet. E. Chater, Esq’.84 Bernard believes that Byron borrowed the book from Septimus and that it is unlikely that Septimus ‘would have lent Byron the book without first removing the three private letters’.85 Therefore, he believes Byron was the recipient of the letters. He has come, two hundred years later, to a dramatically incorrect conclusion about what happened at Sidley Park. And all because of a minor, almost unnoticed action (the stage direction says that ‘“The Couch of Eros” now ­contains the three letters, and it must do so without advertising the fact’.86) in the chain of events in 1809. Byron did not acquire the book from Septimus. Instead, Lady Croom had picked up the book87 (with the three letters ­inadvertently inside) and Byron obtained it from her. Thus, the Butterfly Effect has operated. Over a period of time a small input in 1809 has caused a large discrepancy in output two centuries later in Bernard’s misunderstanding of the past.88 The Butterfly Effect is further to be seen in the history of how Septimus’ copy of The Couch of Eros came into Bernard’s hands, thus prompting his interest and miscalculation in the first place:

84 85 86 87 88

84 85 86 87 88

it was in Byron’s library which was sold to pay his debts when he left England for good in 1816.…‘Eros’…was bought by the bookseller and publisher John Nightingale of Opera Court, Pall Mall…whose name survives in the firm of Nightingale and Matlock, the present Nightingale being my Arcadia, page 41. Arcadia, page 74. He dismisses the possibility that Byron could have taken the book without Septimus knowing. Arcadia, page 54. Arcadia, page 55. See B. Niederhoff, ‘Fortuitous Wit: Dialogue and Epistemology in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia’, note 6, page 11.

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cousin.…I’ll just give you the headlines. 1939 stock removed to ­Nightingale country house in Kent. 1945, stock returned to bookshop. Meanwhile, overlooked box of early nineteenth-century books languish in country house cellar until house sold to make way for the Channel Tunnel rail link.89 If it wasn’t for the particular combination of inputs – the forced sale, evacuation to avoid the blitz, an oversight in returning the books and a compulsory purchase to make way for a new railway line – Bernard would never have come across the book. Scaling is part of the discipline of chaos. Scaling produces detail at finer and finer levels and at those fine levels the constituents of irregular shapes, like clouds, are called fractals. Fractals are important because ‘the structures that provided the key to nonlinear dynamics proved to be fractal’.90 Fractals are self-similar – like the components of a snow flake – and Stoppard laces Arcadia with numerous examples of self similarity. Perhaps the most obvious lies in the characters of Gus, the mute boy, in the twentieth century parts of the play, and Augustus in the 1809 scenes. In fact, in the last scene, as the stage direction confirms they become almost indiscernible from each other: ‘Gus appears in the doorway. It takes a moment to realize that he is not Lord Augustus’.91 Self similar also are the books on the table: Stoppard instructs that ‘books, etc., used in both periods should exist in both old and new versions’.92 In scene 7 the twentieth century characters, who are attending a party, wear regency costume, highlighting their similarity to the nineteenth century characters. The very last image in the play is a self-similar one: two couples dancing; Septimus and Thomasina from 1809; and Gus and Hannah in modern times (but in regency dress). Further examples of self similarities are the piano playing in both time periods, the review Hannah receives from Bernard and the one Chater gets from Septimus and the three sets of margin notes: those of Thomasina, Fermat and in English Bards And Scotch Reviewers. The most profound instances of self-similarity occur in scene 7. ‘Doubled by time’93 is the important stage direction Stoppard gives as characters from both time periods read together Thomasina’s work: Septimus and Hannah study Thomasina’s lesson book (in Trevor Nunn’s staging Hannah was leaning over Septimus’ shoulder as they 89 90 91 92 93

89 90 91 92 93

Arcadia, page 40. J. Gleick, Chaos, page 114. Arcadia, page 129. Arcadia, page 19. Arcadia, pages 103 and 124.

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­simultaneously turned one page and another, back one and forward one,94 dramatically emphasising the self-similarity); and, Septimus and Valentine study Thomasina’s diagram. The significance of self similarity in Chaos Theory is that it ‘is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern’95 which means that in the dynamic systems governed by Chaos Theory there is pattern beneath the chaotic differences. Part of the process of Chaos Theory is iteration. In the science it is the iteration of algorithms using the output of one as the input of the next. This has important implications in non-linear dynamic systems for the understanding of things such as the behaviour of populations. It is no coincidence that Valentine is studying patterns of grouse numbers on the Sidley Park estate. Metaphoric examples of iteration exist in Arcadia – for example, the on/off duel between Septimus and Chater, the regular thumping beat of Noakes’ steam engine, the waltz and even in the panes of glass so prominent in the stage design. Stoppard gives a particularly precise stage instruction concerning the collection of objects on the table: During the course of the play the table collects this and that, and where an object from one scene would be an anachronism in another…it is simply deemed to become invisible. By the end of the play the table has collected an inventory of objects.96 The items on the table are the outward manifestation of a process of iteration that goes on throughout the play and between both time periods. The biggest and most significant form of iteration, however, is set into the structure of the play: The action of the play shuttles back and forth between the early nineteenth century and the present day…97 This stage direction is the key to the interweaving of the idea and the vehicle in Arcadia. In Chaos Theory ‘In an apparently unruly system, scaling meant that some quality was being preserved while everything else changed’.98 This applies to algorithms that ‘went through a sequence of bifurcations on the way 94 95 96 97 98

94 95 96 97 98

J. Fleming, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, page 68. J. Gleick, Chaos, page 103. Arcadia, pages 19–20. Arcadia, page 19. J. Gleick, Chaos, page 172.

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to disorder’.99 Within the process of bifurcation which leads to chaos there are areas of consistency or pattern or order. This conclusion is in marked contrast to the old science which expected dynamic systems to behave in a deterministic, straight line. Arcadia’s structure is a bifurcation process. John Fleming’s work identifies this point. He points out that the scenes in the play are a nonlinear system – they alternate between the early nineteenth century and the present day. The last scene intermingles both time periods. He asked Stoppard why he had constructed it so and he got the following answer: ‘The play mimics the way an algorithm goes through bifurcations into chaos’.100 Stoppard barely does himself justice in explaining the structure of the play: ‘…in a very crude way the structure of Arcadia mimics the reiteration towards chaos…The play bifurcates two or three times and then goes into the last section which is all mixed up. So, it’s very chaos structured’.101 In fact, the last section has definable nineteenth century and present day sections, in keeping with the Chaos Theory premise that within chaos there are elements of order. It is worth noting, too, the similarity of the way the architecture of Arcadia works with that of its Stoppardian scientific twin, Hapgood. Just as the scene structure of Arcadia demonstrates Chaos Theory, so in Hapgood the structural twinning of its scenes and the quantum jumps between scenes allude to aspects of the quantum theory in practice. Arcadia the play, therefore, is an example of Chaos Theory in action and it is summed up by John Fleming and William Demastes, when combined by Fleming himself, thus: ‘Deterministic chaos has shown that as many of these (dynamic) systems respond to variations in input, the graph of their behaviour “bifurcates and creates an oscillation pattern between two ‘steady states’. If increases continue, the bifurcated patterns would themselves bifurcate… into a condition of complete randomness”’.102 Within the random states ‘a new steady state develops, a self-similar though downscaled replication of the ­primary pattern…There is order in chaos – an unpredictable order, but a ­determined order nonetheless and not merely random behaviour’.103 It is the 99 100 101 102 103

99 J. Gleick, Chaos, page 173. 100 J. Fleming, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, page 52. 101 Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes – ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994. 102 J. Fleming, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, page 50 – incorporating a quotation from W. Demastes, ‘Re-inspecting the crack in the chimney: Chaos theory from Ibsen to Stoppard’, New Theatre Quarterly, vol 10, number 39, page 246. 103 W. Demastes, ‘Re-inspecting the crack in the chimney: Chaos theory from Ibsen to Stoppard’, New Theatre Quarterly, vol 10, number 39, page 246.

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downscaled replication that allows Valentine, by using his computer, to perform the many iterations to produce ‘patterns making themselves out of nothing’104 from Thomasina’s equations. William Demastes contends that Stoppard has a pivotal role in describing the chaotic environment and the operation of human consciousness within it. He argues that comedy has the capacity to change the world because it has a unique view of nature and because it can challenge the cultural predispositions humans have to order by allowing our unconsciousness to talk to our consciousness. He goes on to contend that, ‘order and disorder do not operate in dialectic opposition to each other’,105 rather, ‘after centuries of seeing chaos as the exact opposite of order, contemporary Western civilisation is once again beginning to adjust its vision to see chaos as a place of opportunity, a site of interactive disorder generating new orders and of order transforming to regenerative disorder’.106 In this process, ‘one could replace “chaotics” and “chaos theory” with “comedy”’.107 He ascribes to theatre a role in this transformation as it has evolved from the dramatic naturalism of the late nineteenth century, based upon traditional Newtonianism, to the other extreme of absurdism and resulting in the middle ground of the theatre of chaos which while it ‘agrees with the absurd and denies the linear order of naturalism it also in part sides with naturalism by challenging the randomness of the absurd. Like the chaotics of science, it espouses a vision of dynamic interaction leading to orderly disorder’.108 Demastes ascribes to Stoppard a seminal role in the evolution of the theatrical process of chaos, arguing that, ‘it took Tom Stoppard to merge the poet’s vision with a “scientific” rigour that until the twentieth century simply did not exist’.109 He began in Galileo wherein, ‘Stoppard’, writing the following remark from its eponymous subject, ‘clearly instils the chaos paradigm as virtually all great artists have intuited it. Change is a vital virtue to be embraced rather than stifled’:110 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

I do not understand why perfection should be in a state of rest rather than a state of change.111 Arcadia, page 101. W. Demastes, Comedy Matters, page 105. W. Demastes, Theatre Of Chaos, page xii. W. Demastes, Comedy Matters, page 105. W. Demastes, Theatre Of Chaos, page xvi. W. Demastes, Comedy Matters, page 106. W. Demastes, Comedy Matters, page 107. Galileo, Act 1, page 22.

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At around the same time Stoppard blended the science with his own sense of stagecraft as he ‘utilized’, in Jumpers, ‘his pandemonious comic sensibility to create his own chaotic “Thinkery”’112 – the Stoppardian stage debate in a comic background. Stoppard, later, chose to write a play about the subject that ‘clearly opened the door’113 for the new, chaotic way of thinking: quantum mechanics. In much the same way that Einstein and Heisenberg provided a turning point along the way for the development of scientific thinking towards chaos theory, so, in a parallel way, Stoppard achieves the same in post Beckettian theatre, as in Hapgood Stoppard is ‘arguing for an actual reconstructed order rising out of the absurdist gloom’.114 Stoppard himself goes on to demonstrate that order five years later with Arcadia, ‘the first mainstream theatre product consciously designed to be a “chaos” play’,115 in which, according to Demastes, he, ‘stepped beyond comic “intuition” by directly utilizing the chaotics paradigm to articulate the comic vision with a precision only dreamt of in the philosophies of his comic predecessors’.116 Demastes concludes that, in Travesties, ‘Stoppard took on the task of demonstrating that the artistic enterprise is the endeavor that best captures processes of human consciousness117.’118 Tzara, smashing pots and cutting up words as he does, represents the disorderly, Joyce the orderly disorderly continuum and Carr, with his pandemonious brain (as evidenced by his time slips), lies in between. Perhaps Travesties, in this sense, reflects a comment Stoppard wrote while still a journalist: ‘there is no humanity without art, no art without humanity’.119 Stoppard was to return to the issue of brain 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

112 113 114 115 116 117

W. Demastes, Comedy Matters, page 116. W. Demastes, Theatre Of Chaos, page 41. W. Demastes, Theatre Of Chaos, page 50. W. Demastes, Theatre Of Chaos, page 85. W. Demastes, Comedy Matters, page 107. Citing a process astonishingly reminiscent of that of the application of Occam’s razor Demastes refers to Daniel C. Dennett’s book, Consciousness Explained, by concluding that the comic/chaotic enterprise manages the order/disorder landscape through a system of the interaction of thought and feeling: ‘In essence, according to Dennett, the mind takes a pandemonium of received data and an equally pandemonious list of possible reactions, and through a force of serialized manipulations considers the options and selects the best response for the moment’. (I am not sure that Dennett would entirely agree with Demastes’ précis of his Multiple Drafts Model. Dennett does, however, apply Occam’s razor to counter what he calls the Cartesian Theater of Cartesian dualism – viz: ‘Postulating a “real seeming” in addition to the judging or “taking” expressed in the subject’s report is multiplying entities beyond necessity’. – D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, page 134). 118 W. Demastes, Comedy Matters, pages 113–114. 119 Stoppard, ‘Critic and his credo’, Western Daily Press, 5 January 1961.

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consciousness in The Hard Problem, although his emphasis therein was on dualism. It is noteworthy that one metaphor Stoppard eventually chose not to run in Arcadia is that of turbulence. ‘Turbulence’ – not ‘chaos’120 is a margin note by Stoppard in the autograph manuscript copy of Arcadia at the British Library suggesting that he initially thought ‘turbulence’ would be a good metaphor for or description of chaos. In fact, the word turbulence is only uttered once in Arcadia, by Valentine, who describes the ‘pictures of forms in nature’121 that Thomasina’s ‘method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets’122 as ‘Pictures of turbulence’.123 It is interesting that Stoppard chose not to pursue this aspect of Chaos Theory further, particularly in the light of William Demastes observation of, ‘turbulence being a prime chaos theory topic of study’.124 There is also a feeling of sexual heat running through Arcadia.125 With the first words of the play Thomasina asks, ‘Septimus, what is carnal embrace?’.126 It is a metaphor which strikes right at the crux of the argument between the old and the new science because what undermines Newtonian theory is ‘the action of bodies in heat’.127 This is a double entendre far too good for Stoppard to pass up. He develops it further when Chloe says, The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be part of the plan.128 And there is plenty of that going at Sidley Park. Mrs Chater is caught visiting Lord Byron’s room. Septimus and Mrs Chater are ‘discovered in carnal embrace in the gazebo’.129 Actually, Septimus confesses that his activity with Mrs 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

Margin note in Arcadia ADD Ms.89037/1/4 UNBOUND 5028A, April 2, April 7 1992. Arcadia, page 62. Arcadia, page 62. Arcadia, page 62. W. Demastes, ‘Re-Inspecting The Crack In The Chimney – Chaos Theory From Ibsen to Stoppard’ in New Theatre Quarterly,10, No. 39, pages 242–255. The same metaphor appears in Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba which Stoppard adapted. Arcadia, page 2. Arcadia, page 111. Arcadia, page 97. Arcadia, page 3.

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Chater ‘in an agony of unrelieved desire’130 is actually a proxy directed at Lady Croom in the form of what she describes as ‘the most insolent familiarities regarding several parts of my body’.131 Lady Croom catches Bernard and Chloe in the cottage, notwithstanding that Bernard has invited Hannah to London for sex. Valentine, too, wishes to get in on the act with Hannah, referring to her as his ‘fiancé’ even though she isn’t. In the final scene it becomes clear as Thomasina ‘kisses Septimus full on the mouth’132 that her feelings have gone far beyond the respect a pupil should have for her tutor. Ultimately, Captain Brice marries Mrs Chater. Many of these sexual attractions are unconventional or inappropriate – pupil for tutor, tutor for employer, louche university lecturer for the daughter of a landed and titled family, the brother of a countess and a poet’s wife. They are metaphorically the ‘strange attractors’ of Chaos Theory. ‘The attraction that Newton left out’133 is the point in the debate at which the need for a new explanation is required. ‘Heat was the first thing which didn’t work that way. Not like Newton’.134 Sex is both the metaphor for the heat that is lost but it also turns out to be the element – the Butterfly Effect – which undermines the determinism of the Newtonian process.135 In the example Valentine quotes of a ball breaking a glass window, ‘You can put back the bits of glass but you can’t collect up the heat of the smash’.136 There are, however, numerous instances of heat which are all too real. Thomasina dies in a fire the night before her seventeenth birthday. She has entered the last scene carrying a candlestick. The great library of Alexandria is burned, as are the hermit’s papers upon his death, Septimus’ letters which were to be opened in the event of his death and Byron’s letter in front of Lady Croom. The heat from Noakes’ engine is real, too, although its dissipation only reinforces the metaphor behind the second law of thermodynamics: ‘Improve it as you will, you can never get out of it what you put in. It repays eleven pence in the shilling at most’.137 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137

130 131 132 133 134 135

Arcadia, page 95. Arcadia, page 92. Arcadia, page 122. Arcadia, page 97. Arcadia, page 125. W. Demastes emphasises this key point. ‘Wittily, the play suggests that though the world strives to be Newtonian, sex is the element – the butterfly effect at work – that undermines the process. It is ‘the attraction Newton left out’. All the way back to the apple in the garden’. W. Demastes, ‘Re-Inspecting the Crack in the Chimney: Chaos Theory from Ibsen to Stoppard’ in New Theatre Quarterly, 10, number 39, page 253. 136 Arcadia, page 125. 137 Arcadia, page 115.

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In truth, the allegory and the argument are not quite drawn with crystal clarity. The distinction between the classical and Romantic garden is blurred by the intermediate phase conducted by Capability Brown. The distinction between old and new science is equally blurred because Thomasina has to anticipate the second law of thermodynamics. Perhaps it is part of the chaos process and, therefore, the play’s metaphors. Stoppard is aware of this observation: It isn’t as tidy as that. In painting, literature, landscape gardening, these changes all happened sequentially. Over a hundred years, 1730 to 1830, they all seemed to go through that change, though not necessarily in concert with each other. I’m not really saying there was ever such a thing as Classical mathematics, and one doesn’t talk about there being a Romantic phase in mathematics either. I think what one is really doing is taking advantage of one’s enthusiasms.138 Some commentators say that Arcadia is a play about ideas.139 In fact, it is more about knowledge than ideas.140 The key to it is Hannah’s comment, ‘It’s wanting to know that makes us matter’,141 combined with the equivalence drawn between science and knowledge by Valentine: ‘What matters is the calculus. Scientific progress. Knowledge’.142 One should not forget that Arcadia is set in a classroom. I once saw a production of Arcadia at Cambridge University in 138 139 140 141 142

138 Stoppard, interview with N. Hawkes, ‘Plotting The Course of a Playwright’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 267. 139 For example: B. Niederhoff: ‘Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia … is a play of ideas. It is also a play about ideas’ in ‘Fortuitous Wit: Dialogue and Epistemology in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia’; C. Bertoni: ‘People think of Arcadia as a play about ideas’ in The Oxford Student 17 October 2013. 140 See Alastair Macaulay’s observation that ‘Most or all of Stoppard’s plays are about epistemology – about the various ways in which our brains apprehend and address the world, the range of possibilities whereby experience and thought become knowledge.…And the nature of knowledge – what has been lost, forgotten, mistaken? – is an abiding theme’. – A. Macaulay, ‘Tom Stoppard, A.E. Housman, and the Classics’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 150. Allen Rodway argues that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers and Travesties all deal with knowledge and that, ‘Travesties is constructed as a thematic network: some twenty interrelated aspects of the problem of knowledge’. – A. Rodway, ‘Stripping Off’, London Magazine, 16 (1976) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 195. 141 Arcadia, page 100. 142 Arcadia, page 80.

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which Septimus was already teaching his lesson to Thomasina as the audience filed in to take their seats. But, knowledge in the play means different things, some of which play a part in the scientific metaphors. There are three elements of research being undertaken in the story: Valentine is researching the grouse records in the game books; Hannah is looking through ‘Lady Croom’s garden books’143 in order to identify the hermit who lived in the garden; and, Bernard is trying to prove his theory that Byron killed Chater in a duel at Sidley Park, the outcome of which, then, forced him to leave England in a hurry. Rather like Chaos Theory itself research is about recovering information from fields of data. Valentine is extracting data from the grouse books to put into his computer to run through Chaos Theory algorithms. But, he is suffering from ‘noise’. It is particularly the case with his chosen field of investigation: ‘There’s more noise with grouse’.144 Then, he introduces the Butterfly effect and all its variables of input: Distortions. Interference. Real data is messy. There’s a thousand acres of moorland that had grouse on it…But nobody counted the grouse. They shot them. So you count the grouse they shot. But burning the heather interferes, it improves the food supply. A good year for foxes interferes the other way, they eat the chicks. And then there’s the weather.145 When the extraneous is excluded and the data refined to produce a conclusion/ argument/(paper in Bernard’s case) that is a process not unlike the paring effect of Occam’s razor. The act of research, particularly historical research – which is what, in part, they are all doing – is an act of bifurcation between the present and the past. Bernard has found a book with three letters in it (past) which leads him to formulate a theory (present) which requires further corroboration in the form of a letter Lady Croom has written to her husband (past) which causes Bernard to need proof (present) of Byron’s presence at Sidley Park which Valentine supplies in the game books (past). As a point of note, Stoppard’s own research is meticulous, although he prefers to see it as background reading.146 But, here’s Stoppard’s point: there 143 144 145 146

143 144 145 146

Arcadia, page 38. Arcadia, page 60. Arcadia, page 60. Michael Billington comments, ‘I have an indelible memory of meting Stoppard on the steps of the London Library laden with books some time before Jumpers opened. “What have you got there?” I innocently asked. “My next play”, he crisply replied. Stoppard goes

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is good and bad research. Bernard is ‘going through the library like a bloodhound’147 but his motive – ‘this is fame’148 – is all wrong. Moreover, he has ­decided what the answer is, it is just a question of proving it. ‘Somewhere in the Croom papers there will be something’.149 For Bernard it is a case of ‘We can find it’.150 In pursuit of his ends Bernard has no intellectual rigour. ‘Do we need to look far?’,151 he asks twice. As Hannah remarks on his paper, ‘You’ve left out everything which doesn’t fit’.152 He overrides all objections to his paper: it is i­nconceivable to him that it was not Septimus who lent Byron The Couch of Eros; Byron must be the author of a hostile review of one of Chater’s poems, ‘The Maid of Turkey’, in the Piccadilly Recreation. He asserts, ‘Did Septimus Hodge have any connection with the London periodicals? No’.153 But, one learns that Septimus’ brother was, in fact, the editor of the Piccadilly Recreation.154 ­Bernard simply cannot accept Hannah’s point that ‘Nobody would kill a man and then pan his book’,155 which is what his hypothesis presupposes. In the end his loose scholarship gets its comeuppance156 as his theory is proved wrong by an entry in a botanical journal proving that Chater was alive and well enough to have discovered a dahlia in Martinique a year after the incident with Byron at Sidley Park: ‘Fucked by a dahlia!’,157 as Bernard so unforgettably puts it. Hannah, by contrast is much more rigorous in her research. She has been ‘very thorough’158 – ‘through the lot’,159 in fact. Her attitude to research is one 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159

147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159

into training for a new, major play like Daley Thompson preparing for the Decathlon’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 82. Stoppard rather forcefully denied he researches, instead giving a different emphasis: ‘I don’t like doing research, and I never do it if I can help it. The kind of thing you have in mind’, he told ACH. Smith, ‘is general background reading’. – Flourish, Issue One 1974. Arcadia, page 58. Arcadia, page 42. Arcadia, page 42. Arcadia, page 65. Arcadia, pages 77 and 78. Arcadia, page 78. Arcadia, page 75. Arcadia, page 117. Arcadia, page 79. Bernard, though he does not realise it, also possesses a clue which demonstrates that Septimus was the hermit because he has unearthed The Peaks Traveller and Gazetteer. Arcadia, page 118. Arcadia, page 33. Arcadia, page 32.

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of possibility, not certainty – ‘if only I can find it’.160 Even when evidence is unearthed to suggest that Septimus was Sidley Park’s hermit, because he shared the same birthday, Hannah does not feel she has enough for certainty. ‘I’ve got a good idea who he was, but I can’t prove it’,161 she later concludes. Of course, that’s enough for Bernard. ‘Publish!’,162 he exhorts her. Her proof only arrives at the very end when the production by Gus of Thomasina’s drawing of ‘Septimus holding Plautus’,163 the tortoise, can be linked with the extract from Godolphin’s 1832 guide, The Peaks Traveller and Gazetteer, which describes ‘a hermitage occupied by a lunatic since twenty years without discourse or companion save for a pet tortoise, Plautus by name’.164 It is impossible to avoid books in Arcadia and they play an important role in the theme of knowledge. In addition to acting as a symbol of knowledge they allow Stoppard to identify a different view of knowledge, but one which is in keeping with the scientific debate of the play. One of the most lyrical episodes in the play is when Thomasina laments the burning of the library at Alexandria. ‘How can we sleep for grief?’,165 she asks. Rather like the determinism of the old Newtonian world Septimus answers by saying that knowledge is not lost:166 We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.167 This is the application of the first two laws of thermodynamics to knowledge – matter cannot be created or destroyed, but it can change. Septimus continues:

160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167

160 161 162 163 164 165 166

The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal

Arcadia, page 88. Arcadia, page 128. Arcadia, page 129. Arcadia, page 130. Arcadia, page 85. Arcadia, page 50. Contrast Septimus’ view with that of Bernarda Alba, in Stoppard’s adaptation of The House of Bernarda Alba, page 37, who contends that, ‘There are many things once known now forgotten’. 167 Arcadia, page 50.

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themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.168 But, as with the creation of entropy, what is written in another language may not be usable, as is shown by Thomasina’s literal attempt to translate Latin – ‘try to put some poetry into it’,169 suggests Septimus by way of encouragement.170 Not all the aspects of knowledge fit into the scientific metaphor. Septimus’ knowledge has a higher purpose: ‘I inspire by reverence for learning and the exaltation of knowledge whereby man may approach God’.171 Bernard’s knowledge is different again. For him ‘if knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much’.172 Therefore, he cites Byron’s poem, She Walks In Beauty: ‘She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless chimes and starry skies, and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes’,173 emphasising his point by letting the audience know (‘with offensive politeness’174) that Byron wrote it after he had returned from a party. The sort of questions he asks ‘don’t matter’.175 It’s almost as if he’s in the wrong play as he struggles to understand why science matters. For him the world of knowledge is about people – ‘Why does scientific progress matter more than personalities?’,176 he demands. ‘A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton’.177 Ultimately he is in a rush – to leave to avoid Lady Croom’s disapproval of his dalliance with her daughter, Chloe. He leaves to return to his version of knowledge: to go back to a university where his idea of education is to ‘let the brats sort it out for themselves’.178

‘Mental Acrobatics’

When interviewed by Bragg Stoppard said of Jumpers, ‘I wanted to write about an idea. Thereafter, I have enormous difficulty in constructing some sort of 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178

168 Arcadia, page 51. 169 Arcadia, page 47. 170 See P. Edwards, ‘Science in Hapgood and Arcadia’ in K. Kelly (ed),The Cambridge Companion To Stoppard, page 179. 171 Arcadia, page 106. 172 Arcadia, page 81. 173 Arcadia, pages 81–82. 174 Arcadia, page 82. 175 Arcadia, page 80. 176 Arcadia, page 81. 177 Arcadia, page 81. 178 Arcadia, page 27.

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vehicle for this thing to travel in’.179 One would not have guessed so. In Jumpers the dramatic vehicle and the idea combine to produce a quite spectacular visual and verbal feast which underpins the debate about the existence of God in his role as the Creator and the source of moral values.180 The very title of the play and its use of a team of acrobats provides a constant metaphor for the mental agility of the arguments within the debate.181 It is almost a statement of intent when, just after the start of the play, Stoppard has ‘EIGHT JUMPERS enter jumping, tumbling somersaulting…’.182 They go on to form a human pyramid. Archie, the Vice Chancellor of the university where the symposium, entitled ‘Man – good, bad or indifferent’, is taking place ‘is of course a firstrate gymnast, though an indifferent philosopher’.183 He describes himself as ‘a doctor of medicine, philosophy, literature and law, with diplomas in psychological medicine and P.T. including gym’.184 Moreover, as George points out ‘the close association between gymnastics and philosophy is…unique to this university’.185 Most significantly, the Professor of Logic, McFee, is a ‘part-time acrobat’.186 The scene is set for what Stoppard refers to in Undiscovered Country as one of the ‘performances on the philosophical flying trapeze’187 as he runs through the mental gymnastics of the arguments for and against the existence of God. The metaphor is allowed to run riot: ‘Professor McFee bends over backwards to demonstrate that moral judgements belong to the same class as aesthetic judgements’188 whilst he is seen to be constantly ‘jumping through the Vice-Chancellor’s hoop’.189 For Stoppard the ‘jump’ also carries another dimension which he reveals in an interview with Joseph McCulloch: 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189

179 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Bragg, ‘The South Bank Show’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 117. 180 Stanley Kauffman disagrees. In a review of Jumpers he argues, ‘Stoppard attempts a triple counterpoint between his vaudeville, a murder-mystery farce, and an intellectual comedy.…The elements are merely juxtaposed…The play is fake, structurally and thematically’. – S. Kauffman, ‘Persons of the Drama’ in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, pages 123–125. 181 Stoppard retained echoes of the metaphor in Artist Descending a Staircase, page 116 – Martello: ‘My brain is on a flying trapeze that outstrips all the possibilities of action. Mental acrobatics’. 182 Jumpers, page 18. 183 Jumpers, page 51. 184 Jumpers, page 61. 185 Jumpers, page 51. 186 Jumpers, page 51. 187 Undiscovered Country, page 104. 188 Jumpers, page 52. 189 Jumpers, page 53.

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I can accept the evolution of the tripes and pipes and liquids which are in (George Moore). I can accept the evolution of the button on his cuff and the cathode-ray tube he watches, and everything about him – except his ability to discuss it, because there, to me, is a break in…philosophical logic…There is a gap between an object becoming as complex, as prolific, as intelligent and as extraordinary as it can be, of itself, and actually knowing all these things about itself. This seems to me, in the imagery in which it occurs to me, to create a gap where you need to make a jump.190 It has even been suggested that another aspect of jumping Stoppard is metaphorically referring to is the human propensity to jump to conclusions, especially about profound isues such as morality.191 The play is set in a background in which the concept of the relativist view of morality – that goodness depends upon one’s point of view – has led to a chaotic world in which the Archbishop of Canterbury, the former Radical Liberal spokesman for Agriculture and an agnostic to boot, has had his chaplains use tear gas to disperse the common people and the Radical Liberals are holding a noisy parade to celebrate the winning of a general election by means of what Archie calls a coup d’etat. The church itself is going to be rationalized. The connection is made between the political situation underpinning the world outside George’s apartment and the debate on morality by the announcement, in ­Archie’s voice, that the gymnasts are the ‘INCREDIBLE – RADICAL! – ­LIBERAL!! – JUMPERS!!’.192 The interconnection between the moral chaos of the relativist outside world and the argument on the nature of morality is cemented by the Archie’s assertion that McFee, the chief proponent of the relativist argument ‘was the guardian and figurehead of philosophical orthodoxy’.193 In other words, the chaos of relative morality has become mainstream. The disintegration of society on a moral level is reflected in Dotty’s own mental disintegration. She is a former star of the musical stage who, in her own words, is unreliable and neurotic. Her situation is linked to the moral metaphor by the fact that her psychiatrist is Archie. Her mental condition has been caused by the shock of seeing a moon landing by two astronauts. The landing has removed for Dotty the mystery of the place. ‘When they first landed, it was 190 191 192 193

190 Stoppard, in an interview with J. McCulloch, ‘Dialogue with Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 43. 191 See S. Eichelbaum, ‘Call Me the Thinking Man’s Farceur’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 78. 192 Jumpers, page 18. 193 Jumpers, pages 63–64.

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as though I’d seen a unicorn on the television news…it certainly spoiled unicorns’.194 She came over funny and left work never to return. Instead, she keeps singing songs which, with the exception of the one she sings in the Coda, all have some reference to the moon – Shine on Harvest Moon etc. The significance of the moon landing for interweaving the vehicle of the play into the ideas it discusses is two-fold. First of all, Millions of viewers saw the two astronauts struggling at the foot of the ladder until Oates was knocked to the ground by his commanding officer…Captain Scott has maintained radio silence since pulling up the ladder and closing the hatch with the remark, ‘I am going up now. I may be gone for some time’.195 Apart from being an inverse pun on the famous scene on Scott’s Antarctic journey in which Oates sacrifices himself with the words, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’,196 it demonstrates the chaotic world of relativism in which the morality of one’s actions depends upon one’s point of view. But, it also links directly into the debate about the existence of a God who is the source of moral absolutes. As Crouch relates, it caused McFee to keep ‘harking back to the first Captain Oates…sacrificing his life to give his companions a slim chance of survival’.197 McFee realises that an act of self-sacrifice does imply – prove, even – the existence of a moral absolute. Secondly, the moon landing leads to the relativists’ point about perspective. Stoppard had come somewhere close to this point in an earlier radio play, Albert’s Bridge, in which Albert, while high up painting the bridge, notes that from his vantage point ‘I saw the context. It reduced philosophy and everything else. I got a perspective’.198 In Jumpers Stoppard develops the point further as 194 195 196 197 198

194 Jumpers, page 38. A programme note in the 1972 production of Jumpers at the Royal National Theatre (repeated in the programme for the 1976 production at the Royal National Theatre) demonstrates a live example of the effect described by Dotty. ‘At the time of the first moon landing, the union of Persian storytellers sent a cable to Cape Kennedy (now Canaveral) saying that not only had nasa robbed them of their livelihood, but it had also robbed the world of its illusions’. 195 Jumpers, page 23. 196 Scott, Journals, page 410. 197 Jumpers, page 80. 198 Albert’s Bridge, page 62. ‘For Stoppard’s purposes, a bridge which is high enough is like an accessible moon, offering a change of perspective’. – R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 65. Gladys, in If Your Glad I’ll Be Frank, comes very close to the same point, using time as her

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Dotty says, ‘Man is on the Moon…and he has seen us whole’. As a result ‘… all our absolutes … that seemed to be the very condition of our existence…’, now, ‘look like the local customs of another place’ and ‘the truths that have been taken on trust, they’ve never had edges before, there was no vantage point to stand on and see where they stopped’.199 The eternal truths of moral absolutism have become local. Both Dotty in Jumpers and Penelope in Another Moon Called Earth suffer from the same insight and realise its consequences. Penelope explains, ‘when that thought drips through to the bottom, people won’t just carry on. The things they’ve taken on trust, they’ve never had edges before’.200 What results is the world founded on relativist morality, which Dotty describes in the pseudo-biblical terms of a moral apocalypse: ‘There is going to be such … breakage, such gnashing of unclean meats, such coveting of neighbours’ oxen and knowing of neighbours’ wives, such dishonourings of mothers and 199 200

metaphor: ‘…they think that time is something they invented…When you look down from a great height you become dizzy. Such depth, such distance, such disappearing tininess so far away, rushing away, reducing the life-size to nothing – it upsets the scale you live by… because time viewed from such distance etcetera rushing away reducing the lifespan to nothing and so on’ – If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank, pages 29–31. 199 Jumpers, page 75. 200 Another Moon Called Earth, page 57. Michael Billington is sceptical of Stoppard’s interpretation of the effect of a moon landing (which in Another Moon Called Earth predates Apollo 11’s landing): ‘the discovery that the earth was not the centre of the universe but simply part of the inter-planetary system did not disqualify the concepts of good and evil, love and duty; and no more did the lunar landings’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 54. He repeats the point with reference to Jumpers (op cit, page 91): ‘Even more crucial to our assessment of Jumpers is the absurdity of Dotty’s thesis that the moon-landings will lead to moral mayhem “because the truths that have been taken on trust, they’ve never had edges before”. Even when Jumpers was premiered it was a pretty way-out notion’. Stoppard’s point is that the new perspective made the earth’s moralities seem local. I would argue that it was not the moon landing of Apollo 11 which had the effect of putting the earth’s morality into a local context but rather it was the picture entitled Earthrise, taken by astronaut William Anders aboard Apollo 8 on 24 December 1968, which showed the earth hanging above the surface of the moon and suspended in the dark void of space. A similar, but much less definitive and black and white, photograph was taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 on 23 August 1966, which predates the first production of Another Moon Called Earth in June 1967 and I can only speculate that this image might have given Stoppard his idea. Anders perceptively commented, ‘After all the training and studying we’d done as pilots and engineers to get to the moon safely and get back, (and) as human beings to explore moon orbit what we really discovered was the planet earth’. – ‘How astronauts went to the Moon and ended up discovering planet Earth’, The Guardian, 20 December 2008.

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fathers, and bowings and scrapings to images graven and incarnate’.201 McFee, as related by Crouch, sums it up by saying that he has given ‘philosophical respectability to a new pragmatism in public life’.202 The vehicle continues to reflect the ideas through the murder storyline. In the opening scene one of the acrobats (it turns out to be McFee) is murdered.203 This act is one of the most symbolic in the whole of the Stoppardian landscape.204 Later on the audience learns from Crouch205 that McFee r­ ealised that the existence of altruism would destroy his relativist argument. The ­pyramid, comprising other acrobats who symbolise the relativist philosophers, is similarly destroyed when McFee is shot out of it. Clegthorpe, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is also murdered in the Coda. But, two other deaths occur: George’s accidental shooting of his pet hare, Thumper, and his treading on his tortoise, Pat. As he does so he cries out, ‘Dotty! Help! Murder!’.206 The concept of murder lies at the heart of the discussion on the source of morality. To a relativist like McFee murder ‘is not sinful but simply anti-social…philosophically (McFee) doesn’t think it’s actually, inherently wrong in itself…’.207 As the previously unseen view of the earth from the moon has highlighted, it depends upon the perspective. Mental acrobatics, identified by Martello, also arise in Stoppard’s radio play Artist Descending a Staircase in which the playwright uses the idea of three artists and an episode, fifty years earlier, in which a blind girl comes into their lives as a vehicle for a consideration of the merits of modern art. Stoppard lampoons his subject with an array of objets d’art that would do justice to London’s Tate Modern: a Venus de Milo made from sugar, ‘ceramic bread and steak and strawberries with plaster-of-paris cream’208 and an aurally fraudulent recording of a game of ping-pong. Amidst half remembered reflections of the life the three of them shared – was it Edith Sitwell or Wyndham Lewis, Monte Carlo or Switzerland, 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208

201 202 203 204

205 206 207 208

Jumpers, page 75. Jumpers, pages 79–80. Jumpers, page 21. GB. Crump notes that, ‘the murder of McFee is central to George’s debate with the materialists’. – GB. Crump, ‘The Universe as Murder Mystery: Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers’ in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook, page 154. John Fleming’s verdict on McFee’s death and conversion, which he describes as ‘pivotal’ (J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 90), illustrates how significant the metaphor of the collapsed pyramid is. Jumpers, page 80. Jumpers, page 81. Jumpers, page 48. Artist, page 126.

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Nancy Cunard’s coming-out ball or Queen Mary’s wedding? – they almost themselves resemble a theatrical version of Dali’s painting, The Persistence of Time. The title of the play is a pun in itself, inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s ­modernist painting of 1912, Nu descendant un escalier (Nude descending a staircase). Stoppard admits that, ‘Other than the title, I didn’t go into Duchamp too much’.209 (This is a slight understatement. Duchamp was also a chess player, as was Lenin and Tzara, which allows Stoppard to open a reference to all three in Switzerland and to start what, in Travesties, was to become a longer association with the subject matter). He goes on to say, ‘after exploring the reasons for art, I did want to focus on the different perceptions of it’.210 It is tempting to see Artist Descending a Staircase as a form of theatrical preamble for what was to come soon after in Travesties. In a largely one-sided assault Stoppard has Beauchamp list out various examples of modern art – ‘symbolism, surrealism, imaginism, vorticism, fauvism, cubism’.211 Donner, it would appear has had a recent Damascene conversion from his flirtation with such styles and is now engaged on a portrait of Sophie as he announces that, ‘I have returned to traditional values’.212 In their pre-war naivety Beauchamp enjoys the fun of making ‘indefensible statements about art’.213 Fifty years on Donner admits that after the war, to him, art no longer made any sense. ‘That’s what killed it for me. After that, being an artist made no sense’.214 Beauchamp’s pre-war idealism had led him to question the purpose of art. ‘How can the artist justify himself in the community? What is his role? What is his reason?’.215 It led, in terms of modern art, to perverse justifications of the art form – ‘How can one justify a work of art to a man with an empty belly? The answer, like all great insights was simple: make it edible’.216 – and Donner’s reductio ad absurdum of ‘Think of poor villages getting a month’s supply of salt in the form of classical sculpture!’.217 The waiter at the Café Russe ‘lost a leg at Verdun’218 but in the 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218

209 Stoppard, in an interview with D. Maychick, ‘Stoppard Ascending’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 232. 210 Stoppard, in an interview with D. Maychick, ‘Stoppard Ascending’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 232. 211 Artist, page 122. 212 Artist, page 122. 213 Artist, page 143. 214 Artist, page 128. 215 Artist, page 144. 216 Artist, page 126. 217 Artist, page 126. 218 Artist, page 127.

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morality of modern art this reverberates into Martello’s work, ‘The Cripple’; ‘a wooden man with a real leg’.219 Beauchamp has taken another path, for which Sophie’s blindness is a metaphor, and has been making recordings with artistic intent: ‘I’m trying to liberate the visual image from the limitations of visual art. The idea is to create images – pictures – which are purely mental’.220 The result, in Donner’s judgement, is ‘rubbish, general rubbish. In the sense of being worthless, without value; rot, nonsense’.221 He continues his onslaught with a demolition of Beauchamp’s idea of modern art: You don’t know what art is. Those tape recordings of yours are the mechanical expression of a small intellectual idea, the kind of notion that might occur to a man in his bath and be forgotten in the business of drying between his toes.222 The vehicle of the play – the relationship of the three boys to the blind S­ ophie – allows Artist Descending a Staircase to conclude by proving its point that old fashioned art is not dead. In 1920 Beauchamp says, with not entirely misplaced prescience (given where modern art was to lead), that, ‘Nobody will be painting in fifty years’.223 Sophie enters a plea that beauty still be painted. Just over fifty years on Donner has returned to painting, after his dalliance with sugar cubes, and his subject matter is Sophie herself. ‘She would have liked it’,224 concedes Beauchamp.

The Play-Within-A-Play

It should not escape anybody’s notice that Stoppard uses a play-within-aplay – or even a play-alongside-a-play – as his vehicle on several occasions.225 219 220 221 222 223 224 225

219 220 221 222 223 224 225

Artist, page 132. Artist, pages 136–137. Artist, page 120. Artist, page 120. Artist, page 142. Artist, page 123. Richard Corballis notes, ‘Perhaps the most characteristic feature of Stoppard’s art is his fondness for the play-within-the-play’. – R. Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork, page 106. Corballis believes that the classification of play-within-the-play includes the dream sequence in Night And Day, the charades and references to Macbeth in Jumpers, Foot’s interpretation of events in After Magritte, the colloquium in Professional Foul, Brown’s Magrittean mural in A Separate Peace and he makes a case for Arthur’s

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In ­addition to reflecting his oft occurring theme of illusion and reality the use of a play-within-a-play to carry the ideas of his own plays reflects, above all else, Stoppard’s interest in and love of the theatre. In Travesties he largely adapts the narrative from Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, to produce a parallel play as a vehicle for his discussion of the compatibility of art and revolution. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead takes the vehicle of Stoppard’s play much deeper into what is its mirror image play,226 Hamlet, and goes on to borrow not only its narrative but its themes and structure as well. In Cahoot’s Macbeth Stoppard returns to Shakespeare for his vehicle but this time it is his language which he chooses to adapt in a production of Macbeth under the auspices of a totalitarian regime. Stoppard eventually takes the play-within-a-play format and makes the underlying play his vehicle: in The Real Inspector Hound the critics reviewing a play become characters involved in it whereas The Real Thing opens with a scene which turns out to be in a play that Stoppard’s main protagonist, Henry, has written. With Travesties Stoppard had the idea of a debate. His attention had been drawn by a friend to the fact that Tzara and Lenin lived in Zurich contemporaneously during the First World War: a case of ‘two revolutions formed in the same street’.227 This coincidence gave him two subjects for debate – art and politics – which he was to fuse into one question: ‘whether an artist has to justify himself in political terms at all’.228 He, then, realised Joyce also lived in Zurich at the same time and, thus, he was able to add Joyce to the intellectual 226 227 228

monologue in New-Found-Land. He also adds the pin-up photographs in Dirty Linen as ‘pictures-within-the-play’ and the ‘orchestra-within-the-play’ in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. One might now add the play-within-a-film – Shakespeare in Love. The film is very close in structure to The Real Thing as the opening titles make clear that it is a play. Thus it is conceived of as a play about a man writing a play, including various rehearsals. Unlike The Real Thing, the play being written is performed at the end. Charles Marowitz referred to Travesties as a ‘play-within-a-monologue’. – C. Marowitz, ‘Tom Stoppard – The Theatre’s Intellectual P.T. Barnum’, New York Times, 19 October 1975, ii, page 5, quoted in FH. Londre, Tom Stoppard, page 70. 226 William Gruber disagrees. In reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead he says, ‘Properly speaking, Stoppard has not composed a “play within a play”, nor has he written a lesser action which mirrors a larger’. – W. Gruber, ‘Wheels Within Wheels’, Comparative Drama, xv (1981–1982) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 86. 227 Travesties, page 8. 228 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 69.

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mixture. This he found attractive ‘mainly because I didn’t want Tzara and the Dadaists to carry the artistic banner in the play, and Joyce was an artist with whom I sympathise a great deal’.229 But, he needed a vehicle. In his words, ‘I want to marry the play of ideas to farce. Now that may be like eating steak tartare with chocolate sauce, but that’s the way it comes out’.230 Stoppard found the essence of his chocolate sauce in an obscure consular official in Zurich, Henry Carr. As Stoppard relates in his short biography of Henry Carr at the start of the printed edition of his play, in March 1918 Joyce had been prevailed upon to put on a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Joyce sought official approval from the British consulate and, perhaps in order to seal the approval, ‘in an unlucky moment Joyce nominated a tall, good-looking young man named Henry Carr, whom he had seen at the consulate’231 to play the part of Algernon in the absence of anyone else to take the role. This invitation led to a double court case after the performance when Carr and Joyce quarrelled: Carr sued Joyce for the cost of his costume and Joyce countersued for slander. But, The Importance of Being Earnest and the Joycean connection gave Stoppard the vehicle he was looking for. Stoppard implies that it came late in his creative process: Once I had this group of people (ie: Lenin, Joyce and Tzara) I used them to get various ideas off my chest. At first there was no narrative line, but then I discovered that Joyce and Carr were mixed up in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. That gave me the linking theme.232 What Stoppard is primarily doing is adapting Wilde’s narrative into an entirely different story. The Importance of Being Earnest, written by Oscar Wilde and first performed in 1895, is a ‘trivial comedy for serious people’233 in which two 229 230 231 232 233

229 Stoppard quoted in B. Weiner, ‘A Puzzling, “Traditional” Stoppard’ in San Francisco Chronicle, 29 March 1977, page 40 and quoted in J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 102. 230 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Wetzsteon, ‘Tom Stoppard Eats Steak Tartare With Chocolate Sauce’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 83. The premiere of Travesties in London in 1974 saw mixed reactions to its narrative. Michael Coveney, in the Financial Times, reported, ‘a lack of any dramatic accumulation in the play induces a ­response of indifference’, whereas Harold Hobson, in The Sunday Times, wrote of it as, ‘a story as elaborate and carefully constructed as that of “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold”’. 231 Travesties, page ix. 232 Stoppard quoted in O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 169. 233 The Importance of Being Earnest, frontispiece.

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eligible men, Algernon and Jack, invent excuses to enable themselves to ­enjoy themselves. Jack, a country gentleman, has ‘invented a very useful younger brother called Earnest, in order that (he) may be able to come up to town as ­often as (he) like(s)’.234 Algernon, who lives in London, has ‘invented an ­invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that (he) may be able to go down into the country whenever (he) choose(s)’.235 When Jack is in town he pretends to be his brother Earnest and in that guise proposes to Gwendolin, daughter of Lady Bracknell, Algernon’s aunt. Algernon, in riposte, visits Jack’s ward, Cecily, telling her he is Jack’s brother, Earnest, and proposes to her. In the course of the play Jack turns out to be Algernon’s brother, left to the care of Lady Bracknell by her sister and accidentally left in a handbag at Victoria ­station by his nurse Miss Prism, who by the time of the play is Governess to ­Cecily. The audience also meets Lane, Algernon’s manservant, and the ­Reverend Chasuble, a cleric who lives near the Manor House where Cecily lives. Stoppard took inspiration from a device Joyce had used when writing Ulysses. Ulysses is written in a structure which reflects episodes in the life of Odysseus. In the same way Stoppard uses episodes in The Importance of Being ­Earnest as the structural basis for Travesties. To begin with the dramatis personae in Travesties correspond (some more loosely than others) to characters in Wilde’s play in the following form: The Importance of Being Earnest Travesties Algernon Jack Lady Bracknell Lane Gwendolen Cecily

Carr in Zurich Tzara Joyce Bennett Gwendolyn Cecily

The characters of Lenin and Nadya get a slightly different treatment.236 Stoppard was originally of the view that ‘one thing I could not do was to integrate 234 235 236

234 The Importance of Being Earnest, page 13. 235 The Importance of Being Earnest, page 13. 236 Toby Zinman argues that Stoppard is Miss Prism’s twin. See T. Zinman, ‘Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 125.

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the Lenins into the Importance scheme.…It would have been disastrous to Prismize and Chasublize the Lenins and I believe that section saves Travesties because I think one’s just about had that particular Wilde joke at that point’.237 Nevertheless, he recants slightly in the 1993 version: (LENIN enters, wearing a clerical collar, but otherwise dressed in black from parson’s hat to parson’s leggings. He and NADYA look at each other – Chasuble and Prism)238 Stoppard offers plenty of clues about the derivation from The Importance of Being Earnest. A stage direction in Act 1 reads, ‘TZARA, no less than CARR is straight out of The Importance of Being Earnest’.239 Carr adds to the confusion: CARR: My dear fellow, Gwendolen is my sister and before I allow you to marry her you will have to clear up the whole question of Jack. TZARA: Jack! What on earth do you mean? What do you mean, Henry, by Jack?240 At times Cecily addresses Tzara as ‘Jack’241 while Carr is described as ‘Jack’s decadent nihilistic younger brother’,242 and, at one stage, a Voice off is to be heard uttering, ‘How are you, my dear Ernest. What brings you up to town?’ – ‘Pleasure, pleasure – eating as usual, I see, Algy…’,243 echoing Jack’s entrance in The Importance of Being Earnest.244 Stoppard, then, proceeds to adopt his own version of the Ulysses device by constructing some, although not all, of the scenes in Travesties as parallels with some of the episodes from The Importance of Being Earnest. Given the importance in Stoppardian playwriting of finding the appropriate vehicle for his ideas Travesties provides a terrific opportunity to see exactly how Stoppard goes about it. Analysing how the two plays of Stoppard and Wilde interrelate is, therefore, deserving of close scrutiny. The structural replica begins 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244

237 Stoppard, in R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 10. 238 Travesties, page 53. 239 Travesties, page 19. 240 Travesties, pages 26–27. 241 eg: Travesties, page 54. 242 Travesties, page 46. 243 Travesties, page 42 (and 15, 19 and 24 where the interrogative is, ‘What brings you here?’): The Importance of Being Earnest, page 6. 244 See T. Brassell, Tom Stoppard An Assessment, pages 149–150.

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with the scene between Carr (Algernon) and Bennett (Lane, the butler). Carr complains to Bennett, ‘I see from your book that on Thursday night when Mr Tzara was dining with me, eight bottles of champagne are entered as having been consumed’,245 which corresponds to Algernon’s complaint to Lane ‘I see from your book that on Thursday night, when Lord Shoreman and Mr Worthing were dining with me, eight bottles of champagne are entered as having been consumed’.246 The scene develops mimicking The Importance of Being Earnest. Tzara arrives, announcing, ‘I have come by tram expressly to propose a marriage’247 to Gwendolen, just as Jack announces, ‘I am in love with Gwendolen. I have come up to town expressly to propose to her’.248 Carr produces a library ticket, lost by Tzara, from his pocket in much the same way as Algernon says to Lane, ‘Bring me that cigarette case (Jack) left in the smoking room last time he dined here’.249 In the second stage of the structural replica the opening scene of The ­Importance of Being Earnest develops as Lady Bracknell (Joyce) and Gwendolen arrive at Algernon’s London residence where they interrupt Algernon and Jack. In just the same way Joyce and Gwendolen arrive at Carr’s house and interrupt Carr and Tzara. Whereas in The Importance of Being Earnest Lady Bracknell is Gwendolen’s mother, so in Travesties Joyce ‘has made a disciple out of Gwendolen’.250 Stoppard runs the likeness between Joyce and Lady Bracknell, who is Algernon’s’ ‘Aunt Augusta’,251 when Tzara notes, ‘Mr Joyce, Irish writer, mainly of limericks, christened James Augustine,252 though registered, due to a clerical error, as James Augusta, a little known fact’.253 Stoppard continues the parallel but mixes up the chronology of parts of the discourse in The Importance of Being Earnest within the same scene. ‘Miss Fairfax’, says Jack, ‘ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl’.254 In the same way, but later in the corresponding scene in Travesties, Tzara tells Gwendolen, ‘…Miss Carr. Ever since I met you I have admired you’.255 Gwendolen, in Travesties, retorts, 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255

245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255

Travesties, page 13. The Importance of Being Earnest, page 4. Travesties, page 15. The Importance of Being Earnest, page 7. The Importance of Being Earnest, page 9. Travesties, page 26. The Importance of Being Earnest, page 16. Joyce’s full name is James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. Travesties, page 24. The Importance of Being Earnest, page 20. Travesties, page 36.

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‘for me you have always had an irresistible fascination. Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you’,256 while in The Importance of Being Earnest Gwendolen’s reply is identical. But Stoppard brings forward to before this last exchange a point about consent for marriage which occurs much later in The Importance of Being Earnest – and, just to complicate things further Stoppard transposes the quotation from one Wildean character to a different corresponding Stoppardian one. At one point, towards the end of The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack ‘absolutely decline(s) to give’257 his consent to Cecily’s marriage to Algernon. In Travesties, in the first scene between Carr and Tzara (and before Gwendolen and Tzara declare their love), it is Carr who says to Tzara, ‘In the first place, girls never marry Romanians, and in the second place I don’t give my consent’.258 The third stage of the structural copy commences with Joyce’s command to Tzara, who is kissing Gwendolen, to, ‘Rise, sir, from that semi-recumbent posture!’,259 which is virtually a direct lift from Wilde’s text. Stoppard mimics the scene in The Importance of Being Earnest in which Lady Bracknell interrogates Jack with Joyce’s inquisition of Tzara. ‘How old are you?’, ‘What is your income?’, ‘What are your politics?’,260 Lady Bracknell asks in an effort to determine Jack’s suitability. Joyce’s questioning is equally penetrating, but his subject matter is the genesis and history of Dadaism. In apparent contradiction of his earlier assertion that the Wildean joke has gone far enough Stoppard continues the structural pastiche into Act 2, although, in his defence, it is far less strictly adherent to Wilde’s episodes as Stoppard starts to borrow more indiscriminately small events from The Importance of Being Earnest. It begins with the encounter between Carr and Cecily, immediately after Cecily’s monologue, which harks back to Cecily and Algernon’s first meeting in the garden at the Manor House. ‘…You are at a glance the prettiest girl in the whole world’,261 Carr tells Cecily, just as Algernon r­ emarks to ­Cecily, ‘You are the prettiest girl I ever saw’.262 Algernon asks Cecily to r­ eform him whereas Cecily tells Carr: ‘Ever since Jack told me he had a younger brother who was a decadent nihilist it has been my girlish dream to reform you and to love you’,263 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263

256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263

Travesties, page 37. The Importance of Being Earnest, page 87. Travesties, page 26. Travesties, page 37; The Importance of Being Earnest, page 23. The Importance of Being Earnest, pages 24–26. Travesties, page 47. The Importance of Being Earnest, page 45. Travesties, page 53.

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The next episode of structural replication arises when Cecily and Jack meet in the garden with Cecily’s revelation that, ‘I have got such a surprise for you. Who do you think is in the dining-room? Your brother!’.264 In Zurich, Cecily has a similar surprise for Tzara; ‘I have such a surprise for you. Your brother is here’.265 And, just as Algernon pretends to be Jack’s brother, so Carr pretends to be Tzara’s. Reversing Wilde’s chronology slightly – by inserting his scene before Wilde’s Cecily and Gwendolen scene – Stoppard, then, recalls the scene in which Algernon scoffs down the muffins. Carr and Tzara duly bicker over muffins and tea-cake, although in Zurich it is Tzara who protests, ‘I don’t like tea-cake’,266 whereas in the garden scene it is Algernon. Stoppard picks up the Wildean episodic structure again when Cecily and Gwendolen meet for the first time, introduce themselves and address each other in the form of rhyming verses in increasing tetchiness over the ‘(mis)understanding’267 that occurs between them, which corresponds to a near identical scene in The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde writes it thus: Cecily:   Pray let me introduce myself to you. My name is Cecily Cardew. Gwendolen: Cecily Cardew?…What a very sweet name!268 Cecily’s rhyme gives Stoppard the perfect cue to commence his verses: Cecily: …Cecily Carruthers… Gwen: Cecily Carrruthers! What a pretty name! According to the consul ‘Round the fashionable fonts you’ll Often hear the Cecily’s declaimed.269 The structural parallel continues with the scenes in both plays in which both Cecilys and both Gwendolens have ‘just one question’270 they wish to ask and ends with the conclusion to both plays. In Wilde, both sets of young lovers 264 265 266 267 268 269 270

264 265 266 267 268 269 270

The Importance of Being Earnest, page 50. The Importance of Being Earnest, page 54. Travesties, page 55; The Importance of Being Earnest, page 75. Travesties, page 65; The Importance of Being Earnest, page 70. The Importance of Being Earnest, page 62. Travesties, page 62. Travesties, page 67; The Importance of Being Earnest, page 72.

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embrace as well as Chasuble and Miss Prism. In Stoppard, ‘TZARA dances with GWEN, CARR with CECILY’.271 (Amusingly Joyce and Bennett also double for Chasuble and Prism and dance). But, in Stoppard’s final twist of time young Carr and young Cecily dance off and old Carr and old Cecily dance on in their place. Along the way Stoppard has in Act 2 amusingly extracted various remarks and actions from The Importance of Being Earnest, irrespective of their strict structural relevance.272 Both Cecilys complain that, ‘A gross deception has been practised upon us’.273 Tzara swears not to shake hands with Carr just as Jack refuses Algernon’s hand and Stoppard adapts Algernon’s dislike of Jack’s clothes into Carr’s dislike of Joyce’s apparel. Stoppard even contrives the accidental swap of documents by Gwendolen and Cecily to recall the moment when Miss Prism admits how she caused Wilde’s whole farce in the first place when ‘in a moment of mental abstraction…(she) deposited (her) manuscript in the bassinette and placed the baby in the hand-bag’.274 Thus it is that the structure of Travesties is replicating several of the episodes of the first act of The Importance of Being Earnest, just as Joyce’s Ulysses recalls episodes in The Odyssey.275 But, it is not enough for Stoppard to copy the Wildean structure. Onto this vehicle he also grafts excerpts of the Joycean structure as well. The scene in which Joyce interrogates Tzara is also a pastiche of the chapter in Ulysses which is known as the Ithaca catechism. Joyce writes the whole chapter in the form of a catechism (a series of questions):

271 272 273 274 275

What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning? … Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary? …

271 Travesties, page 70. 272 Ronald Hayman disagrees with my analysis of how Stoppard uses the text of The Importance of Being Earnest. He argues that, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest is used in more or less the same kind of way that Hamlet was in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but in this palimpsest most of the original writing has been rubbed out. The only quotation which is presented as such is a few lines of dialogue which Carr speaks off-stage’. – R. ­Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 119. 273 Travesties, page 66; The Importance of Being Earnest, page 71. 274 The Importance of Being Earnest, pages 92–93. 275 Tim Brassell comments, ‘The concept of setting characters within borrowed cultural ­patterns plainly owes much to Joyce, since Ulysses – in the use it makes of The Odyssey – provides the archetype for this kind of structure’. – T. Brassell, Tom Stoppard An Assessment, page 139.

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Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions to experience?276 And so on. Stoppard’s version continues in like manner: Joyce: Were there further disagreements between Tzara and Huelsenbeck? Tzara: There were. Joyce: As to? Tzara: As to the meaning and purpose of Dada. Joyce: Huelsenbeck demanding, for example? Tzara: International revolutionary union of all artists on the basis of radical Communism. Joyce: As opposed to Tzara demanding? Tzara: The right to urinate in different colours.277 And so on, also. Stoppard explains (or defends – it depends upon one’s point of view) this scene as a set of levels: ‘On one it’s Lady Bracknell quizzing Jack. Secondly the whole thing is actually structured on [the eighth] chapter in Ulysses, and thirdly it’s telling the audience what Dada is and where it comes from’.278 Tynan’s view is that ‘the scene resembles a triple-decker bus that isn’t going anywhere’.279 But, three decks on the bus just isn’t enough for Stoppard because he proceeds, for good measure, to wrap his vehicle in the language of his three main protagonists: Wilde, Joyce and Lenin. One example of each will suffice to illustrate the point. Stoppard borrows from Wilde quite deliciously all over the text with probably the finest example being the words he chooses, with great amusement, to give to Lenin: Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example what on earth is the use of them? They seem as a class to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility! To lose one revolution is unfortunate. To lose two would look like carelessness.280 which derives closely from two of the most famous of all Wildean quotations: 276 277 278 279 280

276 277 278 279 280

Ulysses, page 619. Travesties, page 41. Stoppard quoted in K. Tynan, ‘Withdrawing with Style from Chaos’. K. Tynan, ‘Withdrawing with Style from Chaos’. Travesties, page 58.

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Algernon: Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example what is the use of them. They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.281 and Lady Bracknell: To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.282 Stoppard lets Lenin speak for himself. In his Acknowledgements Stoppard states that, ‘Nearly everything spoken by Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya herein comes from his Collected Writings and from her Memories of Lenin’.283 An illustration comes with Cecily: As Nadezhda writes in her Memories of Lenin, ‘From the moment the news of the February revolution came, Ilyich burned with eagerness to go to Russia’.284 Joyce’s language is picked up straight away as Travesties commences with Joyce dictating parts of Ulysses: Joyce (Dictating to GWEN): Deshill holles eamus … Joyce: Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. … Joyce: Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa!285 Joyce is dictating the opening words to the chapter in Ulysses referred to most commonly as ‘Oxen of the Sun’:

281 282 283 284 285

281 282 283 284 285

Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. The Importance of Being Earnest, page 5. The Importance of Being Earnest, page 26. Travesties, page xii. Travesties, page 46. Travesties, page 2.

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Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa!286 This chapter in Ulysses corresponds to the episode in The Odyssey when Odysseus arrives in Thrinacia. In a letter Joyce explained its relevance to his Ulysses story as, ‘Oxen of the Sun, the idea being a crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition’.287 The chapter is interpreted as symbolizing the gestation period of the English language because Joyce uses various idiomatic styles of English, beginning with Anglo-Saxon and ending up with a version of modern day English, to provide a stylistic guide to literature. Other than representing the Joycean linguistic (for which, read artistic) notion of chaos I can only assume that Stoppard’s use of it in the opening prologue to Travesties symbolises the gestation period or process of the play itself and the arguments contained therein. Joyce was known for embracing a wide range of literary styles and Stoppard cannot resist the challenge, within the vehicle of Travesties, to do the same in a further reverberation of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ chapter in which Joyce ‘by a miracle of compression, uses the gamut of English literature from Chaucer to Carlyle’.288 Stoppard’s aim, he told Charles Marowitz, was to include ‘a minor anthology of styles-of-play, styles of language’.289 Accordingly, Stoppard produces a Joycean stock-in-trade; the stream of consciousness style, a good example of which is Carr’s description of his experience of war: Great days! The dawn breaking over no-man’s land – Dewdrops glistening on the poppies in the early morning sun! The trenches stirring to life!… ‘Good morning, corporal! All quiet on the Western Front?’…‘Tickety-boo, sir’ – ‘Carry on!’ – Wonderful spirit in the trenches – never in the whole course of human conflict was there anything to match the courage, the comradeship, the warmth, the cold, the mud, the stench – fear – folly Christ Jesu!290 Travesties offers up a torrent of limericks, for instance:

286 287 288 289 290

286 287 288 289 290

An impromptu poet of Hibernia rhymed himself into a hernia. Ulysses, page 366. Joyce, letter to Budgen in March 1920 – quoted in Explanatory Notes to Ulysses, page 905. Travesties, page 70. Stoppard – quoted in J. Fleming, Tom Stoppard Finding Order amid Chaos, page 105. Travesties, page 23.

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He became quite adept at the practice except for occasional anti-climaxes291 Stoppard also provides the poetry of Joyce’s Mr Dooley and two monologues – Carr’s and Cecily’s (particularly in the 1975 version). Even the nature of the Carr’s room in the set of the 1993 revival in London was in the style of ‘an Alicein-Wonderland look, all the furniture and bookcases were tilted, offering a continuous slant’.292 Act 2 contains a long scene in which Cecily and Gwendolen address each other in rhyme song, in part a parody of an old vaudeville song entitled ‘Mr Gallagher and Mr Shean’, such as: Oh Cecily, Oh Cecily… To say this gives me physical distress But one of Joyce’s chapters Sent Tristan into raptures On the subject of the stream of consciousness.293 The use of linguistic style becomes a metaphor for the arguments of Joyce, Tzara and Lenin. Lenin, in his own words and the snippets of Russian spoken by him and his wife symbolise his position. The literary mayhem of Joyce’s style emphasises his brand of artistic spontaneity whilst Tzara’s repeated chanting stands for his anti-art philosophy. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead illustrates how using an existing vehicle (just as he does with his adaptations of Chekhov, Schnitzler, Molnar et al) helps solve Stoppard’s difficulty with the narrative. He noted that, ‘I have enormous difficulty in working out plots, so actually to use Hamlet, or a classical whodunit, or another play…for a basic structure takes a lot of the pressure off me’.294 The first Stoppardian vehicle to be constructed around another play borrows the structure, themes and narrative of Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead grew not so much out of an idea but rather the two eponymous characters, which is unusual for Stoppard. He says that he ‘was not in the least interested in doing any sort of pastiche…or in doing a 291 292 293 294

291 292 293 294

Travesties, page 18. I. Nadel, Double Act A Life of Tom Stoppard, page 255. Travesties, page 65. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 60.

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­criticism of Hamlet – that was simply one of the by-products’.295 He explains his motivation: 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.…What was actually calculated was to entertain a roomful of people with the situation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at Elsinore.296 ‘Every exit being an entrance somewhere else’297 – the Player’s verdict on his craft encapsulates the vehicle of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Whereas in Travesties Stoppard extracted the structure and format of some scenes from one play (The Importance of Being Earnest) and transposed them into the characters and actions of another (Travesties), in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead he takes one play, Hamlet, and produces a mirror i­mage298 of it such that, in the Player’s words again, ‘we do on stage (in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) things that are supposed to happen off’299 (in Hamlet). Appendix 1 contains a matrix which analyses where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear in Hamlet and where the other characters in Hamlet appear in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It is as if there is a revolving door between the two plays as characters arrive in each play as they exit the other.300 At the same time Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead tells the story of what is going on in Elsinore and on the ship to England which is ­happening offstage, behind and alongside the unfolding of events in Hamlet. However, the story of 295 296 297 298 299 300

295 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 57. 296 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 57. 297 RosGuil, page 19. 298 Daniel Jernigan does not go as far as accepting the idea of the mirror image but he does highlight how Stoppard’s play interacts with Shakespeare’s. ‘Whenever the plot of Hamlet shifts away from ros and guil, R&G keeps ros and guil as its focus’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 18. 299 RosGuil, page 19. 300 See T. Brassell, Tom Stoppard: An Assessment, pages 43–47 for an assessment of the scenes where this is not quite the case.

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the dubious succession of Claudius and his hasty marriage to Gertrude is seen not through the eyes of her son, Hamlet, but through the experience of two minor courtiers; another example of Stoppard seeing the world from a different angle. Using the framework of the mirror image and revolving door Stoppard explores and weaves into his play the principal themes of Shakespeare’s. Against a play in which ‘the time is out of joint’301 Stoppard sets a play in which ‘times being what they are…Indifferent…Wicked’.302 Hamlet is a revenge tragedy in which eight characters – Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – die (plus a former king, Hamlet’s father, is murdered). Likewise, death is never far away in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: ‘Death followed by eternity…the worst of both worlds’,303 utters Guildenstern. There is a strong sense of fate in Hamlet – ‘My fate cries out’,304 as Hamlet shrugs off Marcellus’ entreaty not to visit his father’s ghost – which is matched by the focus in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on destiny and direction: the Player points out that, ‘There’s a design at work in all art…Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion’.305 Hamlet is also a play about playing: illusion and reality. It contains a play-within-aplay306 and a main character who has ‘that within which passeth show’.307 So, too, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.308 ‘What are you playing at?’309 is a question that the Player asks and to which Stoppard spends a good deal of the play offering possible answers. Both are plays about language. For Hamlet, it’s about ‘words, words, words’.310 It is a similar view one gets from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310

301 Hamlet, Act i, scene v, line 189. 302 RosGuil, page 14. 303 RosGuil, page 64. 304 Hamlet, Act i, scene iv, line 81. 305 RosGuil, page 71. 306 The Seagull also contains Konstantin’s aborted play-within-a-play. See The Seagull pages 412–414. 307 Hamlet, Act i, scene ii, line 85. 308 CWE. Bigsby notes that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead contains allusions to other plays – eg: (1) the parallel between ‘good old east’ and the reference to ‘good old north’ in Albee’s The Zoo Story; and, (2) the parallel between ‘Don’t clap too hard. It’s a very old world’. and Archie Rice’s instruction in Osborne’s The Entertainer of, ‘Don’t clap. It’s a very old building’. See CWE. Bigsby, Tom Stoppard, page 13. 309 RosGuil, page 19. 310 Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 193.

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Ros:  What are you playing at? Guil: Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.311 Although a little later they admit to certain difficulties: Ros:   Took the very words out of my mouth. Guil: You’d be lost for words. Ros:   You’d be tongue-tied.312 Stoppard also, on occasions, picks up the Shakespearian language to make the vehicle more convincing. A good comparison to illustrate the point is seen in the instructions given on how to play a pipe: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hamlet

Guildenstern to Rosencrantz ‘One of the sailors has pursed his lips against a woodwind, his ­fingers and thumbs governing, shall we say, the ventages, ­whereupon, ­giving it breath, let us say, with his mouth, it, the pipe, discourses, as the saying goes, most eloquent music’.313

Hamlet to Guildenstern ‘Govern these ventages with your finger and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music’.314

The result in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is, arguably, one of Stoppard’s best adaptations of the vehicle to the idea. Notwithstanding his original objective, if one writes a play which is so interlinked with Hamlet to the extent that Stoppard’s play exists in the wings of Shakespeare’s then it is inevitable (an appropriate conclusion, given the subject matter of the two plays) that the ideas under review in Stoppard’s play are precisely those contained within the vehicle of Shakespeare’s. On the third occasion Stoppard writes one of his plays around an existing play he takes not the structure of his target but the language it contains as his 311 312 313 314

311 312 313 314

RosGuil, page 32. RosGuil, page 53. RosGuil, page 104. Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, lines 333–335.

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vehicle.315 In Cahoot’s Macbeth Stoppard mines another Shakespearean tragedy in order to achieve two ends: firstly to get a demonstration of the practical application of Wittgenstein’s theory that language is learnt through experience of use and is, therefore, contextual; and, secondly to draw attention to the repressiveness of the totalitarian state. The vehicle is an illicit production of Macbeth by a group of actor dissidents, inspired by the Living-Room Theatre adopted in Czechoslovakia during its years of authoritarian government. In his usual, unwittingly ironic way the Inspector, the emblem of the state, identifies a key theme of Cahoot’s Macbeth: ‘…if it’s not free expression, I don’t know what is’.316 Stoppard draws out from Macbeth a host of references to speech, thereby emphasising that he is writing a play about Wittgenstein’s theory which is best exemplified by Banquo’s comment that alludes to the need to apply reason (ie: put into context) to language: Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?317 Other references to speaking, particularly emphasising the need for interpretation, include, ‘Tis not for you to hear what I can speak’,318 and ‘Have you considered of my speeches?’.319 The Inspector, unknowingly as ever, demonstrates Wittgenstein’s argument for putting speech in context by suggesting (using a Stoppardian play on words), ‘when in Rome parlezvous as the natives do’.320 Stoppard elides Macbeth into the world of a repressive society. He does so both structurally, as in physically mixing the two worlds, Lady Macbeth: I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. (A police siren is heard approaching the house. During the following ­dialogue the car arrives and the car doors are heard to slam.) 315 316 317 318 319 320

315 Stoppard largely passes up the chance to exploit the duality in much of the language of Macbeth. For an analysis of the ‘equivocation’ of language in Macbeth, see J. Shapiro, 1606 William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, Chapter 10: eg; ‘Equivocation permeates the play’. – page 214. 316 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 207. 317 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 180; Macbeth, Act i, scene iii, lines 83–85. 318 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 189; Macbeth, Act ii, scene iii, line 85. 319 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 196; Macbeth, Act iii, scene i, line 75. 320 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 190.

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Macbeth: There’s one did laugh in’s sleep, and one cried ‘Murder!’. One cried ‘God bless us!’ and ‘Amen’ the other, (Siren stops.) As they had seen me with these hangman’s hands.321 and by using the Shakespearean text to evoke aspects of a totalitarian state, such as the sinister knock on the door: ‘Whence is that knocking? (Sharp rapping.) How is’t with me when every noise appals me?’.322 The interweaving of Macbeth with the play is completed by Easy replicating the role of Banquo’s ghost: ‘His entrances and exits coincide with those for BANQUO’s GHOST…’.323 The Inspector’s perplexed cry, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’,324 is the crux of the play and its relationship with Macbeth. Easy, who has delivered blocks of wood to build a stage in Dogg’s Hamlet, where he learned to speak Dogg, is now delivering similar blocks to the Czech actors and he brings with him the Dogg language: ‘Useless…useless…Buxtons cake hops…artichoke almost Leamington Spa [Afternoon…afternoon…Buxton’s blocks and that…lorry from Leamington Spa.]’325 In the fashion of Wittgenstein the actors soon learn how to speak Dogg and use it to carry on their conversations in a way that ensures the Inspector cannot monitor them because he does not understand. He does, without realising it, use Dogg language in an ironically linguistic double entendre when he brings his usual, minatory charm to bear: ‘Who are you, pig face?’.326 ‘Pig-face’ in Dogg language means ‘Please’. Not only does Dogg language enable the actors to communicate secretively in front of the Inspector it also enables them to carry on their unauthorised performance under his very nose: Macbeth: Dominoes, et dominoes, et dominoes…[Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…]327 Furthermore, Stoppard provides a metaphorical link between the vehicle and his idea.328 The bloody Macbeth is a device of allusion to the authoritarian state, just as the Inspector stands as a symbol for it. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth

321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328

321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328

Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 184; Macbeth, Act ii, scene ii, lines 15, 22, 26–27. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 184; Macbeth, Act ii, scene ii, lines 57–58. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 198. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 205. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 202. Cahoot’s Macbeth, pages 186 and 205. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 209; Macbeth, Act v, scene v, line 29. Richard Corballis considers several explanations of the end of Cahoot’s Macbeth, including the metaphor of freedom, but adding a possible Stoppardian self-portrait and the use

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the eponymous protagonist misinterprets the witches’ prophesy – ‘none of woman born shall harm Macbeth’329 – and he misunderstands the warning: Child’s Voice: Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him. Macbeth:     That will never be. Who can impress the forest, bid the tree unfix his earth-bound root?330 Similarly, the Inspector can neither understand nor interpret the actors when they talk in Dogg’s language. Pushing the concept of the play-within-a-play to its limit as a vehicle, Stoppard twice makes the inner play the vehicle of his own play. Midway through The Real Inspector Hound Moon and Birdboot become characters in the play they start out watching as critics. By contrast, The Real Thing starts as a scene in the play inside Stoppard’s play and the acts of playing and playwriting ­continue to dominate the plot thereafter.331 ‘The play’s the thing’ sums up the vehicle 329 330 331

of gibberish as a last resort. See R. Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork, pages 135–137. 329 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 201; Macbeth, Act iv, scene i, lines 80–81. 330 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 202; Macbeth, Act iv, scene i, lines 92–96. 331 Daniel Jernigan draws attention to what are called ‘Chinese box worlds’ (DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 72), or recursive structures which repeat actions or scenes. (He credits Brian McHale in his book Postmodernist Fiction (page 112) for the term). Examples include the repeat scenes in The Real Inspector Hound and The Real Thing. Jernigan comments, ‘When the same scene plays itself out with Birdboot operating in the role of Simon, the resulting recursive structure causes interpretations to proliferate; so, too, do ontological questions concerning the boundary between stage and audience’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 27. By contrast, to the time slips associated with Carr’s memory lapses in Travesties he ascribes an epistemological explanation: “As Carr continues to outwardly struggle with his memory it soon becomes clear that Travesties” most fundamental concerns are epistemological’. (op cit, page 68). McHale’s definition of a Chinese-Box (op cit, page 112) – ‘a recursive structure results when you perform the same operation over and over again, each time operating on the product of the previous operation’. – sounds very similar to Valentine’s description of the iterative ­process of Chaos mathematics (Arcadia, pages 57–58). John Fleming also draws attention to the Chinese box nature of The Real Thing: ‘Like the written text, the stage design utilized a “Chinese boxes” type of self-referentiality, showing different levels of representation that have their own level of reality and that affect the perception of “reality”’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 160. Michael Billington says that ‘(The Real Thing’s) structure (is) like a series of Chinese boxes one deftly tucked inside another’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 146.

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of The Real Thing and Stoppard uses the contrast between the actor and the person behind him to act as an allegory for the contrast between private motivation and outward expression.332 This is most clearly seen in the contrast between Max’s verbally dextrous attitude to his discovery of Charlotte’s infidelity upon her return in House of Cards (= acting) and the harsh realism of the reactions of Max and Henry to Annie’s separate infidelities (= the real thing).333 Likewise the language of love in Ford’s (pages 39 and 45) Tis Pity She’s a Whore and, in particular, Strindberg’s Miss Julie is described by Henry as merely ‘happiness expressed in banality and lust’.334 The prime example of which Annie/(Julie): You’re quite the gentleman in that coat…charmant. Henry/(Jean): You flatter me, Miss Julie. Annie/(Julie): Flatter? I flatter. Henry/(Jean): I’d like to accept the compliment, but modesty forbids. And, of course, my modesty entails your insincerity. Hence, you flatter me.335 is to be contrasted with the real language of the characters in the play. But, this vehicle can only be pushed so far. Whilst the metaphor of playing suggests the contrast of illusion and reality, it does not always take account of motivation whilst the impulse driving love – another of the play’s themes – is certainly motivational but it does not always lead to a contrast between the outer act and the inner thought. If anything, the two Ruths of Night And Day go further towards exploring the contrast between the inner thought and the outward expression.336 It is a play about a man, Henry, writing plays: a man who is trying to find out what the real thing is in the course of his own relationships both as a man and a father. Henry declares, ‘I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion’.337 Stoppard proceeds to offer up a host of definitions of love. It’s ‘the sensation that the universe was dispensable minus one 332 333 334 335 336 337

332 See T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, pages 111–117: ‘Stoppard employs the complex device of the play-within-a-play to contrast the private speech of his fictional characters with the various witty, emotional poetic discourses they speak in Henry’s ‘House of Cards’ or in Strindberg’s Miss Julie or in Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’’. (page 111). 333 See also A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, pages 165–166. 334 The Real Thing, page 25. 335 The Real Thing, page 24/Miss Julie, pages 76–77 (in Miss Julie and Other Plays). 336 ‘Ruth’s real feelings have little to do with what she says and does’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 147. 337 The Real Thing, page 27.

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lady’338 which ‘blurs the distinction between everyone else who isn’t one’s lover’.339 In the words of Ford, as quoted in the play, it’s ‘a merry sickness’.340 ‘It’s no trick loving someone at their best’, says Henry, ‘Love is loving them at their worst’.341 There is an argument for fidelity. But, it’s also knowledge. Not knowledge in the sense discussed in Arcadia; a different kind of knowledge completely: It’s to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with.342 In the terminology of a man who has written a play called House Of Cards it is ‘the undealt card’.343 ‘There are no commitments’, Charlotte tells Henry, ‘only bargains. And they have to be made again every day’.344 Henry offers a variation: ‘No commitments. Only bargains. The trouble is I don’t really believe it. I’d rather be an idiot. It’s a kind of idiocy I like. “I use you because you love me. I love you so use me”’.345 Debbie, Henry and Charlotte’s daughter, explores what love might be in a more practical way: When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex.…everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but obviously not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn’t be at one time and the same time – I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all.346 Rather sagely, Henry points out that, ‘What free love is free of, is love’.347 Debbie observes and Henry later agrees, ‘Exclusive rights isn’t love, it’s colonization’.348 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348

338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348

The Real Thing, page 42. The Real Thing, page 27. The Real Thing, page 39. The Real Thing, page 45. The Real Thing, page 42. The Real Thing, page 43. The Real Thing, page 44. The Real Thing, page 45. The Real Thing, page 42. The Real Thing, page 42. The Real Thing, pages 43 and 52.

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Later on, however, he goes so far as to contend that it’s something slightly different; an ‘exclusive voracity’.349 Henry sums what he comes to conclude is his view of love, rather touchingly, as he reasons with Annie over her dalliance with Billy: ‘I can’t find a part of myself where you’re not important’.350 The play is laced with the consequences of what appears to be love at the time: how both Debbie and Charlotte lost their virginity – the mother cannot remember her lover’s name whilst the daughter lost hers at school; the numerous affairs and relationships that go on – Annie and Billy’s, Henry and Annie’s and Charlotte’s in Henry’s play, for example. It is also pain. While she is in the midst of her affair with Henry Annie admits ‘Max is so unhappy…He loves me, and he wants to punish me with his pain’.351 Two years later Annie admits that she has ‘to choose who I hurt and I choose you (ie: Henry) because I’m yours’.352 The nature of love is reflected in the metaphor of the play. Annie is first seen acting, ‘steaming with lust’,353 in Strindberg’s Miss Julie, a play in which love leads to suicide. Two years later she is in a production of Tis Pity She’s A Whore, a play about a more controversial form of love: incest. More than coincidentally Charlotte lost her virginity to the actor who played Giovanni to her Annabella, an act replicated in Ford’s play by the brother on his sister. So that the point is not lost Stoppard has Annie and Billy rehearse a scene of significance from Ford’s play, and not just once over – ‘once as in a “word rehearsal” and then again as an “acting rehearsal”’.354 Billy: Come, Annabella – no more sister now, But Love, a name more gracious, – do not blush Beauty’s sweet wonder, but be proud to know That yielding thou hast conquered,… I marvel why the chaster of your sex Should think this pretty toy called maidenhead So strange a loss, when, being lost, tis nothing, And you are still the same.355 349 350 351 352 353 354 355

349 350 351 352 353 354 355

The Real Thing, page 48. The Real Thing, page 53. The Real Thing, page 23. The Real Thing, page 53. The Real Thing, page 25. The Real Thing, page 45. The Real Thing, page 45.

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There is a minor metaphor running throughout the play in the background; the contrast between classical music and pop music. It begins with Henry choosing the records he is allowed to choose on Desert Island Discs, a long-running British radio programme in which a guest is asked to identify the eight records and one book he or she would take with them to an imaginary desert island. Henry vacillates between the classical genre, which symbolises the intellectual playwright he supposes himself to be, and pop which he likes – an example of the contrast between the inner person and its outward manifestation which is what prompted Stoppard to write the play. As a metaphor it reflects what Debbie tells him should be the criterion of choice: ‘It’s supposed to be the eight records you associate with the turning points in your life’.356 As Charlotte points out, she is a turning point. So, too, is Henry’s later choice for Annie and Annie’s rejection of Max. It’s the choices love makes. In the end the song that gets played is ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, a pop song by Procul Harum which is derived from Bach’s classical tune Air On A G String. This being Stoppard, when a joke beckons he cannot resist: Annie: (pleased) Do you like it? Henry: I love it. Annie: (congratulating him) It’s Bach. Henry: The cheeky beggar. Annie: What? Henry: He’s stolen it. Annie: Bach? Henry: Note for note. Practically a straight lift from Procul Harum.357 But, also because it’s Stoppard, nothing here is wasted. The lyrics of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ refer to ‘The Miller’s Tale’, the cuckolding story from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales about a man whose wife is conducting a relationship behind his back with their lodger. Further Stoppardian economy is evident in the lyrics’ reference to ‘playing cards’ – Max is building a card pyramid at the start of the play in a play called House Of Cards – and ‘if music be the food of love’358 (itself derived from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night). 356 357 358

356 The Real Thing, page 7. 357 The Real Thing, page 51. 358 ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, written by Gary Brooker, Keith Reid and Matthew Fisher. The Shakespearean reference comes in a fourth verse and is believed to have been played not on recordings but occasionally in live performance. Twelfth Night, Act i, scene i, line 1.

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The interaction of the vehicle of The Real Thing and one of its principal themes comes in the form of Henry, the playwright’s, inability to write about love: I don’t know how to write love. I try to write it properly, and it just comes out embarrassing. It’s either childish or it’s rude. And the rude bits are absolutely juvenile. I can’t use any of it.359 Stoppard will return to the situation of a writer who is having trouble writing in Shakespeare in Love. For now, Annie is left to stress the theme of the writer: ‘You write because you’re a writer. Even when you write about something, you have to think up something to write about just so you can keep writing’.360 The Real Thing’s first scene opens in the midst of a play. Against a background of plays ancient and modern – Tis Pity She’s A Whore and Miss Julie and the imaginary House Of Cards – the play itself draws the battle lines of a debate about the morality of writing. Henry is not The Real Thing’s only playwright. Brodie has written one, too. Only ‘it’s rubbish’361 – the sort of play which goes ‘“clunk” every time someone opens his mouth’362 Furthermore, part of the moral argument hinges on Henry’s decision to rewrite Brodie’s play.

The Vehicle Comes First

Very occasionally Stoppard gets the vehicle before the idea. This is the case, as he explains in his Introduction to Every Good Boy Deserves Favour:

359 360 361 362 363

359 360 361 362 363

Usually, and preferably, a play originates in the author’s wish to write about some particular thing. The form of the play then follows from the requirements of the subject. This time I found myself trying to make the subject follow from the requirements of the form. Mr Previn and I agreed early on that we would try to go beyond a mere recitation for the concert platform, and also that we were not writing a piece for singers. In short, it was going to be a real play, to be performed in conjunction with, and bound up with, a symphony orchestra.363 The Real Thing, page 24. The Real Thing, page 33. The Real Thing, page 35. The Real Thing, page 55. egbdf, page 5.

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Stoppard then proceeds to explain how the cart pulled the horse into the idea of the play. Originally Stoppard came up with the idea of a millionaire triangle player who had his own orchestra. That premise migrated into an imaginary orchestra in the mind of a lunatic triangle player. Then, Stoppard met Victor Fainberg, a Russian dissident who had been part of a group of people protesting in Red Square about the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He had been pronounced insane and sent to a Soviet prison-hospital. That gave Stoppard the final inspiration for the idea: I don’t recall that I consciously made the metaphor, but very soon I was able to tell Mr Previn, definitively, that the lunatic triangle-player who thought he had an orchestra was now sharing a cell with a political prisoner. I had something to write about and in a few weeks the play was finished.364 As with so much in Stoppard, the exception proves the rule. Regardless of whether Stoppard’s cart was before his horse Every Good Boy Deserves Favour produces a vehicle which admirably reflects the subject matter he wishes to cover: the rights of the individual in a repressive society. The metaphorical ­vehicle of the orchestra to tackle such a subject is one of Stoppard’s strongest. As he puts it, ‘The subject matter seemed appropriate to the form: the dissident is a discordant note in a highly orchestrated society’.365 The metaphor is fused together with the idea as Ivanov, a genuine mental patient, has in his head an imaginary orchestra and is forced to share a cell with Alexander, ‘a political prisoner’.366 The play has another orchestra, a real one in which the doctor at the asylum plays the violin. The orchestra plays the role of a metaphor of the repressive society in which the individual is merely part of the whole. In The Coast of Utopia the same idea occurs in the similarly repressive Russian society of the mid-nineteenth century. Sazonov argues, rather ominously for the Sacha of the next century, ‘An orchestra is a very good metaphor. There is no contradiction between individual freedom and duty to the collective…because being in the orchestra is the individual right’.367 As Sacha’s teacher says, A ­ lexander, the boy’s father and a dissident, is forced, like a naughty schoolboy, to repeat 364 365 366 367

364 egbdf, page 7. 365 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The dissident is a discordant note in a highly orchestrated society’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 34. 366 egbdf, page 15. 367 Shipwreck, page 37.

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the line, ‘I am a member of an orchestra and we must play together’.368 Alexander, by contrast, ‘do(es) not play an instrument’369 Sacha, just like his father, does not ‘want to be in the orchestra’,370 either. The doctor is a violinist in a real orchestra and the string section is at times choreographed to copy his actions uniformly. Both the teacher and the doctor, the two characters in the play whose job it is to brainwash people with ideological orthodoxy, symbolically take their places in the real orchestra at the end of the play, as does the released Ivanov. The triangle itself is also a significant part of Stoppard’s allegory. In what is probably Stoppard’s most appalling pun the uniformity of society is reflected in Ivanov’s statement that, ‘Everyone is equal to the triangle’.371 The metaphor continues as Sacha’s schoolbook is a geometry textbook from which he is forced to quote, ‘A Triangle is the polygon bounded by the fewest possible sides.’372 – in other words, symbolic of the narrowest minded society restricting the views of its members as tightly as possible. Stoppard pursues the symbolism of the geometric triangle further as he makes Ivanov refer to the ‘five postulates of Euclid’.373 The first four postulates all relate to the properties of geometric equality, which have metaphorical significance in a totalitarian society, and the last asserts that the whole is greater than the part.374 But, the triangle plays a double metaphor because it is ‘a subversive triangle’.375 Stoppard instructs it to be ‘struck randomly and then rapidly’, putting the orchestra off until, ‘it is the only instrument to be heard’.376 At the beginning of the play, where Stoppard usually wants to grab his audience’s attention, the triangle is used to emphasise the individual in society as Ivanov begins to strike his own triangle and gradually, as the audience enters Ivanov’s head, the sound of the whole orchestra is revealed ‘with the conductor in position and the orchestra playing fully and loudly’.377 Significantly, continuing the metaphor, ‘the triangle is a prominent part in the symphony’.378 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378

368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378

egbdf, page 20. egbdf, page 17. egbdf, page 19. egbdf, page 34. egbdf, page 20. egbdf, page 34. See Euclid, Elements. egbdf, page 18. egbdf, page 19. egbdf, page 16. egbdf, page 16.

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The Worked Example

The time shift structure in Arcadia allows Stoppard to give a practical demonstration of the bifurcation process in Chaos Theory which produces order from chaos. He repeats the worked example in other vehicles. Stoppard uses one aspect of the vehicle of Professional Foul to answer the issue he sets out to address: the play demonstrates that moral theory is no good without moral action and that moral lessons can be learned from experience. The play also illustrates how important to Stoppard it is to get the vehicle properly integrated with the idea, as he explains: As you get further into it you have to integrate the internal profound subject matter with the narrative subject. You’ve got to actually make them the same thing.…it’s better in some way if you integrate the deep subject matter with the top subject matter so that if somebody is going to be in Prague to tell me something about moral absolutes then it doesn’t do any harm if his profession is moral philosophy.379 The overall vehicle of Professional Foul, a play about the ethical relationship between the individual and the State, is a conference, the Colloquium Philosphicum Prague 1977, attended by a collection of moral philosophers. Titles of papers to be delivered at the colloquium include ‘Ethical Fictions as Ethical Foundations’. The title of the conference at once evokes an association with Charter 77, a document signed by 241 people pointing out that the Czech government was in default of its obligations under the Helsinki Accords of 1975, to which it was a signatory, which guaranteed certain human rights: The human rights and freedoms underwritten by these covenants constitute features of civilized life for which many progressive movements have striven throughout history and whose codification could greatly assist humane developments in our society. We accordingly welcome the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic’s accession to those agreements. Their publication, however, serves as a powerful reminder of the extent to which basic human rights in our country exist, regrettably, on paper alone.380 379 380

379 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Bragg, ‘The South Bank Show’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 121. 380 Charter 77.

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The Charter was drawn up in response to the imprisonment of three members of the Czech rock band the Plastic People of the Universe and its manager, Jirous, who symbolically represent the case for ‘free expression’381 in Rock ‘N’ Roll. One of the signatories referred to in the Charter, Dr Vaclav Havel, is the model for Ferdinand, a dissident character in Rock ‘N’ Roll, and who is described as writing ‘a long letter to Husak’382 ‘about what’s gone wrong in Czechoslovakia, the apathy, the spiritual paralysis, the self-destructive tendency of what he calls post-totalitarian…’.383 Havel’s tactics are in contrast to the behaviour of rock musicians which tests the regime in an altogether different way because it is ‘frightened by the indifference’384 of their approach. Stoppard adds a twist to the vehicle by devising a practical moral dilemma which is an example of one of the ethical ‘test situations’385 that Anderson, one of the delegates, refers to and is the basis upon which he addresses the issues that motivated the purpose of the play. The dilemma refers to a position Anderson finds himself in, all because he has accepted an invitation from the Czech government to attend the Colloquium whilst at the same time he secretly has a ticket to attend an international football match being played contemporaneously in Prague. On the journey out he finds himself sitting next to McKendrick, a fellow delegate who argues for catastrophe theory;386 a practical application of ethics that suggests when two moral principles contradict each other the rational man, at the point of contradiction, will reverse his behaviour. Anderson confides to McKendrick that he has another, hidden reason, in addition to attendance at the conference, for going to Prague but when McKendrick, his curiosity aroused, enquires as to what the secret purpose is, Anderson replies, ‘I don’t think I am going to tell you. You see, if I tell you I make you a co-conspirator whether or not you would have wished to be one’.387 This, however, is merely a minor ethical dilemma compared with what Anderson is presented with during his stay. Anderson meets a former pupil of his, Hollar, who asks him to smuggle out a thesis about the relationship of the ethics of the individual and those of the State which draws what in the eyes of 381 382 383 384 385 386 387

381 382 383 384 385 386

Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 45. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 49. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 47. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 48. Professional Foul, page 79. For background material on catastrophe theory see J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, Notes 11 and 12, Page 280. 387 Professional Foul, page 47.

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the repressive regime of Czechoslovakia is ‘not a safe conclusion’.388 Anderson refuses, citing ‘bad manners’ as his reason. Here is the moral dilemma Stoppard has set up within the vehicle of his play. Does Anderson respect the human rights, of freedom of expression, of Hollar or the laws of Czechoslovakia, whose guest he is? Unlike George in Jumpers, Anderson is faced with a practical application of an ethical question in the harsh reality of a Communist, totalitarian State rather than imaginary world of the Radical Liberals. In the words of McKendrick, Anderson has ‘end(ed) up using a moral principle as (his) excuse for acting against a moral interest’.389 Anderson is persuaded to change, or reverse in McKendrick’s terms, his point of view when he witnesses Hollar’s home being searched and is faced with the pleading of Hollar’s wife and son. First of all he changes his speech to reflect an altered moral position in which he abandoned his view that ‘the individual ethic…flow(s) from the collective ethic’390 in the form of a contract; an act which is also described by the Chairman as a ‘discourtesy’391 and Anderson as ‘bad manners’392 which equates in his terms to a breach of local law. Even more significantly, Anderson does smuggle out Hollar’s document, not in his own luggage but by hiding it in McKendrick’s on the grounds that the authorities would be ‘very unlikely’393 to search him. As Anderson confesses, with huge moral irony and much to his fellow delegate’s ire, he thought that ­McKendrick ‘would approve’,394 in an example of McKendrick’s catastrophe theory in action, of how he ‘had reversed a principle’.395 Anderson has reversed his earlier decision in three ways: practically, he is now smuggling the thesis; morally he has given primacy to Hollar’s human rights over his hosts’ local laws – a position his revised lecture argued for; morally, too, he has reversed his earlier refusal to make McKendrick a co-conspirator when in refusing to divulge his secret purpose in visiting Prague he had reasoned, ‘Ethically, I should give you the opportunity of choosing to be one or not’.396 McKendrick’s reaction to Anderson’s pragmatic view that he was unlikely to be searched – ‘That’s not the bloody point’397 – shows the shock of what happens when ethics are 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397

388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397

Professional Foul, page 55. Professional Foul, page 78. Professional Foul, page 55. Professional Foul, page 88. Professional Foul, page 88. Professional Foul, page 93. Professional Foul, page 93. Professional Foul, page 93. Professional Foul, page 47. Professional Foul, page 93.

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moved from the abstract of academia and applied in the real world. Anderson’s actions demonstrate how, by means of the vehicle, Stoppard fulfilled his purpose in writing the play: ‘I wanted to write about somebody coming from England to a totalitarian society, brushing up against it, and getting a little soiled and a little wiser’.398 In Professional Foul Stoppard adds a further metaphorical element to his ethical vehicle which, because of its limitations, isn’t quite so successful. In reversing his decision over Hollar’s thesis Anderson has committed what may be described as a ‘professional foul’, in two senses: as a man whose business is ethics he has broken his originally held ethical view; and, he has ‘fouled’ his companion by putting him at risk of arrest. The term ‘professional foul’ is also used in a sporting sense to describe a situation in which a footballer, in order to deny an opponent a chance to gain an advantage on the field of play, deliberately fouls him, taking the view that the moral crime of breaking the rules is a price worth paying to avoid the risk of losing a goal. Anderson’s second, ­secret purpose in visiting Prague is to attend an England versus Czechoslovakia World Cup qualifying football match. An England footballer, Roy, has, indeed, committed a professional foul, as McKendrick describes: Roy here is sensitive because he gave away a penalty today, by a deliberate foul. To stop a certain goal he hacked a chap down. After all, a penalty might be saved and broken legs are quite rare.399 It is another example of a moral dilemma with a practical application in the real world. It enables McKendrick to have a ‘philosophical discussion about the yob ethics of professional footballers’400 with a bunch of football journalists and members of the England squad who are all staying in the same hotel. It permits McKendrick to soar off in flights of philosophical sporting fancy – what motivates footballers?, should their behaviour be exemplary?, how are teams organised from an anthropological point of view? – until one of the footballers complains that, ‘his philosophy is getting up my nostrils’,401 and punches him. The football metaphor allows Stoppard to run a few weaker allusions. McKendrick can say that ‘I still think of myself as a bit of a left-winger at Stoke’,402 398 399 400 401 402

398 Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 156. 399 Professional Foul, page 83. 400 Professional Foul, page 83. 401 Professional Foul, page 85. 402 Professional Foul, page 60.

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referring to his philosophical position at the university but also punning the fact that Stoke City is an English football team and left-wing is a playing position in a football team. Equally, the term ‘qualifier’, used in the context of a World Cup football match, apes the language Stone uses to describe his linguistically philosophical problem which reflects his ethically relativist standpoint: ‘The qualifier takes its meaning from the contextual force of the verb it qualifies’.403 The football metaphor does not have the legs to sustain the vehicle in the way the moral dilemma and the philosophical colloquium does, however. It is worth noting that the practical nature of the moral dilemmas in Professional Foul is in contrast to the abstract dilemmas contained in the ‘thought experiment(s)’404 of Darkside. In his radio play Stoppard presents a series of hypothetical situations which contain moral questions. In a leaky hot-air balloon ‘someone had to go over the side’ and it turned to be the ‘fattest first, (which) saved the lives of three thin balloonists’.405 Another concerns ‘three passengers on a private aeroplane. The pilot has had a heart attack and has died at the controls. There is only one parachute. The passengers are a politician, a banker and a moral philosopher’.406 In Stoppard’s amusing world it is, of course, the moral philosopher who gets the parachute! The most famous is the prisoner’s dilemma, as Baggott, the lecturer in ethics, describes: Two prisoners. They can’t confer. They’re thinking. If they both keep silent, nothing can be proved. If they give evidence against each other, their lives will be spared and they’ll go to prison. But…if one keeps silent and the other turns state’s evidence…Spot the dilemma!407 The prisoner’s dilemma recurs in much greater detail in The Hard Problem which, like Professional Foul, sees the vehicle of the play provide a real example of the idea of the play. The Hard Problem explores the nature of consciousness which leads to questions of motivation and, therefore, human behaviour. In order to match the vehicle of the play to the idea Stoppard infuses the narrative with numerous examples of the very behaviour he is observing – a touch too many for the audience to follow in their entirety.408 Hilary applies for and gets a job at a brain research institute which is run by a hedge fund manager, Jerry

403 404 405 406 407 408

403 404 405 406 407 408

Professional Foul, page 62. Darkside, pages 9, 12, 16, 24, 26 and 46. Darkside, page 24. Darkside, page 17. Darkside, pages 31–32. Nicholas Hytner remarked on, ‘how intricately (The Hard Problem) is constructed’, in his interview with Stoppard, 6 February 2015.

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Krohl, where she supervises ‘a variation of a well-known experiment’,409 the purpose of which is to test for what she defines as, ‘Motivation. Egoist motives and altruistic motives’.410 The nature of the experiment is to fool the subjects into thinking they are answering one question when, in fact, they are answering another. As such it is a metaphor for the play in which Stoppard superficially asks questions about the nature of consciousness and elicits answers about the nature of morality and, in particular, God. It raises the issue of altruism and the play contains various examples of such behaviour. ‘Jerry’s money was seed money for the Institute’, Hilary tells Bo, her junior, who replies, ‘He did something good with it’.411 Jerry and his wife also adopted their daughter, Cathy. ‘You brought her up’, Hilary asks Jerry, ‘– is altruistic behaviour a big thing with you and Mrs Krohl?’.412 A smaller example of selflessness is the necklace, ‘a holiday gift’413 according to Stoppard’s stage directions which Hilary gives Bo on her return from her trip to Venice. The play commences with one of Stoppard’s statements of intent as Spike and Hilary are discussing the prisoner’s dilemma – a standard problem of game theory which is the basis of Jerry’s wealth as he is, to quote Bo, ‘Gaming the market to make more money for people with money’.414 Game theory is used as a mathematical way of analysing human behaviour and, in particular, its motivation. The Hard Problem contains an example of a game theory problem as two scientists – Hilary and Bo – produce a flawed paper and their behaviour in the aftermath concerns who should take the blame. But, typical Stoppard, he introduces an element that game theory cannot admit: the altruism for which Hilary’s motivational experiment is testing. Hilary volunteers to take the blame for Bo’s mistake. In a letter to Stoppard Armand Marie Leroi concludes his review of the history of behavioural motivation – rooted in materialist explanations but allowing (just) for a metaphysical explanation – as follows:

409 410 411 412 413 414

…while it’s true that genomic and sociological Big Data are closing in, the variance explained by our predictive models – all of them – remains derisory. Whether this is just due to the models’ inadequacy, or

409 The Hard Problem, page 39. Hilary is referring to the experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram. 410 The Hard Problem, page 39. 411 The Hard Problem, page 42. 412 The Hard Problem, page 74. 413 The Hard Problem, page 54. 414 The Hard Problem, page 42.

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an i­ndeterminacy at the root of human affairs as well, we do not know. Perhaps we never shall.415 Stoppard replicates the point in Amal’s verdict, couched in the context of game theory and Darwinian argument, on the financial markets which Krohl Capital Markets plays: In theory, the market is a stream of rational acts by self-interested people; so risk ought to be computable, and the models can be proved mathematically to crash about once in the lifetime of the universe. But every now and then, the market’s behaviour becomes irrational, as though it’s gone mad, or fallen in love. It doesn’t compute.416 Stoppard presents the financial markets as a sophisticated game. Amal, once again, explains: ‘The market is a belief system with a short-term memory, and it’s leveraged on highly correlated billion-dollar bets – and trillions on side bets – which are going to go wrong together. I mean to zero’.417 It is a competitive environment, as is the selection process for candidates’ acceptance into the Krohl Institute. Hilary is ‘competing to do a doctorate at the Krohl Institute’,418 in rivalry with Amal for a place in a process which is described by Ursula in reference to her academic colleague: ‘…picking a winner from the slush is Leo’s little vanity’.419 The key to Jerry’s success is information and it is a subtle play by Stoppard on what David Chalmers identifies as the key to the hard problem of consciousness. Chalmers describes two forms of consciousness: mechanistic forms which are relatively ‘easy’ to understand; and, the ‘hard’ problem which involves the application of experience. Chalmers most favoured explanation of the hard problem is a ‘basic principle … (which) involves the notion of information’.420 He goes on to add that, ‘we are led to a conception of the world on which information is truly fundamental’.421 ‘You need more information’,422 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422

415 416 417 418 419 420

AM. Leroi, letter to Stoppard. The Hard Problem, page 69. The Hard Problem, pages 33 to 34. The Hard Problem, page 5. The Hard Problem, page 21. D. Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3) 1995. 421 D. Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3) 1995. 422 The Hard Problem, page 27.

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Jerry tells his daughter Cathy, as he explains the idea of a coincidence to his daughter Cathy. Rather like the easy and hard cognitive processes happening simultaneously to form consciousness Jerry tells Cathy that ‘a coincidence is two things happening at the same time’.423 The resolution of the play rests on a coincidence – the daughter that Hilary gave up at birth is the same girl whom Jerry and his wife adopt. When Hilary describes this as a miracle Jerry’s response typifies both his attitude (offering a clue as to how he has made his money) and ensures that both Stoppard’s play and Chalmers’ theory rest on the same explanation: ‘A miracle? No. A coincidence. I don’t believe in miracles. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe in coincidence either. You didn’t have the information’.424 In explaining to Cathy how she might reduce the odds of a coincidence occurring on what she might bet a pound Jerry illustrates how information helped him get rich.425 Jerry:  You need more information. Everything that makes the coincidence smaller and smaller till you decide it’s worth betting your pound, is information. Cathy: Did you have more information? Jerry:    Oh, yes. Cathy: Did you bet on your coincidence? Jerry:    Oh, yes. In fact, it wasn’t really a coincidence any more.426 In the London staging by the Royal National Theatre of the play’s first run in 2015 the issues in the play were underpinned by two effects: one visual, the other aural. Above the stage was an installation comprising an interwoven series of neon tubes ‘like a map of the London Underground with eighty six billion stations connected thirty trillion ways…’427 which lit up in various colours to mimic the pulses of brain activity. In between scenes a pianist played Bach’s Preludes, an exercise in counterpoint which symbolised the contemporaneous 423 424 425 426 427

423 The Hard Problem, page 26. 424 The Hard Problem, page 76. 425 It is interesting to note how knowledge, according to Daniel Jernigan, had hitherto in Stoppard’s works been so rarely linked with power. Writing in 2012 Jernigan says, ‘In Stoppard, however, there is nothing (or at least very little) about the relationship between power and knowledge’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 12. 426 The Hard Problem, pages 27 to 28. 427 The Hard Problem, page 7. Coveney describes it as, ‘a spaghetti-like cranium of tubular veins that light up’. See M. Coveney, ‘Stoppard’s parting gift to Nicholas Hytner is unashamedly clever’ in What’s On Stage, 29 January 2015.

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operation of hard and easy mechanisms to form consciousness. Stoppard uses the same analogy in a structural way when he constructs two simultaneous telephone calls between Jerry and a client and Cathy and Jerry’s wife. Stoppard’s stage directions specify that, ‘Their voices more or less dovetail’,428 thereby mimicking symbolically the operation of consciousness.

The Vehicle as Man

The vehicle of The Invention of Love is the dream-reminiscence of a man, AE Housman, who is passing away. It is not historically accurate and does not pretend to be: ‘It’s not biographical’, Stoppard admits. ‘Things happen that never happened. The whole thing never happened… In real life Wilde and Housman never met, for example’.429 Unlike Carr and Crewe the memory is not of a minor or peripheral character but of a renowned classical scholar and poet. However, there is still a sense of the road less travelled for while Housman is highly regarded he is not as well-known as one of the other protagonists, Oscar Wilde. ‘Wilde was the one who crashed and burned’, says Stoppard, ‘Housman the one who died a success. But from our standpoint, from 1997, it’s Wilde who is the success, and Housman the ­failure’.430 Because it is a dream it affords Stoppard a vast licence both in terms of subject matter – art, morality, poetry, classical scholarship, the nature of love, freedom – and also the flexibility with which it is treated. Unusually for Stoppard the vehicle and chief focus of the play is an individual,431 although he had undertaken a dry run of the concept a few years 428 429 430 431

428 The Hard Problem, page 28. 429 Stoppard, in an interview with T. Hill, ‘The poet punts down the Styx’, Daily Telegraph 4 October 1997. 430 Stoppard, in an interview with T. Hill, ‘The poet punts down the Styx’, Daily Telegraph 4 October 1997. 431 Holger Sudkamp suggests that the focus on individuals, particularly historical ­individuals, is not so unusual in Stoppard’s works. For example: ‘with his focus on the individual in history and by broaching the question of the (im)possibility of its reconstruction, Stoppard is not only a historical, but chiefly a biographical dramatist’. – Tom Stoppard’s Biographical Drama, page 2. He cites Travesties, Squaring the Circle, Shakespeare in Love, Enigma, E­ mpire of the Sun, The Coast of Utopia trilogy, Galileo, Indian Ink, Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Invention of Love and Arcadia as examples. ­Sudkamp’s ­argument includes the contentions that ‘a purely fictitious character becomes the biographical subject in Indian Ink, giving the term “fictional biography” an entirely new meaning’ (op cit, page 6), ‘the only historical character in Arcadia is Lord Byron,

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earlier with a fictional character, Flora Crewe. This is a complete departure from Stoppard’s usual process of developing an idea and vehicle for his subject matter and even he admits the novelty: It is character-based isn’t it? I’ve always started with an idea before, often quite separate from whoever was in the play. This time I’ve started with whoever is in the play.432 Born in Worcestershire, Housman lived from 1859 to 1936. He attended St. John’s College, Oxford, where he read Classics and, thereafter, worked in the Her Majesty’s Patent Office and eventually became Kennedy Professor of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge. Contained within the character of Housman are three themes that dominate the play and the ideas it highlights: Housman is both a pre-eminent classical scholar and a highly regarded poet.433 Furthermore, a key feature of his life was his love for another man, Moses Jackson, at a time when such love was illegal and, in Housman’s case, was repressed. Significantly, in terms of the play, as Stoppard explains, ‘It all goes on in Housman’s head’.434 The crux of the play’s treatment of its first theme, love, is a Latin poem, Horace’s ‘Ode iv, 7’, which is often referred to by its opening words, ‘Diffugere nives’ (‘The snows are fled away’).435 Housman produced a translation of the poem 432 433 434 435

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who dominates the play by means of his constant stage absence. At the same time he has the function of the (meta)biographical butterfly of the so-called butterfly effect’. (op cit, page  5) and that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is ‘Stoppard’s first biography play’. (op cit, page 4). Stoppard, in an interview with T. Hill, ‘The poet punts down the Styx’, Daily Telegraph 4 October 1997. Melina Probst takes issue with Stoppard’s own analysis, arguing that, ‘(The Invention of Love’s) topics are too complex for the play’s concern to be mainly an indepth psychological portrait, and the characters are too complex for the play to be merely ­topical’. – M. Probst, ‘The Inauthentic Translations in The Invention of Love’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 203. ‘Classical literature and their scholarship become a metaphor for the (im)possibility of biographical reconstruction, and the dichotomous nature of the historical Housman becomes a structuring device for the play’. – H. Sudkamp, Tom Stoppard’s Biographical Drama, page 7. Stoppard, in an interview with T. Hill, ‘The poet punts down the Styx’, Daily Telegraph 4 October 1997. Alastair Macaulay observes that, ‘Horace’s poem Diffugere nives recurs throughout the play’. For his analysis of the poem’s use in the play and how, like Housman’s duality, it exhibits, ‘a division in Horace’s thought as well as in Housman’s’, see A. Macaulay, ‘Tom

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in his edition of More Poems, published posthumously,436 and it was printed, in both Latin and English, in the programme notes to the original production at the Royal National Theatre in 1997. The poem, in particular, contains the story of Theseus, king of Athens, and his friend, Pirithous. Pirithous persuaded Theseus to go to the underworld with him to kidnap Persephone, the wife of Hades. Hades traps them, though. Hercules, in the midst of one of his labours, encounters them and frees Theseus, but he cannot free Pirithous. The poem had enormous significance for Housman. In May 1914, during his lectures at 436

Stoppard: A.E. Housman, and the Classics’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, pages 159–160. 436 The Housman translation: The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws And grasses in the mead renew their birth, The river to the river-bed withdraws, And altered is the fashion of the earth. The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear And unapparelled in the woodland play. The swift hour and the brief prime of the year Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye. Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers Comes autumn with his apples scattering; Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs. But oh, whate’er the sky-led seasons mar, Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams; Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams. Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add The morrow to the day, what tongue has told? Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had The fingers of no heir will ever hold. When thou descendest once the shades among, The stern assize and equal judgment o’er, Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue, No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more. Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain, Diana steads him nothing, he must stay; And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain The love of comrades cannot take away.

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Cambridge, Housman reached Horace’s ‘Ode iv, 7’. He introduced it with the words, ‘I should like to spend the last few minutes considering this ode as simply poetry’. That struck many of his students as odd, for a man who valued textual criticism so highly would normally regard such an approach as ‘beneath contempt’. He proceeded to read the poem through, first in Latin and then in English and he did so ‘with deep emotion’. He finished thus: That’, he said hurridly almost like a man betraying a secret, ‘I regard as the most beautiful poem in ancient literature’, and walked quickly out of the room. Afterwards an undergraduate, a scholar of Trinity commented: ‘I felt quite uncomfortable. I was afraid the old fellow was going to cry’.437 Stoppard allows the audience to recognize the significance of this particular poem to Housman, albeit some time after its deployment with such devastating impact in Act 1. In Act 2 Housman says, ‘Diffugere nives goes through me like a spear…I think it’s the most beautiful poem in Latin or Greek there ever was’.438 Despite his focus on textual criticism aeh concedes to Housman that there may be other reasons for reading the ancient poets. He even gives Horace as an example: …it may even improve your inner nature, if the miraculous collusion of sound and sense in, let us say, certain poems by Horace, teaches humility in regard to adding to the store of available literature by, let us say, yourself.439 This quotation highlights the duality Stoppard wishes to explore in the human personality. It also suggests the contrast between the inner self and public portrayal which Stoppard explores in The Real Thing. The ‘inner nature’ resembles the poet in Housman, who describes the poem thus:

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Horace must have been a god when he wrote ‘Diffugere nives’ – the snows fled, and the seasons rolling around each year but for us, when we’ve had our turn, it’s over! – you can’t order words in English to get near it –440

437 Quoted from R. Graves, ‘A.E. Housman, The Scholar Poet’ in the programme notes to the 1997 Royal National Theatre production of The Invention of Love. 438 The Invention of Love, page 71. 439 The Invention of Love, page 31. 440 The Invention of Love, page 40.

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By contrast, the classical scholar in aeh sees classical scholarship as ‘the science of textual criticism’.441 To make his point aeh produces a working example of his talent for textual emendation by citing Horace’s ‘Odes Four, one’.442 He demonstrates that the Latin word ‘bella’ can mean either the adjective ‘beautiful’ or the noun ‘war’ and that previous translations of it as the former (notably by the unfortunate academic, Mr Fry) are wrong. It makes correct sense only when taken in the context of Book Three of the Odes: Ten years after announcing in Book Three that he was giving up love, the poet feels desire stirring once more and begs for mercy: ‘Venus, are you calling me to arms after this long time of truce? Spare me, I be you, I beg you!’443 But Horace’s Ode only serves to show that the ‘inner nature’ aeh was referring to has a second meaning: the inner morality that a human being has. aeh almost provides a definition: ‘Science for our material advancement, classics for our inner nature. The beautiful and the good. Culture. Virtue. The ideas and moral influence of the ancient philosophers’.444 In Housman’s case this was an illicit and repressed love for another man, Moses Jackson. Act 1 closes with a scene of immense poignancy and import as aeh, having finished his lesson on how to emend correctly Horace’s text, recites Horace’s ‘Ode iv, 1’, in which Horace describes his repressed and unrequited love for Ligurinus, against Stoppard’s stage direction of ‘Jackson is seen as a runner running towards us from the dark, getting no closer’.445 The audience knows that Jackson figuratively is Ligurinus as Pollard later hails him as, ‘Ave Ligurine!’.446

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I take no pleasure in woman or boy, nor the trusting hope of love returned, nor matching drink for drink, nor binding fresh-cut flowers around my brow…but why, Ligurinus, alas why this unaccustomed tear trickling down my cheek? – why does my glib tongue stumble to silence as I speak? At night I hold you fast in my dreams, I run after you across the Field Of Mars, I follow you into tumbling waters, and you show no pity.447 The Invention of Love, page 47. The Invention of Love, page 47. The Invention of Love, page 48. The Invention of Love, pages 30 and 31. The Invention of Love, page 49. The Invention of Love, page 66. The Invention of Love, page 49.

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This is the love referred to in the last stanza of ‘Ode iv, 7’ which Stoppard has aeh quote to his younger self (using Housman’s actual translation): Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain, Diana steads him nothing, he must stay; and Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain the love of comrades cannot take away.448 This passage has a double significance for Stoppard. Hippolytus is famed for his chastity and reflects the chaste nature of the relationship between Housman and Jackson – Jackson rejected Housman’s affections. In Greek mythology Hippolytus dies but is brought back to life and has a son by Diana (the g­ oddess of hunting). Both Hippolytus, once revived, and his son are called Virbius, which derives from the Latin ‘vir bis’, meaning ‘a man twice’, hence reflecting the duality of personality which Stoppard is exploring in the play. Not surprisingly, aeh also quotes Plutarch’s version of the comrades of ‘the sacred Band of Theban youths’,449 whom Philip of Macedon absolves from any baseness in behaviour despite their mutual love. ‘Was there ever a love like the love of comrades ready to lay down their lives for each other?’,450 Housman asks. This is the love Housman has for Jackson: ‘Oh, Mo! Mo! I would have died for you but I never had the luck’,451 aeh cries out in reminiscence more than once. And aeh knows full well what this love really is: ‘Love will not be deflected from its mischief by being called comradeship or anything else’.452 Housman’s masculine love is a particular form of homosexuality which the Greeks found acceptable and which, in what is surely another example of Stoppardian intentional coincidence, is also born out of what they perceived as a duality of character and being. It is best illustrated in an extract from ­Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium:

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Each of us when separated…is but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other half.…But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they have affection for men and embrace them, and these are the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act The Invention of Love, page 39. The Invention of Love, page 42. The Invention of Love, page 39. The Invention of Love, pages 5, 46 and 100. The Invention of Love, page 43.

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thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them.… When they reach manhood they are lovers of youth…And such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together, and yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.453 Chamberlain recognises what Housman feels for Jackson: ‘You want to be brothers-in-arms, to have him to yourself…(to) perform valiant deeds to earn his admiration, to save him from certain death, to die for him’.454 In particular, and echoing Bosie’s words, ‘You want him to know what cannot be spoken’.455 To a disbelieving Jackson Housman confesses his feelings and the subsequent conversation between them encapsulates Housman’s feelings in the Greek concept of manly love:

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Jackson:    You’re a good pal to me and I hope I am to you.…Shake hands? Housman: Gladly. Jackson:    Still pals. Housman: Comrades. Jackson:    Like whoever they were. Housman:  Theseus and Pirithous…They met on the field of battle to fight to the death, but when they saw each other, each was struck with admiration for his adversary, so they became comrades instead and had many happy adventures together. Theseus was never so happy as when he was with his friend. They weren’t sweet on each other. They loved each other, as men loved each other in the heroic age, in virtue, paired together in legend and poetry as the pattern of comradeship…456 Plato – Symposium (ironically, Jowett’s translation). The Invention of Love, pages 64–65. The Invention of Love, page 65. The Invention of Love, page 76.

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Jackson’s rejection of Housman’s love would have been acutely painful, given Housman’s belief of how such love should be conducted which is explained in a marginal note he wrote in his copy of TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The programme notes to the production at the Royal National Theatre in 1997 state that he wrote ‘This is me’ next to a passage which includes the following: ‘for intimacy seemed shameful unless the other could make the perfect reply in the same language, after the same method, for the same reasons’.457 Wilde’s homosexuality is founded in the same classical genre: ‘The truth is (Bosie) was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me’.458 But is based around the physical and the instant, like Pater’s interpretation of aestheticism. It is the ecstasy of the moment in which ‘we…garner not the fruits of experience but experience itself…to catch at the exquisite passion’.459 This ‘buggery’,460 exemplified by Wilde, is objected to by Ruskin and Jowett. For Ruskin beauty has a moral purpose and he objects to the doctrine of the ecstasy of the moment: Conscience, faith, disciplined restraint, fidelity to nature – all the Christian virtues that gave us the cathedral at Chartres, the paintings of Giotto, the poetry of Dante – have been tricked out in iridescent rags to catch the attention of the moment.461 Jowett produces ‘nimble translation(s)’462 of ancient texts to appease Victorian sensitivity to homosexual love and in a famous (and real) case had cause to expel a Balliol man who had had what he considered to be an inappropriate relationship with Pater:

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I feel, Mr Pater, that letters to an undergraduate signed ‘Yours lovingly’, thanking him for a sonnet on the honeyed mouth and lissome thighs of Ganymede, would be capable of a construction fatal to the ideals of higher learning even if the undergraduate in question were not colloquially known as the Balliol bugger.463

457 Programme notes to the Royal National Theatre production of The Invention of Love in 1997. See TE. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Chapter ciii. 458 The Invention of Love, page 95. 459 The Invention of Love, page 19. 460 The Invention of Love, page 17. 461 The Invention of Love, page 18. 462 The Invention of Love, page 42. 463 The Invention of Love, page 21.

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Whereas Housman’s ‘“honour” is all shame and timidity and compliance. Pure of stain’,464 Wilde’s homosexuality is publicly advertised: ‘Oscar Wilde contributed a page or two of epigrams (to The Chameleon magazine) to oblige an Oxford student he’d befriended, Lord Alfred Douglas’465 (who became his lover, Bosie). Wilde’s problem for society is that, as expressed by Jerome, ‘I might have been sorry if he’d kept his misfortune to himself like a gentleman’.466 Jackson, in contrast, represents conventional heterosexual love and the morally acceptable standard of society at the time. He’s in love with Rosa, as he tells Housman. ‘You see, I’m awfully strong on Rosa, she’s not like other girls, she’s not what I’d call a girl at all, you saw that for yourself, she’s a woman, we love each other’.467 Confused that Housman seemed ‘normal’ and ‘not one of those Aesthete types’468 he reflects the morality of the time, insisting that Housman’s predilection is ‘not your fault’469 and is ‘rotten luck’.470 Rather like a disease Jackson hopes Housman might be cured of it: ‘I bet before you know it you’ll meet the right girl and we’ll all be chuckling over this’.471 Jackson’s classical counterpart is Catullus with his conventional, heterosexual love for Lesbia, as Pollard recognises, quoting the Roman poet: ‘Catullus! Give me a thousand kisses, and then a hundred! Then another thousand, then a second hundred – yes, Catullus is Jackson’s sort of poet’.472 Pollard explains their relationship – they do what young lovers do, experiencing the full range of emotions – and in the process sets up the key to answering the play’s puzzle: They loved, and quarrelled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.473 Pollard explains the significance of the love poem: ‘Like everything else, like clocks and trousers and algebra, the love poem had to be invented…the 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473

464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473

The Invention of Love, page 96. The Invention of Love, page 101. The Invention of Love, page 85. The Invention of Love, page 75. The Invention of Love, page 77. The Invention of Love, page 77. The Invention of Love, page 78. The Invention of Love, page 78. The Invention of Love, page 12. The Invention of Love, page 13.

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t­rue-life confessions of the poet in love, immortalizing the mistress, who is actually the cause of the poem – that was invented in Rome in the first century before Christ’.474 Both Wilde and Housman write forms of poetry as a result of their amorous emotions, except theirs are about homosexual love. Wilde’s poetry is seen in terms of his lover, Bosie: … before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.475 He admits that his creation ‘is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented’476 but that’s not what matters. Observing that Wilde lived in the wrong age – ‘It’s all in the timing’.477 – aeh tells him that, ‘a nameless luckless love has made notoriety your monument’.478 But, it’s a monument all the same and Wilde has a different interpretation. He believes that the world is changing and that he has played his part in it: ‘I made my life into my art and it was an unqualified success’.479 Chamberlain is astute enough to realise that the source of inspiration for Housman’s poetry is Jackson, remarking on Housman’s curious behaviour after his introduction to Jackson on the Isis – ‘that time no one could find you for a week. I thought: the river, and no two ways about it’:480 Chamberlain: Still, you probably wouldn’t have written the poems. aeh: This is true.481 Indeed, it was true. In 1922 Housman sent a seriously ill Jackson a copy of his Last Poems accompanied by a letter in which he says that the book was sent ‘by a fellow who thinks more of you than anything in the world’ and adds, ‘you are largely responsible for my writing poetry and you ought to take the 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481

474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481

The Invention of Love, page 13. The Invention of Love, page 95. The Invention of Love, page 95. The Invention of Love, page 41. The Invention of Love, page 96. The Invention of Love, page 96. The Invention of Love, page 87. The Invention of Love, page 87.

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consequences’.482 Incidentally, Jackson also inspired Housman’s scholarship, too. The play refers to Housman’s editions of books by Ovid, Juvenal, Lucan and Manilius ‘which’, aeh says, ‘I dedicated to my comrade Moses Jackson’.483 And it is another duality within The Invention of Love which resolves the puzzle Stoppard sets in the play. In writing the play Stoppard has attempted to answer Housman’s plaintiff remark, ‘I don’t know what love is’484 aeh’s response is to make reference to The Loves of Achilles by Sophocles: ‘Love, said Sophocles, is like the ice held in the hand of children. A piece of ice held fast in the fist’.485 It is an internal and elusive duality, which Wilde recognizes as he continues, reflecting Sophocles: ‘Then we saw what we had made – the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go’.486 The act of grasping it, through the heat of one’s hand, melts and destroys it. The metaphor is particularly apt and acute because a child cannot rationalise the fact that that the attractiveness of holding the ice is an irresistible lure that only hastens its destruction. It reflects, too, the respective experience of the two protagonists: Housman had to let Jackson go, whereas Wilde could not loosen his grasp of Bosie. In another version of the text Stoppard writes ‘the ice that burns who clasps it’487 since extremely cold ice can burn the skin. And Wilde, indeed, refers to his ‘immolation’.488 This duality is present in the love poetry – both classical and Housman’s own – that The Invention of Love has reflected and from which it has quoted so copiously and beautifully throughout the play. Its dichotomy is left to the two halves of Housman, the young and the old, to reveal at the end. aeh’s younger self idolises the classical poets: Virgil puts it all in a Golden Age with pan-pipes and goatherds, and Apollo there in person – but you can trust it…Real people in real love, baring their souls in poetry that made their mistresses immortal!489 But, aeh illustrates that there is another side to the coinage of love poetry:

482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489

482 quoted by M. Glover, ‘Theatre: Housman: a very private lad’, The Independent 27 September 1997. 483 The Invention of Love, page 95. 484 The Invention of Love, page 43. 485 The Invention of Love, page 43. 486 The Invention of Love, page 95. 487 J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 241. 488 The Invention of Love, page 96. 489 The Invention of Love, page 99.

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Oh, yes, there’d been songs…valentines – mostly in Greek, often charming … but the self-advertisement of farce and folly, love as abject slavery and all-out war – madness, disease, the whole catastrophe owned up to and written in metre – no; that was new.490 It is a side of the coin present in Housman’s poems, too. Harris believes that A Shropshire Lad merely demonstrates that, ‘Life’s a curse, love’s a blight’.491 Housman the vehicle carries a second theme; that of classical scholarship.492 Housman has the effrontery, as recalled by aeh, right at the start of the play to correct an Oxford don’s pronunciation in only his first week after coming up: ‘I heard Jowett pronounce “akribos” with the accent on the first syllable, and I thought, “Well! So much for Jowett!”’.493 With the same indifference to academic authority he later upbraids Professor Postgate for his errors of emendation, too. Housman himself actually described classical scholarship as ‘the science of discovering error in texts and the art of removing it’.494 Stoppard chooses to interpret Housman’s view in the play with an emphasis on the science in the context of the frailties of the human mind. Textual criticism is the acme of scholarship in Housman’s eyes: ‘the recovery of ancient texts is the highest task of all’.495 Scholarship is ‘a small redress against the vast unreason of what is taken from us’.496 To Housman this is an exciting task – ‘to be the first for thousands of years to read the verse as it was written’.497 Stoppard produces a litany of both aeh’s and Housman’s critical opinions of various other academics’ attempts to translate and emend the Greek and Roman authors – Mr Robinson Ellis, Mr Fry, Paley, Munro and Palmer etc. As is usually the way in Stoppard’s vehicles the themes themselves interweave. For example, in The Invention of Love the textual criticism is allowed to interact with the theme of love: 490 491 492 493 494 495 496 497

490 The Invention of Love, page 99. 491 The Invention of Love, page 86. 492 For a review and explanation of the classical texts and references in The Invention of Love see A. Macaulay, ‘Tom Stoppard, A.E Housman, and the Classics’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, pages 150–167. 493 The Invention of Love, page 3. 494 Programme notes for the 1997 Royal National Theatre production of The Invention of Love. 495 The Invention of Love, page 71. 496 The Invention of Love, page 71. 497 The Invention of Love, page 56.

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Pollard:       …like everything else, the love poem had to be invented.…the love poem…was invented in Rome in the first century before Christ. Jackson:      Gosh. Housman: Basium is a point of interest. A kiss was always osculum until Catullus. Pollard:       Now Hous, concentrate – is that the point of interest in the kiss? Housman:  Yes.498 A further example occurs when Stoppard uses a classical pun on the Greek word ‘trochos’ to introduce the issue of effeminate love: Housman, displaying his precocious textual erudition to his new Oxford chums, suggestively explains, ‘Actually, “trochos” is Greek, it’s the Greek word for hoop…to a Roman, to call something Greek meant – very often – sissylike, or effeminate. In fact, a hoop, a trochos, was a favourite gift given by a Greek man to the boy he, you know, to his favourite boy’.499 All Housman’s fastidiousness over the classical texts – intellectually amusing, impressive and frustratingly good – only goes to demonstrate Postgate’s verdict that he is ‘very likely the best classical scholar in England’.500 Housman’s own verdict on classical scholarship is rather more brutal: ‘If you can’t read Latin go home, you’ve missed it!’.501 And his verdict on other classical scholars is damning; ‘I defended the classical authors from the conjectures of idiots’.502 Housman is also a first rate poet and the third theme of the vehicle in The Invention of Love is poetry: much of it Housman’s poetry, both his translations of the classical authors and his own poems, and Stoppard’s extensive use of it ensures that The Invention of Love is his most lyrical play. The main focus in the play is on Horace’s Odes because, in keeping with the interweaving of the themes, they have significant implications for Stoppard’s exploration of the theme of homosexual love. The Odes are quoted extensively in Housman’s own translation:

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But oh, whate’er the sky-led seasons mar, Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams: The Invention of Love, page 13. The Invention of Love, page 7. The Invention of Love, page 81. The Invention of Love, page 77. The Invention of Love, page 95.

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Come we where Tullus and Ancus are, And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.503 But, Stoppard provides an onslaught of other classical poetry from Catullus to Sophocles, Ovid, Aristophanes, Aeschylus and Propertius. Whereas in Act 1 it is primarily used to illustrate the scholarship of the classics, for which Housman was famous, and the arguments Stoppard puts up, in Act 2 it is used to express the masculine love that is the subject of the play. As Housman is about to reveal to Jackson his love for him Jackson is reciting Sappho: Blest as one of the gods is he The Youth who fondly sits by thee,504 And he plunders Plato for Wilde’s lament for Bosie: ‘Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy’s beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day’.505 Just as Stoppard mines Horace for much of his classical poetic material so he makes frequent use of Housman’s own poems to illustrate the narrative. Wilde’s apprehension and subsequent conviction under the Labouchere amendment clause is accompanied by: Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?506 Similarly, Jackson’s departure abroad and subsequent death is illustrated by aeh’s ominous recital: The thoughts of others Were light and fleeting, Of lover’s meeting Or luck or fame, Mine were of trouble And mine were steady, 503 504 505 506

503 504 505 506

The Invention of Love, pages 40 and 41. The Invention of Love, page 73. The Invention of Love, page 95, from Socrates’ lament in Plato’s Phaedrus. The Invention of Love, page 82.

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So I was ready When trouble came.507 The death of a Woolwich cadet, ‘a young man who shoots himself’,508 rather than face the shame of his homosexuality, is painfully lamented as Wilde recites another of Housman’s poems: Shot? So quick, so clean an ending?… Oh, soon, and better so than later After long disgrace and scorn, You shot dead the household traitor, The soul that should not have been born.509 There is a symmetry in the coupling of Housman’s poetry and the classical that at least one observer has noticed. Richard Gaskin, for example, contends that, ‘Horace’s Odes and Housman’s lyric poems are two remarkable bodies of work that have much in common’.510 When Stoppard combines both Housman and the ancients one really gets the sublime pain and intensity of Greek love, that of a man for a youth. He does so when three times he quotes the same passage from Theocritus; first with aeh and, secondly, almost at the very end of the play when Housman repeats it to underline his feelings for Jackson; ‘When thou art kind I spend the day like a God; when thy face is turned aside, it is very dark with me’.511 But, underlying its significance both within the play and to the discussion of the nature of love, just prior to the second quotation in English Housman quotes it in ancient Greek. It is the two lines of Greek that Housman says to Jackson in response to his question, ‘What will become of you, Hous?’.512 What Housman does not quote in English is Theocritus’ preceding line: ‘Half my life lives in thine image, and the rest is lost’.513 Instead, Stoppard picks up the sentiment with one of Housman’s own poems, which Housman quotes, again to express his unrequited love for Jackson: 507 508 509 510 511 512 513

507 508 509 510 511 512 513

The Invention of Love, pages 86–87. The Invention of Love, page 93. The Invention of Love, pages 92–93. R. Gaskin, Horace and Housman, page ix. The Invention of Love, pages 40 and 102. The Invention of Love, page 101. Theocritus – ‘Idyll xxix’ (attributed to Theocritus on the evidence of the scholiast in the Symposium of Plato).

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He would not stay for me; and who can wonder? He would not stay for me to stand and gaze. I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder And went with half my life about my ways.514 Twice in the scene in which Jackson rejects Housman’s confession of his love for him Stoppard has the two shake hands. More significantly still, Stoppard actually has Housman say to Jackson, as he angrily protests that he had no idea of Housman’s affections, ‘You’re half my life’.515 But, Stoppard saves one of the most important classical, poetic quotations not to articulate the feeling of masculine love but to illustrate the argument the play makes about the changing perception of society to such love. And, to make his point, Stoppard has Housman quote the Latin and his older self, aeh, the English: Housman: Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore. The boat goes. aeh:   And they stretched out their hands in desire of the further shore.516 The further shore represents metaphorically both a time when masculine love will be acceptable and the place Housman would have been in had Jackson returned his love. It is to Housman the classical version of the Promised Land that he saw from his own Mount Pisgah: There’s a hill near our house where I live in Worcestershire which I and my brothers and sisters call Mount Pisgah. I used to climb it often, and look out towards Wales, to what I thought was a kind of Promised Land.517 Like the Biblical Moses, Housman never got to set foot in it and, instead, remained ‘forsaken in the wilderness to gather grapes and thorns and figs of thistles’.518 It is particularly apt – and surely not a Stoppardian coincidence, for 514 515 516 517 518

514 515 516 517 518

The Invention of Love, page 78. The Invention of Love, page 77. The Invention of Love, page 100 and Virgil – The Aeneid, Book vi. The Invention of Love, page 30. The Invention of Love, pages 4 and 10.

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there are few, if any, of those in his meticulously researched works – that Stoppard should have quoted from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book vi because it is the episode on Aeneas’ wanderings when he visits Hades. Escorted, like aeh, across the Styx by Charon Aeneas meets, amongst others, symbols of both heterosexual and homosexual love: his great love, Dido, and two characters who appear in Housman’s favourite Ode of Horace, Theseus and Pirithous.519 A constant element of The Invention of Love is one of contrasts, reflecting the duality of Housman: athlete versus aesthete, death versus life, the railway versus the river, science versus art, the Styx versus the Isis, the dog that leaps into the undergraduates’ boat and Cerberus. The duality within Housman goes further than merely that of the poet versus the classicist. His modus operandi changes between the two roles. The classicist whose obsessive pedantry and attention to detail extends to ‘taking out a comma and putting it back in a different place’520 admitted that ‘some of my details are wrong and imaginary’521 and that he had written six of the ‘Shropshire’ poems before he even set foot in the county.522 Hence Kate’s comment about his poem ‘The vane on Hughley steeple’: ‘Mrs M. says you’re no guide to Shropshire – she went to look at Hughley church and it doesn’t even have a steeple!, never mind a grave full of suicides’.523 Stoppard lets aeh admit, ‘I was never there, I just liked the name’.524 But, by far the biggest contrast that Stoppard draws is that between the character as a man of Wilde and Housman.525 Apart from an Oxford education both have one thing very much in common, their love of another man: Bosie and Jackson respectively. 519 520 521 522 523 524 525

519 Virgil – Aeneid, Book vi: (1) ‘Unhappy Dido! Was the tale true then that came to me, that you were dead and had sought your doom with your sword? Was I, alas! The cause of your death?’; (2) Charon: ‘And in truth it brought me no joy that I took Heracles on his journey over the lake, or Theseus and Pirithous, though sons of gods and invincible in valour’. Aeneid, Book vi also mentions ‘Here is the band of those who suffered wounds fighting for their country’. 520 The Invention of Love, page 38. 521 quoted by M. Glover, ‘Theatre: Housman: a very private lad’, The Independent 27 September 1997. 522 See R. Graves, A.E. Housman The Scholar Poet. 523 The Invention of Love, page 89. 524 The Invention of Love, page 90. 525 Alastair Macaulay notes that, ‘(The Invention of Love) takes a long time before showing us another dualism: that between Housman and Oscar Wilde’. – A. Macaulay, ‘Tom Stoppard, A.E. Housman, and the Classics’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 158.

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Reflecting Bosie’s words, it is no better expressed than in one of Housman’s poems, quoted by Chamberlain, ‘Because I liked you better than suits a man to say’.526 Both go about their lives and their loving in distinctly different ways. Wilde is all flamboyance and public display. ‘Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light’527 is his motto. What Wilde attracted was ‘all this attention’528 brought about by ‘all that posing and dressing up’529 – ‘like the Three Musketeers’530 – and ‘flouncing about Piccadilly and trying to be witty’.531 The ‘fellow in velvet knickerbockers’532 had become ‘the original aesthetic article for purposes of publicity’533 and ‘an effeminate phrase-maker’.534 Whilst the journalists may have claimed to have ‘invented Oscar’535 he was of the view that he ‘took charge of his own myth’536 which led to ‘genius, brilliancy, daring’.537 Wilde sums up his own life thus: I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey. I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters. I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new.538 And where, by contrast was Housman? ‘At home’,539 living his life as, Wilde would say, one of ‘those who wilfully live in sadness’540 and, as aeh concedes, 526 527 528 529 530 531 532 533 534 535 536 537 538 539 540

526 The Invention of Love, page 89. The poem, ‘Because I Liked You’, goes on to say, ‘We parted, stiff and dry’ which explains Chamberlain’s comment about Housman’s condition when he reappeared after a missing week at Oxford once he had met Jackson: ‘…you turned up again, dry as a stick’. – The Invention of Love, page 87. 527 The Invention of Love, page 96. 528 The Invention of Love, page 56. 529 The Invention of Love, page 56. 530 The Invention of Love, page 77. 531 The Invention of Love, page 56. 532 The Invention of Love, page 18. 533 The Invention of Love, page 57. 534 The Invention of Love, page 57. 535 The Invention of Love, page 57. 536 The Invention of Love, page 96. 537 The Invention of Love, page 96. 538 The Invention of Love, page 96. 539 The Invention of Love, page 97. 540 The Invention of Love, page 96.

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in a way which, ‘is marked by long silences’.541 He was regarded by others as, ‘a dry old stick’,542 to judge by a reference to him in Indian Ink. Housman admits that ‘my reputation at Trinity is for censoriousness and misanthropy’.543 In complete contrast to Wilde who wanted to change the world aeh tells his younger self that, ‘You are to be a rounded man, fit for the world, a man of taste and moral sense’.544 Averse to publicity, Housman is a man who once moved house ‘because a stranger spoke to me on my train about my work’.545 He is a man who ‘shall cause a sensation by addressing a remark to my neighbour at dinner in Hall’.546 Above all, and utterly unlike Wilde, Housman is a man of discretion. Chamberlain trusts him not to ‘tell on me at the office’547 and reveal his own secret homosexuality. Housman’s epitaph will be to be ‘the straightest, kindest man’.548 Housman is not above being obsessed with his legacy. ‘How am I to leave my mark?’,549 he asks aeh. Pollard, also, notices Housman’s narcissistic enigma: Pollard:  I know what you want. Housman: What do I want? Pollard:  A monument. Housman: Oh, you’ve guessed my secret.550 Wilde supplies the answer to aeh: ‘You didn’t mention your poems’, he tells him. Recalling Joyce’s argument for the eternal nature of art in Travesties, Wilde continues, ‘How can you be unhappy when you know you wrote them? They are all that will still matter’.551 Just as only one line of Gallus’ poetry survived, aeh makes the point that ‘Virgil wrote a poem for him: how much immortality does a man need?’.552 However, the duality of Housman recognises that 541 542 543 544 545 546 547 548 549 550 551 552

541 542 543 544 545 546 547 548 549 550 551 552

The Invention of Love, page 95. Indian Ink, page 47. The Invention of Love, page 91. The Invention of Love, page 30. The Invention of Love, page 95. The Invention of Love, page 90. The Invention of Love, page 64. The Invention of Love, page 64. The Invention of Love, page 35. The Invention of Love, page 72. The Invention of Love, page 97. The Invention of Love, page 98.

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you cannot have one without the other. The poetry survives, but it’s no good if you don’t know exactly what the poet wrote. Hence, the scholarship – ‘putting people right about what Horace really wrote’553 – is indispensable to the process of the immortality of the poet. Implicit in the idea of immortality is death, which is a spectre that haunts The Invention of Love. The play is partly set in the Underworld, the Woolwich cadet shoots himself and the Theban 300 are part of the illustration of the nature of love. Both the classical and Housman’s own poems reflect death in different ways. As Housman comments of the classical, ‘Nobody makes it stick like Horace that you’re a long time dead’,554 so Harris says of A Shropshire Lad, ‘I never read such a book for telling you you’re better off dead’.555 In the end aeh finds himself ‘standing on this empty shore’556 (just as Septimus in Arcadia describes the end of time as, ‘When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore’.557) but the younger, more idealistic Housman, in his terms, has an optimistic view of that prospect, quoting, in part, a pederastic elegy of Theognis of Megara:558 ‘And when thou comest to go down to the lamentable house of Hades, never – albeit thou be dead – shalt thou lose thy fame’.559 In The Coast of Utopia the vehicle is the life stories of Alexander Herzen and the Bakunin family.560 Stoppard, perhaps, derives his inspiration from EH. Carr’s observation that, ‘It is seldom recognized how often a man’s political convictions reflect his intimate personal experience; and it is odd to remark how closely Herzen’s denigration of the west and idealization of Russia are related to the drama of his private life’.561 In the trilogy Stoppard tells the sagas of 553 554 555 556 557 558 559 560 561

553 554 555 556 557

558 559 560 561

The Invention of Love, page 55. The Invention of Love, page 71. See Diffugere nives. The Invention of Love, page 86. The Invention of Love, page 102. Arcadia, page 126. John Knapp notices the similarity in thought with Keats’ poem ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’ – J. Knapp, ‘Stoppard’s Arcadia: “This is not science; this is story telling”’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 106. Theognidea, lines 237–254. See M. Hadas, A History of Greek Literature and Yiqun Zhou, Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece. The Invention of Love, page 102. H. Sudkamp describes Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage as ‘a group biography play’. – Tom Stoppard’s Biographical Drama, page 7. EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 184.

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two families; the Bakunins and the Herzens. The families contain intellectual powerhouses of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia of the nineteenth century and their story covers both hope and tragedy, spread across various countries in Europe and set against the background of revolution and autocratic repression. Two individuals, in particular, feature prominently: Alexander Herzen, the conscience and sage of the revolutionaries and, once in exile, the king over the water of the Russian political mind; and, Michael Bakunin, the radical firebrand, addicted to the revolutionary drug of action. The families both act as the flame to the philosophical moths of the Russian, and other, socio-political thinkers of the mid 1800s – men such as Belinsky, Turgenev, Ogarev, Chernyshevsky and Stankevich – and, thereby, Stoppard is able not only to tell the tale of the Russian intelligentsia’s struggle for emancipation from the Romanov totalitarianism but also the development of their accompanying philosophies which addressed the issue of how society should be organised and governed in both a practical and moral sense. As Michael Bakunin puts it, in a clarion call resonant with the sound of Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy and Lenin,562 the question Stoppard’s trilogy poses for these Russians is ‘What is to be done?’.563 The Coast of Utopia story begins at the Bakunin family estate, Premukhino, just north-west of Moscow, in the summer of 1833. The patriarch, Alexander, is about to marry off one of his four daughters, Liubov, to Renne, a cavalry officer. Voyage sees the loves and losses of Bakunin’s daughters unfold. Tatiana, another daughter, rebuffs the amorous intentions of a cavalry officer ‘fop’,564 Count Sollogub. Varenka, a third daughter, marries Dyakov, another officer – allegedly to placate her father because Liubov does not love Renne and fails to follow through with the marriage. Liubov, instead, falls in love with a radical, Stankevich, on a visit to Moscow. Stankevich had been the object of Natalie Beyer’s desires in Moscow but, losing out to Liubov, she turns her attentions to Michael Bakunin, Alexander and Varvara’s only son. And it is Michael who is really the fulcrum around which the Bakunin’s story turns. Originally at Artillery School ‘for five years’565 Michael turns up at Premukhino, in debt (which is to be his one constant companion in life566), and seduced by the idealism of German 562 563 564 565 566

562 Chernyshevsky – What Is To Be Done?; novel, 1863: Tolstoy – What Is To Be Done?; novel, 1886: Lenin – ‘What Is To Be Done?’; pamphlet, 1902. 563 Voyage, page 47. 564 Voyage, page 84. 565 Voyage, page 7. 566 ‘Bakunin remained faithful, throughout his chequered career, to his own peculiar interpretation of the word “loan”’. EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 29.

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Romantic philosophy to which he has been introduced by Stankevich. Michael has a ‘gigantic row’567 with his father when he announces he wishes to go to Berlin to drink at ‘the fountainhead’568 of his new philosophy rather than take the civil service job Alexander has procured for him from a friendly Provincial Governor. Michael goes to Moscow where he attends a soiree at Mrs Beyer’s at which he meets Belinsky for the first time. Belinsky, a ‘literary critic’569 at The Telescope, one of a clutch of publications which are an outlet for the emerging revolutionary philosophy of the new Russian intelligentsia, lives above a blacksmiths and a laundry. Michael starts to write articles for The Telescope and invites Belinsky to Premukhino where Belinsky takes a fancy to Alexandra, Michael’s fourth sister. By 1838 ‘Michael has moved in with Belinsky’570 and together they publish another radical publication, the Moscow Observer. By 1840 Michael has fallen out with Belinsky, both philosophically and personally, and he, then, leaves for Berlin, seen off by Herzen, where he meets Turgenev, who recounts the encounter to the Bakunins on a visit to Premukhino. Once abroad Michael ‘discovered revolution’,571 gets ‘mixed up with some rabble rouser’572 in Switzerland and is committed to criminal proceedings in St. Petersburg as well as ‘condemned to the loss of his noble rank and to banishment to Siberia’573 by imperial decree. Instead, he flees to Paris. By 1841 the Bakunins suffer tragedy and pain as both Liubov and Stankevich are dead and Varenka has left Dyakov, taking her son to Germany with her. Michael turns up at Herzen’s house in Paris in 1847, dabbling in the nicety of remarking to Belinsky about Herzen’s admiration for his letter to Gogol, but really with revolution on his mind as he is ‘in the market for a hundred rifles’574 to support Polish independence. As Herzen tells him, ‘You’ve made yourself a European reputation by a kind of revolutionary word-music from which it is impossible to extract an ounce of meaning, let alone a political idea, let alone a course of action’.575 By 1849 he is ‘in Saxony under a false name’576 and he 567 568 569 570 571 572 573 574 575 576

567 568 569 570 571 572 573 574 575 576

Voyage, page 20. Voyage, page 20. Voyage, page 33. Voyage, page 98. Voyage, page 109. Voyage, page 114. Voyage, page 114. Shipwreck, page 33. Shipwreck, page 36. Shipwreck, page 63.

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eventually gets to Dresden which he was using as his ‘base while plotting the overthrow of the Austrian Empire’.577 While there revolution broke out against the king of Saxony by which time, in his own words, he ‘ran out of revolutions’578 and he was arrested, incarcerated in both Konigstein and Prague before being handed back to the Russians and sent to the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. Michael is ‘released into exile’,579 but soon becomes a celebrity when he escapes and reaches England – via Japan, across America and the Atlantic. The man whom EH. Carr describes as, ‘incomparably the greatest leader and agitator thrown up by the revolutionary movement of the nineteenth century’,580 cannot resist the lure of revolt581 and tries, first in London, to organise a Slav revolt and, failing that, forms two social democratic associations, announcing finally to Herzen in Geneva that he is trying to infiltrate Marx’s International.582 Alexander Herzen, who increasingly becomes the focus of the trilogy, is first seen in Voyage at Moscow zoo in 1834 in the company of a group of philosophers. The group includes Sazonov, Stankevich, Ketscher and Polevoy and the members of their social circle, Mrs Beyer, her daughter Natalie and two of the Bakunins, Liubov and her mother. Also present is Nicholas Ogarev, Herzen’s friend from his boyhood days and with whom, aged thirteen, he had, in what he describes as ‘the hinge of my life’,583 vowed ‘to avenge the Decembrists’.584 577 578 579 580 581 582 583 584

577 Shipwreck, page 73. 578 Shipwreck, page 101. Bakunin was arrested and sentenced to be hanged but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment – A. Herzen, My Past And Thoughts, note 31, page 378. 579 Salvage, page 69. 580 EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 320. 581 In My Past And Thoughts, page 566, Herzen describes Bakunin in 1861: ‘He was just as devoted to one idea, just as capable of being carried away by it, and seeing in everything the fulfilment of his desires and ideals, and even more ready to for every experience, every sacrifice, feeling that he had not so much life before him, and that consequently he must make haste and not let slip a single chance’. 582 I. Berlin concludes in Russian Thinkers, pages 110–111 that ‘(Bakunin) is not a serious thinker; he is neither a moralist nor a psychologist; what is to be looked for in him is not social theory or political doctrine, but an outlook and a temperament. There are no coherent ideas to be extracted from his writings of any period, only fire and imagination, violence and poetry, and an ungovernable desire for strong sensations, for life at high tension, for the disintegration of all that is peaceful, secluded, tidy, orderly, small scale, philistine, established, moderate, part of the monotonous prose of daily life’. 583 Voyage, page 60. 584 Voyage, page 60. See A. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, pages 61–62.

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The radical intelligentsia are marked men and in 1835 a number are rounded up by the Tsar’s police. Herzen is exiled to Perm. In exile he ‘lived the life of a minor official…fell in love, by letter post, and got married’.585 By the time he encounters Belinsky in St. Petersburg in 1840 he has lent Michael Bakunin money, seen him off to Berlin and has a one year old child. While in Russia relationships with his fellow revolutionary intelligentsia become tetchy as, ‘quarrelling with everyone’,586 he falls out with Ketscher and Granovsky. Granted permission to leave Russia in in 1846 in order to seek medical help for his son he ‘has’, by 1847, ‘established himself in the Avenue Marigny’587 in Paris. Herzen ‘came to Paris as people used to come to Jerusalem or Rome, and found the city of the plain’.588 But, in a clear fusion of the vehicle and the idea in Shipwreck both Herzen’s life and his ideology founder. He sees for himself the sickening horror of the barricades of 1848 and the failure of the revolution in both intellectual and political terms. His despair at the ‘celebrities of the left (who) spend their time writing tomorrow’s headlines and hoping that someone else will make the news to go with them’589 foreshadows his contempt for the exiles when he is later in London. At the same time his wife Natalie embarks, first of all, on a ‘romantic friendship’590 with another woman, Natasha Tuchkov, and, then, with much more significance for her marriage, on an affair with George Herwegh who had, at one time, led a revolt by a band of German Democratic Exiles. Following an arrest for taking part in a march with Sazonov and disillusioned by the failure of the revolution Herzen takes his family to Nice in 1850, with the Herweghs ‘living upstairs’.591 It is a period of great pain for Herzen as he confronts Natalie about what he describes later as the ‘great evil in my life’592 and offers to leave her. She has another child and it is implied that Herwegh is the 585 586 587 588 589 590 591 592

585 586 587 588

589 590 591

592

Voyage, page 105. Shipwreck, page 62. Shipwreck, page 25. Salvage, page 18 cf A. Herzen, Sobranie Sochinenii, 5: 317: ‘The name of this city is bound up with all the loftiest aspirations, with all the greatest hopes of contemporary man – I entered it with a trembling hand, with reverence, as people once entered Jerusalem or Rome’. Shipwreck, page 32. Shipwreck, page 44. Shipwreck, page 85. Initially Herzen is unaware of his wife’s relationship with George Herwegh, even though George’s wife does know. As EH. Carr explains, ‘Emma – for reasons which Herzen could not understand at all, and which Natalie understood only too well – regarded the proposal (that the Herweghs should live above the Herzens in Nice) with horror’. – The Romantic Exiles, page 73. Salvage, page 28.

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father. Herzen is summoned back to Russia but refuses to go. He, then, loses both his mother and deaf son, Kolya, who are on board a steamer from Marseilles when it sinks. He tells Bakunin, whom he meets on the way to England, that ‘It finished my Natalie. She was expecting another baby, and when it came she had no strength left. The baby died, too’.593 When in London Herzen admits that, ‘I haven’t entered into English life’.594 His time in London has two elements of significance to his life. First of all, his wealth enables him to run what amounts to ‘keeping open house for the émigré population of London’595 for exiles of all nationalities. They form what he calls in his memoirs ‘choristers of the revolution’596 but, for Herzen, the choir found it increasingly hard to sing in harmony or even the same tune. It did bring him into contact with Worcell who persuades him to set up a ‘Free Russian and Polish Press’.597 During his peripatetic existence in London Herzen published a number of journals which were an uncensored mouthpiece for the revolutionary Russian intelligentsia and the last of which, The Bell,598 campaigned for freeing the serfs. The second element was the arrival in London of the now married (after Maria Ogarev’s death599) Nicholas and Natalie Ogarev; the former his old boyhood comrade and the latter, when known as Natasha Tuchkov, the object of Natalie Herzen’s affections. As EH. Carr notes, ‘The coming of the Ogarevs broke, like a tempestuous sea, into the calm unruffled pools of Herzen’s daily existence’.600 Natalie Herzen’s ‘dying wish’601 had been to entrust the care of her children to the second Natalie in Alexander Herzen’s life and upon her arrival she takes that duty so seriously that the live-in German tutor is elbowed out of the way. More importantly, Herzen and Natalie Ogarev begin an affair which results in ‘Natalie openly living with Herzen’,602 and in 593 594 595 596 597 598 599 600 601 602

593 Shipwreck, pages 99–100. 594 Salvage, page 14. EH. Carr says, ‘In the course of twelve and a half years he had struck no roots in the country. He had found there a haven of refuge, but not the arms of friendship’. – The Romantic Exiles, page 223. 595 Salvage, page 28. 596 Quoted by A. Kelly in the programme notes to the Royal National Theatre production of The Coast of Utopia. 597 Salvage, page 21. 598 According to EH. Carr The Bell had a ‘stupendous circulation’ with a first edition print run of usually 2,500. See The Romantic Exiles, page 186. 599 ‘Maria’s death enabled them at last to marry’. – EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 169. 600 EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 164. 601 Salvage, page 45. 602 Salvage, page 112.

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three children.603 Nicholas Ogarev retaliates by starting an affair with a prostitute. In London Herzen’s life ebbs and flows in contrast with the fortunes of Tsarist Russia in the Crimea and the death soon after of the despotic Nicholas I. Herzen is buoyed by his successor, Alexander ii’s, emancipation of the serfs, an event which Chernyshevsky accuses Herzen of having ‘bet The Bell on’.604 The emancipation proves to be a false dawn. Herzen is hectored by Michael Bakunin and Ogarev into allowing The Bell to support the ‘Land and Liberty’ campaign in Russia even though Herzen knows it implies advocating ‘agitation for violent revolution’.605 Letters which Herzen had attempted to smuggle back into Russia are intercepted, leading to what Ogarev describes as, ‘thirtytwo arrests in all…(and) Land and Liberty has ceased to exist’.606 The result is that ‘Nobody is reading The Bell’607 and a disenchanted Herzen needs little encouragement from Natalie to move to Switzerland. En route the twins Natalie bore him die from diphtheria while in Paris. Herzen, unpopular because, in the words of his long-time friend Ogarev, ‘Preaching socialism from London didn’t make you friends among your friends at home’,608 ends by describing the new generation of Russian intelligentsia as ‘the syphilis of our revolutionary lust’.609 Stoppard tells the story of the Herzens and the Bakunins in the midnineteenth century, using the changing credos of their two main scions – Alexander Herzen and Michael Bakunin – and their friends and rivals amongst the Russian intelligentsia to form the basis of an analysis of Russian sociopolitical thought in the period between the failure of the Decembrists and the rise of Lenin. In the three plays there is an unmistakeable prominence of the concept of the family unit. The deeply personal sagas also allow Stoppard to roam across the plain of human experience. Moreover, elements in the vehicle of the family story have metaphorical reference to the issues Stoppard covers. 603 604 605 606 607 608 609

603 Natalie Ogarev’s childlessness seems to have been a significant motivation for her. ‘Her childlessness weighed on her “like the heavy hand of the Commander in Don Juan”. She brooded on it; and it became at once the cause and symbol of her unrest, the focal point of her thwarted passions’. – EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 169. 604 Salvage, page 81. 605 Salvage, page 99. EH. Carr says, ‘Herzen followed with a bad grace and a heavy heart’. – The Romantic Exiles, page 201. 606 Salvage, page 105. 607 Salvage, page 108. 608 Salvage, page 48. 609 Salvage, page 113.

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This is particularly true of the families themselves. It is very much a case, to use Alexander Bakunin’s words, of ‘Family on parade’.610 The family is portrayed at times as a happy and harmonious organisational unit, in contrast to the chaos of Russia itself. Renne, a suitor to one of the Bakunin sisters, describes the family unit in religious terms – ‘A family reunion is a sacred affair’.611 – noting along the way that such a family is, ‘so wonderfully unrussian’.612 The whole saga begins with what is very much a family scene at the Bakunin’s home: ‘Premukhino, the Bakunin estate…Interior, verandah, garden. There are places to sit in the garden, and a hammock…Family supper is coming to an end’.613 It is not a coincidence that both the first two plays begin and end on family estates just outside Moscow. Even the third play begins with a family scene at Herzen’s house in London and ends at a chateau in Switzerland with Herzen in the company of two of his children, his daughter-in-law and a grandchild. Stoppard even portrays Herzen’s life in London prior to his relationship with Natalie Ogarev in a scene involving Herzen and the two Ogarevs as one of ‘cosy domestic intimacy’.614 Family life is seen through an idealised prism at times as this vignette of Bakunin family life at Premukhino illustrates, highlighting at the same time the class structure in Russia and upon which the intelligentsia depended: A Nurse (a serf ) pushes a baby carriage with a crying infant across the garden, away from the house, going out of view. Alexander and Liubov are where they were, her head against his breast, his fingers searching her hair… Varenka enters from the further garden carrying the mewling baby, with Tatiana pushing the empty pram and Alexander dancing attendance…615 This reminder of the role of serfs in Russian society is an irony for the intelligentsia who rely on them. ‘A serf goes to the fire with an armful of dead wood (while) A House Serf crosses from the house, bringing provisions and utensils, folding chairs, cushions, etc’.616 are the stage directions which demonstrate that at Premukhino their position in society is taken for granted. It takes Turgenev to point out that the intelligentsia are a ‘generation of repentant gentry… 610 611 612 613 614 615 616

610 611 612 613 614 615 616

Voyage, page 8. Voyage, page 7. Voyage, page 7. Voyage, page 3. Salvage, page 52. Voyage, page 25. Voyage, page 45.

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(sharing)…the same disease, an egotistical upper-class weakness with its roots in the social corruption of a society based on serfdom’.617 Alexander Bakunin defends this assumption: ‘My estate is of five hundred souls and I am not ashamed’,618 he tell his son who is embarrassed by the situation and he continues his justification, saying, ‘In the way of life at Premukhino there is true liberty’.619 But, all that glisters is not gold and the family concept in the trilogy turns out to be a complex entity. Stoppard’s stage direction at the very start of the story reveals the contradiction. ‘Alexander Bakunin’s rule is benign despotism but the family atmosphere is prevailingly democratic’.620 His benign despotism stands in contrast to Nicholas I’s autocratic despotism. Not surprisingly a fanatic such as Michael Bakunin rebels against his parents in a minor version of the political rebellions he tries to foment across Europe and within Russia: ‘I don’t need parents!’, he announces, ‘I renounce them!’.621 George Herwegh is unsympathetic to the institution of family. ‘I need to have an hour or two free from family life. What an abominable institution’.622 Perhaps his affair with Natalie Herzen, which nearly tears apart both the Herwegh and Herzen families, has something to do with his lack of enthusiasm? Michael Bakunin’s meddling, as his father sees it, is responsible for turning his ‘sisters’ faces away from the light of parental love’ such that, he asserts, ‘you’ve broken their lives like a spoiled child smashing his breakfast egg to annoy his nurse’.623 But, despite the assaults on the family unit, it still remains a strong and positive force throughout the plays – even for a hardened case like Michael Bakunin who is forced to admit at one stage, ‘I washed my hands of home sweet home…but, God, I miss it sometimes’.624 Many of the family relationships in the play fracture. Herzen is destroyed by Natalie’s affair with George Herwegh. To Emma Herwegh it is a humiliation which can get no worse. Herzen’s own affair with Natalie Ogarev puts his relationship with Ogarev under strain such that Nicholas seeks solace elsewhere. The relationship between Herzen and Natalie Ogarev itself is, at times, far from 617 618 619 620 621 622 623 624

617 618 619 620 621 622 623 624

Salvage, page 64. Voyage, page 38. Voyage, page 38. Voyage, page 3. Voyage, page 24. Shipwreck, page 61. Voyage, page 48. Voyage, page 85.

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ideal and she threatens to leave, at one stage going off to visit her sister in Germany. Her own arrival in the Herzen household in London pushes Malwida out of the nest. Varenka Bakunin’s marriage to Dyakov ends in separation, as does Nicholas and Maria Ogarev’s. In the latter case Maria rather obstinately and painfully refuses to permit a divorce. In a mixing of the vehicle and the idea Stoppard allows part of the family saga to become part of the philosophy that the Russian intellectuals are embracing. Premukhino, the Bakunin family home, is portrayed as an example of the moral ideal of the universal harmony that the German Romantic philosophers (such as Schelling and Fichte) espoused. The doctrine of what the Germans referred to as ‘the Absolute’ initially attracted many of the Russian intellectuals. Stankevich confesses to an unimpressed Herzen that the hinge of his life was, ‘reading Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism’.625 Premukhino is described by both of its radical visitors in terms which unmistakeably portray it as conforming to this ideal. Belinsky, an early disciple of the German philosophy, describes it thus to his mistress, Katya: Premukhino in the freshness of the early morning, everything chirping and croaking, and splashing, as if Nature was having a conversation with itself, and the sunsets breathing, as alive as fire…You understand how the Eternal and Universal are more real than your everyday life…you believed in the possibility of escape, of transcendence, of raising your soul to the necessary height, and living high above your own life, folded into the mind of the Absolute.626 Turgenev reinforces this presentation: ‘At Premukhino the eternal, the ideal, seems to be in every breath around you…’.627 Alexander Bakunin, too, reminds his daughter, Tatiana, that, ‘You grew up in Paradise, all of you children, in harmony that was the wonder of all who came here’.628 The link between the family vehicle and the philosophical idea continues when Michael Bakunin adopts realism as his new philosophy. Now, his idealism discarded, he sees Premukhino ‘an agricultural business’629 The mundane realities of everyday life, ignored by the idealists, are no longer irrelevant as he realises that, ‘The 625 626 627 628 629

625 626 627 628 629

Voyage, page 60. Voyage, pages 91–92. Voyage, page 52. Voyage, page 113. Voyage, page 100.

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peasants plant things as their fathers did, the things grow, you eat them or feed the animals with them, and then it’s time to plant some more’.630 Thus, the house in The Coast of Utopia, rather like Sidley Park in Arcadia, has symbolically become part of the vehicle. Misalignment? The alignment between vehicle and idea in a Stoppard play is not always contiguous.631 Stoppard’s difficulty in integrating Lenin and his wife into The Importance of Being Earnest structure of Travesties has already been noted.632 Much more significantly, Night and Day illustrates Stoppard’s old problem of finding a vehicle to fit his idea, as he freely confesses: I wanted to write a play about journalism, but I had nothing to write about, if you see what I mean.…Same old problem from the moment I began writing plays. And bit by bit you invent some sort of vehicle to put your play in about journalism.633 The problem in Night and Day is that he had other impulses to satisfy that do not produce an integrated vehicle – for instance: 630 631 632 633

630 Voyage, page 100. 631 Peter Wood’s criticism of Hapgood implies something similar – ‘Hapgood didn’t have any construct at all; and therefore it had no situation’. – J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright and the Work, page 188. Richard Corballis, on the other hand, criticises the play for appearing to veer in the direction of pursuing morality at the expense of wit, noting that all but one scene in Act 2 comprise a debate between two characters – see R. Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork, page 147. 632 Tim Brassell comments, ‘Lenin is not only not incorporated into the Wildean pastiche… For much of the second half of the play the solemn, towering figure of Lenin unquestionably restricts the comic momentum, weakening in particular the overall effect of the Earnest pastiche’. – T. Brassell, Tom Stoppard An Assessment, page 158. Brassell’s verdict (written in 1985) is overtaken slightly by Stoppard’s 1993 revision in which Lenin wears a clerical collar (recalling the Rev. Canon Chasuble) and a stage direction (page 53) explicitly draws comparison between Lenin and his wife and Chasuble and Prism. 633 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Bragg, ‘The South Bank Show’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 123.

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I was very interested in the idea of people risking their lives for what was, in the real world, a commercial enterprise.634 and I also wanted to write a play – another play you understand, Day and Night, about a woman, not exactly falling in love, but having an instant love reaction to somebody just-like-that.635 The result is that Stoppard’s vehicle is not always intricately aligned with the idea.636 In Night and Day Stoppard principally tackles the issue of press freedom. He sets the argument into the story of journalists competing for a scoop in a war-torn African state. From the point of view of the vehicle, the foreign country, and not the rather more obvious office of a newspaper is important, as Stoppard explains: Suddenly, for the first time, I felt I had one piece of solid ground for my extremely abstract play about journalism, that it would take place at a provincial newspaper office or in a publisher’s boardroom. I worked from that point onwards because I wanted a plausible locale where British reporters could be covering some kind of war.637 634 635 636 637

634 Stoppard, in an interview with H. Hebert, ‘A Playwright in Undiscovered Country’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 127. 635 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Bragg, ‘The South Bank Show’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 123. 636 Stoppard is very harsh on himself over Night And Day, telling Jim Hunter in 2003 that, ‘it wasn’t that good a play, for a start’. – Stoppard, in an interview with J. Hunter in J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 172. Nevertheless, it ran at the Phoenix Theatre for nearly two years. See J. Hunter, op cit, page 186. John Fleming observes part of the problem: ‘The connection between the journalism plot and the love plot is tenuous as they are bound through the characters but their interlacing sheds little light on the respective themes’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 150. Anthony Jenkins, perhaps, identified a key issue with the play when he described it as, ‘the one instance where Stoppard does not lure his audiences’ intellect’. – A. Jenkins, ‘The Theatre of Tom Stoppard’, page 143. 637 R. Berkvist, ‘This Time, Tom Stoppard Plays It (Almost) Straight’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 139.

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So far so good, but there is little scope for anything allegorical or metaphorical in the plot. There are glimpses of it. It is not a coincidence that the photographer, Guthrie, talks about press freedom shining a light into dark areas. Had there been a metaphor it would surely have been something to do with freedom. But the sexual freedom Ruth craves and the implied desire for freedom of Shimbu’s rebels do not constitute anything like a metaphor for the play’s theme. There are three stories within the plot: Ruth’s love life; the civil war; and, the journalistic competition which draws in the debate about freedom of the press. But, they are not interwoven in the way the vehicles are in other Stoppard plays. To a very great extent there was an admitted intent on Stoppard’s behalf that this was to be the case. Stoppard admitted that, ‘A lot of things in Travesties and Jumpers seem to me to be the terminus of the particular kind of writing which I can do. I don’t see much point in trying to do it again’.638 Rather, as he puts it, he wished to write ‘a story telling play, you know, one which didn’t suddenly stand on its head and start to rhyme’.639 What one gets is a gritty realism about a bunch of hard bitten journalists and a woman on her second marriage in a colonial house in an African country torn between a totalitarian President and a rebellious warlord. In Rock ‘N’ Roll Stoppard’s vehicle becomes an unintentional victim of a misalignment that cannot be laid at his door. The clue to the play’s vehicle is in the title – rock music. The right to play it is emblematic of the right to freedom of expression in the autocratically governed Czechoslovakia under Communist rule. A local band, The Plastic People of the Universe, comes to symbolise Czech rock music and is, on a wider stage, identified with The Rolling Stones – such is their commonality that the Plastics record a version in Czech of The Rolling Stones’ song ‘It’s All Over Now’. The allegory of the representation of freedom of speech by rock music culminates in the concert given by The Rolling Stones in Prague once the Communist rule has been overthrown by the Velvet Revolution. The symbolism of the vehicle was undermined somewhat by the decision a few weeks prior to the premiere of Rock ‘N’ Roll at The Royal Court theatre in London of The Rolling Stones to allow the Chinese authorities to remove five songs from their playlist at a 638 639

638 Stoppard – in an interview with R. Hayman, quoted in J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 137. 639 Stoppard, in an interview with H. Hebert, ‘A Playwright in Undiscovered Country’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 127.

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concert in Shanghai on 8 April 2006640 as the price for allowing the group to perform.

Too Complicated? Wates:  How are you at telling lies? Hapgood: I make a living.641

The problem with Hapgood is that the mendacious and deceitful nature of the subject of the play’s narrative, spying, leads to complications of comprehension within the audience. In Hapgood the vehicle of a spy story is intrinsically linked with that of quantum physics. It reflects the implication of quantum physics that an electron can be in two places at the same time because, as Kerner observes, ‘The particle world is the dream world of the intelligence officer. An electron can be here or there at the same moment’.642 It also reflects Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that the act of observation of an electron disturbs the electron whose path becomes unpredictable. Therefore, Kerner points out: You can choose; it can go here to there without going in between; it can pass through two doors at the same time, or from one door to another by a path which is there for all to see until someone looks, and then the act of looking has made it take a different path. Its movements cannot be anticipated because it has no reasons. 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.643 This phenomenon is exactly what the baffling opening scene with the depositing of briefcases in the shower cubicles portrays. The spying vehicle is 640 641 642 643

640 New York Times, 9 April 2006. Mick Jagger’s response was, ‘I am pleased the Ministry of Culture is protecting the morals of expatriate bankers and their girlfriends’. He added that he had 400 other songs to choose from, so, ‘it doesn’t really matter’. In 2003 the Chinese authorities also deleted songs from The Rolling Stones’ Greatest Hits album when it was released in the People’s Republic of China. 641 Hapgood, page 29. 642 Hapgood, page 35. 643 Hapgood, page 35.

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in motion right from the start of the play. Blair explains that ‘…there is a regular traffic of monitored information going to the Soviets from (Hapgood’s) office, organized and prepared by Mrs Hapgood and Mr Ridley, and delivered to (Kerner) for delivery to (his) Russian control’.644 In typical Cold War style a scientist named Kerner, planted by the Russians but turned without Russian knowledge and now working for the British, leaves a briefcase, to be picked up by a Russian agent, containing secrets in a cubicle at a gentlemen’s changing room in a swimming pool. Kerner is to collect a briefcase, in return, from the Russians. However, the British agent Ridley, in a sting operation, switches briefcases, leaving one for the Russians and taking Kerner’s to Hapgood. This is part of a plan to identify a mole in British intelligence, suspected by the Americans to be Kerner. As Blair explains to Kerner, the information the British give to Kerner to pass to the Russians is put into a briefcase except, ‘Mrs Hapgood and Ridley duplicated your delivery. They photographed all the documents again and made a copy of your computer disc. So now we had everything twice in two briefcases’.645 Kerner is quick on the uptake: ‘Ridley delivered to my Russian control. I delivered to Ridley. So, if I was adding anything to my briefcase, you get it all back’. Ridley intercepted Kerner’s briefcase at the drop in the changing room and swapped it for another which the Russian agent picked up. In order to catch Kerner opening his briefcase and adding to the information, Blair continues, Wates, the American agent, ‘had booby-trapped (Kerner’s) briefcase. He spayed the inside with an aerosol can, like radioactive deodorant’.646 Again, Kerner is quick to realise the situation: ‘If I open the briefcase I give a Geiger reading’.647 Just for good measure Wates has also bugged Kerner’s briefcase with a radio signal. The Russians, in order to confuse matters, use a pair of identical twins to effect the pick-up and drop-off with Kerner. But, the trick goes wrong. As Blair recounts to Kerner, ‘When we opened your briefcase Mrs Hapgood’s films had gone’648 but, ‘Nobody gave a Geiger reading’649 (except Hapgood when she opened the briefcase to inspect it). Even more puzzling, the radio signal was tracked to the pool and, then died. In a development that looks bad for Hapgood, Wates, his suspicions fuelled when he began ‘digging up the back garden’ and thought he had ‘found some bones he can 644 645 646 647 648 649

644 645 646 647 648 649

Hapgood, page 39. Hapgood, page 10. Hapgood, page 10. Hapgood, page 10. Hapgood, page 10. Hapgood, page 11.

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make bodies out of’650 in the form of two previous incidents in Athens and Paris – both involving Ridley and Hapgood – which went wrong in suspicious circumstances, picks up the tracker at ‘three o’clock in the morning’651 and traces it to Hapgood’s office. Hapgood explains to a wrong-footed Wates that ‘when the bug died it was no longer in the briefcase, it was in the water’.652 Accordingly, she had the pool drained and the bug had been sent to her office along with all the other dregs found in the pool. Once out of the water it began to transmit again. Meanwhile the dummy briefcase has been recovered from one of the Russian twins. It contains the agreed leaked materials of ‘one duplicate disc…five rolls of film’.653 The briefcase Ridley intercepted was missing the bag containing the films. The bag also contained the bug. So, it becomes clear that Ridley has removed the bag, taken the films and flung the bug into the pool. What the British and Americans cannot work out is how Ridley achieved all this without appearing to open the briefcase. A trap is baited to flush out Ridley. In a scene in Hapgood’s office Kerner pretends to be passing real secrets to the Russians and Ridley falls for a fake Hapgood twin and a fake kidnapping of Hapgood’s son by the Russians, leading him into a trap which exposes Ridley as one of a pair of identical twins (which explains how the first switch was effected) at another switching scene in the swimming pool. The spy vehicle is the cue for all sorts of spy language and metaphor, most of which only serves to emphasise the theme of duality. Blair ends up by double crossing Hapgood. Kerner was originally a Russian ‘sleeper’, an agent planted with a long term view to blending in before he activates and starts spying. In an ambiguous phrase Kerner recounts Hapgood, who is credited with turning him, as saying, ‘I want to sleep with you’.654 Blair asks Wates, when he explains how he discovered at three o’clock in the morning that his bug had become reactivated, ‘…couldn’t you sleep?’, to which Wates eventually replies by returning the barb to Blair, ‘Where were you sleeping?’.655 The British turned Kerner, who now works as, in the duality metaphor, a double-agent, which is referred to in spy circles as a ‘joe’.656 Kerner’s Christian name is Joseph while Hapgood’s son is called Joe. Fitting well into the spy metaphor is the light experiment, 650 651 652 653 654 655 656

650 651 652 653 654 655 656

Hapgood, page 31. Hapgood, page 22. Hapgood, page 28. Hapgood, page 28. Hapgood, page 54. Hapgood, page 22. Hapgood, page 8.

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illustrating quantum mechanics, which begins with the assumption of firing bullets from a machine gun. Continuing the duality of spy language Hapgood carries the code name ‘Mother’ to acknowledge her role as head of her unit and in reality she is Joe’s mother. The spy vehicle reflects the duality that Stoppard sees in the theory of quantum physics which seeks to explain the behaviour of things on a sub-atomic scale. The quantum atomic world is immediately highlighted by the spying narrative from the opening scene in which an agent is tracked using an electronic dot on a map of London. The random behaviour of the dot replicates the behaviour of an electron around the nucleus of an atom and the way the map is allowed to zoom in closer and closer to the detail of the location of the dot reminds the audience that one of the subjects under review is the small world of atoms. Hapgood contains a further metaphor which cements the relationship between spying and duality and quantum theory; ‘positional geometry’.657 Geometry is never far from the narrative. Hapgood is skilled at chess, a game requiring intellectual positional sense. She manages, via her Secretary Maggs, to conduct a game of chess with someone in Ottawa as she conducts a discussion with Blair and Wates. She describes the job of spying to Ridley as ‘a boardgame’658 while the process of identifying the location of the transmitting bug is known as ‘triangulation’.659 It is a form of positional geometry that Hapgood uses to help her son find his lost key – ‘Just do the grid – five minutes for every square’,660 she advises him. Hapgood resolves the problem first and sends her junior, Merryweather, to explain to Joe that ‘The garage key is on Roger’s (his hamster) hutch’.661 The location of the key is not the only matter to be solved by geometry. Blair concludes that the mystery of how the Russians pulled off the trick of avoiding the trap set for them in the opening scene is, ‘…a technical question, it almost looks as if you could solve it with a pencil and paper: cubicles A, B, C, D, briefcases P, Q, R find X when the angles are Kerner and the Russian twins’.662 By far the biggest foray into the geometrical metaphor is the adaptation of the problem of the seven bridges of Konigsberg. Stoppard introduces the 657 658 659 660 661 662

657 658 659 660 661 662

Hapgood, page 33. Hapgood, page 32. Hapgood, page 24. Hapgood, page 16. Hapgood, page 27. Hapgood, page 13.

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‘problem of the bridges of Konigsberg’663 into Hapgood right at its very beginning by making the initial shower scene, in which various briefcases are exchanged, a modern day version of the problem. The apparent reason why Stoppard should choose to deploy such a device is threefold: it was solved by Euler, an eighteenth century scientist who, with others, had proposed a wave theory of light, which ultimately led to the debate which formed the basis of quantum mechanics; it allows Stoppard to introduce the metaphor of duality into Hapgood; and, it provides Stoppard with an opportunity for one of the arresting opening scenes for which his plays are noted. Geometry is a metaphorical introduction of the spying vehicle. In the opening scene, the American agent, Wates, ‘is shaving’664 and observes the switching of three briefcases by two Russian agents, Ridley and Kerner, involving four cubicles, a lobby, a shower and a swimming pool – seven ‘bridges’ – in the process. Stoppard provides a clue as to his adaptation of the seven bridges problem in the stage directions: The essence of the situation is that Ridley moves around and through, in view and out of view, demonstrating that the place as a whole is variously circumnavigable in a way which will later recall, if not replicate, the problem of the bridges of Konigsberg.665 Whilst this scene clearly achieves Stoppard’s desire for theatricality, given that no member of the audience watches a play with a copy of the stage directions in front of him it is difficult to reconcile this scene with Stoppard’s view that he writes his plays to be played, rather than read. Nevertheless, Wates has drawn a diagram, on pink paper, showing who was where when, with all the comings and goings. Kerner explains the seven bridges problem: I was born in Kaliningrad.…Of course, it was not Kaliningrad then, it was Konigsberg…in Konigsberg there were seven bridges. The river Pregel… divides around an island and divides again…An ancient amusement of the people of Konigsberg was to try to cross all seven bridges without crossing any of them twice.666 663 664 665 666

663 664 665 666

Hapgood, page 2. Hapgood, page 1. Hapgood, page 2. Hapgood, page 33.

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The problem was proven by Euler to be insoluble. But, the key point was that Euler proved it to be so using geometry. Kerner continues: The Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler took up the problem of the seven bridges and he presented his solution…in the form of a general principle based on vertices. Of course, Euler didn’t waste his time walking around Konigsberg, he only needed the geometry. (He now produces Wates’s diagram on pink paper) When I looked at Wates’s diagram I saw that Euler had already done the proof. It was the bridges of Konigsberg, only simpler.667 The geometry metaphor also introduces one of the themes of the play; that of twins, which is part of Stoppardian duality. Euler realised two things. First of all, with the exception of the start and the end of the walk, every entrance onto a land mass has a corresponding exit from a land mass. This is strikingly reminiscent of the Player’s exclamation in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, ‘every exit being an entrance somewhere else’.668 No wonder this problem appealed to Stoppard. Secondly, Euler had worked out that for each of the four land masses in Konigsberg, created by the division of the river Pregel, and for the path taken to cross each bridge only once, the number of bridges attached to each land mass must be an even number. That is not the case; each land mass has an uneven number of bridges attached to it. Thus, when Hapgood asks, ‘What did Euler prove?’, Kerner answers, ‘It can’t be done, you need two walkers’.669 Stoppard has given a tiny clue as to how the cubicles scene worked – again, available only to those in possession of the stage directions – in his directions which rather casually say, ‘(As a matter of interest, the Ridley who posts the briefcase is not the same Ridley who entered with it.)’.670 This tiny clue unlocks the whole mystery of the play – how was the switch of briefcases effected. Hapgood catches on to implications of Kerner’s explanation probably a lot faster than the audience does. She realises that, just as there are identical twin Russian agents, there must be identical twin Ridleys as well: It finally makes sense of Tweedledum and Tweedledee trailing their coats around the pool. A little while ago the Swedes got themselves a kgb 667 668 669 670

667 668 669 670

Hapgood, page 33. RosGuil, page 19. Hapgood, page 33. Hapgood, page 2.

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defector and the famous twins turned up in his debriefing with a solid London connection. If two Ridleys are for real they must have felt the draught. Those two jokers at the meet (ie: the Russian twins) were brought in as decoys. Reflectors. I never believed in the twins until then.671 Geometry also leads allegorically to the subject matter of quantum mechanics. What Euler had done was to invent Graph Theory. In doing so he had produced two things of profound but indirect significance for Hapgood. In solving the problem he had applied the principle of parsimony. By not walking the route and, so, not allowing himself to be confused by all the extraneous details of the city of Konigsberg Euler had eliminated all but the two most necessary features of the puzzle: the land masses and the bridges. Secondly, he had realised the puzzle was one of connectivity – in the problem, when represented graphically, the condition that must be fulfilled for the solution to work requires connectivity of the points on the graph. Connectivity is a metaphorical representation of the path of an electron around an atom; the electron, by gaining or losing energy, achieves a quantum jump into another orbit which is random and unpredictable, an example of the connected duality that Stoppard is exploring in the play. It also provides the metaphor of networks, which in the real world is one of the bases of spying, the theme of Hapgood.672 In theory, the alignment of the vehicle of the equivocal world of spying with the duality inherent in quantum mechanics is close. However, Hapgood had a far harder time at the box office than most of his other major plays.673 Stoppard admitted to Mel Gussow that those who found it clear, ‘were in the minority’.674 Moreover, while at the time it suffered per se it also suffers by comparison with Stoppard’s other science play, Arcadia. 671 672 673 674

671 Hapgood, page 34. 672 There is a further metaphorical reference to sugar which runs through the play – eg: see Hapgood, pages 11, 17 and 28. The 1988 text does not appear to offer any explanatory clues. Perhaps it refers to the (unverified) claim that if you were to remove all the space between electrons and their nuclei you would be able to fit the whole human race into a sugar cube capable of being held in your hand. See D. Cavendish, interview with Josie Lawrence, Daily Telegraph, 26 March 2008. 673 See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 176. Note, however, the three-times extension of its eventual production at the Lincoln Center – op cit, page 179. 674 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 78. However, Stoppard told W. Mortimer in 2015 that, ‘I can’t remember any direct evidence

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Stoppard admits that it was a struggle from the outset to find the narrative – ‘Believe me’, he told Thomas O’Connor, ‘it took an awful long time to get anywhere near knowing what to write about’.675 As usual the idea had come first. ‘It was only in looking around for a real world that might express the metaphor, that I hit upon the le Carré world of agents and double agents’, Stoppard says. ‘The physics came first, the woman called Hapgood came second’.676 Stoppard later qualified his decision to set it in the spy-thriller world with the words, ‘rightly or wrongly’,677 suggesting that he was not entirely convinced. Despite the birth pangs of the play the issue with the piece is really that there is too much double dipping. The problem is the narrative, not the science, as Stoppard himself confessed: ‘It’s not the physics that’s the problem, it’s the story, the plot, the narrative, the mechanism, the twins, all that’.678 The first complication is, indeed, the identical twins which are woven into the story. Elizabeth Hapgood impersonates her imaginary sister, Celia – rather too convincingly for most audiences. Although Stoppard lays clues about Ridley, he, too, is a pair of identical twins, which is the answer to the ‘How did he do it?’. His is a complicated part, as the following stage direction at the end of Act 2, scene 2 makes manifest: ‘Ridley stays where he is. The next time he moves, he’s somebody else’.679 In the 2015 text Stoppard made an important adjustment, effectively admitting the problem, saying, ‘I could see that I’d got one important piece of information in the wrong place. It was a simple matter to bring it forward, and to make it absolutely explicit, rather than something to be inferred’.680 What he appears to be referring to is the restructuring of the end of Act 1, scene 4 in which he inserts: 675 676 677 678 679 680

675 676 677 678 679 680

of the audience finding the play “difficult”, and Michael Codron, the original producer, reminded me the other day that it played through the actors’ six-month contracts and made a profit’. – Stoppard, in an interview with W. Mortimer in the programme to the 2015 production of Hapgood at the Hampstead Theatre. Stoppard, in an interview with T. O’Connor, ‘Welcome to the World of Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 228. Stoppard, The Matter of Metaphor, page 2. Stoppard, in an interview with T. O’Connor, ‘Welcome to the World of Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 228. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Fleming, ‘A Talk with Tom Stoppard’, page 25. Hapgood, page 51. Stoppard, in an interview with W. Mortimer in the programme of the 2015 production of Hapgood at the Hampstead Theatre.

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Blair:    We have a hypothesis. Wates:   A hypothesis? Blair:    Mmm. Actually, it’s Mr Kerner’s hypothesis. … Hapgood: It’s twins. Wates:   It’s twins? Hapgood: Two Ridleys.681 The second complication is the duplicitous nature of spying itself which produces a deceptive plot which is probably at its hardest for the audience to comprehend at the start of Act 2 when Hapgood, Blair and Kerner set up, in Ridley’s presence, the trap to catch Ridley. In order for it to work the audience really has to see the scene through Ridley’s eyes – in other words, not realise it is a trap. Stoppard accepts the point, as he told Mel Gussow: You can tell the audience that they’re about to witness a con trick, but they get sucked in to the con-man’s point of view. You tell them, we’re going to tell lies to Ridley. Then you set up a scene where everything is being done for Ridley’s sake, and it’s a lie. But the audience seem equally surprised when the rug is pulled from under him.682 Stoppard’s plot tends towards obfuscation from the outset with an opening scene which even he describes as, ‘virtually incomprehensible’,683 (although he does say that is characteristic of other plays he has written) and for which he found it necessary to write in a later version an explanatory monologue given by Wates in what he calls, ‘A Child’s Guide to Hapgood’.684

681 682 683 684

681 Hapgood, 2015 text, pages 43–44. 682 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 81. 683 Stoppard, in an interview with T. O’Connor, ‘Welcome to the World of Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 227. 684 Stoppard – in an interview with T. O’Connor, ‘Welcome to the World of Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 225. The 2015 text does not include Wates’ monologue.

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Parsimony The key to Stoppard’s most successful plays is the fusion of the vehicle and the idea, often in the form of a collision, which suggests the action of parsimony – the resolution through the application of Occam’s razor in the explanation of the unlikely yoking of disparate themes and stories. The vehicle of Jumpers unites moral and physical gymnastics. Out of the Stoppardian plenitude further vehicular patterns emerge, such as the recurring theme of the play-within-a-play in The Real Thing, Travesties, The Real Inspector Hound and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or the worked examples of moral dilemmas in The Hard Problem and Professional Foul. The vehicle even becomes embodied in historical individuals – Housman, for his duality, and the historical narrative of Herzen and Bakunin. But, it is with Arcadia that the vehicle and the idea are yoked most felicitously by Stoppard. The narrative of the replacement of the classical garden by a Romantic one acts as a metaphor for the scientific debate whilst Thomasina’s schooling and Valentine’s research allows Stoppard to explain it. The play weaves in the allegorical concept of bodily heat, the attraction that got left out and the self-similarities of fractals. The plot of Bernard’s humiliation even relies upon an example of the Butterfly Effect. But, to cap it all, the play’s structure replicates the iterative Chaos process. The patterns of method are merely the means by which Stoppard conveys his ideas. The bipartite essence of both the stage debate and the fusion of the vehicle and the idea foreshadows the bedrock of Stoppard’s themes; duality, which is best exemplified by the bipolarity of his moral environment.

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Ethics Ethics is a very complicated business.1 anderson, Professional Foul

∵ At the heart of Stoppard’s long-running debate about morality is goodness and the question of whether it is absolute or relative. It leads Stoppard to a consideration of the role of the individual in society. Is he free or does he have obligations? Can he express himself without restraint? What is the purpose of art and the nature of truth? All these questions are dealt with by Stoppard, but the underlying pattern of his morality is always the dichotomy of moral absolutism versus moral relativity. In that way the other great theme in Stoppard’s works – duality – is an allegory for his moral dilemma and the prominence within it of his fascination with illusion and reality stands because it relies on perspective, which is the essence of relativism. At first glance Stoppard’s audience could be forgiven for wondering what Stoppard’s views and work on ethics and morality has to do with Occam’s razor. In fact, it is the most significant example of his use of the principle of parsimony – metaphysical and methodological. Both in his personal opinions and in the rich and varied debates he has within his plays he reduces, in a ­process – subconscious or otherwise – of parsimony, all the intellectual noise on morality down to one very simple, fundamental assumption: that within the human being there is an intuitive concept of what is right and what is wrong. He summarizes this position in reference to Professional Foul and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour but it applies to the whole canon of Stoppard’s work on ethics and morality: It seems to me that the point of view which these plays express is one which would be recognizable not merely to intellectuals but to an intelligent child – that something is self-evidently wrong.2 1 Professional Foul, page 93. 2 Stoppard, in an interview with D. Henninger, ‘Tom Stoppard and the Politics of Morality’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 143. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_005

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It is very interesting to note that Stoppard eschewed the opportunity to repeat this point explicitly in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour when, on the grounds that it was ‘too explicit, too preachy’3 he deleted the following speech to be given to Sacha by his father, Alexander the dissident political prisoner, in defence of why he should not capitulate and recant: And what about the other fathers? And mothers? There are truths to be shown, and our only strength is personal example. I mean important truths – not about prisons and hospitals and legal rights. I’m talking about the difference between good and evil, which even a teenage boy can understand.4 Stoppard’s point hinges on George’s argument in Jumpers. He has applied the razor by ‘traducing a complex and logical thesis to a mysticism of staggering banality’;5 that ‘life itself is the mundane figure which argues perfection at its limiting curve’.6 The perfection – the ‘mystery in the clockwork’7 as George so eloquently puts it – is that innate sense of right and wrong that mankind has derived from a morally absolutist concept of goodness. In what is, in philosophical terms, a side issue Stoppard eventually addresses whether that source of innate goodness is a theistic figure. It need not be, but some members of mankind have endowed God the Creator with religious connotations. As with the nineteenth century Russian intelligentsia’s views on society which he so keenly observes, Stoppard admits that even his own position on God has evolved. His Cartesian pun in Jumpers – ‘Cogito ergo deus est’8 – suggests Voltaire’s aphorism which Stoppard recalls in Travesties with a hint of intellectual sarcasm: ‘If Lenin did not exist, it would be unnecessary to invent him’.9 A form of supreme being is necessary for society – because otherwise, in Hilary’s words, mankind would be marking its own homework and morality would be a collection of local rules, as Anderson explains, and not founded upon an absolute standpoint. 3 4 5 6

J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, note 7 on Chapter 6, page 279. J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, note 7 on Chapter 6, page 279. Jumpers, page 72. Jumpers, page 72. According to John Bailey this is ‘George’s finest statement’. – J. Bailey, ‘Jumpers by Tom Stoppard: The Ironist as Theistic Apologist’, Michigan Academician, 11 (Winter 1979), page 248, quoted in H. Bloom (ed), Tom Stoppard, page 64. 7 Jumpers, page 72. 8 Jumpers, page 72. 9 Travesties, page 56. cf Beauchamp in Artist Descending a Staircase, page 124 : ‘If lemons don’t exist, it is necessary to invent them’.

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The duality of absolute versus relative reverberates through Stoppard’s moral world. It resides in the nature of truth. Stoppard portrays the relative version of it in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s world of Elsinore and in Henry iv’s ambiguous court. But, in contrast, he also presents, in Voyage, Schelling’s cosmos in which the Absolute produces a universe that is all of a oneness. A second consequence of that absolute goodness is that ‘freedom is neutral’10 and the most significant element in it is free speech: ‘free expression – it’s the last line of defence for all the other freedoms’.11 Milne’s position in Night and Day articulates that belief, including the price that has to be paid for it. But, such absolute morality needs to be applied in local situations. Alexander, in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, tests that moral absolute in its fiercest crucible; a totalitarian state that denies the freedom of the individual. In Professional Foul Stoppard generates an ethical dilemma for an academic, who just happens to be a moral philosopher, and it is a child, Hollar’s son, who causes him – to use Stoppard’s own words, by ‘wielding Occam’s razor upon it’12 – to revise his speech to resolve, in the same way that George Moore does with morality, the relationship between the absolute and relativist views on the rights of an individual within society. Fundamentally, Stoppard is asking the bipartite question that Emily asks in Darkside: Did we start off good and couldn’t keep it up? Or start off bad and this is as far as we’ve got learning to be good?13 It is Rousseau’s view of society versus that of Hobbes. Stoppard is disinclined to that of Hobbes because if one has to be taught to be good, then, he asks, ‘Who is teaching?’.14 Stoppard takes Anderson’s contrast between local rules (relative) and the rights (absolute) of individuals and explores how the individual should act within society in The Coast of Utopia with scenarios ranging from Rousseau’s natural and uncorrupted state of man to Marx’s collective regimentation. If man is free it raises the issue, for Stoppard, of determinism. Michael Bakunin’s one-time Hegelian morality turned the concept of the Absolute into an inevitable historical process. It is a determinism which manifests itself in 10 11 12 13 14

Night and Day, page 48. Night and Day, page 31. Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, pages 154–155. Darkside, page 22. Stoppard, in an interview with N. Hytner, The Royal National Theatre, 6 February 2015.

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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s preoccupation with the concept of fate. Herzen presents the counterpoint with his image of the Ginger Cat which symbolises the randomness of life at the individual level. The Stoppardian dichotomy, then, becomes a pattern played out in the world of science: in Arcadia there is an order to the apparent chaos of the natural world whereas in Hapgood the world of quantum mechanics is relative. In Stoppard’s world the framework against which an individual’s actions are judged is set by the artist. From an absolutist point of universal perception the artist sets out a long-term moral context. The artist is set apart – Old Donner sees the artist as particularly gifted, Henry believes the artist does something special while Carr contends that the artist is a member of a privileged class; all in sharp contrast to the products of modern art (eg: an edible Venus de Milo made from sugar) portrayed in Artist Descending a Staircase. Therefore, it follows, that art should be, in Belinsky’s words, the creation of a sole, eternal idea, stemming from the innate sense of goodness that George Moore can not see under his microscope. Stoppard’s morality extends beyond the boundaries of human behaviour. But, all the time he sees the ethical world through the prism of the bipolar metaphor of absolutism and relativity which he finds in subjects as diverse as language, beauty and textual criticism.

Absolutism versus Relativism – Morality What is the Good?15 emily, Darkside

∵ In Jumpers Stoppard produces a debate about the very essence of morality: is it relative or absolute? He portrays a madcap environment which is a manifestation of a world based on relative values against which George Moore argues the case for absolute morality. Darkside, Stoppard’s radio play, revisits the vision of the relativist world but also introduces, briefly, the idea that there might be a payoff for moral decisions. The Hard Problem goes on to assess how such a payoff works and ascribes value to such decisions. 15

Darkside, pages 28 and 49.

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Stoppard’s discussion about the fundamental nature of morality is prompted not just by a lecture about the existence of God which George is writing but by an event, the moon landing, which has altered Dotty’s perspective on the world and turned what she had previously considered to be moral absolutes into local customs. The effect is more comprehensively explained by Penelope in Another Moon Called Earth who is suffering from the same problem:16 The moon man…He’s changed everything.…he has stood outside and seen us whole, all in one go, little. And suddenly everything we live by – our rules – our good, our evil – our ideas of love, duty – all the things we’ve counted on as being absolute truths – because we filled all existence – they’re all suddenly exposed as nothing more than local customs – nothing more – because he has seen the edges where we stop, and we never stopped anywhere before.17 From the lunanaut’s perspective, as Penelope realises, the morality system which she believed had encompassed everything she understood to be the only world now looks like just a small part in relation to a much bigger universe. So, the consequence for her sense of morality is that the world is, ‘not the be-all and end-all any more, but just another moon called Earth’.18 Against a background of a world that appears to be a reductio ad absurdum of a society in which relativist morality has achieved primacy – the Vice Chancellor of the university’s ‘main interest … is the trampoline’,19 the Archbishop of Canterbury ‘has certain doubts about the existence of God’20 and a military procession, in which ‘jet planes scream and thunder’,21 is rather dubiously being used to advertise the electoral triumph of the Radical Liberals – George is composing a paper which includes a defence of the argument for moral absolutism. ‘The study of moral philosophy’, he explains, ‘is an attempt to determine what we mean when we say that something is good and that something else is bad’.22 He accepts that ‘good’ means different things in different c­ ircumstances 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

Anthony Jenkins argues that, ‘The moon-landing idea does not work well in Another Moon because for Penelope it remains only an idea’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 75. Another Moon Called Earth, page 57. Another Moon Called Earth, page 66. Jumpers, pages 61–62. Jumpers, page 84. Jumpers, page 30. Jumpers, page 63.

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but the point is that in each circumstance it is driven by an ultimate notion of goodness: A savage who elects to honour his father by eating him as opposed to disposing of the body in some – to him – ignominious way, for example by burying it in a teak box, is making an ethical choice in that he believes himself to be acting as a good savage ought to act.23 Decorating his arguments with considerations of what makes a good bacon sandwich, a good cricket wicket and a comparison of the sound of an elephant trumpeting with that of a piece of music by Mozart George makes a case for an absolute good. 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 based on if not the intuition that kindness is simply good in itself and cruelty is not.24 But, Stoppard hits on an important addendum to the absolutist argument. Goodness exists in relation to bad. George expands his argument: ‘The irreducible fact of goodness is not implicit in one kind of action any more than its opposite, but in the existence of a relationship between the two’.25 Years later Stoppard repeats the point when commenting on The Hard Problem: ‘The idea of goodness isn’t implicit in what we call good behaviour – that merely leaves you with a Mobius strip. It’s only implicit in its relation to something you can compare with it, e.g. its opposite’.26 The intuition of goodness is the foundation of George’s absolutist argument. The relativist argument is what George calls a ‘moral limbo’ in which ‘one man’s idea of good is no more meaningful than another man’s whether he be St. Francis or – Vice Chancellor’.27 It is a world in which, 23 24 25

26 27

Jumpers, page 55. Jumpers, page 67. Jumpers, page 55. George’s statement, although not quoted by Kenneth Tynan, is surely evidence to support Tynan’s proposition that Stoppard believes in, ‘a universe in which everything is relative yet in which moral absolutes exist’. – K. Tynan, ‘Withdrawing with Style from Chaos’. See also John Fleming’s discussion of how Stoppard blends relative and absolute perspectives into a consistent worldview in J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, pages 132–135 and Note 13, page 280. Stoppard, in a letter to Richard Dawkins.2. Jumpers, page 67.

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Moral judgements belong to the same class as aesthetic judgements.28 The relativist believes that good and bad are merely ‘categories of our own making’29 and do not exist in ‘any absolute or metaphysical sense’.30 Under this view ‘telling lies is not sinful but simply anti-social’.31 Using the example of ‘the idea of beauty as conceived by Mozart…and, on the other hand as conceived by a group of musicians playing at a wedding in a part of Equatorial Africa’, George characterises relativism as a view that ‘beauty is a diverse notion and not a universal one’.32 Morality is reduced to a relative concept. What Stoppard does in Jumpers is to set out the foundations of the edifice of a moral viewpoint, the logical consequences of which he applies and explores in future works. The play reflects his intention, as he describes: I wanted to write about the dispute between somebody who thinks that morality is an absolute and somebody who thinks that it’s a convention which we have evolved like the rules of tennis,33 and which can be altered.34 Stoppard entertains the same dispute in Darkside. In a speech that echoes George’s argument for an intuition of goodness Emily says: We are of a kind, we are natural born to kindness, which means to act as to our kind, as kin to kin, as kindred, which is to act kindly.…To be unkind is against nature, and makes us feel bad. To be selfish is against nature because it is against our kindness. We are as natural-born to unselfishness as a mother to her baby.35 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

Jumpers, pages 52–53. Jumpers, page 48. Jumpers, page 48. Jumpers, page 48. Jumpers, page 53. Stoppard explains : ‘What (Jumpers) says is that if the status of goodness is a matter of convenience and social evolution,and consequently, has simply evolved through a series of changes, then it is open to be changed in a reverse direction where casual murder might be deemed good’. – Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Seriousness compromised by my frivolity or…frivolity redeemed by my seriousness’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 17. Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 157. Darkside, pages 28–29.

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She answers the question George poses in his lecture – ‘What, in short, is so good about good?’36 – by stating that, ‘You can’t work out what is the good, you just know what is the good, that’s what’s good about it’.37 Stoppard, once again, puts the arguments for a relativist and an absolutist world. He offers up Nietzsche’s version of morality, which looks very much like McFee’s relativist view. ‘Nietzsche looked around him and announced that God was dead. The question follows: if God is dead, who is making the rules? Nobody, Nietzsche said. Or rather, anybody. The rules are made by whoever has the will to make them’.38 As Stoppard shows in Jumpers and explained to Oleg Kerensky, ‘The difference between moral rules and the rules of tennis is that the rules of tennis can be changed’.39 Emily describes a world in which there was no prime mover, one of the ‘two of (God) that philosophy obligingly provides’:40 ‘In the beginning, before there was something there was nothing, but in the nothingness was everything to come squeezed into a point which burst and was the universe’.41 George describes the logically unnecessary, but entirely defensible, view that the Creator is unlikely to wash his hands of his creation because, ‘people admit a Creator to give authority to moral values, and admit moral values to give point to the Creation’.42 Emily asks the question that George answers; ‘Where is the juggler?’.43 If there is no God to act as an absolute source of morality what one gets is McFee’s relativist world of the Coda in Jumpers. Stoppard provides another version of it in Darkside. Archie offers a platitudinous despair of a world of ‘Hell’s bells and all’s well … vast areas are unpolluted’, in which he ignores suffering at the expense of the fortunate – ‘millions of children grow up without suffering deprivation, and millions, while deprived, grow up without suffering cruelties, and millions, while deprived and cruelly treated, none the less grow up’.44 Emily, by contrast, describes the same polluted world, but this time she focuses on the negative aspects of a world which is being destroyed ecologically by a mankind with no sense of the common good, ie: without absolute morality. 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Jumpers, page 55. Darkside, page 32. Darkside, page 17. Stoppard, quoted in O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 170. Jumpers, pages 25–26. Darkside, page 50. Jumpers, page 26. Darkside, page 50. Jumpers, page 87.

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The ice is melting. Your drink is getting warm. A wall of water is heading for your patio. … Hardwoods are toppling for dashboards. The last rhino has given up its horn for a cancer cure that doesn’t work. The last swordfish is gasping beneath a floating island of plastic as big as France.45 In a line which would be just as at home in the new political order of the newly elected Radical Liberal Jumpers Emily adds, ‘The weather forecast is a state secret’.46 These are the consequences of a ‘universe (which) was nothing but stuff in empty space, atoms pinballing into molecules, into stars, and everything lifeless. That was everything there was and ever could be, anywhere’.47 Using a similar ambiguity to Archie’s, Pink Floyd sing in Darkside, And everything under the sun is in tune But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.48 In that world ‘There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark’.49 Hence, Emily’s repetition of her question reinforces the notion of a world without an absolutist view of morality: ‘Where is the juggler?’.50 Reminiscent of Spike’s Game Theory in The Hard Problem, Emily uses the example of a valley of common land to demonstrate the difference between the relativist world of behaving according to everybody’s own rules and the absolutist world of a single yardstick of the common good. The Fat Man describes why he cheated by grazing extra cows on it and extracted water from it to irrigate his own tomato patch: Look at it my way. Either there’s others cheating or there’s nobody cheating. If there’s others cheating, I’d be a fool to stick to what was agreed. For all I know I’d be the only one! – So it’s best for me to cheat along. That’s obvious. And if there’s nobody cheating, my little bit of cheating makes no difference, so that’s best for me too. Whatever the others are doing it’s best for me to cheat. The tragedy was that everyone else was thinking the same thing. So the common was bound to be overgrazed, and the stream

45 46 47 48 49 50

Darkside, page 52. Darkside, page 52. Darkside, page 50. Darkside, page 53: Eclipse by Pink Floyd. Darkside, page 53. Darkside, page 53.

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was bound to fail. Nothing could have stopped the common from being ruined for us all.51 Emily explains by contrasting the consequences of relativist with the absolute attitude: ‘You wouldn’t be on your own if everybody was thinking the same! In the end you gained nothing by cheating, so you might as well have played fair’.52 What distinguishes the discussion of morality in The Hard Problem from the debates Stoppard writes in his other stage plays is the concept of value. In Stoppard’s words, ‘(Hilary’s) “problem” is the foundation of morality, of ethics, of aesthetics, of “the good”; in short, of value’.53 The play contains examples of how value is ascribed, most clearly in the description of why investors place money with Jerry Krohl’s business. Spike explains: ‘…let’s say you have ten million pounds which you’d like to put to work. You decide to invest it in Krohl Capital Management. First Jerry Krohl takes two per cent per year, £200,000, as his fee for taking your money to gamble with. Then he gambles with it and keeps twenty per cent of the winnings. If he loses, the losses are all yours’.54 The reason an investor makes such a decision is the possible payoff – Amal enlightens the audience with the news that ‘Krohl Capital Management averaged sixteen per cent per annum return on capital’.55 By contrast the application of value to morality is most aptly seen in Hilary’s decision, aged fifteen, to give up her child, Catherine, for adoption. ‘It seemed like the best thing’,56 she admits to Julia. But, Stoppard’s play eventually applies a monetary value to the outcome when Hilary tells Jerry that, ‘The very last thing I imagined was that Catherine was a rich kid’.57 Hilary’s calculation of value also comes into the other altruistic decision she makes to take the blame for Bo’s error. Her own analysis of it to Leo is that Bo’s skills are too valuable for the department to lose. What defines Hilary’s sense of value is her reaction to the idea of mother-love, exemplified by Raphael’s painting Madonna and Child. If there is just one thing in the play which illustrates the extra dimension of value that Stoppard is adding to his debate on the source of morality it is that she simply cannot accept Spike’s assertion that ‘at root its virtue consists in its 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Darkside, page 25. Darkside, page 25. Stoppard – First Person. The Hard Problem, page 59. The Hard Problem, page 60. The Hard Problem, page 20. The Hard Problem, page 76.

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utility’.58 Spike re-iterates the extra dimension by referring to the painting as ‘Woman Maximising Gene Survival’.59 The Hard Problem revisits Stoppard’s arguments about whether morality is innate or learned but it does so in the context of what the payoff for behaviour is. Spike understands that the implications of Hilary and Bo’s research into what motivates children has an ethical dimension, as his comment (alluding to the difference between the views of Rousseau and Hobbes) on their flawed paper shows: (the paper) points to a strong indication that we start off nice and learn to be nasty, instead of the received wisdom that we start off nasty and learn to be nice. Ergo, good, or ultimate niceness, has its root in nature. Or rather human nature. Or rather human nature when it is separated from animal nature, which is actually a problem for people like me who can’t see the join.60 In the ethical landscape of Stoppard’s plays the conclusion of the flawed experiment has enormous significance because it suggests that both George Moore’s and Anderson’s contentions that man is born with an innate sense of goodness are correct. The debate comes to rest with a very personal question which Jerry poses to Hilary about his daughter, Cathy, whose birth mother, it turns out, by coincidence, is Hilary. He asks it in the frame of reference of Hilary’s ill-fated questionnaire. ‘Cathy was…an outlier. Do you think it’s nature or nurture that’s responsible for Cathy?’. This question is at the heart of Stoppard’s concern with morality. Is one born with an innate sense of goodness, or does it have to be learned? It is a debate he characterises as one between the view of Rousseau – in what Herzen refers to as, ‘the nobility of man in his natural state’,61 – and that of Hobbes, in which the life of man in the natural condition of mankind is seen to be, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’,62 and in which, ‘the notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place’.63 Stoppard resists the Hobbesian view on the grounds that, ‘I don’t like the idea of humanity having to be taught to be good’,64 because it raises the question of who is doing the teaching. 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

The Hard Problem, page 13. The Hard Problem, page 13. The Hard Problem, page 64. Voyage, page 37. T. Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter xiii. T. Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter xiii. Stoppard, in an interview with N. Hytner, The Royal National Theatre, 6 February 2015.

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Spike stands, by his own description, as the symbol of science – ‘I’m Darwin. I’m Mendel. I’m Crick and Watson. I stand for all the science that’s taught’,65 he proudly declaims – and espouses the Hobbesian explanation in terms of Darwinian behaviour. He believes that human behaviour may be explained as ‘a survival reflex’,66 which operates on the basis of ‘genetically selected behaviour to maximise’67 (survival) – Hilary interrupts him before he can finish. His insistence to Hilary that, ‘You’re an animal. Get over it’,68 leads him to argue that the Darwinian principle of, to use Hilary’s phrase in imitation of Darwin, ‘evolution by means of natural selection’69 causes a genetically composed animal to devise a morality which is based upon the principles of game theory. Game theory is a mathematical way of evaluating and explaining how a Darwinian being, motivated by self-interest, operates in the form of a society comprising individuals who work or group together. Armand Marie Leroi, in the programme notes to the Royal National Theatre production of The Hard Problem in 2015, explains how the game theory works using as an example a situation which is reflected in the play: Two scientists publish a fishy result. An investigation ensues. Each scientist has a choice: blame the other or stay silent. The consequences of either strategy – the cells of the ‘payoff matrix’ – are these: if both stay silent nothing is proved, so both get a warning; if each blames the other, both get demoted; but if only one points the finger, she gets immunity while her silent colleague gets fired. Together the scientists will be best off if both stay silent, but – here’s the rub – neither knows what the other will do. They are trapped in the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. The worst that can happen is demotion. In this game, ‘blame your colleague’ is the Nash Equilibrium.70, 71 The significance of the Nash Equilibrium is that it is the product of playing the game not once but repeatedly, thereby mimicking the process of evolution. Spike alludes to it with his example of bats who regurgitate and share some of the blood they have harvested with bats who came home hungry from foraging. 65 66 67 68 69 70

71

The Hard Problem, page 10. The Hard Problem, page 14. The Hard Problem, page 14. The Hard Problem, page 15. The Hard Problem, page 10. The Nash Equilibrium is ‘any profile of strategies – one for each player – in which each player’s strategy is a best reply to the strategies of the other players’ – K. Binmore, ‘Fairness as a Natural Phenomenon’. AM. Leroi, letter to Stoppard.

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Spike: I don’t want to be the one to break it to you. How many times do you think a bat will refuse to share its dinner before it finds out next time it comes hungry the other bats won’t cough up? Hilary: I don’t know. Spike: I don’t know either, but off the top of my head…four. Four times, say. That’ll teach the selfish little bastard how to behave.72 By means of a repeated process involving the evaluation of payoffs the bats have decided that it is better to share because it is the best strategy for both donor and recipient bat. It is Spike’s explanation of altruism – ‘Altruism is always self-interest’, he says, ‘it just needs a little working out’.73 ‘Moral rules’, Spike says, ‘are the stable strategy evolved by millions of years of jockeying between humans in real-life situations like the game of prisoner’s dilemma’.74 He is echoing the argument of Ken Binmore who, on the basis of game theory, contends that ‘fairness evolved as Nature’s answer to the equilibrium selection problem in human co-ordination games’, which leads to his conclusion that, ‘Nobody is going to consent to a reform on fairness grounds if the resulting distribution of costs and benefits seems to them unfair according to established habit and custom’.75 It is in direct contrast to Anderson’s view that, ‘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’.76 In Spike’s game the audience learns, right at the start of the play, that, ‘Two rational prisoners will betray each other even though they would have done better to trust each other’,77 because ‘the game is…about a statistical tendency. It’s about survival strategies hard-wired into our brains millions of years ago. Who eats, who gets eaten, who gets to advance their genes to the next generation. Competition is the natural order. Self-interest is the bedrock. Co-operation is a strategy. Altruism is an outlier unless you’re an ant or a bee’.78 He explains away altruism as another form of egoism by using the example of mother love, which Hilary thrusts at him and calls ‘a virtue’.79 His 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

The Hard Problem, pages 5–6. The Hard Problem, page 6. The Hard Problem, page 15. K. Binmore, ‘Fairness as a Natural Phenomenon’. Professional Foul, page 90. The Hard Problem, page 4. The Hard Problem, pages 4–5. See R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, pages 171–172 and 177–181 for a discussion on the behaviour of bees and ants in the context of survival behaviour. The Hard Problem, page 13.

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explanation for the existence of such seeming morality is that, ‘You don’t call it a virtue, because at root its virtue consists in utility … Mother and baby are in a cost-benefit competition’.80 Darwin doesn’t do sentimental.…Culture, empathy, faith, hope and charity, all the flip sides of egoism, come back to biology, because there just ain’t anywhere else to come from except three pounds of grey matter wired up in your head…hard wired for me first.81 Richard Dawkins, in correspondence with Stoppard in 2006, explains altruism by considering subjective feelings (eg: sympathy) as a ‘misfire’: ‘Like any other Darwinian rule of thumb, they misfire in conditions that differ from the original conditions in which natural selection favoured them’.82 Altruism has no place in game theory, as one knows from McFee’s confession in Jumpers, ‘if altruism is a possibility…my argument is up a gum tree…’,83 which implies that altruism proves the existence of an objective moral yardstick. Stoppard, in a letter to Richard Dawkins, draws the same conclusion as McFee and translates its import into the arena of the consciousness dualism debate: ‘You can’t let altruism in because that would let in any stand-alone morality, and stand-alone morality translates as dualism’.84 Hilary believes in altruism and she demonstrates it by reference to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. ‘Rose of Sharon’s baby is born dead, so she gives her breast to an old man dying of hunger, a stranger, just some old man they find lying in a barn where the family are sheltering from the rainstorm. That’s how the story ends with Rosaharn holding a starving man to her breast. Altruism means being good for its own sake’.85 Amal, in a conversation with Jerry, inadvertently references Chalmers’ experience/George Moore’s mystery/Hilary’s altruism – the ‘extra ingredient’ – in a fusion of the Chaos Theory, expounded in Arcadia, and Chalmers’ hypothesis of the hard problem: Amal: … if you separate what you can’t understand from anatomy, you’re going backwards to Plato. The brain is physical, and there’s no 80 81 82 83 84 85

The Hard Problem, pages 13 to 14. The Hard Problem, page 7. R. Dawkins to Stoppard – 2006. Published in the programme of the Royal National Theatre production of The Hard Problem 2015. Jumpers, page 80. Stoppard, in a letter to Richard Dawkins.1. The Hard Problem, pages 6 to 7.

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other stuff out there…The maths to explain what’s going on in the brain is like trying to write equations for a waterfall as big as – I have no idea how big, as big as a million Niagaras maybe – and so far we can write a short-term prediction for two variables in a mixer-tap… … Jerry: I don’t think you can write a prediction for a non-linear complex system, even for a mixer tap. Amal: Short-term you can, if you have some earlier values for the variables. That gives you a history of the system’s behaviour, like a library of the patterns it made, because there is a pattern, a chaotic system isn’t really random, it just looks random. So you look in the library for previous states of the system, and where you find some similarity to what you’re looking at now, you can expect to see similar behaviour in the short-term future.86 It also alludes loosely to Dawkins’ contention as to what distinguishes man from other animals: ‘It is possible that yet another unique quality of man is a capacity for genuine, disinterested, true altruism.…We have at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests’.87 God You ask something else, to get the answer to the question that you didn’t ask.88 hilary, The Hard Problem

…

Is anybody there?89 dotty, Jumpers

∵ 86 87 88 89

The Hard Problem, page 25. R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, page 200. The Hard Problem, page 40. Jumpers, page 26.

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Stoppard’s own view about the need for a deity has evolved. He has been very clear that an absolute morality is essential: I’ve always felt that whether or not ‘God-given’90 means anything, there has to be an ultimate external reference for our actions. Our view of good behaviour must not be relativist.91 His view about whether that absolute reference is a theistic one was rather more reluctantly arrived at from the rejection of relativism which, he says, ‘led me to the conclusion, not reached all that willingly, that if our behaviour is open to absolute judgement, there must be an absolute judge’.92 By contrast, Belinsky, in Voyage, is more certain of his conviction: ‘Every work of art’, he tells the Bakunins, ‘is the breath of a single eternal idea breathed by God into the inner life of the artist’.93 Stoppard’s reluctant view was a motivation

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Stoppard defined the subject of Jumpers as, ‘whether social morality is simply a conditional response to history and environment or whether moral sanctions obey an absolute, intuitive, God given law’. Quoted in M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 82. O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 170. Stoppard goes on to say (op cit, page 170) that, ‘I think it’s a dangerous idea that what constitutes “good behaviour” depends on social conventions’. Jernigan cites Stoppard’s view as evidence of his theory that Stoppard moves away from postmodernism – viz: ‘For what are these “social conventions” that Stoppard is so quick to dismiss but just short of “local narratives” that Lyotard (upon whose definition of “postmodern” in The Postmodern Condition Jernigan relies) considers as having become commonplace in the postmodern era. It would appear…that to reject logical positivism is to distance oneself from the sort of thinking which pervades postmodernism’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 46. O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 170. Stoppard also arrives at the idea of a God from a different angle. ‘I’ve always thought that the idea of God is absolutely preposterous but slightly more plausible than the alternative proposition that, given enough time, some green slime could write Shakespeare’s sonnets’. – Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Seriousness compromised by my frivolity or…frivolity redeemed by my seriousness’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, pages 15–16. He also told Mel Gussow, in response to a question of what is Jumpers about?: ‘They found traces of amino acid in volcanic rock – the beginnings of life. Now a straight line of evolution from amino acid in volcanic rock all the way through to Shakespeare’s sonnets – that strikes me as possible, but a very long shot. Why back such an outsider? However preposterous the idea of God is, it seems to have an edge in plausibility’. – Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 5. Voyage, page 41.

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behind Jumpers. ‘I wanted to write a theist play, to combat the arrogant view that anyone who believes in God is some kind of cripple, using God as a crutch. I wanted to suggest that atheists may be the cripples, lacking the strength to live with the idea of God’.94 But, a belief in God, for Stoppard, does not imply religion – ‘I approve of belief in God and I try to behave as if there is one, but that hardly amounts to faith’,95 he told Shusha Guppy. Although George Moore talks in terms of the source of morality being a God (or supreme moral being), it is not necessarily the case. Anderson, in Professional Foul, articulates the point: If there is a God, we would doubtless subscribe to his values. And if there is not a God, he, our creation, would undoubtedly be credited with values which we think to be fair and sensible.96 Stoppard revisits this point in his programme notes to the 2015 production of The Hard Problem at the Royal National Theatre, commenting on Ronald Dworkin’s argument of religion without God: Dworkin acknowledged ‘religious’ feelings which transcended the material world in our mindscape of morality and beauty and so forth, but this was religion ‘without God’, in that we had defined our God in terms of our values, so our values must have pre-existed God, rather than deriving from God.97

94 95

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O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 170. Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater vii’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 188. Delaney’s suggestion (P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays), page 45, plus a shorter assertion on page 5 op cit, that, ‘In a 1977 pronouncement he identified himself as predisposed toward “Western liberal democracy favouring an intellectual elite and a progressive middle class and based on a moral order derived from Christian values”’, is a slight over emphasis. What Stoppard is quoted as saying is part of Stoppard’s summary of Paul Johnson’s Enemies of Society in ‘But For The Middle Classes’. In the same article Stoppard does go on to say that he is, ‘a similarly predisposed reviewer’. Professional Foul, page 89. ‘Anderson enables Stoppard to sidestep the question of whether moral absolutes do or do not have a divine source while firmly maintaining that such standards are universal, paramount, and immutable’. – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 89. Stoppard, programme notes to the 2015 Royal National Theatre production of The Hard Problem.

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In addition, George Moore points out that there is no reason why the source of moral absolutes and the creator should be the same entity – but, in practice, mankind views them as one: I say they are unconnected because there is no logical reason why the fountainhead of goodness in the universe should have necessarily created the universe in the first place; nor is it necessary, on the other hand, that a Creator should care tuppence about the behaviour of his creations. Still, at least in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, nothing is heard either of a God who created the universe and then washed his hands of it or, alternatively, a God who merely took a comparatively recent interest in the chance product of universal gases. In practice, people admit a Creator to give authority to moral values, and admit moral values to give point to the Creation.98 In Jumpers and Professional Foul Stoppard establishes an argument for the existence of a source of moral absolutism. In The Hard Problem Stoppard asks a question about consciousness and gets an answer about the nature of God because the central issue – of mind-body dualism – leads to an analysis of the nature and motivation of human behaviour: is it entirely caused by selfinterest which has been honed by years of evolutionary refinement or is it determined by the supreme moral being George Moore identifies? In order to do so Stoppard depicts the Krohl Institute for Brain Science99 in which a researcher, Hilary, is engaged in trying to discover the nature of consciousness. But, as she says and, thereby, explains, with the aid of a terrific simile, the crux of the play is how one question answers another: 98

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Jumpers, page 26. The Hard Problem does not explore this point in great detail, no doubt in consequence of what Stoppard describes in his interview with Hytner on 6 February 2015 as, ‘a desire to write a short, brisk play’. Dworkin adds an element to his argument which echoes George’s division of God’s role into two parts: prime mover and the source of moral values. Dworkin argues, in Religion Without God, Chapter i, that, ‘The conventional, theistic religions with which most of us are familiar – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – have two parts: a science part and a value part’, that are, ‘conceptually independent’. He goes on to define the science part as that which answers questions as to the origin of the world and the value part as the convictions by which on lives one’s life and behaves. Some of these convictions – eg: worship, prayer – make no sense without belief in a god; others – eg: the ‘ethical responsibility to live as well as possible’ – require no connection with a God. But, anyone accepting the ethical responsibilities acknowledges that ‘nature is not just a matter of particles thrown together’ and may be determined as a ‘religious atheist’. The Hard Problem, page 16.

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…with consciousness – with the mind-body problem – the God idea shoves itself to the front like a doctor at the scene of an accident, because when you come right down to it, the body is made of things, and things don’t have thoughts.100 The context for the analysis of the nature of the source of morality is first set by another Stoppardian protagonist. Logically it begins with Max arguing for reason in Rock ‘N’ Roll. In an exchange with Max which explains the link between the separation of consciousness in Sappho’s poetry and the nature of social and political organisation, which is the principal subject of the play, Lenka highlights the difference between the interior human spark and the exterior environment which seeks to control individuals: Lenka: You think human nature is a beast which must be put in a cage. But it’s the cage that makes the animal bad. … Max: The cage is reason. Lenka: Reason is your superstition. Nature is deeper than reason, and stranger.101 In The Coast of Utopia, Belinsky cannot subscribe to Hegel’s argument for reason as the moral absolute and, instead, rather like George in Jumpers and Anderson in Professional Foul, introduces the sense of intuition as the basis of morality: ‘The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist…’.102 Congruent with George’s explanation that the absolute may manifest in different ways according to local customs Belinsky argues that the moral intuition may be expressed according to local mores: ‘the universal idea speaks through humanity itself, and differently through each nation in each stage of history’.103 If humanity is the mouthpiece of morality and if the body is an assembly of items which do not have the capacity for thought there must be something which exists in addition to the physical nature of the brain. The additional aspect is consciousness which is the way one experiences the world. The programme notes for the Royal National Theatre’s inaugural production of 100 101 102 103

The Hard Problem, page 12. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 111. Voyage, pages 37–38. Voyage, page 40.

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The Hard Problem contain a short article about ‘Cartesian Dualism’ which explains how Rene Descartes addressed the issue of consciousness by making a distinction between mind and body: His starting point was to ask himself what, if anything, he could believe as a fact without any possibility of doubt. Could he believe even in his own existence? A demonic spirit might, after all, be responsible for the illusion of existence. He concluded that his ability to have such a thought, was the one fact which could not be doubted. ‘I think, therefore I am’. He wrote it first in French, then in Latin. Cogito ergo sum.104 This thought first occurs in Stoppardian literature in the words of the codphilosopher cum madcap inventor, George Riley, in Enter a Free Man when he tells Florence, ‘I’m a cerebral man…I think, therefore I am!’.105 The same thought leads Max in Rock ‘N’ Roll, prompted by a consideration of Sappho’s poetry, to an analysis of the state of human consciousness. Max represents one extreme of the debate when he argues that, ‘The brain is a biological machine for thinking. If it wasn’t for the merely technical problem of understanding how it works, we could make one out of – beer cans. It would be the size of a stadium but it would sit there, going, ‘I think, therefore I am’.106 His argument is reminiscent of Medvedenko’s comment in Stoppard’s version of The Seagull to the effect that, ‘It’s quite unsound…to take spirit and matter separately, for the simple reason that, for all we know, spirit itself is nothing else but the totality of material atoms’.107 The point is reinforced with youthful insistence by Amal in The Hard Problem who substitutes items of stationery for beer cans: ‘…the brain is a machine, a biological machine, and it thinks. It happens to be made of living cells but it would make no difference if the machine was made of electronic gates and circuits, or paperclips and rubber bands for that matter. It just has to be able to compute’.108 The opposite extreme is advanced by Lenka, Eleanor’s pupil, who believes that, ‘the mental separates from the physical’.109 Her point stems from her interpretation of Sappho’s description of the sensation of love: ‘when Sappho so much as glances at her lover, her entire body goes berserk! She’s describing 104 105 106 107 108 109

The Hard Problem – Programme notes of the Royal National Theatre production 2015. Enter a Free Man, page 29. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 58. The Seagull, page 415. The Hard Problem, page 22. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 57.

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what it’s like to be in love – her heart jumps around like a bird beating its wings, her eyes stop seeing, her tongue breaks, her ears fill up with noise, her skin goes hot, then cold and clammy, her body’s out of control’.110 Eleanor, Max’s wife, draws a distinction between ‘what’s in Sappho’s consciousness with what’s physically “out there” in the objective world’.111 Whilst Sappho might paradoxically ‘describe the feeling of love as objectively as she might describe being stung by a bee’,112 Lenka argues that ‘she is in love separate from her body’.113 Eleanor supports Lenka with the observation that, ‘When you say, “I love you”, you’re not saying “Darling, I notice some rather unusual events in my body”’.114 In opposition to Max, and recalling the ‘mystery in the clockwork’115 of George in Jumpers that is the essence of humanity beyond what can be seen under the microscope, she asserts that, ‘We have to rediscover our human mystery in the age of technology’.116 Appropriately, Eleanor’s body, ravaged as it is by cancer, becomes a symbol of Lenka’s point about the distinction of human consciousness from its corporeal frame. Eleanor exclaims, in one of Stoppard’s most painfully beautiful speeches, They’ve cut, cauterised and zapped away my breasts, my ovaries, my womb, half my bowel, and a nutmeg out of my brain, and I am undiminished. I’m exactly who I’ve always been. I am not my body. My body is nothing without me, that’s the truth of it.117 Continuing in the same evocative and plaintiff style Eleanor hammers home her point about the difference by furiously imploring Max: I don’t want your ‘mind’ which you can make out of beer cans. Don’t bring it to my funeral. I want your grieving soul or nothing. I do not want your amazing biological machine – I want what you love me with.118

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 55. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 56. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 56. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 58. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 56. Jumpers, page 72. Rock ‘N’ Roll, pages 58–59. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 62. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 63.

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What Hilary argues for in The Hard Problem, borrowing from Greek semantics, is what Eleanor berates Max for – ‘The psyche in psychology is Greek for soul’.119 Hilary’s exploration of Max and Lenka’s positions on the nature of consciousness in Stoppard’s hands becomes a proxy for asking the question of whether faith enters into the philosophical arena. In the same way that George in Jumpers concludes that, ‘there is more in me than meets the microscope’,120 Hilary uses the metaphor of the scanner to broaden the discussion about the role of the extra ingredient into the realm of wider human behaviour: Being wrong about human behaviour is our guiding star…It’s what’s telling us the study of the mind is not a science. We’re dealing in mind stuff that doesn’t show up in a scan – accountability, duty, freewill, language, all the stuff that makes behaviour unpredictable.121 In so doing she takes the duality of consciousness and turns it into a mindbody duality.122 In contrast to materialists, like Spike, who argue that the mind is reduced to the functions of the brain, dualism is the idea that the mind and the brain are separate. Hilary, while not particularly obsessed with consciousness, is more concerned with the morality that ensues from a dualist approach. The Hard Problem becomes a debate about the nature of human behaviour and, ultimately, the motivation of such behaviour, thereby answering another question – are the rules for that behaviour set by a supreme moral being? What Hilary does is confer upon the ‘extra ingredient’ a religious aspect. Stoppard runs the suggestion in The Coast of Utopia. Granovsky, in an exchange with Herzen, argues that such a source of morality has a theistic nature, although Herzen brusquely and passionately dismisses that proposition: Granovsky: Without faith in something higher, human nature is animal nature. Herzen: Without superstition, you mean.

119 120 121 122

The Hard Problem, page 36. Jumpers, page 68. The Hard Problem, page 37. Hilary is also relying on an argument proposed by Thomas Nagel in a paper entitled ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’.

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Granovsky: Superstition? Did you say superstition? Herzen: Superstition! The pious and pitiful belief that there’s something outside or up there, or God knows where, without which men can’t afford to find their nobility. Granovsky: Without ‘up there’, as you call it, scores have to be settled down here – that’s the whole truth about materialism. Herzen: How can you – how dare you – throw away your dignity as a human being? You can choose well or badly without deference to a ghost! – you’re a free man, Granovsky, there’s no other kind.123 When adapting Anna Karenina into a screenplay Stoppard appears to remove God from the explanation. In Tolstoy’s book, Levin and Fyodor, a muzhik, discuss morality: Fyodor: …Fokanych – he’s an upright man. He lives for the soul. He remembers God. Levin: How’s that? Remembers God? Lives for the soul? Levin almost shouted. Fyodor: Everybody knows how – by the truth, by God’s way.124 Fyodor’s words prompt Levin to a conclusion that George Moore would appreciate: Yes, the one obvious, unquestionable manifestation of the Deity is the laws of the good disclosed to world by revelation, which I feel in myself…125 But, in the screenplay Stoppard writes it slightly differently – more concisely – and to the point. In so doing he leaves out God.126 In The Hard Problem God reappears. Spike, alerted to Hilary’s religious belief because he catches her ‘saying my prayers’127 confronts her faith:

123 124 125 126 127

Shipwreck, page 19. Anna Karenina, page 794. Anna Karenina, page 815. Theodore suggests that Man has an internal sense of right and wrong. The Hard Problem, page 8.

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Spike: …it’s pathetic to rely on a supreme being to underwrite what you call your values. Why are you afraid of making your own? Hilary: You don’t claim to make your own. What’s the difference between a supreme being and being programmed by your biology? Spike: Freedom. I can override the programming.128 This is reminiscent of what Stoppard identifies in Jumpers – ‘The difference between moral rules and the rules of tennis is that the rules of tennis can be changed’.129 And, it is the notion of faith which Stoppard is exploring, albeit not strictly a religious one. The play, rather subliminally, contrasts the faith of religion with the fervent adherence of those who unquestionably believe in the power of the computer. The blind faith in computer models is illustrated in an explanation from Amal that cleverly alludes to the moral relativity of marking one’s own homework: ‘So long as the market is correcting itself, the models look as if they’re working’.130 Such faith is also reflected in Hilary’s comment which she makes in reference to Spike’s rationale for consciousness but it could also be construed to apply to the materialism of financial traders: ‘What does materialism remind you of? It’s a faith’.131 The independent rule maker, according to Hilary, is not necessarily a ‘God’ in the sense of ‘someone who created the world in six days and then had a rest’132 – implying a biblical or faith-based solution – but it is, nevertheless, a moral being with intelligence. Such an independent moral being is incompatible with Spike’s science, as Hapgood illustrates. Kerner recounts, ‘It upset Einstein very much, you know, all that damned quantum jumping, it spoiled his idea of God…He believed in the same God as Newton…Quantum mechanics made everything finally random, things can go this way or that way, the mathematics deny certainty, they reveal only probability and chance…’.133 In a reference to a famous quotation from Einstein, Kerner reveals that, ‘Einstein couldn’t believe in a god who threw dice’.134 Sarpi, a follower of Galileo’s, rather beautifully echoes Einstein’s position by suggesting that, ‘science and theology will always find a way to dance together to the music of the ­universe,

128 129 130 131 132 133 134

The Hard Problem, page 49. Stoppard quoted in O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 170. The Hard Problem, page 69. The Hard Problem, page 49. The Hard Problem, page 51. Hapgood, page 36. Hapgood, page 36.

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because time, which will reveal all truth, is infinite’.135 Stoppard enlarged upon the implications of Sarpi’s idea in an interview with the Reverend Joseph McCulloch and came to the point at which Dotty arrived – that the world is local – and drew from it a theological conclusion: I rather think that science and theology will always find a way to dance together to the music, because the whole of science can be said, by a theologian, to be operating within a larger framework. In other words, the higher we penetrate into space and the deeper we penetrate into the atom, all it shows to a theologian is that God has been gravely underestimated.136 In Galileo’s time the view that the earth was at the centre of the universe…meant that the whole thing could not be that big…it had to be a reasonable size; and in the still centre of this mechanism was the apple of God’s eye. The awful thing about a rotating earth was that suddenly the whole machine became infinitely huge.…It is the thought that suddenly one was no longer this privileged little unique world in the middle of these marble globes, but one that was simply on a lump of rock, barely distinguishable from millions of others, flung out into unimaginable space like a dice flung out of a cup – it was this, surely, which upset the theologians of the time. And I think the lesson which derived from that confrontation was the thought that God had been underestimated and that all this changed nothing. It simply, as it were, glorified God.137 As Dworkin in Religion Without God puts it, Einstein also drew a religious conclusion from a similar scientific observation: Einstein meant much more than that the universe is organized around fundamental physical laws;…The beauty and sublimity he said we could reach only as a feeble reflection are not part of nature; they are 135 Galileo, Act 1, page 28. 136 Stoppard’s comment is reminiscent of Einstein’s belief that, ‘everyone who is involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve’. – see A. Calaprice (ed), – Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein’s Letters to and from Children, page 129. It may be read in conjunction with Einstein’s famous quotation that Kerner reports as, ‘Einstein couldn’t believe in a God who threw dice’. (Hapgood, page 36). 137 Stoppard, in an interview with J. McCulloch, ‘Dialogue with Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 42.

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something beyond nature that cannot be grasped even by finally understanding the most fundamental of physical laws. It was Einstein’s faith that some transcendental and objective value permeates the universe, value that is neither a natural phenomenon nor a subjective reaction to natural phenomena. That is what led him to insist on his own religiosity. No other description, he thought, could better capture the character of his faith.138 Both the quantum physicists of Hapgood and the Chaos theorists of Arcadia argue, at micro and macro scientific levels, that there is a predictability that lies within randomness.139 Kerner expands, in a parallel of Feynman’s physical mystery, upon the metaphysical problem Einstein had somewhat ironically caused himself through his development of the theory of quantum mechanics: 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 of life turns out to be this same mystery, the join between things which are distinct and yet continuous, body and mind, free will and fate, living cells and life itself.…Who needed God when everything worked like billiard balls?…The man who took the certainty out of Newton was Einstein.140 What The Hard Problem does is tackle the relationship linking the metaphysical bit in between and consciousness. Einstein believed in the same God as George in Jumpers. Life to Einstein is not a game of chance, like dice,141 and in the same way, just like George, he cannot explain his ‘mystery in the clockwork’142 A similar concept is hinted at by Stoppard’s Galileo. He states unequivocally that, ‘I believe in reason’,143 but concedes, after he has abjured his beliefs, that, ‘There is something else that makes one man unreasonably 138 R. Dworkin, Religion Without God, Chapter 1. 139 W. Demastes, ‘Re-Inspecting the Crack in the Chimney: Chaos Theory from Ibsen to Stoppard’ in New Theatre Quarterly, 10, number 39, page 245: ‘As with quantum physicists, the chaos theorists conclude that they can uncover a pattern that leads, at best, to probability’. 140 Hapgood, page 36. 141 cf Galileo, Act 2, page 34 – Urban: ‘We are not Pope of an empire that has been flung like dice out of a cup into an emptiness of unimaginable space!’. 142 Jumpers, page 72. 143 Galileo, Act 1, page 16. So, too, does Levin in Anna Karenina.

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stubborn and another unreasonably true to his word’.144 And, if Einstein believes in God, then, as George points out, one of God’s two functions is to act as ‘the God of Goodness to account for moral values’.145 It allows Hilary to complete her argument, in terms of Chalmers’ hard problem and in a way that answers Stoppard’s other question about whether one should endow the source of moral values with a faith, in an exchange with Spike which refers to her lingering concern for her daughter Catherine, whom she gave up for adoption: Hilary: …there are things we believe are right or wrong like, say, torturing someone with electric shocks, and if this belief is also a brain-state, that’s fine by me, but our brain is about something, it’s about torture, which is right or wrong whether we’re thinking about it or not. Spike: You don’t need God for that. Hilary: (forcefully) But you need something for it to be true, some kind of moral intelligence, otherwise we’re just marking our own homework. That’s what I pray to for Catherine, because somewhere between ape-men and the beginning of religion, we became aware of an enormous fact we didn’t understand.146 For Stoppard, ‘the case for God is not an intellectual one’.147 And that brings Stoppard directly to the limiting curve of the intellectual pun he derives from Descartes and gives to George in Jumpers: ‘Cogito ergo deus est’.148 Truth Left to myself I subscribe…to objective truth and absolute morality.149 stoppard

…

144 Galileo, Act 2, page 36. See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 81. 145 Jumpers, page 26. 146 The Hard Problem, page 51. 147 Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theatre viii’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 188. 148 Jumpers, page 72. 149 Stoppard, ‘But For The Middle Classes’.

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The truth will out.150

prisoner, The Gamblers

∵ Stoppard’s consideration of truth reflects the absolutist and relativist nature of his debate about morality. His abstract analysis of the nature of truth at the courts of Elsinore and the Holy Roman Emperor is complemented by the real world philosophy of the nineteenth century. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead presents a version of truth which is relativist. The two protagonists discover in a search for the nature of truth that their existence is only real in relation to their surroundings. Pirandello’s Henry iv takes up the theme of reality and explores the duality between how an individual sees himself and how the rest of the world perceives him. Henry iv’s mind and the world surrounding him is ambiguous. Emerging out of his madness is his discovery of the nature of his self which, in Stoppard’s world, spills over into a more philosophical evaluation in The Coast of Utopia. Once again, it is the sense of duality which is striking: the bipolarity between the inner and the outer self and the perception and reality of the world as seen by the Romantic philosophers and interpreted by the Russian intelligentsia. In Hamlet the Prince tells the Player that ‘the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’.151 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, like its mirror image, is a play about the search for the nature of truth. As Guildenstern acknowledges, it is an ever-present, but difficult, odyssey: All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when someone nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.152 And, as in Hamlet, truth is largely a relative, rather than absolute, concept. It is as if Stoppard has taken the relativism of Hamlet’s aphorism ‘for there is

150 The Gamblers, page 20. 151 Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, lines 19–23. 152 RosGuil, page 30.

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nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’153 and turned it into one of the main themes of his play. The stage for this exploration is set by the play’s two protagonists soon after they have finished tossing their coins: Guil: Then what are we doing here, I ask myself. Ros: You might well ask.154 It’s a quest for truth about their existence and it becomes more insistently asked by Guildenstern: ‘(seizing (Rosencrantz) violently) WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?’.155 They come to see truth as relative because they discover, as Guildenstern notes, that, ‘we only know what we are told, and that’s little enough. And for all we know it isn’t even true’.156 Later on he complains that, ‘We only act on scraps of information’,157 whilst Rosencrantz moans that, ‘If they won’t tell us, that’s their affair’.158 Ultimately, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern remain unsatisfied: ‘To be told so little – to such an end – and, still finally to be denied an explanation…’.159 The Player confirms their suspicions about the relative nature of truth, echoing Hamlet’s point: ‘For all anyone knows, nothing is (true). Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true’.160 But, he offers up a further observation that hints a little at George’s belief in an instinctive sense of absolutism in Jumpers: ‘It’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honoured. On acts on assumptions’.161 The fact that it is honoured suggests a deeper, more intrinsic sense of truth. Stoppard offers a small digression on whether truth is gleaned by instinct or experience. Guildenstern argues at one point, ‘…if we can’t learn by experience, what else have we got?’.162 Later on he takes a different position, picking up at the same time the theme of fate, when he says they are, ‘sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct’.163 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163

Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 247–248. RosGuil, page 10. RosGuil, page 35. RosGuil, page 58. RosGuil, pages 93–94. RosGuil, page 85. RosGuil, page 114. RosGuil, page 58. RosGuil, page 58. RosGuil, page 82. RosGuil, page 94.

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The play abounds with examples of the relative nature of truth, much of it coming from Guildenstern. In particular, he tackles the truth of existence: A Chinaman of the T’ang dynasty – and, by which definition, a ­ hilosopher – dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was p never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him in his two-fold security.164 Likewise, Guildenstern’s comment on the perspective of reality: ‘A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself’.165 The reality of existence is only corroborated by relation to other perspectives: A man…sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds or, to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until – ‘My God’, says a second man, ‘I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn’. At which point a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it ever will be. A third witness, you understand adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to common experience …166 But, Guildenstern highlights the relative nature of truth by adding: ‘Look, look! recites the crowd. “A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer”’.167 In the same way Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s understanding of the truth depends upon corroboration from other sources: Ros: …We’re (Hamlet’s) friends. Guil: How do you know? Ros: From our young days brought up with him. Guil: You’ve only got their word for it. Ros; But that’s what we depend on. Guil: Well, yes, and then again no.168 164 165 166 167 168

RosGuil, page 51. RosGuil, page 59. RosGuil, pages 11–12. RosGuil, page 12. RosGuil, page 101.

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In a similar vein their struggle to know physically (not philosophically) their situation, which implies the need for objective truth, highlights the relativism, as Rosencrantz illustrates: ‘The sun’s going down. Or the earth’s coming up, as the fashionable theory has it.…Not that it makes any difference’.169 This sense of the relativity of their whereabouts troubles Rosencrantz: ‘I merely suggest that the position of the sun, if it is out, would give you a rough idea of the time; alternatively, the clock, if it is going, would give you a rough idea of the position of the sun. I forget which it is you’re trying to establish’.170 Guildenstern’s response, about the direction of the wind, hints at a sense of absolutism: ‘In that case, the origin. Trace it to its source and it might give us a rough idea of the way we came in – which might give us a rough idea of south, for future reference’.171 Just as the Player needs his audience by which he can justify and reference his existence, so Rosencrantz and Guildenstern need external stimuli to give their own existence reference – it does not exist independent of anything. When he cannot see anything Rosencrantz’s internal faculties of thinking and talking do not prove able to give his life reference. Without sight he needs the sensation of feeling to do so: Guil: Well, we’re here, aren’t we? Ros: Are we? I can’t see a thing. Guil: You can still think, can’t you? Ros: I think so. Guil: You can still talk. Ros: What should I say? Guil: Don’t bother. You can feel, can’t you? Ros: Ah! There’s life in me yet!172 Much of the search for truth involves asking questions and the interrogative process dominates much of the speech pattern of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. There is an extremely extensive passage (pages 32–42) of questions and answers which form part of a verbal game in which the two courtiers try to avoid uttering a sentence which makes a statement. The verbal jousting back and forth is given greater emphasis in the film version because it is played out on a badminton court. Other passages of text which involve 169 170 171 172

RosGuil, page 116. RosGuil, page 50. RosGuil, page 50. RosGuil, page 88.

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quick-fire questions and answers also occur in pages 58–61, 65–66, 88–89 and 96–97. The pattern is best illustrated by a short extract in which they, and in this case the Player to begin with, try to unpick Guildenstern’s paradox of the man talking nonsense: Player: Why? Guil: Ah. (to Ros) Why? Ros: Exactly. Guil: Exactly what? Ros: Exactly why. Guil: Exactly why what? Ros: What? Guil: Why? Ros: Why what, exactly? Guil: Why is he mad?! Ros: I don’t know!173 The business of questions and answers is part of the plot. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are being used by Claudius to extract answers from Hamlet about his state of mind: ‘to gather so much as from occasion you may glean’.174 Their performance as interrogators of their quarry is not impressive: Ros:  (derisively) ‘Question and answer. Old ways are the best ways’! He was scoring off us all down the line. Guil: He caught us on the wrong foot once or twice, perhaps, but I thought we gained some ground.175 Rosencrantz’s verdict is: ‘It was question and answer all right. Twenty-seven questions he got out in ten minutes, and he answered three. I was waiting for you to delve’.176 And, reflecting the nature of illusion and reality which also permeates the play, what they do extract has a duality to it: ‘Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn’t mean anything at all’.177 In fact, it seems most of the answers came from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves: ‘Six rhetorical and two repetition, leaving nineteen of which we 173 174 175 176 177

RosGuil, page 60. RosGuil, page 27; Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 15–16. RosGuil, page 47. RosGuil, page 48. RosGuil, page 48.

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answered fifteen’.178 Theirs is a world of continual questions and, at one time, answers, too: Ros: I remember when there were no questions. Guil: There were always questions. To exchange one set for another is no great matter. Ros: Answers, yes. There were answers to everything.179 In fact, Rosencrantz recalls (in a typical example of Stoppardian wordplay), ‘There were answers everywhere you looked. There was no question about it’.180 But, as Guildenstern points out, of Rosencrantz’s answers: ‘…the trouble is, each of them is…plausible, without being instinctive’.181 This position recalls Stoppard’s arguments about the relative and the absolute. Rosencrantz’s answers lack that inborn sense that both Anderson and George Moore regard as absolutist. Closely linked to the recurrence of questions and answers in the play is the concept of memory182 which a typical piece of repartee demonstrates: Guil: …What’s the first thing you remember? Ros: Oh, let’s see…The first thing that comes into my head, you mean? Guil: No – the first thing you remember. Ros: Ah. (Pause.) No, it’s no good, it’s gone. It was a long time ago. Guil: (patient but edged) You don’t get my meaning. What is the first thing after all the things you’ve forgotten? Ros: Oh I see. (Pause.) I’ve forgotten the question.183 Remembering reverberates its way through the play. Rosencrantz muses, ‘What was the last thing I said before we wandered off?…(helplessly) I can’t remember’.184 Again, in true Stoppardian fashion: 178 179 180 181 182

RosGuil, page 48. RosGuil, page 29. RosGuil, page 30. RosGuil, page 30. The act of remembering also features in Waiting for Godot – eg: see pages 50–51 and 77. Travesties, The Invention of Love and On ‘Dover Beach’ all rely on the memory of participants. The sequences involving Herzen’s dream in Salvage may also be considered to rely on his memory. 183 RosGuil, pages 6–7. 184 RosGuil, pages 98–99.

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Guil: What’s the last thing you remember? Ros:   I don’t wish to be reminded of it.185 So many enquiries lead to admissions of forgetfulness: Ros:  …You remember that coin. Guil: No. Ros:  I think I lost it. Guil: What coin? Ros:  I don’t remember exactly.     Pause Guil: Oh, that coin…clever. Ros:   I can’t remember how I did it.186 But, it is not just the two main protagonists who are obsessed by memory. The Player is concerned about it: ‘…by this time tomorrow we might have forgotten everything we ever knew’.187 The matter also reflects on Claudius: Guil: And receive such thanks as fits a king’s remembrance. Ros:    I like the sound of that. What do you think he means by remembrance? Guil: He doesn’t forget his friends.188 Stoppard takes the persistence of memory and the relativism of truth in Elsinore and applies it to the self in his ‘version’ of Pirandello’s Henry iv, a study about a man who seems to be mad189 and how that translates into the difference between how an individual sees himself and how others see him.190 As such it links the themes of illusion and truth that Stoppard pursues so assiduously elsewhere in his canon. While his other adaptations – such as On the Razzle and Rough Crossing (which address the subject through farces of mistaken identity and misrepresentation) and Undiscovered Country 185 RosGuil, page 52. 186 RosGuil, page 61. 187 RosGuil, page 13. 188 RosGuil, page 32. 189 ‘Henry iv (1922) is a play about madness, or at least the appearance of madness’ – C. Spencer, ‘Hail to the mad “king”’, Daily Telegraph 5 May 2004. 190 cf H. Sudkamp: ‘(Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) questions the status of objective truth’. – Tom Stoppard’s Biographical Drama, page 330.

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(which shines a light on the affected social customs of Vienna191) – show the contrast in reality and perception from an external point of view Stoppard’s adaptation of Pirandello’s Henry iv presents the contrast from an internal perspective. Falling from his horse when dressed as Henry iv for a pageant the character of Henry iv appears to be mad. As with several of Stoppard’s other explorations of illusion the focus is on role playing as Henry iv before his accident is described as ‘a very good actor’,192 his life seeming to be led on the edge of reality: Belcredi describes, ‘that outside view of himself, like someone watching himself playing a part, separated him from what he was feeling – which then seemed to him not exactly fake because he wasn’t faking his feelings, but something he had to act out as a self-conscious intention, to make up for the authenticity he couldn’t feel’.193 Already Stoppard is sketching out the difference between how one sees one’s self and how the outside world perceives the individual. The ambiguity of his mind makes it hard to discern after his accident what his mental status was. As Belcredi explains, ‘We thought he’d recovered and was acting up like the rest of us’.194 Actually, it is concluded that it was not ‘a masquerade but madness unmasked’.195 One of the four courtiers employed to maintain the façade of an eleventh century court around him uses the two paintings of Henry iv and Matilda, dressed as the Holy Roman Emperor and the Countess of Tuscany, to describe Henry iv’s predicament: …to him they’re more like whatsits, representations of…what you’d see in a mirror. That one is him just as he is, same clothes, in this throne room, which is right in every detail, no surprises. If it was a mirror, you’d see yourself in the eleventh century. So that’s what he sees. Himself. So, it’s like mirrors reflecting back a world which comes to life in them.196 Perhaps Stoppard had a similar thought in mind when adapting Parade’s End which repeatedly uses a kaleidoscopic mirror and other images of reflections, in this case to suggest the inner character rather than the outer world. 191 Terry Hodgson sees the contrast as more one of ‘a collision between different ages and temperaments’. See T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, page 122. 192 Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 18. 193 Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 18. 194 Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 19. 195 Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 19. 196 Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 7.

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Stoppard’s description of Moon looking at himself in the mirror in Lord Malquist and Mr Moon adopts the same technique, this time using a hinged mirror: He looked at himself in the mirror and his compassion for his image reflected back into himself but it did not comfort him. When he leaned forward between the hinged mirror-leaves he caught the reflection of his reflection and the reflection of that, and of that, and he saw himself multiplied and diminished between the mirrors, himself aghast in the exact centre of a line that stretched to the edges of a flat earth.197 The portraits contain another inversion of reality as Matilda’s portrait, made twenty years earlier when she was a young woman, now looks like her daughter, Frida: ‘I saw myself, and saw I was…just like she is now’.198 To complete the illusion in the last Act Frida and Di Nolli stand inside the frames, instead of the pictures, dressed as the Countess of Tuscany and Henry iv. The Doctor has his own theory of Henry iv’s madness which incorporates the ambiguity of Henry iv’s existence: …we must bear in mind the peculiar psychology of the mad. They can see right through any disguise, while at the same time suspending their disbelief, like children at play believing in their make believe. That’s why I say he is in one sense like a child while in another it’s complicated – ­because you see, his make-believe – and he is well aware of it – is that he is the image of that image in the picture frame.199 Matilda, now dressed as Duchess Adelaide to accommodate Henry iv’s madness, realises that Henry has recognised her and that the Doctor’s explanation does not stand scrutiny. As reality and illusion interweave Henry iv reveals that, whilst initially the fall had induced madness for a period of about twelve years, he has been sane since. But he ‘decided to stay mad…to live as a madman of sound mind’.200 This revelation raises the notion in the other characters, who had all been playing along with Henry iv’s madness, that their own play acting was an act of madness itself, thereby highlighting what Henry iv

197 198 199 200

Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, page 87. Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 13. Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 33. Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 62.

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calls a ‘deliberate caricature of that other charade which is the life we live as puppets’.201 Straying into the relativity of perspective Henry iv castigates those who maintained the charade of the eleventh century court in order to pander to his madness as, ‘people who every living moment expect everyone else to be how they see them!’.202 Invoking Hamlet and alluding to the relative meaning of words identified by Wittgenstein and explored in Dogg’s Hamlet, Henry iv continues to assess their modus vivendi: ‘…when all’s said and done, what do they do with it? Words, words, words.203 Simple words, which anyone can make mean whatever they like’.204 It leads him to question the nature of truth, the catalyst for which is what his affected madness looks like to the sane in much the same way as Dotty’s view of the world was altered by seeing the world without edges for the first time: You’re alarmed because you think I’m still crazy.…the ground disappearing under your feet, the air knocked out of your body? What do you expect? – faced with a madman? – with someone who shakes the foundations of everything you’ve shored up, inside and out?…You hold everything tight; madmen let everything go. You say: this can’t be; they say: everything can be! But now you’re thinking: not true. Because it’s not true for you – and you – and you – and a thousand others. All right, let’s look at what they think is the truth, the sane majority… When I was a child the moon in the bottom of a well was real to me. And many other things, too. I believed everything I was told and I was happy.205 Basing his belief on his notion that, ‘We all hug our idea of ourselves to ourselves’,206 Henry iv examines his own condition and concludes, in reference to the painting of himself made just before the pageant, that he is, ‘hostage to that apparition’.207 He believes that his own truth is that he is sane when everyone else thinks he is mad. He reinforces his relativist point: 201 Pirandello’s Henry iv, pages 62–63. 202 Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 48. 203 Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 193. See also Tango, in which Stomil also refers to Hamlet’s words. 204 Pirandello’s Henry iv, pages 48–49. 205 Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 51. 206 Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 29. 207 Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 31.

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Heaven help you if you don’t cling to your own reality, even if yesterday’s is contradicted by tomorrow’s. Pray God you don’t find out the thing that’ll drive anyone crazy: that when you see yourself reflected in someone’s eyes – as happened to me once – you see a beggar standing at a gate he can never enter. The one who goes in can never be you, in your closedoff, self-created world…208 Henry iv summarises his position by explaining that simulation does not exist, one merely lives in one’s own world: ‘None of us lies or pretends – what happens is, in all sincerity, we inhabit the self we have chosen for ourselves, and don’t let go’.209 In a final twist that is exactly what happens to Henry as he reverts to madness, ending the play with the words, ‘…no two ways about it… Together again…Henry the Fourth, now and for ever’.210 The truth of the Self and its relationship and interaction with the world fascinated the nineteenth century as much as Henry iv’s eleventh. The Coast of Utopia demonstrates how the Russian intelligentsia were engaged in a constant search for truth in their philosophy of which part was their socio-­political views on how to reform Russian society and governance. The hungry sheep of the Russian intelligentsia, having looked up and found no sustenance within Russia, looked to Germany and France for inspiration. Two German philosophers, Schelling and Fichte, proved to be highly influential. They argued that the squalid, mundane chaos in life, of which there was plenty in Tsarist Russia at the time for the everyday serfs, was not a true reality. As Michael Bakunin explains to his sister Tatiana (and later will try do so to his father), ‘The outer world of material existence is mere illusion’.211 It is a view which resonates in Trofimov’s critical analysis of Varya’s affection for him: ‘Her narrow mind can’t grasp that we’re above and beyond what she calls love. To be free from the trivial, the illusions that keep us from being truly happy – that’s the goal and meaning of our life’.212 The reality that mattered was what Kelly describes in the programme notes of the original production of the trilogy in 2002 at the Royal National Theatre in London as, ‘the creative life of the spirit, through which individuals could achieve a sense of identity with the Absolute – the

208 209 210 211 212

Pirandello’s Henry iv, pages 51–52. Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 28. Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 65. Voyage, page 9. The Cherry Orchard, page 43.

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eternal “essence” of the universe – grasp its hidden harmony and understand their own place in it’.213 Stankevich is an early adopter of this Romantic idealism: ‘Schelling’s God is the cosmos, the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got…This truth says the universe is all of a oneness, not just a lot of bits which happen to be lying around together. In other words it says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show. How do we get the rest of the meaning? Schelling says: by unlocking our innermost being. By letting meaning flow through us. This is morality’.214 Michael Bakunin admits an early initial seduction by Schiller, but soon recants in favour of Fichte’s more extreme interpretation of the importance of Self. ‘I got led astray by Schelling’, he admits, ‘He tried to make the Self part of nature – but now Fichte shows that nature is simply non-Self – there is nothing but Self – the soul must become its own object!’.215 This view produced a focus on the inner being, or the Self. It was a view that Stankevich attributes to Kant, as he explains to a credulous Michael Bakunin: ‘Kant says: but morality has no meaning unless we are free to choose, so it follows that we are the only government of our real lives, the ideal is to be discovered in us, not in some book of social theory…Idealism – the self – the autonomous will – is the mark of God’s faith in his creations’.216 The inner Self is the only reference point for reality. Bakunin explains his rejection of Schelling because he feels that the reality of the outer world only exists by reference to the inner Self. In his latest philosophy, he explains, ‘The world achieves existence where I meet it. (He demonstrates with a stale bread roll…) I don’t eat because it’s food, it’s food because I eat it. Because I decide it. Because I will it’.217 This is the opposite view of the Player, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who all conclude that it is their existence which is only proven by reference to external stimuli. Bakunin argues that, ‘Schelling was trying to make out I was just some insignificant spark of consciousness in the Great Pre-Conscious, but Self won’t be got rid of like that. How do I know I exist? Not by meditation!…In meditation I cease to exist.…The world is nothing but

213 A. Kelly, in the programme notes of the Royal National Theatre production of The Coast of Utopia, 2002. 214 Voyage, page 18. 215 Voyage, page 27. 216 Voyage, page 18. 217 Voyage, page 84.

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the impress of my Self. The Self is everything, it’s the only thing’.218 Descartes asked the same question which, in Stoppard’s world, produces the debate on consciousness duality in The Hard Problem. Michael Bakunin, ever the philosophical grasshopper, later repudiates Fichte’s view in favour of Hegel’s rationality. ‘You must read Hegel’, he tells Belinsky, ‘Hegel is the man! Fichte tried to argue the objective world out of existence. No wonder I was going wrong!’.219 Two years later his father is less impressed. ‘I was on the wrong track with Fichte’, his son explains, ‘…Fichte was trying to get rid of objective reality, but Hegel shows that reality can’t be ignored, reality is the interaction of the inner and outer worlds…and harmony is achieved by suffering through the storms of contradiction between the two’.220 ‘You’ve changed windbags, that’s all’,221 is Alexander Bakunin’s haughty response. Living in the realms of high flown idealistic reality is not sustainable in the face of the situation in Russia. It takes Belinsky to point out that the intelligentsia can only enjoy this perspective because of the grim situation of the serfs. He accuses Michael Bakunin of a ‘permanent flight into abstraction and fantasy which allows you not to notice that the life of a philosopher is an aristocratic affair made possible by the sweat of Premukhino’s five hundred souls who somehow haven’t managed to attain oneness with the Absolute’.222 What Bakunin has now clung on to is Hegelianism. Hegel provided the antidote to the early German idealism by arguing that the Absolute that Schiller and Fichte’s teaching espoused was not an essence of the inner self but manifested itself in an earthly way through the inexorable process of the progress of mankind to a society founded on reason. According to Berlin, ‘Belinsky was, first and foremost, a seeker after justice and truth’,223 and he understands the same point as Bakunin; that the Romantic philosophy had ignored the reality of life: Belinsky: So, the objective world is not an illusion? Stankevich: No. Belinsky: The laundry, the blacksmith, everything that Fichte said was just the shapes left by the impress of my mind…is real?

218 Voyage, page 84. 219 Voyage, page 94. 220 Voyage, page 46. 221 Voyage, page 46. 222 Voyage, page 101. 223 Berlin, i – Russian Thinkers, page 266.

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Stankevich:  Yes. Everything rational is real, and everything real is rational.224 Belinsky concludes, ‘Reality can’t be thought away – what’s real is rational, and what’s rational is real’225 and Turgenev is also a convert, insisting, ‘…we’re all Hegelians now. “What’s rational is real, and what’s real is rational”’.226 The Russian intelligentsia’s search for the nature of reality is over. The question then moves on, post Hegel, to explaining what his view of the inevitable historical progress, as he sees it, implies for the role of the individual within society. Stoppard also pursues the idea of truth in The Coast of Utopia through the metaphor of a child’s puzzle. ‘You remember those puzzle pictures, when we were children…there’d be a drawing with things wrong in it, a clock with no hands, a shadow going the wrong way, the sun and stars out at the same time… and it would say, “What is wrong with this picture?”’.227 It becomes an allegory of two questions: what is the nature of reality?; and, what is wrong with Russia? It is seminal to the question of reality because, under Kant’s theory, as described by Stankevich, ‘my existence is necessary to a complete description of reality. Without me there is something wrong with this picture’.228 Herzen asks the question by observing that Russians are in the picture themselves – ‘What do we mean by reality? By nature?’.229 But, the picture Herzen describes is Russia under autocratic rule: What is wrong with this picture?…Someone sitting next to you in class disappears overnight, nobody knows anything.…The Kritski brothers disappeared for insulting the Tsar’s portrait, Antonovich and his friends for forming a secret society, meaning they met in somebody’s room to read a pamphlet you can buy on a street in Paris. A crocodile of Poles goes clanking by in leg-irons on the Vladimir road. There is something wrong with this picture.230 224 225 226 227

Voyage, page 97. Voyage, page 102. Voyage, page 52. Voyage, page 54. cf Stoppard’s belief that, self-evidently, such points of view would be recognizable to an intelligent child (Stoppard, in an interview with D. Henninger, ‘Tom Stoppard and the Politics of Morality’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 143). 228 Voyage, page 19. 229 Voyage, page 54. 230 Voyage, page 54.

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It is as if Mankind is misinterpreting the rules for society and producing an aberration. ‘What is wrong with this picture?’, he asks again and answers, ‘Nothing. It’s Russia’.231 The same criticism applies to the deterministic vision of history as a sacrifice of the present for a better future. Herzen, again, observes, ‘… there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning of nature’s highest creation?’.232 There is a sense with Stoppard that children have an ability to see through a lot of the sophisticated argument that adults employ to arrive at simpler truths (in a process not unlike the application of Occam’s razor). For example, he commented on Professional Foul: ‘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 a reason why people want to get out”. There’s a childlike truth about it’.233 Michael Billington comments, ‘If there is a moral touchstone in Stoppard’s work it is probably to be found in children’.234 Stoppard expanded upon the point to Billington: ‘It’s to do with their innocence which isn’t something they acquire but which is something they haven’t lost. I do have an idea which crops up all the time which is that children are very wise because they don’t know how to be taken in. You can fool people if they are very clever but it’s quite hard to fool a child. I think children start off with a sense of natural justice which is obscured through a process of corrupting sophistication’.235 231 Voyage, page 59. 232 Shipwreck, page 100. 233 Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 164. 234 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Billington, ‘Stoppard’s Secret Agent’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 196. 235 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Billington, ‘Stoppard’s Secret Agent’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 196. Felicia Hardison Londre comments, ‘Like Professional Foul, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour derives much of its poignancy from the simple wisdom of a child in opposition to the monolithic system that distorts logic to protect itself’. – FH. Londre, Tom Stoppard, page 153. Richard Corballis ascribes considerable significance to the role Stoppard gives to children. Writing after the publication of The Real Thing he says, ‘In six recent plays – Professional Foul, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Night and Day, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, Squaring The Circle and The Real Thing – children appear among the dramatis personae. And in most cases they play a major part in defining the moral issues which are at stake’. – R. Corballis, Tom Stoppard’s

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Free Speech Macbeth is now performed in Prague flats.236 pavel kohout

…

Newspapers are part of the system, and truth is relative to that simple fact.237 max, Rock ‘N’ Roll

∵ As with his assessment of truth, Stoppard’s view of free speech is also deduced directly from his analysis of moral absolutism and relativity.238 His plays divide into two parts – those, such as Night And Day, which consider the theory and those, such as Cahoot’s Macbeth and Rock ‘N’ Roll, which apply the theory to real situations. Along the way Stoppard is able to reference the true experiences of Fainberg, Wilde and the Russian intelligentsia in The Coast of Utopia to draw out, in some cases painful, object lessons in the abuse of the freedom of expression. Wrapped up in his consideration of free speech is Stoppard’s analysis of the role of the press who, through what he finely argues is a near absolute moral justification, fulfil an important role as the insurer of last resort of freedom in general by shining a light on society’s darkest places. The question of art’s role in society was the departure point from which Stoppard took up the ethics of free speech in Travesties. Actually, he had made an oblique reference – almost a marginal note for him to return to the Children in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook, page 261. Stoppard himself used the child’s perspective to illustrate his own comment on the release of Anatoly Sharansky in an article, entitled Freedom but thousands are still captive, published in the Daily Mail on 12 February 1986: ‘A child knows that while it seems reasonable that people should need permission to enter a place, whether it’s your house or your country, if they need permission to leave that place then that place is in ordinary language a prison’. 236 Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 143. 237 Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 110. 238 cf Paul Delaney who argues that, ‘Stoppard’s heightened involvement in political issues is inseparable from his earlier moral perceptions’. – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 85.

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subject some other day – to it in Jumpers. George morosely observes that in the madcap world of the relativist Radical Liberals, ‘there’s a photograph here of the Association of National Newspaper Proprietors sitting in the back of a police car with a raincoat over their heads’.239 In Travesties, it is the character of Lenin that allows Stoppard a real opportunity to raise an issue which was later to come to dominate some of his work. In Lenin’s philosophy there is no absolute freedom of speech, although his views derive from an economic and political perspective – ‘we must say to you bourgeois individualists that your talk about absolute freedom is sheer hypocrisy. There can be no real and effective freedom in a society based on the power of money’.240 In this context it is worth noting Anderson’s comment in Professional Foul that totalitarian systems sometimes attempt to nullify the argument in favour of individual rights ‘by consigning the whole argument to “bourgeois logic”’.241 Instead, Lenin argues that freedom is relative and that society allows the expressions that it sympathises with: ‘socialist literature and art will be free because the idea of socialism and sympathy with the working people, instead of greed and careerism, will bring ever new forces to its ranks’.242 In other words, one is free to say what one wants so long as society agrees with you. At least Lenin practised what he preached, ironically. Publishing and distributing centres, bookshops and reading rooms, libraries and similar establishments must all be under party control. We want to establish and we shall establish a free press, free not simply from the police, but also from capital, from careerism, and what is more, free from bourgeois anarchist individualism!243 The party decides what is free from its own viewpoint. It’s the relativist argument all over again. In the face of the relativist argument Stoppard, in Night and Day, puts up a monumental defence of the absolutist view in the context of journalistic freedom. ‘Freedom is neutral’,244 Ruth reminds Wagner and Mageeba. In other words, it is an absolute – or very nearly. Stoppard has quite a refined position on the theoretical and practical application of freedom of expression: 239 240 241 242 243 244

Jumpers, page 37. Travesties, page 59. Professional Foul, page 91. Travesties, page 59. Travesties, page 59. Night and Day, page 48.

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On the idea of absolute free expression, one has always known it was never absolute, and shouldn’t be.…One knew it wasn’t an absolute. But nevertheless, for practical purposes, there was true freedom of expression, and it went hand-in-hand, for example, with habeas corpus.…As I learned when I was writing Coast of Utopia, Alexander Herzen (or perhaps it was one of the other figures in the play) made a particular point that in the England which was the refuge from the failed revolutions on the Continent in 1848, even in that England, these hard-won principles were held onto. If you were arrested, the police had to show good cause within 48 hours or let you go.245 This freedom is very close to Stoppard’s heart246 and his moral position comes through very clearly in Night And Day. I had always felt that no matter how dangerously closed a society looked like it was getting, as long as any newspaper was free to employ anybody it liked to say what it wished within the law, then any situation was correctable. And without that any situation was concealable. I felt that very strongly. I feel it strongly now. I am passionate about this. It’s the one thing that makes a free society different from an unfree one.247 Rarely is his own opinion so obviously and explicitly stated in one of his plays as it is in Night and Day: ‘Unusually for me, there are things said in this play which utterly speak for me’,248 he told Robert Berkvist The central contention, Stoppard observes, in Night and Day is given to Milne who believes that, ‘journalism is – special’.249 The reason why is: ‘A free press, free expression – it’s the last line of defence for all the other freedoms’.250 It shines a light on abuse. This position is very much Stoppard’s own. Talking 245 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. 246 The role of the press is raised in Stoppard’s early short stories: (1) in the pastiche of the Lord’s Prayer in Life, Times: Fragments; and (2) in The Story. Susan Rusinko comments, ‘Stoppard’s concern with ethical problems of journalists is dramatized with intellectual complexity in Night and Day (1978) but it is a concern that was with him as early as 1964’. – S. Rusinko, Tom Stoppard, page 22. 247 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Bragg, ‘The South Bank Show’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 123. 248 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Berkvist, ‘This Time, Stoppard Plays It Straight’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 137. 249 Night and Day, page 31. 250 Night and Day, page 31.

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to Gussow he said, ‘Journalism is the last line of defence in this country (ie: the usa)’.251 Guthrie supplies the metaphor: ‘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’.252 Stoppard repeats this point, but with a greater moral emphasis in The Invention of Love, as Housman says, Useful knowledge is good, too, but it’s for the faint hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn’t matter where on what, it’s the light itself, against the darkness, it’s what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God.253 Stoppard, then provides a working example in the form of Wilde, who describes the effect of his trial and ostentatious homosexuality: The blaze of my immolation threw its light into every corner of the land where uncounted young men sat each in his own darkness.254 Stoppard’s view is very clear: ‘I think people would be getting away with much more, were it not for newspapers blowing the whistle, or just being there to observe’.255 He leaves no room for doubt: ‘…the person in the play (Night and Day) who says that information, in itself, is light – about anything – does speak for me’.256 Milne translates it into practice: ‘…if you’ve got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable’.257

251 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 97. 252 Night and Day, page 53. Delaney comments that Guthrie’s speech is ‘an unnoted significance of the play’s title. The difference is not relative; the difference is absolute: the difference is that of Night And Day’. – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 93. Thomas Whitaker comments of Night And Day, ‘the title is already a clue, pointing to the worlds of masculine work…and feminine passion, and the opposites in each’. – T. Whitaker, Tom Stoppard, page 149. 253 The Invention of Love, page 71. 254 The Invention of Love, page 96. 255 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, pages 97–98. 256 Stoppard, in an interview with H. Hebert, ‘A Playwright in Undiscovered Country’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 127. 257 Night and Day, page 32.

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It is a metaphor Stoppard also uses in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to the same effect, but on this occasion light becomes a means of affecting one’s destiny, symbolised in the play by mortality, by uncovering the hidden truth behind death. The Player describes his craft thus: I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not in fact contain; but occasionally, from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that, seen at the right angle, can crack the shell of mortality.258 If freedom of expression is, for practical purposes, an absolute, then it follows that any attempt to fetter such freedom in any way and to any degree represents the introduction of relativism into the equation. Here Stoppard casts his net wide. Newspaper proprietors can wield influence: Wagner: Northcliffe could sack a man for wearing the wrong hat. Literally. There was a thing called the Daily Mail hat, and he expected his reporters to wear it. Things are very different now. Mageeba: Indeed, Mr Wagner, now the hat your proprietor expects you to wear is metaphorical only.259 Influence is also brought to bear by the unions. Wagner ‘wants union membership to be a licence to practice: “This man has been judged fit”’.260 But, the criterion to be applied is not literacy or any measure of journalistic capability. What Wagner, the union man, ‘wants is a right-thinking press – one that thinks like him’.261 Ironically, this is Lenin’s position in Travesties: ‘Down with nonpartisan literature! Down with literary supermen!’.262 Not surprisingly, the press needs to be free from politicians. Mageeba’s idea of equal space for his political opponent, Shimbu, is not in terms of column inches. ‘I’ll give him equal space. Six foot long and six foot deep, just like any other traitor and communist jackal’.263 But, Stoppard is also alive to more subtle use of political interference. He cites the lobby system, a practice of unattributed and off-the-record briefings that some politicians use to leak 258 259 260 261 262 263

RosGuil, page 75. Night and Day, page 46. Night and Day, page 32. Night and Day, page 32. Travesties, page 58. Night and Day, page 49.

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information and some journalists accept because it provides exclusive information: ‘…the British press’, says Mageeba, ‘is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him’.264 Milne realises that no one can set themselves up as the guardian of correctness because the very act of doing so is also a threat to freedom. Yes, he would ‘like a right thinking press, too’265 – right, this time in the sense of objectively correct – but he knows that to achieve so by blacklisting those who do not adhere to orthodoxy is not the answer: ‘Once you establish the machinery it’ll be there for someone else to use. Drum you out if you’re too left-wing, or not left-wing enough, or the wrong colour or something’.266 Lenin, of course – in defiance of Stoppard’s belief that art has a long-term rather than short-term impact – advocates the machine: ‘Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, a cog in the Social democratic mechanism’.267 Labouchere’s actions in The Invention of Love prove Milne’s point, albeit in a rather different vein. The legislation of which Stead claims he is the progenitor backfires. Whilst Stead ‘gave virtue a voice Parliament couldn’t ignore’268 in the raising of the age of sexual consent from thirteen to sixteen the Parliamentary process was bungled by Labouchere’s amendment outlawing male sexual congress (prompted, as Labouchere admits, by Stead informing him just prior to the debate ‘that in certain parts of London the problem of indecency between men was as serious as with virgins’269) which, he admitted, he only introduced in order to ‘make the Bill absurd to any sensible person left in what by then was a pretty thin House’270 and, thereby, eliminate legislation he considered to be a ‘pig’s breakfast’.271 My final effort was the Amendment on indecency between male persons, and God help me, it went through on the nod – (it had) nothing to do with the Bill we were supposed to be debating; normally it would have

264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271

Night and Day, page 46. Night and Day, page 32. Night and Day, page 32. Travesties, page 58. The Invention of Love, page 60. The Invention of Love, page 83. The Invention of Love, page 61. The Invention of Love, page 60.

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been ruled out of order, but everyone wanted to be shot of the business, prorogue Parliament, and get on to the General Election.272 The unintended consequence of Stead’s journalistic crusade, as Labouchere points out, was, therefore, a situation in which ‘a French kiss and what-youfancy between two chaps safe at home with the door shut is good for two years with or without hard labour. It’s a funny old world’,273 in which the guardians of freedom have caused an infringement of liberty in pursuit of the preservation of a virtue. Almost worse still it ‘opened up the north-west passage for every blackmailer in town’274 and all because the government had been ‘stampeded by (the newspapers’) disgusting articles’275 Stead admits that, ‘It’s the aimless arrow that brings us down, the arrow fledges with one of our own feathers’.276 Labouchere gives the problem an ethical dimension: ‘It shakes one’s faith in the operation of a moral universe by journalism’.277 Stoppard shoots down the old chestnut that press freedom should carry responsibility. Rather insincerely Mageeba claims that he ‘did not believe a newspaper should be part of the apparatus of the state’.278 Ignoring the joke that a relatively free press is one ‘which is edited by one of my relatives’,279 Mageeba argues for a sort of half-way house: ‘freedom with responsibility’.280 He does not realise that the flaw in this system of ‘collective responsibility’ is that the journalists will ‘be answerable to no one but themselves’281 in just the same way as ‘if any group got control of the Law Society, they’d be just as free to have only right-thinking solicitors’.282 It would be a selfselecting yardstick of morality – ‘Everybody who’s allowed in would have a vote’.283 Milne (Jacob) points out that responsibility only arises out of freedom rather than acts as its guardian, as he observes to Ruth:

272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283

The Invention of Love, page 61. The Invention of Love, page 61. The Invention of Love, page 63. The Invention of Love, page 59. The Invention of Love, page 58. The Invention of Love, page 58. Night and Day, page 48. Night and Day, page 48. Night and Day, page 48. Night and Day, page 47. Night and Day, page 32. Night and Day, page 32.

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Ruth: You’re an alarmist, Jacob. On the whole people behave responsibly. Milne: On the whole because their behaviour is observed. Reported.284 But, there is a ‘price you pay for the part that matters’.285 Mageeba objects to ‘the carping and sniping and the public washing of dirty linen which represents freedom to an English editor’,286 just as Ruth objects to the ‘grubby symbiosis’ of ‘the populace and the popular press’287 which results in her divorce and later marriage to Carson being splashed all over the newspapers. Stoppard’s view on press responsibility changed, largely in response to the behaviour of the British press in the 2000s which culminated in revelations of telephone hacking by journalists. Such ‘jackal journalism’, which he characterises as, ‘a delinquency which happened to be practised by journalists’, – in other words, it is not does not fall under his definition of journalism – ‘was… not in the journalism I thought I was writing about in 1978’.288 The press had become, in what he describes in an example of one of his dualities, ‘a split personality, part St George, part jackal’.289 Stoppard’s modified view became one in which press freedom is, ‘never absolute’.290 In 2014 Stoppard, forthright as ever, accepted that, ‘I used to believe that the abuse of press freedom was the price one paid for having press freedom. But the law’s redress … wasn’t up to the job, and the abuses finally capsized my idealism’.291 The new position he adopted was an acceptance of legal backing for a system of press oversight. One might divine Stoppard’s view on this point of principle from the conclusion to Dirty Linen. In what might be termed an example of Occam’s razor were the play to have indulged in a more formal consideration of all aspects of the issue of press intrusion the libidinous secretary to the parliamentary Select Committee on Promiscuity in High Places, Miss Maddie Gotobed, rather ironically devises the report concluding the committee’s position, which Mr French formally dictates (with a little prompting from Maddie): 284 285 286 287 288

Night and Day, page 32. Night and Day, page 32. Night and Day, page 48. Night and Day, page 23. Stoppard, ‘Leveson’s legal backstop is aimed at rogue press – not a free press’ in The Independent, 17 March 2013. 289 Stoppard, ‘Leveson’s legal backstop is aimed at rogue press – not a free press’ in The Independent, 17 March 2013. 290 ‘There is no such thing as absolute freedom’ – Stoppard, in an interview with J. Biggins, ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’. 291 Stoppard, in an interview with L. Jury, ‘Sir Tom Stoppard: Newspapers kidnapping sacred idea of press freedom’ in The London Evening Standard, 18 March 2014.

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French: In performing the duty entrusted to them your Committee took as their guiding principle that it is the just and proper expectation of every Member of Parliament, no less for every citizen of this country, that what they choose to do in their own time and with whom, is… Maddie: (prompting)…between them and their conscience. French: (simultaneously with Maddie)…conscience, provided they do not transgress the rights of others or the law of the land; and that this principle is not to be sacrificed to that Fleet Street stalking-horse masquerading as a sacred cow labelled ‘The People’s Right to Know’.292 The Invention of Love underlines the same point. Stead argues, in almost evangelical terms that, ‘we journalists have a divine mission to be the tribunes of the people’,293 and really believes that, ‘in the right hands the editor’s pen is the sceptre of power’294 to such an extent that he can claim that he ‘forced Parliament to pass the Criminal Law Amendment Act’.295 But, just as in Night and Day there is a price to pay. As Labouchere observes, echoing Ruth’s sentiments about journalistic intrusiveness, ‘you had errand boys reading about filthy goings-on which concerned nobody but their sisters’.296 Milne accepts the imperfections that his point of view can produce but argues that ‘junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins’.297 This, too, is almost exactly Stoppard’s position: ‘I stood fairly shoulder to shoulder with the young reporter in the play, when he said the sleazy press is the price you pay for not having somebody with a title and a big blue pencil draw the line’.298 The two sides of the free press are indivisible: ‘inside society and yet outside it, with a licence to scourge it and a duty to defend it, night and day …’.299 Therefore, ironically, ‘rubbish journalism…(is) produced by people doing their best work’.300 Like it or 292 293 294 295 296 297 298

Dirty Linen, page 136. The Invention of Love, page 59. The Invention of Love, page 58. The Invention of Love, page 58. The Invention of Love, page 60. Night and Day, page 33. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, pages 97–98. 299 Night and Day, page 33. 300 Night and Day, pages 32–33.

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not – and Mageeba does not like it – ‘freedom of the press mean(s) freedom to choose its own standards’.301 Even if that means allowing for journalists like Harris in nineteenth century Britain: ‘Do you ever tell the truth?’302 and, ‘Who’s going to believe you?’303 Labouchere witheringly asks him. Freedom of the press is part of a much bigger universe of freedom for Stoppard: the right to freedom of speech. With it comes the rights of an individual in society to say what he wants, particularly if that society is a repressive one. The subject gets its own marginal note, perhaps for future consideration, in a rather obtuse reference during Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Ros:  Fire! Guil jumps up. Guil: Where? Ros:   It’s all right – I’m demonstrating the misuse of free speech. To prove it exists.304 Stoppard’s own conviction on the wider matter of the rights of the individual to say what he thinks are as well-known as his views on press freedom. Interestingly, they are endowed with the same moral authority that George argues for in Jumpers: However inflexible our set of beliefs, whether it’s mine or the ayatollah’s, however authentic their existence may be, the truth is that they owe their existence to individual acts between individuals, which themselves are derived from an individual’s intuitive sense of what is right and wrong.305 Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, if it is about anything at all, is precisely that point. Alexander, a political prisoner, highlights to his son, Sacha, the illusion behind the totalitarian state: Dear Sacha, try to see, What they call their liberty 301 302 303 304 305

Night and Day, page 48. The Invention of Love, page 62. The Invention of Love, page 83. RosGuil, page 51. Stoppard, in an interview with D. Henninger, ‘Tom Stoppard and the Politics of Morality’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 144.

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Is just the freedom to agree That one and one is sometimes three.306 Borrowing from the fatherly advice of Polonius to Laertes,307 Alexander gives his son his own fatherly advice that sums up Stoppard’s own view of the individual’s intrinsic moral sense and makes the consequential point about what freedom really is: To thine own self be true One and one is always two.308 Every Good Boy Deserves Favour concerns two men in a cell in a Russian psychiatric hospital. One, Alexander is a political prisoner whose ‘disease is dissent’.309 (In that respect not a lot has changed in Russia since the rule of Nicholas i where one of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia is facing similar treatment by the autocratic regime: Michael Bakunin explains, ‘Chaadaev’s under house arrest. He’s officially insane, only nobody’s telling him’.310) The other, Ivanov, is ‘a raving lunatic’311 who imagines in his head that he is a triangle player in an orchestra. Using the metaphor of the orchestra to symbolize the totalitarian society Alexander is the individual who wants to express his own views. He does not play an instrument, as he says: ‘I have never played one. I do not know how to play one. I am not a musician’.312 Alexander’s experience is reminiscent of Victor Fainberg, a Russian dissident, and Stoppard uses as part of his sources Fainberg’s writings about his internment and treatment which were published in a magazine, Index On Censorship:313 ‘In the courtroom it was learned that the Russian army had gone to the aid of Czechoslovakia. M, N, O, P, Q, R and S decided to demonstrate in Red Square…when they were arrested and variously disposed of in labour camps, psychiatric hospitals and internal exile’.314 Stoppard also adds the experience of Vladimir Bukovsky, another ‘victim of the abuse of psychiatry in the ussr’315 who had demonstrated against 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315

egbdf, pages 34–35. Hamlet, Act i, scene 3. egbdf, page 36. egdbf, page 30. Voyage, page 94. egbdf, page 27. egbdf, page 18. Index On Censorship, Vol. 4, no. 2. egbdf, page 23. egbdf, page 6.

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the arrest of a couple of writers, as a result of which he had served some time in a mental hospital ‘and then he did something really crazy. He started telling everybody that sane people were being put in mental hospitals for their political opinions…(he) was on trial for anti-Soviet agitation and slander, and he got seven years in prison and labour camps, and five years’ exile’.316 Alexander’s crime is also, according to his son’s teacher, ‘…slanderous letters. Lies’.317 Like Bukovsky, Alexander says he, ‘did something really crazy’.318 My madness consisted of writing to various people about a friend of mine who is in prison. This friend was twice put in mental hospitals for political reasons, and then they arrested him for saying that sane people were put in mental hospitals, and then they put him in prison because he was sane when he said this; and I said so, and they put me in a mental hospital.319 The same repressive censorship is on view in mid-nineteenth century Russia in The Coast of Utopia. It is Stoppard’s motivation for writing the trilogy: ‘I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen’.320 Tsar Nicholas I’s obsession with censorship is little different from his communist descendants as rulers of Russia. Belinsky complains that, ‘(The police) had me in for questioning’,321 and that, ‘My articles get cut by the censor’.322 Polevoy admits that he continually publishes while under a sword of Damocles – ‘Every issue of the Telegraph plays with fire…They can close me down like that (snapping his fingers) – for a word out of place, and send me to Siberia’.323 Meanwhile, Herzen observes that, ‘…at Moscow University teaching philosophy is forbidden as a threat to public order’.324 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324

egbdf, page 23. egbdf, page 24. egbdf, page 24. egbdf, page 29. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Jaggi, ‘You can’t help being what you write’ in The Guardian, 6 September 2008. Voyage, page 91. Shipwreck, page 31. Voyage, page 56. Voyage, page 54.

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The choice of a mental hospital is entirely in keeping with totalitarian mentality. ‘For the politicals, punishment and medical treatment are intimately related’.325 This is because in a totalitarian state the dissenting voice is akin to an illness, as the following exchange shows: Alexander: I have no symptoms. I have opinions. Doctor: Your opinions are your symptoms. Your disease is dissent.326 So, according to Alexander, ‘They put me in the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital…where I was kept for thirty months, including two months on hunger strike’.327 Stoppard proceeds to provide, through Alexander’s ‘barbaric’328 treatment, a catalogue of the behaviour of a repressive state when it wants to deal with an individual who does not conform and, worse still, is intent on speaking out. There are bars on the windows, peepholes in the doors, and the lights run all night. It’s run like a gaol, with warders and trusties, but the regime is more strict, and the male nurses are convicted criminals serving terms for theft and violent crimes, and they beat and humiliate patients and steal their food, and are protected by the doctors, some of whom wear kgb uniforms under their white coats.…I was given injections…which caused swellings, cramps, headaches, trembling, fever and the loss of various abilities including the ability to read, write, sleep, sit, stand, and button my trousers. When all this failed to improve my condition, I was stripped and bound head to foot with lengths of wet canvas. As the canvas dried it became tighter and tighter until I lost consciousness.329 Alexander is advised ‘to recant and show gratitude for the treatment’.330 But, despite Sacha’s pleading, Alexander refuses because even though superficially it would beat the authorities at their own game ultimately, ‘It helps them to go on being wicked. It helps people to think that perhaps they’re not so wicked after all’.331 325 326 327 328 329 330 331

egbdf, page 29. egbdf, page 30. egbdf, page 24. egbdf, page 28. egbdf, page 29. egbdf, page 28. egbdf, page 35.

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Stoppard can rarely be accused of preaching. He, perhaps, gets closest to the accusation in Cahoot’s Macbeth which presents a practical application of how free speech can triumph over totalitarianism, applying Wittgenstein’s theory about how the contextual interpretation of language is developed through active interaction of speaking participants. Using a production of Macbeth in oppressed Czechoslovakia it demonstrates actually and symbolically how the solution to the problems of operating in a controlled state may be overcome by freedom of speech. It is the direct result of a real event which Stoppard explains in his introduction. He had met two dissident actors, Pavel Kohout and Pavel Landovsky, during a short visit to Prague in 1977. Subsequently Kohout wrote to Stoppard describing what the situation was like in Czechoslovakia and how the actors had overcome the oppressive state’s attempts to silence them: As you know, many Czech theatre-people are not allowed to work in the theatre during the last years.…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 home with two great and forbidden Czech actors, Pavel Landovsky and Vlasta Chramostova, can invite his friends and call us.332 Kohout explained that it ‘promises to be not only an interesting solution of our situation but also an interesting theatre event’.333 For Stoppard this situation presented a very open goal at which to shoot. He does not miss. His play immediately picks out references to speaking from Shakespeare’s play: ‘Speak if you can’,334 utters Macbeth, as he refers to the witches as ‘you imperfect speakers’,335 while Banquo asks, ‘Can the devil speak true?’.336 This is a play about free speech, be in no doubt. It is set against the background of Prague which is, in the post Dubcek era, undergoing a period of what the Inspector keeps referring to as a process of ‘normalization’.337 It displays all the usual attributes of a police state. It comprises, in the Inspector’s words, 332 333 334 335 336 337

Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 142. Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 143. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 179; Macbeth, Act i, scene iii, line 47. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 180; Macbeth, Act i, scene iii, line 70. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 180; Macbeth, Act i, scene iii, line 107. Cahoot’s Macbeth, pages 191, 195 and 206.

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‘a one-party system’,338 in which the flat where Macbeth is being performed is bugged, judging by the Inspector’s implication: ‘…between you and me and these three walls and especially the ceiling’,339 he advises the actors. The Inspector admits that he has ‘had this place watched’, while his two sidekicks, ‘examined everyone’s papers and took down the names’.340 The actor playing Banquo has ‘been made a non-person’,341 and Cahoot is labelled as a ‘social parasite and slanderer of the state’342 by the Inspector. It is a society of persecution in which the dissidents suffer ‘jobs lost, children failing exams, letters undelivered, driving licences withdrawn, passports indefinitely postponed’.343 The Inspector, a symbol of the authoritarian regime, executes his job with all the relish and enthusiasm expected of a totalitarian enforcer. He claims that he, ‘arrested the Committee to Defend the Unjustly Persecuted for saying I unjustly persecuted the Committee for Free Expression, which I arrested for saying that there wasn’t any’,344 and he threatens the actors that, ‘anything you say will be taken down and played back at your trial’.345 He warns (in a clear reference to the real Landovsky) that he has ‘got the penal code tattooed on my whistle, Landovsky, and there’s a lot about you in it’.346 He has gate-crashed one of the lrt productions of Macbeth with his henchmen who ‘proceed to investigate actors and audience with their flashlights’.347 Shakespeare is metaphorically the key to the issue of freedom of speech. As the Inspector explains, ‘Shakespeare…is not a popular choice with my chief, owing to his popularity with the public’.348 The right to perform his works is a symbol of free speech, both in the play and in Czechoslovakia. In performing the play to an audience the dissidents are (using a Stoppardian pun) ‘acting without authority’349 and their production of Macbeth ‘goes right against the spirit of normalization’.350

338 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 188. 339 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 194. 340 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 191. 341 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 194. 342 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 193. 343 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 192. 344 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 194. 345 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 206. 346 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 193. 347 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 182. 348 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 192. 349 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 188. 350 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 194.

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The character of Macbeth – who in Shakespeare’s play murders Duncan and his two guards, has Banquo put to death and orders the death of Macduff’s wife and son and their entire household – comes to represent all the horrors of the totalitarian state. In that symbolic role he becomes identified with the other symbol of the oppressive state, the Inspector, as this exchange illustrates: Inspector: … Would you care to make a statement? Cahoot:    Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis351 Just like Macbeth, the police state is an ‘untitled tyrant’.352 It meets its nemesis in the form of free speech. In the play the dissident actors learn, through the application of Wittgenstein’s theory of interactive use of speech, Dogg’s language which has been imported by Easy, a lorry driver from Dogg’s Hamlet, who (along with the audience) has learnt it via Wittgenstein’s method. Easy adopts the role of Banquo’s ghost, Macbeth’s own nemesis. The actors initially use Dogg’s language to conduct conversations in the Inspector’s (ie: the State’s) presence because he cannot understand and eventually it enables them to continue with a performance of Macbeth which the Inspector is keen to have stopped – as he points out to the actor playing Macbeth, ‘I could nick you just for acting’.353 Stoppard’s metaphor of Macbeth symbolising the police state is driven to a conclusion. Shakespeare’s Macbeth describes the nature of his power and authority thus: ‘Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown and put a barren sceptre in my grip’.354 In a highly significant ending Malcolm, symbol of a free society, invites everyone, noticeably using Dogg’s language, ‘to see us crowned at Scone’.355 Stoppard’s belief in the power of free speech to overcome political repression is writ large. Rock ‘N’ Roll is a form of live-firing exercise about the freedom of expression which tests Stoppard’s observation as an outsider arriving in England that the freedoms therein were almost absurdly under threat from some within. He explains his near amazement: I…thought it was perfectly absurd that just about one of the very few places where anything amounting to free expression and democracy was

351 352 353 354 355

Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 193; Macbeth, Act iii, scene i, line 1. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 204; Macbeth, Act iv, scene iii, line 104. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 193. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 196; Macbeth, Act iii, scene i, lines 60–61. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 211; Macbeth, Act v, scene ix, line 41.

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the orthodox wisdom and the orthodox practice – that in such a place there should be a lot of people who were determined to overthrow it.356 Stoppard’s attitude to the freedom available in England is the same as that expressed by Herzen to his fellow émigrés in London:357 ‘They don’t give us asylum out of respect for the asylum-seekers but out of respect for themselves’.358 It’s liberty for the sake of liberty. Whereas Cahoot’s Macbeth uses the performance of Shakespeare as a metaphor for free speech so Rock ‘N’ Roll uses rock music as an allegory for exploring how the freedom of expression Stoppard found in England was denied in his native Czechoslovakia by contrasting the relationship between a Communist professor at Cambridge university, Max Morrow, and Jan, his Czech pupil, who returns to his homeland during the Prague Spring of 1968. In contrast to Herzen in The Coast of Utopia, Max believes in a system. He claims that, ‘I’m a Communist’,359 who believes that, ‘To be human is to be joined together. Society! When the revolution was young and I was young, we were all made from a single piece of timber. The struggle was for socialism through organised labour, and that was that. It wasn’t revolution in the head360 or revolution by an alliance of single issue groups’.361 His view is Marxist, quoting, almost as a mantra, Marx from his Critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875, which Lenin describes as an ‘analysis of what might be called the stages of the economic maturity of communism’:362 ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. What could be more simple, more rational, more beautiful.363 For Max it’s a theory which works, admittedly imperfectly: ‘I’m down to one belief, that between theory and practice there’s a decent fit – not perfect but 356 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Bragg, The South Bank Show, 16 March 2008. 357 Stoppard told Jonathan Biggins, ‘Herzen says this wonderful thing…he said…the English they don’t give us asylum out of respect for us. They do it out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty and they know it’. – ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’. 358 Salvage, page 14. 359 Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 18. 360 A Rock ‘N’ Roll reference in its own right. Revolution in the Head is the title of a book by Ian MacDonald about the Beatles’ records and the 1960s. 361 Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 61. 362 Lenin, vi – Collected Works, vol 25, page 471. 363 Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 36.

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decent: ideology and a sensible fair society, it’s my double helix’.364 He has a fervent, if practical, approach which he uses to goad Jan: If it wasn’t for eleven million Soviet military dead, your little country’d be a German province now – and you wouldn’t be bellyaching about your socialist right to piss everywhere except in the toilet, you’d be smoke up the chimney.365 And so it turns out, when the state police do indiscriminately urinate in Jan’s apartment. Jan reinforces Max’s Marxist position as a largely economic one by noting that, ‘Max, the only thing that will make you happy, is that the workers own the means of production’.366 Echoing Stoppard’s own astonishment and underlining the rationale behind the play Jan concludes: Common sense doesn’t look like we must have missed something, it just looks like common sense. Why do you want to fix the part that doesn’t need fixing, Max, with a foreign theory which in your fortunate innocence you’ve never had to put into practice?367 When the Soviet tanks roll into Prague Jan decides to return home from his studies in Cambridge ‘to save socialism’.368 He is seduced into believing that Czechoslovakia under Russia’s puppet, Husak, will allow the Czechs to create ‘socialism with a human face’,369 as he hopefully concludes that ‘this country found the best in itself’.370 However, he discovers to his cost that the Russians bring with them all the tools of the totalitarian state that Stoppard identifies in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. Jan is interrogated by a man who reveals the existence of a file on Jan while he was at Cambridge and who claims, rather menacingly, ‘I can apparently make you do and say anything I want’.371 With a rather macabre joke the Interrogator explains, ‘We’re supposed to know what’s going on inside people. That’s why it’s the Ministry of the Interior’.372 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372

Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 32. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 35. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 39. Rock ‘N’ Roll, pages 38–39. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 24. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 31. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 30. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 26. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 27.

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Jan sets out to Max, his tutor, his ideal of free speech underpinned by the rule of law, which is paradoxically what Max enjoys but seeks to be rid of: ‘I dream of having what you invented – trial by jury, independent judges – you can call the government fools and criminals but the law is for free speech, the same for the highest and the lowest, the law makes freedom normal, the denial of freedom must prove its case, and if the government doesn’t like it…they can’t touch you, the law is constant’.373 For Stoppard it seems naturally obvious, as Jan encapsulates his position: ‘Justice looks like justice, it doesn’t look like something else’.374 The touchstone for Jan’s belief in freedom of expression is rock music. It is explicitly identified as such when Jan also claims that, ‘I came back to save Rock “N” Roll’,375 his luggage consisting of what the Interrogator describes as ‘entirely – of socially negative music’.376 The ability to play rock music becomes the symbol of free expression. For Stoppard this association of rock music and freedom of speech is a particularly pertinent one given the significance of his own belief in free expression. In reference to Indian Ink he notes that, ‘Rock “N” Roll has rasa as far as I’m concerned. It creates an emotion in the listener. It’s not just for fine art. I think there is an eastern element in it which we probably don’t exploit, which is to do with the state in which you put yourself into in order to receive the art’.377 Thus, on Jan’s return he witnesses the vestiges of Dubcek’s experiment and concludes that all is well: ‘there’s new bands ripping off Hendrix and Jethro Tull…The Plastic People of the Universe played “Venus in Furs” from “Velvet Underground”, and I knew everything was basically okay’.378 In a deeply symbolic act ‘(the Beach Boys) dedicated “Break Away” to Dubcek. He was in the audience’.379 Jan naively, but explicitly, links rock music with human rights: ‘Czechoslovakia is now showing the way – a Communist society with proper trade unions, legal system, no censorship – progressive rock’.380 But, as Max points out to Jan – ironically given Max’s enthusiasm for Communism – ‘Husak certainly made a fool of you’,381 and the bellwether for his 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381

Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 39. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 38. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 30. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 24. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘I retain a nostalgia for the heat and smells and the sounds of India’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 127. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 30. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 28. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 31. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 34

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repression is the effect it has on closing down rock music, particularly that played by the Plastic People of the Universe. ‘There’s this band I like, last year they lost their licence – undesirable elements you know’.382 Symbolically, ‘Jan’s records (are) smashed and scattered among torn-up album covers’383 and Jan and the dissidents are forced into a position in which, as Ferdinand confesses, ‘we’re putting ourselves on the line for a society where the Plastics can play their music’.384 Eventually, Jan has to concede that, ‘Underground concerts are so rare now, kids from all over the country got the word and found their way to this nowhere place. So did busloads of police, with dogs. They stopped the concert and herded everyone to the railway station and through a tunnel under the tracks, and in the tunnel the police laid into everybody with truncheons. Rock “N” Roll!’.385 Managed by Jirous, the Plastic People of the Universe are different: ‘Their songs are morbid, they dress weird, they look like they’re on drugs, and one time they sacrificed a chicken on stage, but otherwise it’s a mystery. So, now it’s illegal for them to make a living from concert bookings’.386 Jirous claims that, ‘We only wanted to produce art that was independent from the political power’.387 Stoppard sees this aspect, however, as the most crucial: ‘Really what he was demonstrating was that you can’t really make a distinction between detachment and dissent’.388 Ferdinand sees the same point from a slightly different perspective: ‘Other bands have better musicians but the Plastics are the only band safe from the desire for recognition’.389 It is the difference combined with the dissent that for Stoppard makes the rock music of the Plastic People of the Universe so powerful in the struggle for freedom of expression. Husak’s repressive regime is not intimidated by the social protest of men like Havel, on whom Ferdinand is modelled, because, as Jan explains, they are playing according to Husak’s rules: ‘It means they’re playing on the same board. So Husak can relax, he’s made the rules, it’s his game’.390 In fact, quite the opposite – it only helps define the oppressors. ‘Policemen love dissidents’, Jan explains, ‘like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give .

382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390

Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 33. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 63. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 47. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 44. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 33. Jirous in The South Bank Show, 16 March 2008. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Bragg, The South Bank Show, 16 March 2008. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 51. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 48.

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meaning to the defenders of the faith’.391 Unlike the general population, too, who ‘by agreeing to be bribed by places at university, or an easy ride at work… care enough to keep their thoughts to themselves’,392 ‘the Plastics don’t care at all. They’re unbribable. They’re coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They’re not heretics, they’re pagans’.393 Stoppard, then, explicitly identifies the Plastic People of the Universe with The Rolling Stones by cutting straight to The Rolling Stones’ song ‘It’s Only Rock “N” Roll’, picking up the title of the play for emphasis. It’s a link in identification that Stoppard makes earlier on when his stage directions require, ‘“It’s All Over Now” by the Rolling Stones – which quickly merges into a segment of the same song as recorded in English by the Plastic People of the Universe on the album “Muz bez usi”’.394 Just as symbolic as the music is the long hair that Jirous (and Jan in the play) grows. Stoppard uses its expression of lack of conformity to describe how the totalitarian state legitimises itself through allowing rock music, but only on its terms, as Ferdinand says: ‘The tempter says, “Cut your hair just a little, and we’ll let you play”. Then the tempter says, “Just change the name of the band and you can play”. And after that, “Just leave out this one song”…It is better not to start cutting your hair, Jirous said. Then nothing you do can give support to the idea that everything is in order in this country’.395 It is a trap that Jirous’ band nearly falls into, as Jan observes from the standpoint of 1987 when he explains to Nigel, the journalist, ‘The Plastics were invited to play if they changed their name to ppu. There was argument in the band. Well, it’s a question. If you play your music and hide your name, are you making fools of the government or is the government making fools of you? Finally they agreed ppu was not exactly changing their name’.396 But, in a further act of defiance, ‘They got a girl singer…and rehearsed. But the police found out and cut off the electricity’.397 Jan continues, ‘Then they were offered to play a club in Brno if they agreed to be on the poster as “A Band from Prague”. It was a crisis. Some said yes, some said no. Bad things were said between the band. Terrible things. It finished the Plastics’.398 Stoppard highlights the same issue by reference to Jan himself, 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398

Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 48. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 48. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 48. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 23. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 50. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 83. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 83. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 83.

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as Ferdinand, in response to Jan’s claim that Czechoslovakia under Husak is all right, observes how Jan is inadvertently allowing the state to manipulate him: Ferdinand: They closed down your paper! Jan:  And we protested, and now we’re publishing again. Ferdinand: With conditions. Jan    (dismissively) That’s only about not being rude to the Russians – Husak’s a realist, keep them off our backs.399 In the symbolism of Rock ‘N’ Roll the rebels eventually storm the castle when in 1990, following the Velvet Revolution, the now ‘President Havel showed the Stones around the Castle’.400 The emblematic alter ego of the Plastic People of the Universe and the freedom of expression that they stood for – The Rolling Stones – end the play with a concert which opens with the metaphorically significant first track from ‘the Rolling Stones live album “No Security”’.401 Freedom Rousseau has a lot to answer for.402 alexander herzen, Shipwreck

∵ In Jumpers Stoppard sets out the rationale for the premise of moral absolutism. In Night and Day and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour he deduces from that premise its consequences for free speech, the last bastion of that moral edifice. In Professional Foul he takes those rights of the individual to the moral absolute of freedom and addresses the question of how they fit into the system of society – what happens if you have to put them into practice?403 Stoppard defines the lines of the intellectual battle: 399 Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 31. 400 Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 118. 401 Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 119. 402 Shipwreck, page 79. 403 ‘Jumpers is a farce, while Professional Foul is a sort of realistic look at a real situation’. – Stoppard, in an interview with R. Berkvist, ‘This Time, Stoppard Plays It (Almost) Straight’

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It’s as though there are two moralities: one to do with systems of government and an alternative morality to do with the relationships between individuals. The latter is governed by instinctive feelings about what good and bad behaviour consist of and an instant and instinctive recognition of each when they occur.404 Stoppard reiterates his distinction in a letter to Richard Dawkins which he released in connection with The Hard Problem: Good behaviour for the public (political) good, i.e. collective morality feels dislocated from personal, individual moral behaviour.405 In Professional Foul Stoppard constructs a moral dilemma as the catalyst for a discussion on the moralities. Hollar holds opinions which are not safe to hold in an authoritarian state and has got into trouble because he ‘wrote a letter to Mr Husak (the then President of Czechoslovakia). Also some other things’.406 He has written a thesis about ‘correct behaviour’407 which he asks Anderson, his former tutor, to smuggle out on his way back to England. Anderson refuses on the grounds that it is ‘bad manners’408 as he is in Czechoslovakia as ‘a guest of the government’.409 This dilemma immediately raises the issue of what rights the individual has within the state. Hollar believes that ‘the idea of a collective ethic…comes from the individual. One man’s dealings with another man’.410 Moreover, Hollar believes that ‘the idea of an inherent right is

404 405 406 407 408 409 410

in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 138. Stoppard expanded upon his explanation: ‘at bottom, Professional Foul and Jumpers can each be described as a play about a moral philosopher preoccupied with the true nature of absolute morality, trying to separate absolute values from local ones and local situations’. – Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 150. Paul Delaney comments, ‘That there is development in Stoppard is clear, but the development is from moral affirmation to moral application’. – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 9. Delaney further contends (op cit, page 8) that, ‘The entire canon of Stoppard’s major plays demonstrates…a consistency, a consistency which has been largely ignored by most observers’. Not by this one. Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 155. Stoppard, in a letter to Richard Dawkins.2. Professional Foul, page 57. Professional Foul, page 54. Professional Foul, page 54. Professional Foul, page 54. Professional Foul, page 54.

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intelligible’.411 In other words, it is a moral absolute, a sense of which is innate within a human being. Anderson, on the contrary, argues that ‘the individual ethic…flow(s) from the collective ethic, just as the State says it does’,412 and, therefore, following Anderson’s logic, ‘such an arrangement between a man and the State is a sort of contract’.413 Anderson, then, relates this view to the practical matter of why he cannot help Hollar: ‘I did accept (the Czech government’s invitation to speak here). It is a contract, freely entered into. And having accepted their hospitality I cannot in all conscience start smuggling.…It’s just not ethical’.414 The question of the real moral dilemma that Anderson is now in is the crucible test of the application of moral absolutism to the real world. Anderson accepts that, ‘there would be no moral dilemmas if moral principles worked in straight lines and never crossed each other’.415 McKendrick, another of the conference lecturers agrees, contending that Hollar’s moral absolutes break down in practical situations. McKendrick, arguing on the basis of catastrophe theory, points out that, ‘The mistake people make is, they think a moral principle is infinitely extendible, that it holds good for any situation’.416 He describes the argument in terms of two lines – one for ‘Morality’ and the other for ‘Immorality’ – on a piece of paper. Whereas Hollar would see them as parallel lines McKendrick explains that in practical application: The two lines are on the same plane. They’re the edges of the same plane – it’s in three dimensions you see – and if you twist the plane in a certain way, into what we call the catastrophe curve, you get a model of the sort of behaviour we find in the real world. 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.417 Alexander in his Soviet psychiatric hospital would not agree. In response to his son Sacha’s plaintiff call to repent – ‘It’s wicked to let yourself die!’418 – Alexander refuses because, rationally from his perspective, he realises that to do so 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418

Professional Foul, page 55. Professional Foul, page 55. Professional Foul, page 55. Professional Foul, page 56. Professional Foul, page 79. Professional Foul, page 78. Professional Foul, page 78. egbdf, page 35.

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merely encourages the State to continue its repression. Instead he seeks refuge in his internal sense of moral rectitude – ‘To thine own self be true’.419 McKendrick attacks another fellow delegate at the conference, Chetwyn who is arguing for the same moral absolutes as Hollar, saying that he believes ‘in goodness and beauty’.420 He, then, draws an important distinction between Anderson and Chetwyn by telling Anderson that ‘You know they are fictions but you’re so hung up on them you want to treat them as if they were Godgiven absolutes’.421 Anderson’s point is that in society you have to indulge in the fiction otherwise ‘how else would they have any practical value’.422 Stoppard concludes the ethical debate through the person of Anderson. But, the catalyst for it is Hollar’s son and his mother. There is an early clue to how this will be the case when Anderson asks Hollar to justify his view of moral absolutism. His answer is revealing: ‘I observe. I observe my son’.423 He is asking himself the same question as Stoppard does when applying Occam’s razor to the argument. How can I simplify this problem to make it intelligible to a child? As a result of meeting Hollar’s wife and son in a park Anderson rewrites the speech he gives at the Colloquium, much to the irritation of the Chairman who eventually cuts it short by inventing a fire alarm. In a revision (a form of catastrophic reversal) of the views he expounded to Hollar Anderson’s new speech, with one exception, adapts or incorporates parts of the positions that the other philosophers have taken in the play. Drawing on Hollar, Anderson focusses on what is the key issue for Stoppard: ‘the conflict between the rights of individuals and the rights of the community’.424 It is a subject which rears its head in the Stoppardian canon in a moral context when Arthur, in Tango, contends that the proper relationship between the individual and society is dependent upon the creation of a set of values and that without such a sustainable set of values what he defines as a moral balance (between good and bad) cannot be established.425 Anderson draws a distinction between rules and rights, arguing that while states impose rules individuals have rights. In doing so he is reflecting George Moore’s assertion that, ‘My moral conscience is different from the rules of

419 420 421 422 423 424 425

egbdf, page 36. Professional Foul, page 78. Professional Foul, page 78. Professional Foul, page 78. Professional Foul, page 55. Professional Foul, page 87. Herzen applies the same concept of balance to the concept of individual freedom – see Shipwreck pages 65–66.

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my tribe’.426 Otherwise, as Bones points out, the relativist sees no difference ‘whether he thinks he’s obeying the Ten Commandments or the rules of tennis’.427 Anderson continues to argue that societies should evolve from a collective application of those rights and the rules should be derived from them: I will seek to show that rules, in so far as they are related to rights, are a secondary and consequential elaboration of primary rights, and I will be associating rules generally with communities and rights generally with individuals.428 Those rights of the individual, he continues, take priority over the rules of communities. George Moore makes the point in Jumpers, using tennis as an example for the rules of any society, that ‘the rules of tennis can be changed’.429 Recognising the need to be able to apply an individual’s rights in the real world and adopting McKendrick’s definition of the fiction he reconciles them to Hollar’s moral absolutism as he says he, ‘will be defining rights as fictions acting as incentives to the adoption of practical values; and I will further propose that although these rights are fictions there is an obligation to treat them as if they were truths’.430 Anderson, then, says that ‘if we decline to define rights as fictions, albeit with the force of truths, there are only two senses in which humans could be said to have rights’:431 either ‘if they had collectively and mutually agreed to give each other these rights’;432 or ‘as the endowment of God’.433 In an argument and language almost identical to one George runs in Jumpers Anderson concludes: What strikes us is the consensus about an individual’s rights put forward both by those who invoke God’s authority and by those who invoke no authority at all other than their own idea of what is fair and sensible.434

426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434

Jumpers, page 68. Jumpers, page 49. Professional Foul, page 87. Jumpers, page 49. Professional Foul, page 87. Professional Foul, page 88. Professional Foul, page 88. Professional Foul, page 88. Professional Foul, page 89.

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Compare that statement with George’s when he illustrates the number of ways human beings believe they confer honour, in particular highlighting the savage who eats his dead parent as opposed to the man who buries his in a teak box: What is surely more surprising is that notions such as honour should manifest themselves at all.435 Drawing our attention to the similarity between articles of the American constitution and the Czech constitution Anderson concludes, like George, ‘Is such a consensus remarkable? Not at all’.436 Contrast it, too, with the ideas of the game theorists in The Hard Problem who believe that fairness results from an evolutionary repetition of notions of self-interest, as evidenced by the behaviour of vampire bats. The rules devised by the State are linguistic in nature and malleable. In the one exception Anderson rejects the arguments put forward by another delegate at the Colloquium, Stone, who argues that ‘the ambiguity of ordinary language’437 means that logical language becomes a question of interpretation and context, much as the arguments of Wittgenstein are portrayed in Dogg’s Hamlet. In order to negate it Anderson explains that Stone’s relativist view has arisen because of linguistic philosophy which ‘proposes that the notion of, say, justice has no existence outside the ways of which we choose to employ the word, and indeed consists only of the way in which we employ it’.438 This is reminiscent of McFee’s relativism in which ‘good and bad aren’t actually good and bad in any absolute or metaphysical sense’. Rather, George asserts, ‘he believes them to be categories of our own making, social and psychological conventions we have evolved in order to make living in groups a practical possibility, in much the same way as we have evolved the rules of tennis’.439 As Dotty puts it, ‘they are just expressions of our feelings’440 and what they mean ‘depends on your point of view’.441 In that context, and as if to prove George’s contention that ‘language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas’,442 in Professional Foul Stoppard indulges in an hilarious scene which 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442

Jumpers, pages 54–55. Professional Foul, page 89. Professional Foul, page 61. Professional Foul, pages 89–90. Jumpers, page 48. Jumpers, page 41. Jumpers, page 53. Jumpers, page 63.

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is effectively a reprise of George’s arguments about good bacon sandwiches in which Stone, another lecturer, debates the various interpretations, depending on the circumstances (illustrating Wittgenstein’s theory, as expounded in Dogg’s Hamlet), that could be applied to the word ‘well’. Language – or, the expression of rules – therefore, is not a source of morality but a means of communication.443 Developing George’s point about language a little further Anderson counters Stone’s position with ‘Verbal language is a technical refinement of our capacity for communication, rather than the fons et origo of that capacity’.444 Stoppard allows Anderson to conclude with what is the result of applying the principle of parsimony to the whole debate and arriving at a position which synthesises Hollar’s and Chetwyn’s beliefs: 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. As an ethical utterance it seems to be an attempt to define a sense of rightness which is not simply derived from some other utterance elsewhere.…There is a sense of right and wrong which precedes utterance. It is individually experienced and it concerns one person’s dealings with another person. From this experience we have built a system of ethics which is the sum of individual acts of recognition of individual right.445 From his conclusion that an ethical system is a collection of individual rights based upon an individual’s innate sense of right and wrong Anderson, then, resolves the conflict between State and individual by explaining that it is illogical for a State to impose rules reflecting values which are not congruent with the rights of individuals: 443 Ronald Hayman notes Stoppard’s ‘connection between immorality and imprecision in the use of language’, in Jumpers. – See R. Hayman, ‘Profile 9: Tom Stoppard’ in New Review, 1, December 1974, page 20. 444 Professional Foul, page 63. See also the views of Henry Carr, Travesties, page 21 and Henry, The Real Thing, page 35. Night And Day also contains references to the expression of morality through language. For example, Milne’s contention to Wagner that he does not ‘keep an abusive vocabulary ready for anyone who acts on different principles’. (Night and Day, page 15). 445 Professional Foul, page 90.

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…the implications are serious for a collective or State ethic which finds itself in conflict with individual rights, and seeks, in the name of the people, to impose its values on the very individuals who comprise the State. The illogic of this manoeuvre is an embarrassment to totalitarian systems.446 At this point his offended hosts, not wishing to hear his indictment of their society, close him down by setting off the fire alarm. Those final words are, as Stoppard admits, very much his own views on the nature of morality: ‘I can honestly say that I have held Anderson’s final view on the subject for years and years, and years before Anderson ever existed’.447 Stoppard reduces the argument to an even more concise basis, using the example of a child again. The Witness, who acts as a form of Sage in Squaring the Circle, observes, ‘Right and wrong are not complicated – when a child cries, “That’s not fair!” the child can be believed’.448 In a practical action which reflects his change of philosophical view following his meeting with Hollar’s wife and son, Anderson changes his mind and resolves his ethical dilemma by smuggling Hollar’s thesis out of Czechoslovakia – but by means of hiding it in McKendrick’s luggage, thereby both incurring his wrath and neatly hoisting him on his own ethical petard of his belief in catastrophic reversal. The battle between the collective and the individual eventually led Stoppard to The Coast of Utopia: (The times and characters in The Coast of Utopia) specified one very generalised but at the same time acute interest which I have had ever since I have been able to think at all: an interest in the tension between autonomous freedom and collective, you know, one’s responsibilities to one’s society and what that means and what the limitations are and how one’s supposed to square the circle.449 The Coast of Utopia presents Hollar’s dilemma in the context of nineteenth century Russian political thought. Russia is not a free society under Nicholas I. Herzen paints a picture of a repressive society. Nicholas I’s autocratic rule, 446 Professional Foul, page 91. 447 Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 156. 448 Squaring the Circle, page 251. 449 Stoppard, in an interview with A. Croggon.

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which was intensified after the Decembrists revolt of 1825, became even worse after the European revolts of 1848. By then Herzen remarks, ‘There’s no emperor or king or pope in Europe who can match the Tsar for despotism, especially now after the almighty scare he got’450 Against that background of what amounts to nineteenth century totalitarianism the intelligentsia, both Russian and wider European, consider what is the optimum form of government, thereby addressing the question of how the rights of the individual fit into the governance of the state. Marx, according to Michael Bakunin, conflates the individual with class, arguing that any form of governance, by implication, is an impingement of freedom. ‘We are both out to free the working man’, he notes and continues, ‘But Marx wants to free the workers as a class, not as individuals. His freedom is regimentation by a workers’ dictatorship. But true freedom is spontaneity. To be answerable to authority is demeaning to man’s spiritual essence’.451 Bakunin’s position is derived from Kant who, according to Stankevich, argues that morality only means something if man is in a state of freedom to govern his own life and is not subject to the rule of some book of theory. Even Herzen when young subscribed to something akin that position, but it was dependent upon Rousseau’s idealistic notion that everybody has the same objectives. ‘I idolised Rousseau when I was young’, he tells the Herweghs, ‘…Man in his natural state, uncorrupted by civilisation, desiring only those things which are good to desire…and everybody free to follow their desires without conflicts because they’d all want the same things…’.452 Herzen later realises that man is not free. Michael Bakunin also realises that mankind does not operate in that way and he tells Herzen so: Bakunin: Left to themselves, people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they’d create a completely new kind of society if only people weren’t so blind, stupid and selfish. Herzen: Is that the same people or different people? Bakunin: The same people.453 Instead, it is Bakunin’s father, Alexander, who observes that there needs to be a balance in society in order to make it work. He tells his daughter Liubov, 450 Shipwreck, page 83. 451 Salvage, page 114. 452 Shipwreck, pages 79–80. cf A. Herzen, Sobranie Sochinenii, 1 :329 : ‘I began to idolise Rousseau’. 453 Salvage, page 37.

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‘Philosophy does not consist in spinning words like tops till the colours run together and one will do as well as another. Philosophy consists in moderating each life so that many lives will fit together with as much liberty and justice as will keep them together – and not so much as will make them fly apart, when the harm would be greater’.454 Herzen, as ever the intellectual touchstone of the Russian intelligentsia, acknowledges both the father’s requirement for balance and the son’s practical observation about human nature to conclude, whilst arguing against Marx’s communism, that there is a minimum requirement for an individual’s right to act. ‘How can Communism catch on?’, he questions. ‘It asks a worker to give up his…aristocracy. A cobbler with his own last is an aristocrat compared with the worker in a factory. A minimum of control over your own life, even to make a mess of it is something necessarily human. What do you think goes wrong with those experimental societies? It’s not the mosquitoes, it’s something human refusing to erase itself’.455 Note that he is making the same argument as Milne – the right to freedom has to include freedom to mess up (in Milne’s case, the risk of ‘junk journalism’). It’s a price that’s necessary to pay. Just as Marx confuses the individual with his class, so Michael Bakunin confuses liberty with equality, and Stoppard produces two encounters between Herzen and Michael Bakunin which illustrate what the practical Herzen sees as the error of Bakunin’s idealistic position. The first comes in 1847: Michael Bakunin: …I give you a toast! The liberty of each, for the equality of all!456 Herzen: What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything. Michael Bakunin: I am not free unless you, too, are free! Herzen: That’s nonsense. You were free when I was locked up. Michael Bakunin: Freedom is a state of mind. Herzen: No, it’s a state of not being locked up.457 The second, very similar exchange, occurs in 1854. Herzen knows that total freedom for all does not work:

454 Voyage, page 24. 455 Shipwreck, page 60. 456 I. Berlin, in Russian Thinkers, page 106 describes Bakunin’s philosophy thus: ‘“The liberty of each for the equality of all” is another of (Bakunin’s) empty incantations’. 457 Shipwreck, page 36.

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Bakunin: You need me to remind you what it is to be free. Herzen: But you’re in prison. Bakunin: That’s why you aren’t free.…To be freedom, freedom must be freedom for all – for the equality of each! Herzen: Stop…stop… Bakunin: It’s within our grasp, Herzen, if we can only remove the fetters from humanity. Herzen: I think you’re saying we’d all be free if humanity was given its liberty. Bakunin: Yes! Herzen: I was afraid of that.458 Tsar Alexander ii’s emancipation of the serfs proves to be a litmus test for Bakunin’s theory. Even Herzen had allowed himself to be carried away at the prospect. But his mistress, Natalie Ogarev, is left to point out that it had not produced the society that everyone had hoped for, albeit that it was effected in such a way that it was doomed to fail: ‘Freedom was thrown to the serfs like a bone to a pack of dogs coming after you…and written in legal gobbledegook even the villager readers couldn’t make out.…The peasants are told they’re free and they think the land they’ve worked now belongs to them, even the big house belongs to them, and the livestock…– so when it turns out nothing belongs to them and they have to pay rent for their plots, well, obviously freedom bears an uncanny resemblance to serfdom’.459 Fate The clever people try to impose a design on the world and when it goes calamitously wrong they call it fate. In point of fact, everything is Chance, including design.460 tzara, Travesties

458 Salvage, pages 36–37. 459 Salvage, page 89. 460 Travesties 1975 version, page 37.

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We are not masters of our fate. Anything might happen to make all prediction useless.461 friedrich, Undiscovered Country

…

I don’t believe in a mechanistic universe.462 stoppard

∵ A logical consequence of Stoppard’s assessment of individual freedom is his focus on fate and the question of its inevitability. For Stoppard the world is not governed according to a map of predeterminism but rather operates as if there were a random element of mystery in the mechanism or, as George Moore remarks, an unobservable factor in the make-up of humans which has a moral dimension. Determinism occurs in Stoppard’s plays both in a scientific context and in a philosophical one.463 In the scientific, Hapgood explores determinism at the sub-atomic level by considering the effect of Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty (which also reflects duality, another of the themes of Stoppard’s plays). In Stoppard’s words, ‘I thought that quantum mechanics and chaos mathematics suggested themselves as quite interesting and powerful metaphors for human behaviour, not just behaviour, but about the way, in the latter case, in which it suggested a determined life, a life ruled by determinism, and a life which is subject simply to random causes and effects’.464 Arcadia takes the debate about determinism to the macro level by considering the implications 461 Undiscovered Country, page 176. 462 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Fleming, ‘A Talk with Tom Stoppard’, quoted in J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 207. 463 Daniel Jernigan puts a contrary emphasis. See DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 11: ‘Stoppard is all about indeterminacy…while much of Stoppard’s work is ultimately devoted to favouring the determinate, that doesn’t mean he isn’t caught up in issues of determinacy and indeterminacy all the same’. 464 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 84. In an extremely prescient comment in 1975 Clive James wrote, ‘the appropriate analogies to Stoppard’s vision lie just as much in modern physics as in modern philosophy’. – C. James, ‘Tom Stoppard: Count Zero Splits the Infinitive’ in Encounter, November 1975.

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of Chaos Theory for the behaviour of naturally occurring systems, like clouds and population behaviour. William Demastes identifies the link: Where quantum physicists introduced uncertainty to the sub-atomic universe, chaos theorists present a slightly different vision of uncertainty to the macro-universe in that these systems do have clearly determined (almost naturalistic) features, but the determinism does not lead to a pattern that can establish precise predictability of future events.465 Stoppard turns this scientific discussion into a philosophical one, first in the abstract world of Elsinore and, then, into the real world of nineteenth century Russia. Like the bipolar morality of absolutism and relativism the philosophical view of fate oscillates between the extremes of determinism and randomness. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet the Prince talks about ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’466 so it is not a coincidence that the most significant feature of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is its consideration of the role of chance and the nature of determinism in the world.467 Shakespeare’s play is defined by Hamlet’s analysis of mankind – much of which he ascribes to chance: So oft it chances in particular men that, for some vicious mole of nature in them…carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, being nature’s livery or fortune’s star, his virtues else…shall in the general censure take corruption from that particular fault.468 It’s a play about a man who, for all his virtues, has a single, but fatal, defect: he cannot make up his mind and in failing to do so he produces a series of random but interconnected events – the death of Polonius, Ophelia’s madness – which ultimately lead to the most determined of all events in life; death. The title itself of Stoppard’s play suggests determinism as the audience knows something 465 W. Demastes, ‘Re-Inspecting the Crack in the Chimney: Chaos Theory from Ibsen to Stoppard’ in New Theatre Quarterly, 10, number 39, page 245. 466 Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, line 58. 467 Michael Billington comments: ‘Stoppard’s play works on two distinct levels: as an extended gloss upon Hamlet, which reveals the private dilemma of two attendant lords, and as a metaphor of the human condition showing how we are sent into this world with free will but find ourselves the victim of arbitrary circumstances which lead to our inevitable extinction’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 33. 468 Hamlet, Act i, scene iv, lines 23–36.

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before the play even begins – that its two protagonists are going to die.469 They know this also, if they know their Shakespeare, because the audience is told at the end of Hamlet that they are dead, too. For Stoppard this prior knowledge is a reasonable assumption as he believes that, ‘Hamlet I suppose is the most famous play in any language, it is part of the common mythology’.470 It is a determinism that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the mirror image of the play Hamlet, reflects from that shown by Hamlet’s finally found resolution before his duel with Laertes and the climactic, final scene of the play: There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.471 Hamlet has realised that he cannot avoid his fate. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come to the same point but in the process Stoppard presents a variety of views of the nature of life along a spectrum from randomness to absolute determinism. Stoppard makes it very clear that his concern was to write a play about the inevitability of fate: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two people who have been written into a scheme of things and there’s nothing they can do about it except follow through and meet the fate that has been ordained for them … I have written about two people on whom Shakespeare imposed inevitability.472 At one stage there is a view of the world presented which has some elements of – what at the time of writing was unformulated – Chaos Theory: Guildenstern advises, ‘Your smallest action sets off another somewhere else, and is set off by it. Keep an eye open, an ear cocked’.473 Unlike Chaos theory, which provides a view of order within an apparently random system, Stoppard offers, in some instances, a view of a totally random world. It is a world not unlike the 469 John Fleming notes that the ‘foreknowledge of their fate points to part of the play’s shortcomings’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 64. 470 Stoppard, in an interview with G. Gordon, ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed) Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 18. Jim Hunter describes Hamlet as, ‘the most famous play of the supreme dramatist’. – See J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 9. 471 Hamlet, Act v, scene ii, lines 202–205. 472 P. Louis, ‘See The Father. See The Baby’. New York Times, 24 March 1968, D3. 473 RosGuil, page 31.

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product of Einstein’s contribution to quantum mechanical theory which, as Kerner reminds us, ‘made everything finally random, things can go this way or that way, the mathematics deny certainty, they reveal only probability and chance’.474 God, to Einstein’s despair, appears to be playing dice with the universe. ‘Anything could happen yet’,475 says Rosencrantz in the belief that by getting on the boat to England, ‘we’ll be free’.476 This decision and belief is in spite of both of the two protagonists having seen the mime in which the Spies, dressed in identical clothes to them, are killed. It is a randomness described by Septimus in Arcadia477 and the random view (albeit inserted into a world which appears to run according to the laws of nature) is offered up by Guildenstern in contrast and response to the continuous and seemingly unnatural landing of heads-up coins: The equanimity of your average tosser of coins depends upon the law, or rather a tendency, or let us say a probability, or at any rate a mathematically calculable chance, which ensures that he will not upset himself by losing too much nor upset his opponent by winning too often. This made for a kind of harmony and a kind of confidence. It related the fortuitous and the ordained into a reassuring union which we recognised as nature. The sun came up about as often as it went down, in the long run, and a coin showed heads about as often as it showed tails.478 As the Player points out, ‘Uncertainty is the normal state’.479 The Player also argues, ‘We take our chances where we find them’.480 It is not a state with which Guildenstern feels comfortable as he complains, ‘All this strolling about is getting too arbitrary by half’.481 At one stage Guildenstern even argues for total freedom: We are not restricted. No boundaries have been defined,482 no inhibitions imposed. We have, for the while, secured, or blundered into, our 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482

Hapgood, page 36. RosGuil, page 87. RosGuil, page 87. Arcadia, page 7. RosGuil, page 8. RosGuil, page 58. RosGuil, page 16. RosGuil, page 61. Jernigan observes that, ‘all of (Stoppard’s) most notable work has, in one way or another, been engaged with using theatrical boundaries to query epistemological and ontological issues’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, pages 158–159.

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release, for the while. Spontaneity and whim are the order of the day. Other wheels are turning but they are not our concern. We can breathe. We can relax. We can do what we like and say what we like to whomever we like, without restriction.483 All this musing is instantly undermined by the pair’s rejoinder (including an intellectual pun about certainty which Stoppard throws in): Ros:  Within limits, of course. Guil: Certainly within limits.484 Before discussing the middle way which they are both veering towards it is necessary to consider the other end of the range: complete fate. The realisation that ‘Ninety-two coins spun consecutively have come down heads ninety-two consecutive times’485 suggests a world in which probability has been completely overturned – ‘probability is not operating as a factor’.486 Rather, ‘there’s a logic at work – it’s all done for you…To be taken in hand and led’,487 claims Guildenstern. They are ‘caught up’ and must wait ‘till events have played themselves out’.488 As Stoppard’s stage directions note, ‘The run of “heads” is impossible, yet Ros betrays no surprise at all’.489 Whilst Rosencrantz appears to find nothing unusual with this state of affairs Guildenstern is, at least, moved to remark that, ‘A weaker man might be moved to re-examine his faith, if nothing else at least in the law of probability’.490 The certainty of events finally registers with Rosencrantz at the end of the play when he realises that, ‘They had it in for us, didn’t they. Right from the beginning’.491 The Player explains that this is the Tragedians’ fate, too: ‘We follow directions – there is no choice involved’.492 This is the one-way street of the Newtonian deterministic world which Valentine describes in Arcadia: Heat goes to cold. It’s a one-way street. Your tea will end up at room temperature. What’s happening to your tea is happening to everything 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492

RosGuil, pages 107–108. RosGuil, page 108. RosGuil, page 8. RosGuil, page 7. RosGuil, page 31. RosGuil, page 31. RosGuil, page 1. RosGuil, page 2. RosGuil, page 114. RosGuil, page 72.

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everywhere. It’ll take a while but we’re all going to end up at room temperature.493 There is within the play an overwhelming sense of helpless determinism which is recognised by Guildenstern, despite clinging to a notion that he retains some element of his own devices: Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are…condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one – that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary, it’ll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect that our spontaneity was part of their order, we’d know that we were lost.494 Even when given options Guildenstern concludes (with probabilistic irony) that fate still decides: ‘We are comparatively fortunate…At least we are presented with alternatives…But not choice’.495 Fate, it is agreed, after some debate (reflecting the interrogative nature of much of the play’s language which metaphorically suggests a search) has brought the players to Elsinore (despite it undermining the Player’s earlier assertion that he takes his chances): Guil:   It was chance, then? Player: Chance? Guil:   You found us. Player: Oh yes. Guil:   You were looking? Player: Oh no Guil:   Chance, then. Player: Or fate. Guil:   Yours or ours? Player: It could hardly be one without the other. Guil:   Fate, then. Player:  Oh yes. We have no control.496

493 494 495 496

Arcadia, page 104. RosGuil, page 51. RosGuil, page 30. RosGuil, page 16.

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The sense of determinism is inextricably linked with death as the ultimate certainty:497 ‘I tell you it’s all stopping to a death,498 it’s boding to a depth, stepping to a head, it’s all heading to a dead stop’,499 shrieks Rosencrantz. In a phrase which eerily recalls Pozzo’s claim in Waiting for Godot that, ‘They give birth astride a grave’.500 Guildenstern proclaims, ‘The only beginning is birth and the only end is death – if you can’t count on that, what can you count on?’.501 This sense of despair about determinism is further reflected in Rosencrantz’s lament, ‘We’ve travelled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation’.502 He expresses the futility of what he understands to be their situation: ‘…it would be presumptuous of us to interfere with the design of fate or even of kings. All in all, I think we’d be well advised to leave well alone’.503 There is, nevertheless, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead a point along the spectrum of determinism which allows for some randomness, some freedom with the overall scheme of things.504 It is not as far along the spectrum towards randomness that Valentine gets with his explanation of Chaos

497 ‘Of all the actions that a man might play, death is a final reality which passeth show; the Player’s stage-death offers but the trappings and the suits of woe’. – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 32. Lucinda Paquet Gabbard comments, ‘The end toward which (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) drift is…death – life’s greatest mystery and the principal focus of this play’. – LP. Gabbard, The Stoppard Plays, pages 33–37, quoted in H. Bloom (ed), Tom Stoppard, page 25. It is worth noting Alastair Macaulay’s observation about the subject of The Invention of Love: ‘Housman’s poems are famously deathlorn’. – A. Macaulay, Tom Stoppard, A.E. Housman, and the Classics in Baker, W and Smothers, A Ed, ‘The Real Thing’, page 156. 498 Hersh Zeifman observes that ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ (Arcadia, page 16) also implies death as ‘the only certainty’. – H. Zeifman, ‘The comedy of Eros: Stoppard in love’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 189. However, Zeifman’s contention is open to challenge as the phrase is ambiguous. 499 RosGuil, page 29. 500 Waiting for Godot, page 78. 501 RosGuil, page 31. 502 RosGuil, page 112. 503 RosGuil, page 102. 504 John Fleming summarises: ‘The image is one of free will, but within constraints – of limited freedom within a larger, determined course’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 57. CWE. Bigsby remarks, ‘(Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) are forced to conclude that the only freedom they possess is that of sailors on a ship, free to move around the vessel but unable to influence the wind and current which draw them inexorably onwards’. – CWE. Bigsby, Tom Stoppard, page 12.

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Theory in Arcadia – ‘patterns making themselves out of nothing’505 or order with chaotic randomness. It is rather a case of some concept of freedom of manoeuvre within a deterministic framework. If anything, it is an exploration of the Prince’s suggestion in Hamlet that, ‘There’s a divinity which shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will’.506 Accepting that Shakespeare grants the process of determinism a guiding hand which is of a religious nature he implies that that the individual can exert some influence within the overall sense of fate. This position is best illustrated by Guildenstern’s assertion: We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought full circle to face again the single immutable fact – that we, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bearing a letter from one king to another, are taking Hamlet to England.507 The Player appears to hint at a similar concept of freedom within destiny: ‘Between “just deserts” and “tragic irony” we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent’.508 Guildenstern believes he has some input to affairs. ‘I would say I have some influence’,509 he claims (erroneously as it turns out) in court matters. The metaphor of being a passenger on a boat in which one can do what one wants subject to the overall direction of the boat over which one has no control emerges towards the end of the play. Guildenstern’s initial naivety of, ‘I’m very fond of boats myself. I like the way they’re contained. You don’t have to worry about which way to go, or whether to go at all…’,510 is later replaced by his realisation that, ‘Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…’.511 In a rather plaintive and ambiguous cry Guildenstern still implies some element of choice about his fate: ‘…there must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said – no. But somehow we

505 506 507 508 509 510 511

Arcadia, page 101. Hamlet, Act v, scene ii, lines 10–11. RosGuil, page 92. RosGuil, page 71. RosGuil, page 16. RosGuil, pages 91–92. RosGuil, page 114.

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missed it’.512 He, then, speculates, again naively, that, ‘we’ll know better next time’513 but with death lurking just around the corner the audience knows he is not going to get that chance. The concluding view on this not quite middle position on the scale of determinism is that of the Player. ‘Life is a gamble at terrible odds – if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it’.514 In other words one has some freedom of self-determination albeit within an overall format in which the odds are very much against us. Associated with the inexorable sense of destiny which pervades the play is a sense of direction. They repeatedly claim that ‘we were sent for’.515 It’s not always positive – ‘We’re just not getting anywhere’,516 Guildenstern cries out in frustration at one stage and is concerned lest, ‘we lose our momentum’.517 All the time they are hoping for assistance. ‘We are entitled to some direction’,518 reasons Guildenstern and they take comfort from the fact that they carry a letter which provides instructions – ‘Everything is explained in the letter’, Guildenstern asserts, ‘We count on that’.519 Occasionally they do find themselves taking ‘a step in the right direction’520 and actually, in Guildenstern’s estimation, ‘getting somewhere’.521 The sense of them being on a journey is highlighted in the film version which opens with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on horseback, clearly going somewhere, rather than with the coin tossing episode (which follows immediately thereafter). In keeping with Hamlet’s description of his own affected madness – ‘I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw’522 – Stoppard offers up plenty of directional references. The Player claims, ‘I know which way the wind is blowing’,523 which, at one stage, Rosencrantz suggests is, ‘coming up through the floor. That can’t be south can it?’.524 Rosencrantz and ­Guildenstern’s

512 513 514 515 516 517 518 519 520 521 522 523 524

RosGuil, page 117. RosGuil, page 117. RosGuil, page 107. RosGuil, pages 7, 8, 9. RosGuil, page 99. RosGuil, page 104. See also Yepikhodov in The Cherry Orchard, page 30 – ‘… fate has got it in for me like a big storm for a small boat’. RosGuil, page 10. RosGuil, page 96. RosGuil, page 79. RosGuil, page 80. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 359–360, RosGuil, page 46. RosGuil, page 57. RosGuil, page 50.

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­inability to know their precise location525 is illustrated in their fumbling attempts to locate the points of the compass as Rosencrantz demonstrates, ‘The sun’s going down.…If that’s west’.526 They seem perpetually lost: Ros: …I think it’s getting light. Guil: Not for night. Ros: This far north. Guil: Unless we’re off course.527 ‘Where’s it going to end?’,528 Rosencrantz asks. His own answer, somewhat later in the play – ‘there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure’529 – leads directly in to the last of the play’s great themes: death.530 This resonates with the mirror image play, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the subject is ever present; not just in the high body count, in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy contemplating suicide (‘To be or not to be’531), in the murder of old Hamlet which sets off the catastrophic chain of events or in the death of the king in The Murder of Gonzago, the play-within-a-play, but in the stunningly memorable description Hamlet himself gives to it; ‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’.532 It is the ultimate end of the deterministic world to which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern inevitably travel. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead offers up various definitions of death despite Guildenstern’s reference to Socrates’ assertion that ‘we don’t know what death is’.533 ‘Death is not anything…death is not…It’s the 525 Waiting for Godot also sees a set of characters striving to know where they are – eg: page 75. 526 RosGuil, page 112. 527 RosGuil, page 90. 528 RosGuil, page 35. 529 RosGuil, page 63. 530 See B. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, page 123. McHale cites the awareness of death as an example of postmodernism: ‘The connection between awareness of fictionality and awareness of death…is highly suggestive, for a character’s knowledge of his own fictionality often functions as a kind of master-trope for determinism – cultural, historical, psychological determinism, but especially the inevitability of death. It functions this way…in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where being the puppet of playwright and director is a metaphor for being the puppet of fate, history, the human condition’. 531 Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, line 56. 532 Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, lines 79–80. 533 RosGuil, page 102.

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absence of presence, nothing more…the endless time of never coming back’,534 says a tired Guildenstern. It has absolute finality, according to Guildenstern; ‘Death’s death, isn’t it?’.535 ‘Death is…not. Death isn’t.…Death is the ultimate negative’,536 he philosophises. The players seem to relish it. ‘Do you call that an ending?’, the Player intones almost incredulously (with a dose of Stoppardian wit to boot), ‘with practically everyone on his feet. My goodness no – over your dead body’.537 The mime they perform in dress rehearsal is, recalling Hamlet’s outcome, ‘a slaughterhouse – eight corpses in all. It brings out the best in us’.538 As far as the Player is concerned death is ‘what actors do best…their talent is dying’.539 He proceeds to reel off a number of ways of so doing. ‘Deaths for all ages’,540 in fact. The puns come thick and fast from Stoppard: ‘I’m sick to death of it’;541 England is ‘a dead end’;542 Rosencrantz has a dead leg; ‘He murdered us’,543 is how Rosencrantz describes the outcome of their question and answer session with Hamlet. Death is an absolute because it is innate in us. In a passing reference to the act of remembering and in part interrogative style (both of which recall one of the play’s other great themes, the nature of truth) Rosencrantz articulates the absolutist position: Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering – stamped into one’s memory. And yet I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality.544 Mortality is the glue that sticks all the play’s themes together because Rosencrantz uses it to highlight an example of illusion and reality.

534 535 536 537 538 539 540 541 542 543 544

RosGuil, page 116. RosGuil, page 82. RosGuil, page 99. RosGuil, page 71. RosGuil, page 75. RosGuil, page 75. RosGuil, page 116. RosGuil, page 30. RosGuil, page 112. RosGuil, page 48. RosGuil, page 63.

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Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?…I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead…which should make a difference…shouldn’t it? 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.…Life in a box is better than no life at all. You’d have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking – well, at least I’m not dead!545 The determinism of mortality is summed up by the Player’s conclusion that, ‘In our experience, most things end in death’.546 The play ends on a note that unmistakeably emphasises the concept of mortality. Against a backdrop of the players in what Stoppard’s stage direction describes as, ‘the tableau of court and corpses which is the last scene of Hamlet’,547 the Ambassador arrives to announce that, ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’.548 In The Coast of Utopia Stoppard applies the discussion about determinism to the nature of history. It was a fertile subject in the minds of not just the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century but amongst European commentators in general and it veered, just as the discussion about fate does in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, from the extremes of rigid determinism to complete randomness. The Coast of Utopia allows Stoppard the chance to portray the opposing views not in an abstract world, like Elsinore, but in the harsh crucible of nineteenth century revolution. However, it is a scene he sets in Another Moon Called Earth where he presents the extremities of the spectrum of the interpretation of history. At one point Bone, a self-styled historian, accuses other men of regarding history as, ‘an arbitrary sequence of events’.549 His own interpretation is closer to Marx’s in which he comes to believe that, ‘everything I did was the culminating act of a sequence going back to Babylon’.550 He offers his interpretation to Albert, his wife’s fraudulent doctor, as ‘exposing the fallacy of chance – there are no impulsive acts – nothing random – everything is logical and connects into the 545 RosGuil, page 62. 546 RosGuil, page 114. Anthony Jenkins comments that, ‘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’. – See A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, pages 44–48. 547 RosGuil, page 117. 548 RosGuil, page 117. 549 Another Moon Called Earth, page 51. 550 Another Moon Called Earth, page 60.

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grand design.…There’s got to be something going on beside a lot of accidents. If it’s all random, then what’s the point?’.551 Albert’s response, which Herzen would recognise, is ‘What’s the point if it’s all logical?’.552 ‘Where are we off to? Who’s got the map?’,553 asks Michael Bakunin as he boards the cross-Channel steamer in August 1852. He might as well be asking about history in general. The deterministic answer is derived from the ideas of Hegel, who took earlier German thought, which suggested the idea of an Absolute essence of a harmonious universe, and developed it into an argument that the Absolute determined a progressive historical path towards a rational society. Reference to it is prompted by Stankevich’s analysis of the real duel resulting in the death of Pushkin in 1837 which Alexandra Bakunin ‘operatically’554 announces to her sisters. Much later in Voyage, following Stoppard’s reversal of chronology, but only a month later in reality, Stankevich argues that, ‘the duel was between knowledge and denial, the dialectic dramatized, it’s all there in Hegel’.555 Interestingly, in reference to the discussion of fate in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he refers Belinsky to ‘the play…called Hamlet by William Shakespeare’,556 which he implies to mean the fight (or ‘duel’ as he calls it) between Hamlet and Laertes. For Stankevich both duels are evidence of the Hegelian concept that the harsh realities of life – ‘Poverty, injustice, censorship, whips and scorns, the law’s delay’ – are ‘Necessary to the march of history. The dialectical logic of history’.557 It is the idea that history is on an inexorable journey; a point which is expressed by Michael Bakunin as he seeks to explain to Herzen the failures of the 1848 uprisings throughout Europe and the ensuing backlash from monarchical authority – ‘Reaction is only the optical effect of the river running backwards on the tide, while the river runs always to the sea, which is liberty boundless and indivisible!’.558 The idea of the linear path of predetermined history is taken to its extreme by Marx who defines it, as Natalie Herzen cynically notices, in terms of a struggle: ‘(Marx) is saying that all history up to now is the history of class struggle. 551 552 553 554 555 556 557

Another Moon Called Earth, page 59. Another Moon Called Earth, page 59. Shipwreck, page 99. Voyage, page 42. Voyage, page 96. Voyage, page 96. Voyage, page 97. Henry iv in Pirandello’s Henry iv, page 53–54 makes a similar point about the logical cause and effect of history although not its determinism : ‘you can sit back and admire how every cause leads obediently to its effect, with perfect logic, how every event fits neatly with every other. That’s the wonderful thing about history’. 558 Salvage, page 36.

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And by sheer luck, Marx himself, the discoverer of this fact, is living in the very place, at the very time, when, thanks to industrialisation…It’s all now arriving at the end of history…’.559 The struggle, or process, is continual, as Marx explains, ‘Industrialisation, ever expanding to feed the markets for canoes, cooking pots, samovars,…and ever contracting to drive out competition…alienates the worker more and more from the product of his toil, until Capital and labour stand revealed in fatal contradiction’.560 Marx believes that behind the onward movement of history there is a predetermined purpose: ‘Then will come the final titanic struggle, the last turn of the great wheel of progress beneath which the generations of toiling masses perished for the ultimate victory. Now at last the unity and rationality of history’s purpose will be clear to everyone’.561 The counterpoint is offered by Herzen who has a much more pragmatic view of what is going on in the world. ‘We’re not the plaything of an imaginative cosmic force, but of a Romanov with no imagination whatsoever. A mediocrity’.562 Belinsky, too, comes to accept that history is not a linear progression as he describes his realisation also in terms of the same tidal metaphor used by Michael Bakunin: ‘I grasped the meaning of the rise and fall of kingdoms, the ebb and flow of history’.563 Herzen, aware of the fluidity of events – ‘…nothing in this life holds still, everything is changing and moving’564 – concludes that the Hegelian view is not sustainable in the face of the evidence of events: ‘People don’t storm the Bastille because history proceeds by zigzags. History zigzags because when people have had enough, they storm the Bastille’.565 Stoppard reinforces the whole argument in favour of the chaotic nature of history by his own chronological structure of the trilogy. As the timeline in Appendix 3 illustrates, at certain points time rebounds backwards as the chronology of the scenes moves backwards. One scene repeats itself and another, rather like Arcadia, has two separate episodes (this time differing in location, not time period) appearing in the same scene. Stoppard uses the appearance of a Ginger Cat to reinforce the point that it is individuals who influence events and that history does not operate according to a predetermined plan. Once again, Herzen is the mouthpiece: ‘The Dialectical Spirit of History would be an extravagant redundancy even if one 559 560 561 562 563 564 565

Shipwreck, page 59. Salvage, page 117. Salvage, page 117. Voyage, page 104. Voyage, page 102. Shipwreck, page 56. Voyage, page 104.

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could imagine what sort of animal it was supposed to be…a ginger cat for example’.566 Stoppard cannot resist the lure of another visually delicious, dramatic opportunity and he introduces on stage ‘A Ginger Cat, smoking a cigar and holding a glass of champagne…’.567 Stoppard explained the point of the Ginger Cat in an interview at the Lincoln Center: In the play, Herzen invokes a six-foot cat he saw at a fancy dress ball, and he invokes this cat in a speech in which he’s trying to make a point. And the point he’s making is a counter-argument to a world view which everybody in Europe was in love with at that moment. It’s a view made famous by the German philosopher Hegel. Essentially the idea was that we are all bound up in a narrative, which is being determined by forces outside us and much larger than us. That the history of nations is, as it were, the narrative of history, and that history is the author of this narrative. So, in other words, it’s about pre-determinism, large scale pre-determinism. And, Herzen reaches for this Ginger Cat in order to say that as collectives of people we may be subject to some such universal law of history. But actually, that’s not terribly relevant to us as individuals. Because as individuals, while this great rolling wheel of Hegelian narrative is slowly taking us towards an unknown destination, a yellow cab can come around the corner and just knock us over, or some other random event…568 In Herzen’s view there isn’t an historical map – a master plan – at all: Nobody’s got the map. In the west, socialism may win next time, but it’s not history’s destination. Socialism, too, will reach its own extremes and absurdities, and once more Europe will burst at the seams…And then a new war will begin between the barefoot and the shod. It will be bloody, swift and unjust, and leave Europe like Bohemia after the Hussites. Are you sorry for civilisation? I am sorry for it, too.569 Perhaps the last word on determinism occurred early on in Stoppard’s career. Reflecting that history is neither a chapter of accidents nor an arbitrary fate Bone in Another Moon Called Earth notes, ‘I do not write history, I dissect 566 Voyage, page 104. 567 Voyage, page 106. 568 Stoppard, in an interview in the Lincoln Center Theater’s Platform Series 14 February 2007. 569 Shipwreck, page 104.

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it – lay bare the logic which other men have taken to be an arbitrary sequence of accidents’.570 Art You may perhaps alter people’s perceptions so that they behave a little differently at that axis of behaviour where we locate politics or justice.571 henry, The Real Thing

…

…art is not the child of pure intellect, it is equally the child of temperament. That is why art is art. And, most of all, that is why it must be distinguished from other human pursuits.572 stoppard

∵ For Stoppard art has a moral dimension and function – but only in the longterm – founded upon what is referred to as a universal perception. I am not sure anyone really believes Stoppard573 when he told Janet Watts that, ‘it’s claimed that art is important. It’s not’.574 Hence, Henry Carr’s comment that ‘art is absurdly overrated’.575 Elsewhere, when questioned about art, he replied, 570 571 572 573

Another Moon Called Earth, page 51. The Real Thing, page 35. Stoppard, ‘But For The Middle Classes’. ‘If Stoppard really believed art was unimportant, he would not have devoted so much time to writing a tv-drama about Solidarity in Squaring The Circle or a commercial play about the freedom of the press in Night and Day’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 14. 574 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Watts, The Guardian, 21 March 1973. Joan Fitzpatrick Dean comments, ‘rather the issue that art notices, (Stoppard) implies, retains its importance’. – JF. Dean, Tom Stoppard Comedy As A Moral Matrix, page 14. 575 Travesties, page 28. Michael Billington illuminates a flaw in Carr’s argument which has implications for Stoppard’s argument that art has only a long-term impact and he also emphasises the two-way impact of art: ‘What Carr’s vision (maybe Stoppard’s also) overlooks is the extent to which our idea of ourselves and our society is actually shaped

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‘art is important because it provides the moral matrix, the moral sensibility, from which we make our judgements about the world’.576 But, it was Michael Billington who elicited from Stoppard the key point in his argument about the role of art, as he distinguishes a difference between its long and the short-term roles. ‘Art is important in the long-term in that it lays down some kind of matrix of moral responsibility. I mean can you think of a play that has helped to change anything?…plays work through metaphor.577 In the end the best play about Vietnam will probably turn out to have been written by Sophocles’.578 Stoppard gave an example of how the moral matrix works, alluding to George Moore’s morality and employing what turned out to be a prophetic reference to what would become the subject of future stage plays: The repression which for better or worse turned out to be Leninism in action after 1917 was very much worse than anything which had gone on in Tsarist Russia.…but the point is not to compare one ruthless regime against another – 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.579

576

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578 579

and formed by art and the way our own experiences of the world are reflected back by art’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 101. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 66. Stoppard used similar words to make a slightly different point to Mel Gussow: ‘I think that art provides the moral matrix from which we draw our values about what the world ought to be like’. – ‘Seriousness compromised by frivolity or…frivolity redeemed by my seriousness’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 20. Stoppard reinforces his view by saying, ‘I don’t think theatre works as parable; it works as metaphor.…the power of the metaphor is that it impacts, and just goes where you happen to see it from’ – ‘The Event and the Text’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, pages 207–208. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Billington, ‘Stoppard’s Secret Agent’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 197. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 64. Paul Delaney argues that this attitude is a distinguishing feature of Stoppard’s: ‘What separates Stoppard from the masses of current British playwrights writing about the masses is not a right-wing political stance as opposed to a left-wing stance, but a metaphysical perspective as opposed to a political perspective, a moral view of individuals and regimes as opposed to a materialistic or ideological view’. – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 9. Stoppard told Lewis Funke that, ‘yes, it is true

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Stoppard’s belief about the limitations of art’s effectiveness in the short-term is contained in a reference to a speech in Artist Descending a Staircase which he chose to repeat in virtually identical language in Travesties: There’s a line in Artist Descending a Staircase that says that in any community of 1,000 people there’ll be 900 doing the work, 90 doing well, nine doing good, ‘and one lucky bastard writing about the other 999’.580 I’ve always felt that the artist is a lucky man. I get deeply embarrassed by the statements and postures of ‘committed’ theatre. There is no such thing as ‘pure’ art – art is a commentary on something else in life – it might be adultery in the suburbs, or the Vietnamese war. I think that art ought to involve itself in contemporary social and political history as much as anything else, but I find it deeply embarrassing when large claims are made for such an involvement: when, because art takes notice of something important, it’s claimed that the art is important. It’s not. We are talking about marginalia – the top tiny fraction of the whole edifice. When Auden said his poetry didn’t save one Jew from the gas chamber, he’d said it all.581 Stoppard summed Auden’s point up in his own way to Mel Gussow: ‘To stretch a point: our moral sensibility is laid down by art not by reportage’.582 In an interview in 1974 for Flourish, the Royal Shakespeare Company Club news-sheet, he explains the difference, referring, once again, to the idea of the matrix that art sets. Art is very much better at laying down inch-by-inch a matrix for the sensibilities which we ultimately use to make our value-judgements on society, than in making an immediate value-judgement on an that I am more interested in the metaphysical condition of man than the social position’. Quoted in P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 34 and referenced Funke, L, Playwrights Talk about Writing: 12 Interviews, page 228. 580 See Artist, page 144 and Travesties, page 46. 581 Stoppard, in an interview J. Watts, Tom Stoppard in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 50. Stoppard cautioned John Tusa about not losing sight of the bigger picture when referring to Auden’s point: ‘I think to focus in on what Auden wrote leads you into trying to make a determination about a particular point; but the real point is that art is a template, a matrix of some kind, for our morality; it’s always there, as politics’ conscience…’. – interview with J. Tusa, J in J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 169. 582 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Seriousness compromised by frivolity or… frivolity redeemed by my seriousness’ in M. Gussow,Conversations with Stoppard, page 20.

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immediate situation.583 Particularly, much better at that than at changing a situation584…I think that art is intensely important for reasons other than writing angrily about this morning’s headlines.585 Stoppard’s view has remained unchanged. In 2011 he told Jonathan Biggins, ‘I have always felt that if you want to change something by Tuesday theatre is no good, journalism is what does that. But if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix then theatre has a longer half-life. I think that’s something to cherish’.586 Stoppard’s belief in the long-term effect of art is encapsulated in Joyce’s speech in Travesties (pages 41–42) in which he explains that the significance of the tale of Ulysses has far outlived the dust of a few broken pots which is all that physically remains of the siege of Troy – ‘My prejudices’, Stoppard said, ‘were all on Joyce’s side – I utterly believe in his speech at the end of Act 1 on what an artist is’.587 (Note that Das makes the same point in Indian Ink when he argues that ‘only in art can empires cheat oblivion’.588). 583 Michael Billington disagrees – ‘Art has a depth charge effect and the history of Western civilisation is filled with examples of artists responding directly to public events’. He goes on to quote examples. See M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 13. Billington implies that Stoppard proves his point with Every Good Boy Deserves Favour: ‘In Audenesque terms, Every Good Boy may not have saved another dissident from persecution: what it did, through the medium of theatre, was to heighten our awareness in a communal situation’. (op cit, page 112). Billington concludes (op cit, page 172) that, ‘drama can be journalistic as well as eternal’. William Demastes explains Stoppard’s point slightly differently: ‘Stoppard seems most consistently to believe that art’s “purpose” is to generate experiences that will make its audience reconsider and possibly even alter not what it thinks and feels but the way it thinks and feels’. – W. Demastes, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard, page 35. He adds (op cit, page 43), ‘The point is that in order to change public policy, there is first a need to alter personal sentiment’. 584 Stoppard explains the difference between journalism and art in their impact: ‘I still believe that journalism, television journalism particularly, is the most efficient medium for changing the world – in the short term. In the long-term, I suppose, the best art has more effect on our moral sensibilities’. – Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight’. in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 58. 585 Stoppard, in an interview with ACH. Smith, Flourish, Issue One 1974. 586 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Biggins, ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’. 587 Stoppard, quoted in O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 169. Anthony Jenkins notices that, ‘In Travesties, Joyce’s statement is one of the few that go unrebutted. 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’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 118. 588 Indian Ink, page 44.

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The source of morality in art is, for Stoppard, the moral absolute of the universal idea. Belinsky’s holistic approach to philosophy and, therefore, the role of the artist is explained by Berlin: ‘Literature was for him not a metier, nor a profession, but the artistic expression of an all-embracing outlook, an ethical and metaphysical doctrine, a view of history and man’s place in the cosmos, a vision that embraced all facts and all values’.589 This eternal value of the artist is explained by Belinsky in a progressively agitated and fervid speech to the revolutionary hot-head, Michael Bakunin: We can watch (a poet) in the moment of creation, there he sits with his pen in his hand, not moving. When it moves we’ve missed it. Where did he go in that moment? The meaning of art lies in the answer to that question. To discover it, to understand it, to know the difference between it happening and not happening, this is my whole purpose in life, and it is not a contemptible calling in our country where our liberties cannot be discussed because we have none, and science and politics can’t be discussed for the same reason. A critic does double duty here. If something true can be understood about art, something will be understood about liberty, too, and science and politics and history – because everything in the universe is unfolding together with a purpose of which mine is a part.590 The act of stepping back, or disappearing, is, Stoppard argues, the key to the artist: ‘The real poet goes absent…Belinsky said, “Where did he go in that moment?”: that’s a question which anybody who composes music, paints, writes plays write anything…which we recognise, “Where did I go in that moment?”’.591 Stoppard’s answer to the question of where did the artist go is answered by Belinsky and it demonstrates Stoppard’s moral perspective on the role of the artist – art’s moral matrix is derived from that same absolute moral source which George Moore identifies and which in artistic terms is ‘the unconscious creative spirit of…artists’.592 Stoppard leaves it to Belinsky in Voyage to explain to the Bakunins the perpetual relevance of an artist’s work: ‘Every work of art is 589 I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, page 266. Berlin describes Belinsky, on page 149, as ‘the moral and literary dictator of his generation’, and, on page 152, ‘the father of the social criticism of literature, not only in Russia but perhaps even in Europe’. 590 Voyage, page 39. 591 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Biggins, ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’. 592 Voyage, page 40.

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the breath of a single eternal idea’.593 Dorn’s advice in The Seagull also seems to be driving at a similar argument when he says, ‘a work of art must express a serious idea. Without seriousness there can be no art…only write about what’s important and permanent’.594 Because of the nature of its inspiration Stoppard believes that the artist is doing something special595 – not given to ordinary people596 – and this conviction is the source of his gripe with modern art597 which he so effectively lampoons in Artist Descending a Staircase and Travesties. That the artist is different – and always has been – is one of Stoppard’s strongest credos which he explained to Andrew Upton: ‘the idea of the writer and the writing as something different from many other tasks that had to be performed in Plato’s Republic. That idea is very strong.…I felt this in myself. I wanted to inherit that, I wanted to be part of it. It seemed to me to be important’.598 Stoppard demonstrates his point with reference to The Real Thing: In a play of mine there is writer and his wife gives him a really hard time… She says something like ‘You think that it’s something special, not something anybody can do. You write, we get written about’. That relationship of artist and subject is actually very sort of complex and ultimately quite suspect and yet it exerts a very strong kind of magic.599 And,…I buy into it. I have always bought into it. I will always buy into it. I need it to be so. It’s only my brain which is sceptical600

593 Voyage, page 41. 594 The Seagull, page 420. 595 Interestingly, Stoppard took time to arrive at this point of view. Kerensky quotes him (O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 169) as saying, ‘I realized that one does not have to apologize for being an artist. It took me years to reach that understanding’. 596 Stoppard: ‘It took me quite a while to justify my own credentials: yet artists do not in fact need to justify themselves – they are producing something which crystallises and makes concrete something in the air’. – ‘Something to Declare’ in J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 112. 597 Stoppard: ‘I think that when Donner says much of modern art is the mechanical expression of a very simple idea which might have occurred to an intelligent man in his bath and be forgotten in the business of drying between his toes, that is me’. – interview with R. Mayne, ‘Arts Commentary’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 37. 598 Stoppard, in an interview with A. Upton, Artworks 24 February 2008. 599 Stoppard relates the work of the artist to magic, notably in Travesties (Joyce – page 41; Tzara – page 29). 600 Stoppard, in an interview with A. Upton, Artworks 24 February 2008.

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But Stoppard’s problem is that the nature of art has changed fundamentally: as he explained to Jonathan Biggins: the crack in the door is…in gallery art…a huge shift has occurred at some point in the conversation between the artist and the observer, the audience…because for most of the history of art the artist was saying to the observer, ‘You can’t do this, I can’, and the observer was saying, ‘Yeah, you’re right. I can’t do that’. And that’s now actually shifted into a completely different conversation where the observer is saying, ‘Yeah, but hang on. Couldn’t I do that?’. And the artist is saying, ‘Yeah, you can. But, you didn’t – and, I did’. There’s a completely different conception of what the artist act consists of. It’s become an act of thought, rather than an act of skill.601 Stoppard believes that artists become moral leaders of their societies, particularly so in times of repression, and this thought was the inspiration for The Coast of Utopia. Stoppard suggests that, ‘A lot of the great literature in the canon…has been produced in places and at times where writers we not free to write as they wished…that was the beginning of The Coast of Utopia’.602 The idea grew from Belinsky’s time in Paris, as Stoppard describes: ‘What (Belinsky) said was he hated Paris where you could publish anything you like.…there was this cacophony in the market place. Every sensational essay was replaced the following day by two others. He said you have to be a Russian living in a police state to understand why it matters to be a writer. What I write is passed from hand to hand by candlelight at midnight’.603 Stoppard, then, contends that in Tsarist Russia – and, indeed, in Russian tradition generally – the role of the artist is one of leadership. Russia has a view of the artist which expresses, embodies this extraordinary foundational assumption which goes back…well before Plato. Belinsky wrote somewhere that Russian people look to writers as their real leaders.604 He wasn’t talking about polemical essayists, he wasn’t talking 601 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Biggins, ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’. 602 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Biggins, ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’. 603 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Biggins, ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’. 604 Stoppard is paraphrasing Belinsky. ‘At home the public look to writers as their real leaders. The title of poet or novelist really counts with us.…My articles get cut up by the censor, but a week before the Contemporary comes out students hang around Smirdin’s

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about history writers. He was talking about Pushkin and Gogol. He was talking about the artist as somebody that the public at large looked to, looked up to.605 In that sense Stoppard’s trilogy puts the theoretical question that he set himself in Travesties – whether the words ‘revolutionary’ and ‘artist’ are capable of being synonymous – into the reality of Russian political and moral thought. Two members of the nineteenth century Russian intelligentsia who feature highly in The Coast of Utopia share Stoppard’s view about the role of art. In the words of Kelly, ‘(Turgenev) fully accepted his friend Belinsky’s belief that the artist cannot remain a neutral observer in the battle between justice and injustice, but must dedicate himself, like all decent men, to establish and proclaim the truth’.606 There is a general sense of the role the artist has which goes far beyond aesthetic matters, as Stankevich argues, ‘Everything now depends on artists and philosophers. Great artists to express what can’t be explained, philosophers to explain it!’.607 Amongst the Russian intelligentsia a man could be both. Belinsky believed that, ‘The public…sees in Russian writers its only leaders, defenders and saviours from dark autocracy, Orthodoxy and the national way of life’.608 Turgenev is made of the same stuff. In 1855 he wrote that, ‘There are epochs when literature cannot merely be artistic, there are interests higher than poetry’.609 His own, rather curious, description of himself as ‘I’m a sportsman’,610 reflects the work of his homage to Belinsky, Sportsmen’s Sketches, in which he argues for the abolition of serfdom. Natalie Herzen, too, understands this universal concept of the artist: Genius isn’t a matter of matching art to nature better than (your painter/ lover) can do it, it’s nature itself – revealing itself through the exalted feeling of the artist, because the world isn’t a collection of different things… which have somehow landed up together, it’s all one thing, like the

605 606 607 608 609 610

bookshop asking if it’s arrived yet…and discuss it half at night and pass copies around’. – Shipwreck, page 31. According to Daniel Jernigan this is an example of Stoppard’s ‘transit of…the postmodern terrain’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 169. Stoppard, in an interview with A. Upton, Artworks 24 February 2008. A. Kelly, in the Introduction to I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, page xxi. Voyage, page 61. V. Belinsky, Open letter to Gogol, 15 July 1847. I. Turgenev, Letter to Vassily Botkin, 29 June 1855. Voyage, page 50.

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ultimate work of art trying to reach its perfection through us, its most conscious part, and we fall short most of the time.611 Belinsky believes, furthermore, that art does not exist in a vacuum. ‘The man and the artist can no longer pass each other in the doorway taking turns to be at home’, he argues and continues, ‘there’s only one person under the roof, he can’t be separated from himself, and must be judged all together’.612 Belinsky’s philosophy sees art (literature) as the way to identifying the truth which is not just a factual truth but an inner truth (part of the universal essence that many nineteenth century philosophers equated with the idea of the moral harmony of the world) – a truth so internal that you can only find it by peeling back its layers to reveal its core essence in much the same way as a matryoshka doll keeps unpacking its layers to reveal the tiniest doll inside. Belinsky explains his point to Chaadaev: Belinsky: I believe literature alone can, even now, redeem our honour, even now, in words alone, that have ducked and dodged their way past the censor, literature can be…become…can… Chaadaev: You mean literature can make itself useful, with a social purpose…? Belinsky: …literature can replace, can actually become…Russia! It can be greater and more real than the external reality. It only has to be true. Art is true or false…. Not true to the facts, not true to appearances, but true to the innermost of the innermost doll, where genius and nature are the same stuff.613 Crucially, Belinsky recognises that whilst the artist’s message is a perpetual, universal one tastes change and different epochs require different artists to make the eternal points. Russia, in his opinion, after the failure of the Decembrists in 1825 and Tsar Nicholas’ subsequent autocratic crackdown now needs new artists: ‘I always believe the artist expresses his age by singing with no more purpose than a bird. But now we need a new kind of song, a different singer’.614

611 612 613 614

Shipwreck, page 70. Voyage, page 108. Voyage, pages 79–80. Voyage, page 107.

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Whilst The Coast of Utopia rests upon historical practice, Travesties and The Invention of Love are more theoretical in their exploration of the role of the artist. In 1917 Zurich Stoppard presents several views about the role of art against the background of what role art can perform in society. For Tzara it is ‘the duty of the artist to belch and howl at the delusion that infinite generations of real effects can be inferred from the gross expression of apparent cause’.615 Carr sees it in aesthetic terms: ‘It is the duty of the artist to beautify existence’.616 Joyce represents what Stoppard describes as, ‘art for art’s sake’,617 because, as Joyce puts it, ‘we…stand enriched, by a tale of heroes’618 etc. Cecily has a different argument altogether. Her point is that, ‘Art is a critique of society or it is nothing’.619 Carr points out, in response, that Cecily’s contention, ‘has the disadvantage that a great deal of what we call art has no such function and yet in some way it gratifies a hunger that is common to princes and peasants’.620 When Cecily argues that it is time to change society. Carr vehemently puts down this argument: ‘No, no, no, no, no – my dear girl – art doesn’t change society, it is merely changed by it’.621 Interestingly, in a speech Stoppard dropped from the 1975 version, Cecily runs a different argument: Art is society! It is one part of many parts all touching each other, everything from poetry to politics. And until the whole is reformed, artistic decadence, whether in the form of the perfectly phrased epigram or a 615 Travesties, page 20. 616 Travesties, page 20. 617 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 69. Stoppard explained his understanding of Joyce’s position in moral terms (op cit, page 69): ‘(Travesties) asks whether an artist has to justify himself in political terms at all. For example, if Joyce were alive today, he would say, juntas may come and juntas may go but Homer goes on for ever. And when he was alive he did say that the history of Ireland, troubles and all, was justified because it produced him and he produced Ulysses.… So, clearly one has to posit a political prisoner taking comfort from the thought that at least he is in the country of Joyce, or of Homer, and to ask oneself whether Joyce, in moral terms, was myopic or had better vision than lesser men’. Kenneth Tynan comments, ‘Stoppard’s idol – the artist for art’s sake, far above the squalid temptations of politics – is, unequivocally, Joyce’. – K. Tynan, ‘Withdrawing with Style from Chaos’. 618 Travesties, page 42. 619 Travesties, page 50. 620 Travesties, page 50. 621 Travesties, page 50.

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hatful of words flung in the public’s face, is a luxury which only artists can afford.622 Oscar Wilde, in The Invention of Love, disagrees and sees the artist as the proponent of reform: ‘(The artist) is the agent of progress against authority’.623 In doing so ‘art cannot be subordinate to its subject’624 and ‘deals with exceptions, not with types’.625 It is the artist, not the scholar who can achieve this, he tells aeh: ‘You are right to be a scholar. A scholar is all scruple, an artist none. The artist must lie, cheat, deceive, be untrue to nature and contemptuous of history’.626 In fact, as Wilde argues, ‘sincerity is the enemy of art. This is what Pater taught me, and what Ruskin never learned. Ruskin made a vice out of a virtue’.627 With his seemingly innate immodesty Wilde explains his point: ‘I banged Ruskin’s and Pater’s heads together, and from the moral severity of one and the aesthetic soul of the other I made art a philosophy that can look the twentieth century in the eye’.628 The result is that Wilde’s world now stands of the cusp of a new age. He tells aeh, ‘I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new – the New Drama, the New Novel, New Journalism, New Hedonism, New Paganism, even the New Woman’.629 Lenin, whilst he was happy to admit art and literature that accorded with his views, denied a moral dimension to the artist to say what he wants.630 He did, indeed, as Nadya says write ‘an article in 1908 on Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday’631 and a slightly fuller version of what Lenin wrote – rather than the speech Stoppard derives for Lenin – helps illustrate the point even more firmly as it contrasts Tolstoy the artist who makes short-term social protest (which is all right as far as Lenin is concerned because Lenin agrees with his views) with 622 623 624 625 626 627 628 629 630

Travesties 1975 version, page 74. The Invention of Love, page 96. The Invention of Love, page 93. The Invention of Love, page 93. The Invention of Love, page 97. The Invention of Love, page 93. The Invention of Love, page 96. The Invention of Love, pages 96–97. Paul Delaney comments with reference to Night And Day, ‘Lenin’s ideology must postulate a collective ethic divorced from its effects on individual lives.…In effect, Lenin, with all the totalitarian zeal if not the humour of President Mageeba in Night And Day, affirms a “relatively free press”, a press which will have about as much freedom as one edited by Mageeba’s relatives’. – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 66. 631 Travesties, page 59.

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Tolstoy the artist who tries to endow his words with longer-term moral significance (the extracts Stoppard uses either entirely or paraphrased are in italics). The contradictions in Tolstoy’s works, views, doctrines, in his school, are indeed glaring. On the one hand, we have the great artist, the genius who has not only drawn incomparable pictures of Russian life but has made first-class contributions to world literature. On the other hand we have the landlord obsessed with Christ. On the one hand, the remarkably powerful, forthright and sincere protest against social falsehood and hypocrisy; and on the other, the ‘Tolstoyan’, i.e., the jaded, hysterical sniveller called the Russian intellectual, who publicly beats his breast and wails: ‘I am a bad wicked man, but I am practising moral self-perfection; I don’t eat meat any more, I now eat rice cutlets’. On the one hand, merciless criticism of capitalist exploitation, exposure of government outrages, the farcical courts and the state administration, and unmasking of the profound contradictions between the growth of wealth and achievements of civilisation and the growth of poverty, degradation and misery among the working masses. On the other, the crackpot preaching of submission, ‘resist not evil’ with violence. On the one hand, the most sober realism, the tearing away of all and sundry masks; on the other, the preaching of one of the most odious things on earth, namely, religion, the striving to replace officially appointed priests by priests who will serve from moral conviction, i.e., to cultivate the most refined and, therefore, particularly disgusting clericalism.632 Given Stoppard’s admiration for the Beckettian trend of making a statement and, then, instantly contradicting it (what he calls firstly A, secondly minus A) it is surprising that he doesn’t employ more of Lenin’s speech. When asked why his plays tend to bear on life in an oblique, distant and generalized way Stoppard’s reply summed up the two ways in which he believes art is relevant. First of all he said, ‘that’s what art is best at. The objective is the universal perception’.633 – in other words, his moral matrix. Secondly, he added, ‘I believe in art being good art or bad art, not relevant art or irrelevant

632 Proletary No. 35, September 11 (24), 1908 in Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers 1973 Moscow, Volume 15, pages 202–209. 633 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 67.

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art’.634 Michael Billington puts the finishing touch to that point – ‘What is true is that the better the art, the more persuasive it is and the greater its effect on human consciousness’.635

Absolutism versus Relativism – General I’m a victim of perspective.636 fraser, Albert’s Bridge

∵ Stoppard’s plays retain a focus on aspects of absolutism and relativism which extends far beyond the boundaries of morality. Because the question of the morality of the individual impinges on the morality of how individuals behave in societies it is no great surprise to see Stoppard apply the duality of absolutism and relativity to politics, especially that practised under totalitarian regimes. But Stoppard seems to see an allegorical value in exploring the impact of perspective and relating it to the absolute in everything from science to art and beauty to textual criticism. His frequent reversion to absolutist and relativist metaphors reinforces the significance of its moral dimension within his plays. In The Real Thing Stoppard takes the opportunity to apply the same argument of relativism and absolutism to language. It arises because of a comparison between the plays Henry writes and the one Brodie has produced and becomes almost a manifesto of Stoppard’s morality and views on the role of art. ‘To you, (Brodie) can’t write. To him, write is all you can do’.637 – Annie, in exasperation, highlights the issue of the objectivity of words in The Real Thing. The argument about the moral nature of words is, perhaps, inspired by Stoppard’s time as a critic. ‘I was an awful critic because I operated on the assumption there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. 634 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 67. 635 M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 14. 636 Albert’s Bridge, pages 81–82. 637 The Real Thing, page 34.

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I didn’t trust my own subjective responses’.638 Annie accuses Henry of believing that writers are sacrosanct, highlighting his belief that art is something special: ‘You’re jealous of the idea of the writer. You want to keep it sacred, special, not something anybody can do’.639 In the linguistic crossfire with Henry Annie defends Brodie’s literary efforts with what is an argument for the relativism of words and the art of writing, recalling the argument in both Jumpers and Arcadia. Annie thinks Brodie’s perspective is the important point: ‘It’s his view of the world. From where he’s standing you’d see it the same way’.640 For Annie and her relativist point of view what matters with Brodie’s words is that ‘he’s writing to be heard’.641 Brodie’s writing is justified because he ‘really has something to write about, something real’.642 She believes that the context of words is relevant: ‘And who wrote it, why he wrote it, where he wrote it – none of these things count with you’.643 Henry’s absolutist point of view is that they don’t count. Henry accuses Brodie of prejudice and suggests that in what Brodie writes about – politics, justice and patriotism – ‘there’s nothing real there separate from our perception of them’.644 Brodie is ‘a lout with language…who thinks that editing a newspaper is censorship’.645 For Henry it’s not writers but words which are important: ‘I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are’.646 In an echo of the argument for absolutism in Jumpers Henry makes a similar case for words: Words…are innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more.647 There are echoes, too, of the argument Henry Carr makes in Travesties about the absolute nature of art: 638 Stoppard, interview with M. Gussow, ‘Writing dialogue is the only responsible way of contradicting yourself’ in Gussow, M Conversations with Stoppard, page 3. 639 The Real Thing, page 33. 640 The Real Thing, page 35. 641 The Real Thing, page 32. 642 The Real Thing, pages 33–34. 643 The Real Thing, page 35. 644 The Real Thing, page 35. 645 The Real Thing, page 35. 646 The Real Thing, page 35. 647 The Real Thing, page 35.

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If there is any point in using language at all it is that a word is taken to stand for a particular fact or idea and not for other facts or ideas.648 For Henry, words have great power. ‘If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little’649 – in other words, alter the moral matrix in the longer term. By contrast, he chides his own daughter for ‘persuasive nonsense’ in the misuse of words: ‘Sophistry in a phrase so neat you can’t see the loose end that would unravel it. It’s flawless but wrong. A perfect dud. You can do that with words, bless ‘em’.650 Henry encapsulates his argument about the power of words, if chosen correctly, in one of Stoppard’s finest and certainly, in its imagery, most memorable speeches. As Henry brandishes a cricket bat651 he reiterates the argument for the power of words in an absolute sense: This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly…What we’re trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might…travel…(He … picks up (Brodie’s) script) Now what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit the ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting ‘Ouch!’ with your hands stuck into your armpits. (Indicating the cricket bat) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the mcc to keep the cudgels out of Lords. It’s better because it’s better.652 648 Travesties, page 21. 649 The Real Thing, page 35. cf Joyce’s speech in Travesties in which he asks, ‘What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist’s touch?’. (Travesties, page 42). 650 The Real Thing, page 42. 651 Anthony Jenkins comments, ‘The analogy between writer and batsman could not be more English’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page x. 652 The Real Thing, page 34. Michael Billington expresses the enormous relevance of this speech to Stoppard’s canon thus: ‘This is a classic statement of the Stoppardian position: the relativity of perception, the subjectivity of our use of key words, the danger of totally inflexible absolutes’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 151.

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Henry’s culminating point, that there is an intrinsic sense of value is similar to Herzen’s point about liberty in Salvage: ‘(The English) invented personal liberty…and they did it without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it’s liberty’.653 The moral boot is on the other foot when it comes to love. Henry is the relativist and Annie the absolutist. Henry, in pain over Annie’s affair with Billy admits: Without you I wouldn’t care. I’d eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday’s clothes. But, as it is I change my socks and make money, and tart up Brodie’s unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.654 Annie disagrees – for her, Henry shouldn’t have rewritten Brodie’s play just because he loved her: ‘You shouldn’t have done it if you didn’t think it was right’.655 In Henry’s definition of real love the moral absolute of right doesn’t matter. ‘I can’t cope with more than one moral system at a time. Mine is that what you think is right is right. What you do is right. What you want is right’.656 Annie disagrees: ‘So, you’ll forgive me anything, is that it, Hen? I’m a selfish cow but you love me so you’ll overlook it. Is that right? Thank you, but that’s not it’.657 The morality of words has become an analogy for the morality of life. In Dogg’s Hamlet Stoppard presents a relativist view of language based upon Wittgenstein’s analysis of language in his book Philosophical Investigations. To Wittgenstein language is part of an activity. It is defined by the way and the context in which it is used.658 This is precisely the argument Stone proposes at the Colloquium in Professional Foul. He gives the example of the word ‘ran’ – ‘When we say that a politician ran for office, that is not an ambiguous statement, it is merely an instance of a word having different applications, literal,

653 654 655 656 657 658

Salvage, page 14. The Real Thing, page 52. The Real Thing, page 52. The Real Thing, page 52. The Real Thing, page 52. Clive James makes an observation that demonstrates how Wittgenstein’s views on language are reflected in Stoppard’s exploration of perspective: ‘It is the plurality of contexts that concerns Stoppard: ambiguities are just places where contexts join’. – ‘Tom Stoppard: Count Zero Splits the Infinite’. Stoppard notes, in ‘Playing With Science’, page 10, that, ‘It was a mathematician in Through The Looking Glass who made somebody say “a word means whatever I choose it to mean”’.

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idiomatic and so on’.659 Anderson makes the point in Professional Foul that the conclusion of such an argument is that, ‘…ethics are not the inspiration of our behaviour but merely the creation of our utterances’.660 Just like Stone, and leaning on the fullest extent of the concept of relativism, Wittgenstein argues that ‘the word [good] has a family of meanings’.661 This implies that ‘there is no need to believe that there is something called “good” which exists independently of any particular “good deed”’.662 It reeks of Hamlet’s assertion that ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’663 and flies in the face of George Moore’s belief in an intrinsic sense of an absolute standard of goodness. Accordingly, language is not something that can be learnt by rote; it is a game-playing activity. Stoppard borrows from Wittgenstein’s example: Dogg’s Hamlet derives from a section of Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations. Consider the following scene. A man is building a platform using pieces of wood of different shapes and sizes. These are thrown to him by a second man, one at a time, as they are called for. An observer notes that each time the first man shouts ‘Plank!’ he is thrown a long flat piece. Then he calls ‘Slab!’ and is thrown a piece of a different shape. This happens a few times. There is a call for ‘Block!’ and a third shape is thrown. Finally a call for ‘Cube!’ produces a fourth type of piece. An observer would probably conclude that the different words described different shapes and sizes of material. But this is not the only possible interpretation. Suppose, for example, the thrower knows in advance which pieces the builder needs, and in what order. In such a case there would be no need for the builder to name the pieces he requires but only to indicate when he is ready for the next one. So the calls might translate thus: Plank=Ready Block=Next Slab=Okay Cube=Thank you664 So, Stoppard presents a play in which a gang of builders is assembling a stage for a school prize-giving at which a pared down performance of Hamlet will be 659 660 661 662

Professional Foul, page 61. Professional Foul, page 90. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 77. S. Rehman, ‘Wittgenstein’s Language-games, Stoppard’s Building-blocks and context based learning in a Corpus’. 663 Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 247–248. 664 Dogg’s Hamlet, Introduction, page 141.

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performed. The workmen all use a language spoken by the headmaster, Dogg’s language, copying Wittgenstein’s wording in order to construct the stage. The language is also used by the boys and school visitors; all except Easy who is delivering the wood. Easy, like the audience, helps Stoppard in fulfilling his aim: ‘The appeal to me consisted in the possibility of writing a play which had to teach the audience the language the play was written in’.665 Stoppard chooses very carefully the whole vocabulary of Dogg’s language to have similarities to modern English and makes the point with the production of Hamlet that Shakespeare’s language is similar to modern English but in many cases one only understands it by reference to the context or intonation of an actor’s voice. To reinforce the point Stoppard has a radio broadcast the football results in Dogg language but in which you can guess pretty much the results as ‘the rhythm of the language coming out of the radio is the familiar one, appropriate to home wins, away wins, and draws’.666 Stoppard provides other examples of the contextual interpretation of language in Cahoot’s Macbeth. The Inspector communicates via walkie-talkie radio using language that at face value is gibberish but is the standard language used in radio communications: ‘Wilco zebra over!…Green Charlie Angels 15 out’.667 The Inspector also parodies Scottish everyday talk (in keeping with the Scottish setting of Macbeth, which the Czech actors are performing) which is understood largely only by Scots: ‘Och aye…Cahoots mon!’.668 Stoppard uses the same device in Indian Ink when Flora and Das play the Hobson-Jobson game, using words that have a particular meaning in an Anglo-Indian context: ‘I was buying chutney in the bazaar when a thug escaped from the choky and killed a box-wallah for his loot, creating a hullabaloo and landing himself in the mulligatawny’.669 It has been described as ‘the official jargon of British India’.670 Both Easy and the audience have to pick up Dogg’s language as the play goes along. So, too, do the Czech dissidents and actors, albeit with a little bit of help from a phrase book (which surely Wittgenstein would regard as cheating?): 665 Dogg’s Hamlet, Introduction, page 142. 666 Dogg’s Hamlet, page 157. In England when the weekly football results are read out on bbc radio the tone and rhythm of the broadcaster’s voice alters according to the result. Thus a 1–0 result is read in a different way from a 1–1 or a 0–1 result. 667 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 208. 668 Cahoot’s Macbeth, pages 204–205. ‘Cahoot’s mon’ is a pun on Hoot’s mon. 669 Indian Ink, page 19. 670 J. Majeed, ‘“The Bad Habit”: Hobson-Jobson, British Indian glossaries and imitations of mortality’ in Henry Sweet Society Bulletin, November 2006.

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Easy:     Cuckoo pig exit what.…Cake hops properly Buxtons.     (The HOSTESS flips through the book.) Hostess: cake hops. Easy:   Cake hops. Hostess:   Timber or wood. Easy:   Timber or wood – properly Buxtons. Hostess: I’m so sorry about this… Easy:   Right. Timber or wood – properly Buxtons. I’m so sorry about this.     (He opens shutters to reveal his lorry.)     Ankle so artichoke – almost Leamington Spa. Lennox: Oh. He’s got a lorry out there.671 Cahoot in Cahoot’s Macbeth explains to the bemused Inspector the Wittgenstein principle Stoppard is applying: ‘You don’t learn it, you catch it’.672 The interpretation of words now depends upon their context, as Easy learns to his cost. For example, his form of greeting, ‘Afternoon, squire…means in Dogg, Get stuffed, you bastard’.673 This enables Cahoot to insult the Inspector (a symbol of state authoritarianism) gratuitously and with impunity as he hails him, ‘Afternoon, squire!’.674 The Inspector inadvertently makes the relativist point: ‘Words can be your friends or your enemy, depending on who’s throwing the book, so watch your language’.675 To prove his point ironically the actors are able to keep on performing Macbeth despite the presence of the Inspector because they start doing so in Dogg language: Macbeth: Rafters Birnam cakehops hobble Dunsinane…[Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane]676 Once again, it is a question of perspective, this time determining the meaning of language.677 The final word of Dogg’s Hamlet, uttered by Easy, is 671 672 673 674 675 676 677

Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 203. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 206. Dogg’s Hamlet, page 152. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 205. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 191. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 209. George Moore in Jumpers also knows that perspective is important to Wittgenstein, as he recounts a story attributed to him: ‘Meeting a friend in a corridor, Wittgenstein said: “Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for men to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?” His friend said, “Well, obviously,

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‘Cube’678 (which means ‘Thank you’ in Dogg language) which shows that he, if not all the audience, has learned Dogg’s language, thereby demonstrating Wittgenstein’s principle. He also utters the final words in Cahoot’s Macbeth: Double double. Double double toil and trouble. No. Shakespeare. (Silence) Well, it’s been a funny sort of week. But I should be back by Tuesday.679 He makes reference to Shakespeare – in particular quoting a piece relating to illusion – thereby demonstrating the overall points of the two plays taken together: that Shakespearian English is contextually understood (according to Wittgenstein’s theory) and that, using the metaphor of Macbeth’s overthrow to symbolise the overthrow of a repressive regime, language is a vehicle for defeating totalitarianism because it highlights how such regimes misuse words to reinforce their control. One might almost argue that such compression of the argument of the two plays smacks of the application of Occam’s razor. An argument strikingly similar to Wittgenstein’s relativist contention that language depends on its context is advanced in Voyage by Stankevich who demonstrates to Michael Bakunin how Kant’s concept of transcendental idealism applies to objects. An object is an appearance, and not an entity per se, as Kant explains. …all objects of an experience possible for us, are nothing but appearances, ie., mere representations, which as they are represented, as extended beings or series of alterations, have outside our thoughts no existence grounded in itself.680 Kant’s view, therefore, echoes Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanical theory, described in Hapgood, in which the behaviour of an electron can be determined by the act of its observation. Stankevich argues the concept to Michael Bakunin:

because it just looks as if the sun is going round the earth”. To which the philosopher replied, “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth was rotating?”’. – Jumpers, page 75. 678 Dogg’s Hamlet, page 174. 679 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 211; Macbeth, Act iv, scene i, line 10. 680 I. Kant, Antimony of Pure Reason.

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The inner life is more real, more complete, than what we call reality – which has no meaning independent of my observing it.…I look out of the window. What is my thought experience? A garden. Trees. Grass. A young woman in a chair reading a book. I think: if there were no chair she would fall on the grass…. Perhaps the only thing that’s real is my sensory experience, which has the form of a woman reading – in a universe which is in fact empty! But Kant says no – I cannot have the experience without there being something out there to cause the experience. In fact, a woman reading. Am I, therefore, no more than an instrument for registering the phenomenal world of appearances…? But again Kant says – no! Because what I perceive as reality includes concepts which I cannot experience through the senses. Time and space. Cause and effect. Relations between things. These concepts already exist in my mind, I must use them to make sense of what I observe. And thus my existence is necessary to a complete description of reality. Without me there is something wrong with this picture.681 Stoppard gives another example of the transcendental approach in Darkside. The Boy sets Emily a question: There’s a juggler on the radio. He sounds exactly the same as if there’s no juggler. There’s lots of people listening to the radio, and some are saying ‘I believe in the juggler!’ and some are saying ‘There is no juggler!’, and there’s a few philosopher-type people saying, ‘How is a juggler you can’t see, hear, smell or touch different from no juggler?’. But there’s nothing any of these people can tell each other about the existence or the nonexistence of the juggler?682 When Emily asks how the Boy knows there is a juggler he answers her, applying the Kantian argument by using concepts he already has in his mind, ‘I heard him on the radio’.683 The relativism and absolutism of the Russian reformers’ view of reality extends to a socio-political context. The Russian intelligentsia and their German antecedents saw the question of how mankind should live together and how societies should govern as part of a greater philosophical whole. Michael Bakunin initially is an adherent of the German Romantic school which, in a 681 Voyage, page 19. 682 Darkside, page 13. 683 Darkside, page 13.

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highly idealised view, regarded earthly realities as just an appearance, rather than a true reality. Referring to philosophers like Schelling and Fichte Michael Bakunin identifies a concept called ‘the Absolute’ which was understood to be an essence of the universe which contained a hidden harmony: Dawn has broken! In Germany the sun is already high in the sky! It’s only us in poor behind-the-times Russia who are the last to learn about the great discovery of the age! The life of the Spirit is the only real life: our everyday existence stands between us and our transcendence to the Universal Idea where we become one with the Absolute!684 It was an idea Hegel developed which evolved a belief that the ideal society was founded on reason. Belinsky cannot subscribe to reason as the moral absolute and, instead, rather like George in Jumpers and Anderson in Professional Foul, introduces the sense of intuition as the basis of morality: ‘The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist…’.685 Marx believes in a morality, but his moral yardstick is an economic one, as George Herwegh explains to Natalie in an imagined conversation: ‘You say, “Karl, I don’t agree good and evil are to be defined entirely by our economic relations”’.686 For Marx that morality is part of a universal and eternal process, as he describes to Herzen in his dream at the culmination of the trilogy: ‘Everything…will be understood as part of a higher reality, a superior morality, against which resistance is irrational – a cosmos where every atom has been striving for the goal of human self-realisation and the culmination of history’.687 But, within the German Romantic philosophy of the late eighteenth century there was a relativist argument, largely emanating from Kant. His view of reality is a subjective one, as he expounds in his Critique of Pure Reason: ‘I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition’.688 So, also, is his system of morality. Stankevich gives the Bakunins what amounts to a revision class in Kantian philosophy – ‘In the system of

684 685 686 687 688

Voyage, page 9. Voyage, pages 37–38. Shipwreck, page 59. Salvage, page 117. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.

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Kant a man is judged only by his intention’,689 he tells Liubov. It is not the end result of an action which is the most important aspect of it. Rather, the value of an action is determined by what the person carrying it out feels at the time he enacts it. ‘Consequences don’t come in to it’.690 This is in contrast to the view of Ethics Man in Darkside who, as explained by Baggott, ‘is a utilitarian. He says an action is a moral action only if the consequences are good and the consequences are good if they increase the sum of human happiness’.691 The example given is of the decision by Ethics Man, on utilitarian grounds, to save a train full of people from running into a broken bridge by diverting it away at the expense of running over a boy on the track according to the rationale that one death is better than many. But, the example runs into the moral buffers, as Emily points out, because by simply preserving many lives at the expense of one Ethics Man pays no heed as to whether included amongst those he saved might be a serial killer or whether the boy might ‘have been the one who stops the glaciers melting’.692 Turgenev arrives at a relativist viewpoint, too, albeit from a more practical approach. He suggests a remedy for Russia that draws criticism from Herzen: Turgenev: …Our only hope has always been western civilisation transmitted by an educated minority. Herzen:   What you mean by civilisation is your way of life, your comforts, your opera, your English gun, your books lying about on good furniture…as if life as evolved in the European upper classes is the only life in tune with human development.693 Turgenev’s answer is the relativist argument that what is good should be determined by particular circumstances: ‘To value what is relative to your circumstances, and let others value what’s relative to theirs’,694 is his proposition. Squaring the Circle demonstrates Turgenev’s proposal in action. It shows how perspective is applied to the moral question, precipitated and asked by the Gdansk ship workers, of how Poland should be governed in the 1980s. At one point in a long process of bargaining over political rights and freedoms between the Solidarity trade union and the governing Communist party the 689 690 691 692 693 694

Voyage, page 22. Voyage, page 22. Darkside, page 9. Darkside, page 11. Salvage, page 102. Salvage, page 103.

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union disagrees amongst itself over whether to call a strike. Stoppard produces three versions of the same scene at the Politburo in which two Communists demonstrate three entirely different ways in which the news of the division amongst the union leaders can be seen: Everybody is there and the mood is buoyant. Rakowkski: (Triumphantly) We’ve split them!… Kania:   |That’s it! Get them at each other’s throats!…      As before. Rakowski   (Gloomily) We’ve split them! Kania     (Gloomily) How can we control them if they’re at each other’s throats all the time?…      As before. Kania:   They’ve split us.…In Torun there’s a big Party meeting which we haven’t sanctioned which wants to speed up reform…695 Stoppard repeats the exercise in perspective when he sets the scene in which Solidarity leader Walesa, Catholic Archbishop Glemp and Communist boss Jaruzelski meet to discuss the Polish situation. Stoppard dramatizes the meeting by having them play ‘a form of whist’.696 The three participants each compete, via the card game, to analyse the causes of Poland’s problems from their own point of view. When faced with the same evidence their own interpretations lead them to agree that, ‘we want to settle our own problems’,697 but they disagree on the effects of socialism and the impact of a Russian invasion. Eventually, they agree again; this time that each of their organisations – Solidarity, the Church and the Communist Party – should have a veto on future action. In Hapgood, under the guise of a discussion about quantum mechanics, Stoppard combines part of the argument about relativism and absolutism (which he first expounded in Jumpers) with part of the argument about Newtonian science (which he was later to counter with Chaos Theory). Like Arcadia, the science in Hapgood begins with Newton. Kerner, a scientist by training, describes Newton’s theory in relation to an observation to Blair that the edge of a wall’s shadow, which they are staring at, is ‘straight like the edge of the wall that makes it’.698

695 696 697 698

Squaring the Circle, pages 239–240. Squaring the Circle, page 256. Squaring the Circle, pages 256 and 257. Hapgood, page 8.

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…Isaac Newton concluded that light was made of little particles. Other people said light is a wave but Isaac Newton said, no, if light was a wave the shadow would bend round the wall like water bends round a stone in the river.699 Kerner goes on to describe an experiment, the one Feynman describes as the solution to all situations in quantum mechanics (except for one mystery), involving a screen and a machine gun which shoots bullets, in keeping with the spy metaphor, which symbolise particles. If you interpose an armour plated wall with two slits in it between the machine gun and the screen you will find that, once the gun is fired, ‘opposite each slit there is a concentration of bullet holes, and maybe just a few holes to left and right through ricochets. This is called a particle pattern’.700 Newton would have expected that. But, Kerner explains: If your gun was a torch and light was bullets, as Isaac Newton said, this is what you will get. But when you do it you don’t get it. You don’t get particle pattern. You get wave pattern. Wave pattern is like stripes – bright, dim, bright, dim across the screen. This is because when a wave is pushed through a little gap it spreads out in a semi-circle, so when you have two gaps you have two semi-circles spreading out, and on their way to the screen they mix together … where a crest from one lot of waves meets a crest from the other lot of waves you get a specially big wave, and where a crest meets a dip, the wave is cancelled out – strong, weak, strong, weak, on the screen it looks like stripes.701 But, Kerner continues, ‘there came a problem with a thing called photo-electric effect’.702 Stoppard does not explain this point, but it refers to the fact that in applying light to a surface in order to observe it the light, however low in intensity, can cause electrons to be emitted. ‘Einstein solved it. Or rather he showed that if light was bullets after all, there was no puzzle. But how to explain the stripes on the screen; the wave pattern’.703 Einstein’s solution is to consider the light as packets of particles in a wave pattern. Feynman explains it better:

699 700 701 702 703

Hapgood, page 8. Hapgood, page 8. Hapgood, page 8. Hapgood, page 9. Hapgood, page 9.

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…electrons arrive in lumps, like particles, but the probability of arrival of these lumps is determined as the intensity of waves would be. It is in this sense that the electron behaves sometimes like a particle and sometimes like a wave. It behaves in two different ways at the same time.704 The wave/particle duality is what Stoppard relates in Hapgood to human behaviour. Actually, what appeals to Stoppard about this experiment is its double duality, both aspects of which, in addition to acting as a metaphor, have implications for both the relativist and absolutist views of morality. The first duality is caused by the act of observation. Kerner explains further, if, ‘we…(repeat the experiment with bullets of light) now without looking to see which way the bullets go…the wave pattern comes back. So we try it again while looking, and we get particle pattern’.705 When asked how by Blair how this can be Kerner has to admit, ‘Nobody knows. Einstein didn’t know’.706 This mystery (which is the mystery to which Feynman alludes), or rather its explanation – to plagiarise Jumpers, ‘the mystery in Einstein’s clockwork’ – is the basis of the ethical implications, in Stoppard’s terms, of Hapgood. Heisenberg realised that it was the act of observation which causes the unpredictability, or duality, of outcomes. Under observation an electron cannot have both a definite position and a definite momentum. Stoppard reinforces the relativity of observation with the spying metaphor. Blair believes in objectivity: Kerner:  …You don’t want to look, and then you’ll get spy pattern! Blair:  I like to know what’s what. Kerner:  Of course! Objective reality. Blair:  (angrily) What other kind is there? You’re this or you’re that, and you know which.707 Stoppard uses Kerner, in his explanation of wave/particle theory to counter Blair’s contention: ‘The experimenter makes the choice. You get what you interrogate for. And you want to know if I’m a wave or a particle’.708 McFee’s brand of moral relativism has been translated into Kerner’s scientific relativism.

704 705 706 707 708

R. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, page 138. Hapgood, page 9. Hapgood, page 9. Hapgood, pages 53–54. Hapgood, page 9.

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Einstein’s theory contains the second duality. Quantum mechanics explains a phenomenon which Newton’s physics could not. Under Newton’s classical physics (which Arcadia refutes with Chaos Theory) electrons would not orbit a nucleus because the motion of orbiting would lead to an emission of energy and once all the energy is lost the electron would collide with the nucleus. Under Einstein the electrons remain in an uncertain, non-deterministic wave particle orbit and no collision occurs. Einstein’s proposal, Kerner explains to Hapgood with one of Stoppard’s best similes,709 had to be refined by Bohr who realised that, ‘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, and at the moment of the quantum jump it is like two moths, one to be here and one to stop being there’.710 Stoppard reflects the quantum jump in the way the play moves from scene to scene; it jumps. In Act 2 there is an Inter-scene between scenes 2 and 3. Scene 2 ends with one Ridley and scene 3 begins with the other Ridley, his identical twin. Stoppard’s stage directions stipulate: So we lose the last set without losing Ridley. When the set has gone, Ridley is in some other place…The main thing is that he is a man arriving somewhere…He is a different Ridley It’s like a quantum jump.711 Similar quantum jumps, although not explicitly described as such by Stoppard, occur in other scene changes. For example, Act 1, scene 1 ends with Blair and ‘the next time he moves…he is at the zoo’712 at the start of scene 2. Likewise, Act 1, scene 2 ends with Blair looking out front and ‘the next time he moves he is on the touchline of a rugger pitch’713 and scene 3 has begun.714

709 It has been suggested by Leane that Stoppard adapted this simile from other variations on it. Whatever the truth, Stoppard is the first to use such a beautiful and memorable simile in these exact words. See E. Leane, Reading Popular Physics Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies, page 86. 710 Hapgood, page 36. 711 Hapgood, page 51. 712 Hapgood, page 7. 713 Hapgood, page 11. 714 It has been suggested (eg: A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 183) that the movements of the characters reflect the movement of electrons in accordance with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Quite how the audience is meant to realise this effect at such an early stage in the play is unclear.

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The relativism of science is encapsulated in the character of Kerner, both at a personal level and professionally. He fell in love with Elizabeth Hapgood, part of his process of being turned. For him beauty is in the eye of the beholder – and, so relative – and he admits’ ‘There is something appalling about love. It uses up all one’s moral judgement. Afterwards it’s like returning to a system of values’.715 His political belief also adopts a relativist stance. In a statement that (1) draws on McFee’s relativism, Feynman’s concept of nature and McKendrick’s catastrophe theory; (2) has an implication for the relationship between the individual and the State; and, (3) contains a democratic pun on the theory of relativity Kerner concludes: The west is morally superior, in my opinion. In different degrees unjust and corrupt like the East. Its moral superiority lies in the fact that the system contains the possibility of its own reversal – I am enthralled by the voting, to me it has power of an equation in nature, the masses converted to energy.716 Typically, Stoppard leaves his audience with a Parthian shot; a moral double entendre, which for a play about duality seems rather appropriate. In an echo of George’s moral position in Jumpers the last words Elizabeth Hapgood utters are an exhortation to her son on the rugby pitch; ‘Hapgood! – that’s good – that’s better!’.717 In Arcadia Stoppard dangles the intellectual bait of applying the concepts of relativism and absolutism to science but declines, unlike in Hapgood, to take it in full measure: to explore it fully would detract from the other ideas being explored in the play. Thus, it remains at a slight tangent. Part of Newton’s science had implications for the concept of time. The key element in Newton’s view of time is that it was absolute. This has two aspects: time is a dimension which is independent of events; and in Newton’s deterministic world events happen in sequence. The contrasting view of time was propounded, at the same time as Newton by Leibnitz. Interestingly, Leibnitz gets a small mention in Arcadia,718 albeit in the different context of Valentine explaining to Bernard that Bernard’s emphasis on personalities is irrelevant to the actual progress of science and knowledge: ‘It’s like arguing who got there first with the calculus.

715 716 717 718

Hapgood, page 53. Hapgood, page 53. Hapgood, page 66. Leibnitz is also referred to in Hapgood, page 33.

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The English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz’.719 Leibnitz argued that time is a structure of the mind in which individuals compare and sequence events. This implies that time is subject to relativism: the idea that the location of any object or event is only by reference to or in relation to other events or objects. Although Stoppard does not allow the subject of time to become a great talking point in Arcadia (despite using it structurally) there are snippets of discussion about it. In the Stoppardian context it is significant because Stoppard had explored the concept of absolute and relative morality in his earlier play, Jumpers. In Arcadia he has within his grasp the same distinction of relativity and absolutism but this time within a scientific context. And the absolutist argument is part of the Newtonian, old scientific explanation of the laws of nature that he is contrasting throughout the play, both in metaphor and debate, with the new Chaos Theory. Stephen Hawking points out that Newton made a connection between the scientific and the moral: ‘Newton was very worried by this lack of absolute position, or absolute space, as it was called, because it did not accord with his idea of an absolute God’.720 A product of the Newtonian science was the second law of thermodynamics. The implication of the law, both in a physical sense but also in a philosophical sense, is determinism. Determinism bothers Septimus because he wonders, ‘what becomes of free will?’.721 He is more comfortable with the implication of chaos, ‘disorder out of disorder into disorder…This is known as free will or selfdetermination’.722 Just as altruism confounds the concept of moral relativity in Jumpers, so determinism would deny free will. However, the process of chaos, albeit with underlying order, resolves the problem. Artist Descending a Staircase sails into the familiar Stoppardian sea of absolutism and relativism with an analysis of art but, owing the length of the play, does not have time to drop anchor. Donner attacks what is presented in the play as the absurd output of modern art in an argument which is close to some familiar Stoppardian territory of the absolute versus the relative and declaims, ‘There are two ways of becoming an artist. The first way is to do things by which art is meant. The second way is to make art mean the things you do’.723 Tzara makes an identical point in Travesties:

719 720 721 722 723

Arcadia, page 80. S. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, pages 20–21. Arcadia, page 7. Arcadia, page 6. Artist, pages 124–125.

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Doing the things by which is meant Art is no longer considered the proper concern of the artist. In fact it is frowned upon. Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the thing he does.724 That, as Donner puts it, made anything possible and everything safe! – safe from criticism, since our art admitted no standards outside itself; safe from comparison, since it had no history; safe from evaluation, since it referred to no system of values beyond the currency it had invented. We were no longer accountable. We were artists by mutual agreement.725 He continues in a vein reminiscent of the faith that the scientists and hedge fund managers of The Hard Problem put in their computer models: ‘It seems there is something divine about modern art, nonetheless, for it is sustained by faith. That is why artists have become as complacent as priests. They do not have to demonstrate their truths’.726 Guildenstern proposes the contrary position, almost as if Stoppard knew he wanted to return to debate the subject on another day: ‘I’d prefer art to mirror life’.727 The blind Sophie provides part of the answer in terms of its morality. In answer to Martello’s question, ‘Why should art be something difficult to do?’,728 Sophie posits, ‘But surely it is a fact about art – regardless of the artist’s subject or his intentions – that it celebrates a world which includes itself – I mean, part of what there is to celebrate is the capability of the artist.…I think every artist is celebrating the impulse to paint in general, the imagination to paint something in particular, and the ability to make the painting in question’.729 In another double entendre of which only Stoppard is capable and which resonates loudly in the context of his arguments between absolutism and relativism in Jumpers Martello’s reply is, ‘Goodness!’.730 Donner provides the counterpoint – In the final analysis he only became an artist because he ‘heard there were opportunities to meet naked women’.731 724 725 726 727 728 729 730 731

Travesties, page 21. Artist, page 125. Artist, page 125. RosGuil, page 73. Artist, page 139. Artist, page 139. Artist, page 139. Artist, page 144.

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In The Invention of Love Stoppard moves the concept of moral absolutism and relativism on from art to beauty. Ruskin’s beauty, like George Moore’s morality, is inherent with the concept of good. For Ruskin, ‘There is nothing beautiful which is not good and nothing good which has no moral purpose’.732 But Stoppard, soon after – and arguably too early in the play for the audience to grasp its full significance – unleashes the relativist perspective as his three Oxford dons attempt to identify what each considers a golden age, in which art is endowed with a moral and social role, and come up with different answers: it’s a question of one’s point of view. However, any consideration of the three opinions must be conducted in the light of aeh’s dictum, offered later in the first Act, that, ‘there is truth and falsehood in a comma’.733 Taking the three academic positions out of the order in which they are made in the play illuminates the point. Ruskin’s vote is for the medieval times: The Medieval Gothic! The Medieval Gothic cathedrals which were the great engines of art, morality and social order!734 Slightly ambiguously (and probably not intentionally at this point), in Ruskin’s assertion morality and social order could be interpreted as either elements in a three item list or subsets of art. Whichever is correct, art has primacy in Ruskin’s mind. Jowett argues for ancient Greece: Nowhere was the ideal of morality, art and social order realized more harmoniously than in Greece in the age of great philosophers.735

732 The Invention of Love, page 15. 733 The Invention of Love, page 37. Stoppard also thinks commas are important, cf his introduction to Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth: ‘The comma that divides Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth also serves to unite two plays which have common elements: the first is hardly a play at all without the second, which cannot be performed without the first’. Stoppard – Introduction to Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 141. There is a further reference to the importance of a comma in In the Native State, page 261: ‘Flora: I’ll keep sending you copies of anything I finish in case I get carried away by the monsoon or tigers, and if I do, look after the comma after “astride”, please, it’s just the sort of thing they leave out’. Stoppard also notes that ‘Oscar Wilde would put in a comma in the morning and take it out in the afternoon’. – Stoppard, in an interview with D. Nathan, ‘In a Country Garden (If It Is a Garden)’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 263. In The Invention of Love Stoppard may be punning the ‘Oxford comma’. 734 The Invention of Love, page 17. 735 The Invention of Love, page 17.

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With Jowett, morality comes before the comma, suggesting its primacy within the three elements – in contrast to Ruskin’s emphasis. Ruskin is, then, quick to add (reinforcing the moral emphasis in Jowett’s list), ‘Buggery apart’,736 to which Jowett assents. Such a qualification is important because it implies that the absolute good in art is not equated with behaviour that is considered morally acceptable. Pater’s view confirms the distinction between art and morality by paying careful consideration to the power of aeh’s comma and using it to isolate art from morality and social order: Actually, Italy in the late-fifteenth century…Nowhere was the ideal of art, morality and social order realized more harmoniously, morality and social order apart.737 In direct contrast to Ruskin Pater proceeds to elaborate on the relativist position: ‘the true Aesthetic spirit goes back to Florence, Venice, Rome – Japanese apart. One sees it plain in Michelangelo’s David – legs apart. The blue of my necktie declares that we are still living in that revolution whereby man regained possession of his nature and produced the Italian Tumescence’.738 For the relativist it’s all about the moment, as Pater demonstrates: The Renaissance teaches us that the book of knowledge is not to be learned by rote but is to be written anew in the ecstasy of living each moment for each moment’s sake. Success in life is to maintain this ecstasy, to burn always with this hard gem-like flame. Failure is to form habits. To burn with a gem-like flame is to capture the awareness of each moment; and for that moment only. To form habits is to be absent from those moments.…The conventional morality which requires of us the sacrifice of any one of those moments has no real claim on us. The love of art for art’s sake seeks nothing in return except the highest quality to the moments of your life, and simply for those moment’s sake.739 The programme notes of the original production at the Royal National Theatre in London explain that the nature of the word ‘aesthetic’ was a real debate between Ruskin and Pater. Ruskin’s absolute belief in beauty was outraged by what he saw as Pater’s justification of immoral art, chiefly involving the glorification of male relationships. Jowett became involved when, as Master of 736 737 738 739

The Invention of Love, page 17. The Invention of Love, page 17. The Invention of Love, page 17. The Invention of Love, page 19.

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Balliol, he was confronted by a scandal involving a Balliol pupil, Hardinge, and Pater exchanging letters of an intimate nature.740 Stoppard steers the debate on morality from art to scholarship, where there is also an absolutism. It grows out of a debate between aeh and Housman about whether one can be both a poet and a classical scholar – the dichotomy which prompted Stoppard to write the play. aeh argues that poetry is relative: the Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical with ours.741 Conversely, Housman, suggests to his elder self that there are eternal truths in poetry: ‘We catch our breath at the places where the breath was always caught’.742 aeh sees absolutism in a different way. ‘To be a scholar, the first thing you have to learn is that scholarship is nothing to do with taste’.743 Scholarship carries with it a concept of truth and, again, like George Moore’s absolute morality and Ruskin’s beauty, is good just because it is: Taste is not knowledge. A scholar’s business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can’t have too much of it and there is no little too little worth having.744 For aeh this idea of the absolute truthfulness of knowledge has a crucial significance: ‘textual criticism is the crown and summit of scholarship’.745 Stoppard has littered his play with clues about aeh’s attitude to this belief earlier in the play. Housman corrects Pollard’s mistaken interpretation that ‘trochum’ is not Latin accusative but ‘Actually, “trochos” is Greek’746 and he has made the case for editing Propertius because the current edition ‘is so corrupt’.747 As far as 740 Programme notes to The Invention of Love 1997 production at the Royal National Theatre, London. 741 The Invention of Love, page 36. 742 The Invention of Love, page 36. 743 The Invention of Love, page 69. 744 The Invention of Love, page 37. 745 The Invention of Love, page 38. 746 The Invention of Love, page 7. 747 The Invention of Love, page 32.

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aeh is concerned, ‘The only reason to consider what the ancient philosophers meant about anything is if it’s relevant to settling corrupt or disputed passages in the text’.748 According to Peter Jones, ‘This is where the acumen of the textual critic counts for everything – spotting the corruptions and emending the text – and where Housman was supreme’.749 Most significantly, Housman, the student, corrects Jowett, the teacher, over his misinterpretation (by means of a mistranscription of the text at some point in history) of Catullus’ poem about the capture of the Golden Fleece – ‘feri is a mistake for freti’.750 Jowett rounds on his pupil, invoking the relativism of taste and criticising a rival academic, Munro: ‘Well, Munro is entitled to concur with everybody who amends the manuscripts of Catullus according to his taste and calls his taste conjectures… ’751 To Jowett, because of the vicissitudes of storage and transcription, there can never be any certainty about what Catullus wrote: ‘certainty could only come from recovering (Catullus’) autograph’752 and that is all but impossible: corruption breeding corruption from papyrus to papyrus, and from the last disintegrating scrolls to the first new-fangled parchment books, with a thousand years of copying-out still to come, running the gauntlet of changing forms of script and spelling, and absence of punctuation – not to mention mildew and rats and fire and flood and Christian disapproval to the brink of extinction as to what Catullus really wrote passed from scribe to scribe, this one drunk, that one sleepy, another without scruple, some ignorant of Latin and some, even worse, fancying themselves better Latinists than Catullus…753 Thus, for aeh textual criticism carries with it an absolute moral concept. A text is either right or it is wrong and is not a matter of interpretation and there is an absolute need to correct for misprints: hence, ‘There is truth and falsehood in a comma’.754 aeh demonstrates his point to his younger self by referring to a passage from Catullus’ ‘The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis’. aeh: To be a scholar is to strike your finger on the page and say, ‘Thou ailest here, and here’. 748 The Invention of Love, page 31. 749 Programme notes to The Invention of Love, 1997 production at the Royal National Theatre, London. 750 The Invention of Love, page 23. 751 The Invention of Love, page 23. 752 The Invention of Love, page 24. 753 The Invention of Love, page 24. 754 The Invention of Love, page 37.

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Housman: The comma has got itself in the wrong place, hasn’t it?…So opis isn’t power with a small ‘o’, it’s the genitive of Ops who was the mother of Jupiter. Everything becomes clear when you put the comma back one place…Is that right? aeh: Oh, yes. It’s right because it’s true … By taking out a comma and putting it back in a different place, sense is made out of nonsense in a poem that has been read continuously since it was first misprinted four hundred years ago. A small victory over ignorance and error. A scrap of knowledge to add to our stock.755 Textual criticism is, therefore, ‘a science whose subject is literature’.756 However, because literature is ‘the work of the human mind with all its frailty and aberration, and of human fingers which make mistakes, the science of textual criticism must aim for degrees of likelihood, and the only authority it might answer to is an author who has been dead for hundreds of thousands of years. But it is a science none the less, not a sacred mystery’.757 Housman points out the relativist vogue for amending the ancient poems to suit the tastes of the day and at the same time propels the discussion into the question of the appropriate nature of love, one of the play’s main themes. ‘The passion for the truth is the faintest of all human passions. In the translation of Tibullus in my College library, the he loved by the poet is turned into a she: and then when you come to the bit where this “she” goes off with somebody’s wife, the translator is equal to the crisis – he leaves it out’.758 This is a crime of which Jowett is guilty. He, rather smugly, points out, ‘In my translation of the Phaedrus it required all my ingenuity to rephrase his depiction of paederastia into the affectionate regard as exists between an Englishman and his wife. Plato would have made the transposition himself if he had had the good fortune to be a Balliol man’.759 In the light of this relativist revisionism Housman puts his finger on ‘the point of interest’, and asks, ‘What is virtue?, what is the good and the beautiful really and truly?’.760 aeh admits that the answer is largely theoretical: ‘You think there is an answer: the lost autograph copy of life’s meaning, which we might recover from the corruptions that have made it nonsense. But if there is 755 756 757 758 759 760

The Invention of Love, pages 37–38. The Invention of Love, page 38. The Invention of Love, page 38. The Invention of Love, page 40. The Invention of Love, page 21. The Invention of Love, page 41.

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no such copy, really and truly there is no answer’. And, so, there is a practical ­acceptance on aeh’s part that, ‘It’s all in the timing’.761 In other words, it depends on the mores of the day. And this sense of timing, and relativism, is no more obvious than in the treatment of homosexual love. In Greece it was, as Pater says, part of a golden age: ‘no amount of ingenuity can dispose of boy-love as the most distinguishing feature of a society which we venerate as one of the most brilliant in the history of human culture, raised far above its neighbours in moral and mental distinction’.762 It was seen as part of the matrix of virtue within an individual, linked to athletic prowess, the sort of which Jackson displays in Housman’s time: ‘To be the fastest runner, the strongest wrestler, the best at throwing the javelin – this was virtue when Horace in his dreams ran after Ligurinus across the Field of Mars’.763 Thus it was when an army comprising ‘a hundred and fifty pairs of lovers…the Sacred Band of Theban youths’764 died for the cause of Greek liberty at the battle of Chaeronea that society regarded their sexuality as without stain and a component of their valour: Philip of Macedon went forth to view the slain, and when he came to that place where the three hundred fought and lay dead together, he wondered, and understanding that it was the band of lovers, he shed tears and said, whoever suspects baseness in anything these men did, let him perish.765 In the time of what aeh refers to as ‘Oxford in the Golden Age’766 the same homosexual love makes its practitioners social outcasts. It is ‘an unnatural disease’,767 ‘the love that dare not speak its name’,768 that has Wilde, one of Oxford’s own, labelled a ‘Sodomite’ and ‘sentenced to two years hard labour’.769 It is, in the words of Housman’s poetry, ‘this unlucky love’770 which led a Woolwich cadet to ‘(blow) his brains out so that he wouldn’t live to shame himself, or bring shame on others’.771 761 762 763 764 765 766 767 768 769 770 771

The Invention of Love, page 41. The Invention of Love, pages 21–22. The Invention of Love, page 42. The Invention of Love, page 42. The Invention of Love, pages 41–42. The Invention of Love, page 102. The Invention of Love, page 101. The Invention of Love, page 101. The Invention of Love, page 82. The Invention of Love, page 89. The Invention of Love, page 93.

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Parsimony At the centre of Stoppard’s moral universe is a dichotomy between absolutism and relativism. The absolutism that George argues for in Jumpers implies an absolute moral yardstick and is best expressed as a childlike sense of right and wrong. Henry’s writing, for example, is better than Brodie’s simply because it is. It is Rousseau’s world of natural goodness, which Herzen admired when young, into which man is born. Derived from such a state is the randomness of Herzen’s Ginger Cat, in contrast to the determinism of Marx, Newton and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s fate. Implicit in this morality is some form of absolute arbiter – possibly God – for, otherwise, one would be marking one’s own moral homework. In the absolutist moral world the rights of the individual, says Anderson, are superior to the local rules of whatever society in which one happens to live. Such rights include the freedom of the individual and freedom of speech, whose light shines as the guarantor of the absolute truth. The moral matrix by which actions are judged is provided by the artist who, working from what Belinsky calls a single, eternal idea, has a special role because he is doing something that others cannot. Above all, it is the innate sense – Belinsky’s divine spark of intuition and what George cannot see under the microscope – of good and bad inside each individual that leads to Hilary’s altruistic decision in The Hard Problem to take the blame for Bo’s actions. The Stoppardian counterpoint is McFee’s relativist society; the world manifest in the Coda in Jumpers and in which the ice is melting in Darkside. Such a society is founded upon perspective. It is the quantum mechanical world of Heisenberg in which the act of observation impinges upon its subject matter and bears out Stankevich’s argument that reality has no independence from observation. So, too, is it Wittgenstein’s linguistic world in which meaning is dependent upon context. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s Elsinore truth exists only by reference to what surrounds it and in Henry iv’s court it is the ambiguous reality of the act in which his courtiers are compelled to participate. It is Kant’s world of perception in which man is judged by his intentions, as opposed to Ethics Man’s consequences. The Stoppardian moral debate is founded upon a duality. It should not surprise one, therefore, to find duality and its metaphor – illusion and reality – as a key pattern to emerge from Stoppard’s works.

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Dualism – Illusion and Reality I suppose I am a dualist by default.1 stoppard

∵ Duality is the other great theme of Stoppard’s writing – because, specifically, it reflects the dichotomy inherent in the first theme, morality and, because, ­generally, it is a metaphorical expression of the two sides of the argument in a Stoppardian stage debate. In an application of Occam’s razor Armand ­Marie Leroi’s letter to Stoppard, reproduced in the programme to the original 2015 production of The Hard Problem, encapsulates the duality of the moral problem that Stoppard wrestles with throughout much of his career. Leroi asks, ‘Is goodness an objective thing? If you believe that it is, then you are a moral absolutist; if you do not, then you are a moral relativist’.2 Stoppard’s mind works by dualisms. It is reflected in the way he writes – fusing disparate pairs of ideas, such as quantum mechanics and spying,3 Newtonian science and classical gardening, hedge fund trading and consciousness. It is also in Stoppard’s methodology. Both the Stoppardian stage debate and the manner by which he marries the vehicle of his plays and the ideas they contain is just duality in ­action – two sides of the same coin. It is indeed ironic, therefore, that probably the most famous scene in all of Stoppard’s plays – where Guildenstern flips 92 coins which, in defiance of probability, keep coming up heads – shows the audience only one side of the coins. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that the same play deals with an aspect of duality that encapsulates Stoppardianism: illusion and reality.

1 Stoppard, in a letter to Richard Dawkins.2. 2 AM. Leroi, letter to Stoppard. 3 Paul Delaney gives a different emphasis, arguing that, ‘although many reviewers talk about the play drawing parallels between quantum mechanics and espionage, the more basic parallel (Hapgood) draws is between quantum mechanics and human identity’. – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 130.

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Illusion and Reality Things are one way or they are another way; ‘better’ is how we see them, Archie says, and I don’t personally, very much; though sometimes he makes them seem not so bad after all – no that’s wrong, too: he knows not ‘seems’. Things do not seem, on the one hand, they are; and on the other hand, bad is not what they can be.4 Dotty, Jumpers

∵ Stoppard’s plays are teeming with references to and examples of a very particular form of duality; that of illusion and reality. It is Hapgood which reveals why such a subject should be of particular fascination to Stoppard: because it ­implies relativism. ‘Quantum mechanics is about…the lack of absolutes’,5 is how Stoppard explains it.6 In the world of quantum mechanics, which seeks to explain the behaviour of things on the small, sub-atomic scale, there is one phenomenon which relates to the act of observation of electrons that can only be explained by the principle of uncertainty, as Kerner, the spy scientist describes: (An electron’s) movements cannot be anticipated because it has no reasons. 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; …it is because there is no such thing as an electron with a definite position and a definite momentum; you fix one, you lose the other, and it’s all done without tricks, it’s the real world, it is awake.7 4 Jumpers, page 41. 5 See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, Note 1, page 286, in which Fleming extracts a quotation from Stoppard’s interview with Peter Lewis (‘Quantum Stoppard’) suggesting that the uncertainty of quantum mechanics was a motivation for writing Hapgood: ‘Quantum mechanics is about probability and the lack of absolutes. In investigating matter, the deeper they go, the smaller the particles, the less certainty they find. That seemed to me to be an exploitable idea’. 6 Adrian Kent adds, ‘Another striking aspect of quantum theory is the fundamental role played by dualities of various kinds’. – A. Kent, ‘You Get What You Interrogate For’ in the programme to the 2015 production of Hapgood at the Hampstead Theatre. 7 Hapgood, page 35.

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Feynman explains: Heisenberg noticed, when he discovered the laws of quantum mechanics, that the new laws of nature that he had discovered could only be ­consistent if there was some basic limitation to our experimental abilities that had not previously been recognized.8 What Heisenberg noticed was that the act of observation disturbs an electron. The more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. Feynman continues: ‘We know that the electric field of the light acting on a charge will exert a force on it.…By trying to watch the electrons we have changed their motions’.9 In the Stoppardian canon this resonates with the debate on morality – set out in Jumpers, The Hard Problem and Professional Foul, but reflected by implication and consequence in other plays – in which Stoppard contrasts the relativist view with the absolutist view. The Heisenberg principle of uncertainty is all about relativism; the subject matter one is looking at is affected by the way in which it is observed. As Kerner concludes, ‘The act of observing determines the reality’.10 Therefore, there is no absolute truth, merely an observed one which depends upon one’s point of view. That is why the subject of illusion and reality, which highlights the question of the perspective of the observer, plays such a significant role in many of Stoppard’s plays. It is explored particularly effectively – and, indeed, most ironically11 – in Artist Descending a Staircase in which a blind girl, Sophie, cannot see what the three young artists see and hears, instead, what the radio audience hears. As Stoppard observed, ‘You’ve got different perspectives on what was happening in the play’s own reality’.12 Stoppard illustrates the relativism of perspective in a small episode in The Dog It Was That Died in which Blair is supervising the placement of an obelisk on top of a Gothic tower he is building as part of a folly in his garden. His desire for the obelisk to be in the centre of the tower, as he instructs Slack (his workman), demonstrates that not everything is as it seems and that it’s all a question of one’s point of view: Slack: …Is it all right to lower away? Blair:   Yes, lower away. 8 9 10 11 12

R. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, page 143. RF. Feynman, RB. Leighton, M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 37–38. Hapgood, page 9. It demonstrates why the play works more successfully on radio than in its stage adaptation. Stoppard, in an interview with Roger Bolton, Feedback, bbc Radio 4, 5 January 2016.

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Slack: (Calls out) Lower away! Blair:  The crane has to swing it over slightly to the right. Slack: No, sir, it’s centred on top of the tower. Blair:  But it’s lop-sided. Slack: Only from where we’re standing. Blair:  But surely, Mr Slack, if it’s centred on top of the tower, it should look centred from everywhere. Slack: That would be all right with a round Norman tower, sir, but with your octagonal Gothic tower the angles of the parapet throw the middle out. Blair:  Throw the middle out –? Slack: The obelisk will look centred from the terrace, sir. Blair:  But it has to look centred from my study window as well.13 In The Dog It Was That Died Stoppard saves the best example of illusion and reality for the act of spying itself. The Chief British spy is left to explain what role Purvis, a spy who committed suicide and whose death and behaviour is the subject of the play, had really been playing. With its double and triple bluff the reality gets lost in the illusion: …In the beginning the idea was that if (the Russians) thought that we knew that they thought Purvis was their man…they would assume that the information we gave Purvis to give to them…would be information designed to mislead…so they would take that into account…and, thus, if we told Purvis to tell them that we were going to do something…they would draw the conclusion that we were not going to do it…but as we were on to that, we naturally were giving Purvis genuine information to give to them, knowing that they would be drawing the wrong conclusions from it…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 first after all…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, even though our first reason for telling Purvis was that we did intend to do them…In other words…in order to keep fooling the Russians, we had to keep doing the opposite of what we really wanted to do…Now this is where it gets extremely tricky…Obviously we couldn’t keep doing the opposite of what we wished to do simply to keep Purvis in the game…so we frequently had to give Purvis the wrong information 13

The Dog It Was That Died, page 167.

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from which the Russians would draw the right conclusion, which enabled us to do what we wished to do, although the Russians, thanks to Purvis, knew we were going to do it.14 The only consolation to the British was that the Russians thought that the British believed Purvis was feeding them Russian information and, so, were forced – in order to maintain Purvis’ credibility – to undertake actions they did not wish to do (but they had to do them because they told Purvis they would). The final words of the play emphasise the question of illusion and reality by leaving open the question of who is really mad. Purvis (from beyond the grave) is heard to say, ‘Incidentally, Dr Seddon thinks that you ought to be in here yourself, but I’ll leave you to field that one’.15 The ambiguity of whether it is addressed to Blair or the audience only adds to the question of illusion. Stoppard connects the issue of identity and spying in Neutral Ground, a play for television. The opening situation concerns a spy, Philo, making his ­escape to the West, crossing the border at a railway station. Two features which distinguish him, a fur hat and a pet monkey, are transferred to an unsuspecting ­American salesman, Comisky, at the station, leading an assassin to identify mistakenly Comisky for Philo and shoot him dead. The spy has evaded ­assassination with one of the tools of his trade, by pretending to be someone else. Part of the essence of spying is pretence which makes it an excellent metaphor for illusion and reality and in Hapgood there is a scene in which the link between spying and perspective is realised. Blair, the spy, meets Kerner, the scientist, at the zoo. Stoppard’s stage directions suggest the scene to be played by the bars of a cage: Perhaps we are looking at Blair and Kerner through the bars of a cage… The bars make hard-edged shadows. We need one particular and distinct demarcation of light and shadow on the floor, perhaps thrown by the edge of a wall.16 This distinctive background setting of dark and light shadows, symbolising ­illusion and reality, is the background for Kerner’s description and explanation of the two slit experiment with light – the experiment referred to in the frontispiece quotation from Feynman – in which the wave pattern is produced 14 15 16

The Dog It Was That Died, page 192. The Dog It Was That Died, page 193. Hapgood, page 7.

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by the light: ‘Wave pattern is like stripes’,17 says Kerner. But, the imagery of the scene is complemented further by the animal in the cage next to which the two protagonists are standing; a giraffe. In an apt reference to reality – and also one which links the spying metaphor to illusion and reality – Kerner comments, ‘…objective reality is for zoologists. “Ah, yes, definitely a giraffe”. But, a double agent is not like a giraffe. A double agent is more like a trick of the light’.18 In the original London production the designer, Carl Toms, took the opportunity to emphasise the imagery even more by having two giraffes in the backdrop such that, when viewed from a certain angle, it looked as if their two heads were connected to one body.19 This visual device has the multiple effect of ­incorporating the duality of personality that is Stoppard’s impulse for ­writing the play, undermining Kerner’s suggestion of objective reality by making how the audience sees the image depend upon the point of view and linking the theme of duality and twins to that of illusion and reality. Stoppard has previously introduced the audience to the imagery of the shadows by specifying that Wates, the first character it sees, is ‘a black man’.20 The rest of Hapgood is shot through with the same theme.21 It is set in a world of spies where ‘everybody’s lying to everybody’.22 Celia, the illusory twin of Elizabeth Hapgood who is playing a role as her, finds it hard to accept, particularly of her sister: Ridley:  …Somebody’s lying to somebody. They’re lying to her or she’s lying to me. Hapgood: I don’t think Betty tells lies. Ridley:   Telling lies is Betty’s job…23 The theme of deliberate illusion continues; Hapgood points out that, ‘… in the next war some of the missiles carry warheads and some carry lots of milkbottle tops to confuse the scanners – reflectors, all right? – disinformation has to be launched’.24 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24

Hapgood, page 8. Hapgood, page 8. see J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 183. Hapgood, page 1. ‘In its elegant ingenuity, Hapgood is like a “thought experiment” designed to probe the randomness behind our perceived realities’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 183. Hapgood, page 60. Hapgood, page 59. Hapgood, page 12.

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In the world of spying nothing is as it seems. Wates’ Geiger counter ‘looks like a Rolex’25 watch. Kerner is a character of many illusory aspects and motives. Blair explains, ‘The Russians put him in as a sleeper years ago but we turned him and now he’s really working for us, they only think he’s working for them’.26 Kerner makes a similar point, emphasising that it is what the Russians think that counts, but adding that from the Russian perspective the situation looks a little different: ‘I am a British joe with a Russian source. But they also have a result: because I have given Giorgio enough information to keep him credible as a kgb control who is running me as a sleeper – which is what he thinks he is’.27 Kerner’s motives for defection, it turns out, are far from what they seem: I don’t even know if I was a genuine defector. When they recruited me, it is true that I had already thought of getting out, but to be honest the system I wanted to flee was the vacuum tube logic system. We were using computers which you had in a museum. I wasn’t seeking asylum, I was seeking an ibm one-nine-five.28 Kerner’s work, according to Ridley, isn’t all that it seems, either – ‘It’s a joke. I’d trade it for my cat if I had a cat’,29 he argues. Hapgood realises that the Russians had turned him back and she points out to him, ‘You made up the truth’.30 Kerner, and Hapgood’s, biggest revelation is that he is Joe’s father. Kerner r­ efuses to allow Hapgood to reveal that particular truth to the boy: ‘tell Joe he has a father after all, not dead after all, only a secret, we are all in the secret service! – no, I don’t think so’.31 By the end Kerner is leaving, but the destination is ambiguous. He does conclude, however, that whatever he seemed to be to Blair the reality of his situation is far more illusory: ‘Paul thinks I was a triple, but I was definitely not, I was past that, quadruple at least, maybe quintuple’.32 To the bamboozled audience various candidates are put forward as the source of leaks of sensitive information. Wates suspects Hapgood and Ridley, which, from his perspective, is not unreasonable, as Ridley realises: ‘It’s 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Hapgood, page 10. Hapgood, page 10. Hapgood, page 9. Hapgood, page 53. Hapgood, page 44. Hapgood, page 65. Hapgood, page 37. Hapgood, page 65.

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all circular. It can’t be me without you, it can’t be you without me, so it’s both of us. Whatever happened to neither?’.33 The Americans, it is suggested, suspect Kerner. It turns out to be Ridley. But Kerner has been turned back by the ­Russians, too. Equally illusory is Hapgood’s relationship with her boss, Blair. There is a confusion in the basis of Hapgood’s dependence on Blair – is it professional or personal? Hapgood: …I was calling you at the pool this morning. Where were you? Blair:   I was there. Hapgood: I needed you. Blair:   No, no, that was only personal. But you’re going to need me now.34 Even more ambiguously Hapgood tells Blair, ‘I absolutely refuse to live without you’.35 Equally, Blair admits to Hapgood, ‘I need you’,36 but with Blair it’s strictly business. Once Blair has betrayed Hapgood’s feelings by secretly using Joe as bait for Ridley, when they had previously agreed to do so without Joe, ­Hapgood’s feelings are different: ‘I’ll never forgive you for that, never ever’,37 she tells him. And the explanation for Joe? Blair’s advice is, ‘Tell him it’s a ­secret. The secret service’.38 Illusions come thick and fast. The whole of Act 2, scene 1 in Hapgood’s ­office is an illusion, in which Kerner ‘confesses’ in order to lay the trap for ­Ridley. Even though Hapgood and Ridley are present, Blair, in order to demonstrate that the interview is ‘friendly’ and off the record, reinforces the ­illusory nature by telling Kerner, ‘Mrs Hapgood isn’t here. Mr Ridley isn’t here either’.39 Illusory, too, is the deception of Ridley with the Hapgood ‘twin’, ­Celia. The switch of the briefcases and the removal of material from the one that ends up with H ­ apgood can only be achieved through an illusion – the e­ xistence of two, ­identical Ridley twins. The same illusion explains the incidents that went wrong in ­Athens and Paris. In exasperation at the kgb’s ­identical twins H ­ apgood blurts out her frustration and, unwittingly at that point in the story, the key to the­­illusion at the 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Hapgood, page 31. Hapgood, page 17. Hapgood, page 46. Hapgood, page 17. Hapgood, page 64. Hapgood, page 64. Hapgood, page 39.

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pool: ‘Those damned twins are like an old joke which keeps coming back. I’ve been hearing it for years and I never believed it. And suddenly here they are, identical and large as life’.40 ‘You can’t be in two places at once’,41 Ridley tells Celia. But, for one half of a pair of identical twins it is possible to be so – or, at least, to seem to be so. In the world of quantum mechanics one really can effect the ultimate illusion. Kerner explains, ‘An electron can be here or there at the same moment’.42 The ultimate illusion, or duality, is within the self which is how Elizabeth’s ‘twin’, Celia, can exist; as the deluded Ridley admits, ‘She’s here and she’s not here’.43 Ironically, ‘Please explain to me about the twins’,44 is all Hapgood wants from Kerner at that point in the story and he mysteriously replies (again giving a clue as to how the initial illusion of the briefcases was effected) that, ‘I just did but you missed it’.45 It’s the same effect on the rugby pitch. As Blair points out, ‘…you can’t tell one from another when they’re all in the same get-up’.46 Kerner’s science has its own duality. Just as quantum mechanics can cause the illusion, so mathematics can reveal the reality: Mathematics does not make pictures of the world it only reveals itself. What you can make of it – twins, waves, the dark star – is your bet on reality. In Athens, in Paris and at the swimming pool, two Ridleys satisfies a requirement. He was his own alibi.47 Audiences who have seen Arcadia will know that mathematics does make pictures, if not of the world, then of nature. Stoppard leaves his audience with an observation that even the scientist who refined the uncertainty principle, thereby causing Einstein such a moral problem, had an underlying ambiguity about him: Kerner relates to Blair that, ‘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’.48 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Hapgood, page 13. Hapgood, page 45. Hapgood, page 35. Hapgood, page 62. Hapgood, page 35. Hapgood, page 35. Hapgood, page 14. Hapgood, page 51. Hapgood, page 51.

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It’s almost as if the ambiguity of illusion and reality were a form of sub­ conscious wallpaper unobtrusively decorating the background of some of Stoppard’s works. He made an early foray into its realm in the medium he uses which is least conducive to the subject matter; his radio play Artist Descending a Staircase.49 He adapted it after some persuasion for the stage. He admits that he ‘did set out consciously to try and write [a play] which had to be a radio play’.50 It does work slightly more effectively in that medium because the audience is forced to ‘see’ things in the same way that Sophie, who is blind, does. The main example of illusion and reality in the play concerns Sophie and her choice, from amongst the three boys, of lover. She first met the three of them at their art exhibition when her sight had not quite failed her. They were, in her words, ‘not at all like artists but like three strapping schoolboy cricketers growing your first pale moustaches. I liked you all very much’.51 The problem was that she ‘never found out, and was too shy at the time to ask, which was D ­ onner, and which was Beauchamp, and which Martello’.52 But, at that ­moment she was overcome by ‘the sick apprehension of something irrevocable which (she) would not have chosen’.53 To Sophie they were all engaging, but, as Beauchamp put it, ‘one of us (is) more engaging than the others’.54 She proposed that there was a way of satisfying her curiosity as she recalled that, of the three, the one she fell for had painted a picture of ‘a row of black stripes on a white background’55 which she described as, ‘black railings on a field of snow’.56 ‘Unable to describe (each of them) with enough individuality’57 she recalled that a photographer had photographed each man next to one of his paintings. From the description she gave of the painting – ‘a border fence in the snow’,58 prompted by Beauchamp – to Donner he determined that ‘It was

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50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

John Tydeman argues that, ‘the essence of Artist is in ambiguity, and the mistaking of things. There’s a hinge through the plot … about a painting, which was either of a white fence against a dark sky or was it of a black fence against a snowfield?’. – J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, pages 193–194. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Mayne, ‘Arts Commentary’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom ­Stoppard in Conversation, page 34. Artist, page 134. Artist, page 141. Artist, page 134. Artist, page 141. Artist, page 139. Artist, page 139. Artist, page 141. Artist, page 142.

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Beauchamp that you had in mind’.59 Thus began her affair with Beauchamp despite the fact that Donner loved her, too. Using the time shift geometry of the play Stoppard reveals years later that the conclusion Sophie drew about Beauchamp could have been mistaken and that she, and the three men, might have lived an illusion. Martello: Did you ever wonder whether it was you she loved? Donner:   No, of course not. It was Beauchamp. Martello: To us it was Beauchamp – she remembered his painting, the snow scene.60 Martello confesses to Donner that, ‘it was a long time afterwards when this ­occurred to me, when she was already living with Beauchamp’61 and he goes on to remind Donner that he, too had a painting which fitted Sophie’s description: Martello: Well, your painting of the white fence – Donner:   White fence? Martello: Thick white posts, top to bottom across the whole canvas, an inch or two apart, black in the gaps.62 Donner’s picture is the schematic inverse of Beauchamp’s but the visual impression is the same; especially to someone nearly blind and seeing through thick glasses. Martello, then, speculates to Donner on what might have been the illusion within the reality of Sophie’s blind world: ‘When one thinks of the brief happiness she enjoyed…well, we thought she was enjoying it with Beauchamp but she was really enjoying it with you. As it were’.63 The dichotomy between the unresolved illusion and reality of Sophie’s mind is heightened by the pain of unrequited love Donner has for Sophie and his assertion just before Sophie’s death that Beauchamp had begun to hurt her. The illusion and reality of Sophie’s relationship becomes an allegory for the discussion about the illusion and reality of modern art. It is reinforced in a minor way by the other example of illusion and reality in the play: Beauchamp’s loop tape. He first records, by accident, Donner’s death but not in a 59 60 61 62 63

Artist, page 142. Artist, page 153. Artist, page 153. Artist, page 153. Artist, page 154.

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way either the artists or the audience can understand it. He later records over it with a near identical situation which the audience, then, realises provides the ­explanation behind the play’s mystery, although just to maintain the metaphor neither Martello nor Beauchamp gets it. Stoppard also reflects the concept of illusion and reality in the debate about modern art itself. The role of the imagination in modern art is reflected in the blindness of Sophie which allows her to have ‘a picture in (her) mind’64 of the world. In the here and now Donner is ‘engaged in the infinitely more ­difficult task of painting what the eye sees’.65 To which Beauchamp replies, ‘Well, I’ve never seen a naked woman sitting about a garden with a unicorn ­eating the roses’.66 But, in the world of modern art the illusion becomes the  ­reality. The blind Sophie remarked fifty years earlier that, ‘It is only my sight I have lost. I enjoy the view just as much as anyone who sits there with eyes closed in the sun; more, I think, because I can improve on reality, like a painter, but without fear of contradiction. Indeed, if I hear hoofbeats, I can put a unicorn in the garden and no one can open my eyes against it and say it isn’t true’.67 Queen Elizabeth, in Shakespeare in Love, remarks upon the sense of illusion68 as she exculpates the Master Of The Revels from his decision to arrest those associated with the production of Romeo And Juliet, adding an allusion to a perceived duality of her own.69 Her comments set the theme for the duality explored in the film as Romeo is played in rehearsal by a woman, Viola de Lesseps (disguised as Thomas Kent), and Juliet by a man (as would have been the case in Tudor times), Sam Gosse.70 At the finale, during the performance, the scenario is unexpectedly reversed as Shakespeare plays Romeo and Viola steps in at the last moment to play Juliet. As in Shakespeare’s play, there is a crucial confusion of truth and illusion because in that same scene Juliet drinks a potion, given to her by the Friar, which makes her appear to be dead when placed in the Capulets’ tomb. Romeo, does not receive the message which would have informed him of the plan the Friar has hatched and, hearing of his lover’s death, obtains poison from the Apothecary. Upon entering the tomb 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Artist, page 141. Artist, page 120. Artist, page 120. Artist, page 142. The opening scene makes it clear that the audience is watching a play-within-a-film. Elizabeth I: ‘ I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king’. The Nurse is also played by a man.

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and seeing the seemingly dead Juliet, he takes it in an act of suicide. Juliet subsequently awakes and kills herself, ironically with his dagger, in grief for her dead Romeo. It is a scene which combines two of the recurrent themes in Stoppard’s works: illusion (in particular, the duality of personality) and the determinism of death. The film asks a question which Stoppard’s play The Real Thing attempts to answer. The question is posed by Queen Elizabeth:71 is it possible for a play to demonstrate the truth and nature of love?72 What is the real thing?73 In The Real Thing Stoppard manipulates the ­issue with his audience as if he were a fisherman playing a fish on a line, constantly reeling his audience in, then letting the reel go again before reeling it in again.74 It is a play in which ‘all that seems real, we soon learn, is imagined, the reverse of the latter part of the play: all that we imagine turns out to be real’.75 Stoppard explains: The idea is that you have a man on stage going through a situation. It turns out he’s written it. Then you have an actor in the scene going through the same situation, except he reacts differently. Then you have the guy who wrote it going through the exact situation and he reacts differently too.76 The play is ‘determined by the playful idea of having people repeat their situation in fiction’.77 It begins, unknowingly for the audience, in a play; Henry’s play, House Of Cards. For the whole of the first scene the audience does not know that it is watching a play. It is only in scene 2 that the audience realises

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75 76 77

In a Stoppardian irony the Queen suggests playwrights cannot teach of the veracity of love. cf Henry’s confession that he cannot write love (The Real Thing, page 24). John Fleming comments, ‘Through (Henry and Brodie’s) contrast the play broaches ­Stoppard’s perception of the real thing not only in love but also in art, politics, and ­writing’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 157. Jernigan portrays it as, ‘The real in turn influences the artificial which influences the real’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 76. See also Paul Delaney’s analysis of what is the real thing – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 123. I. Nadel, Double Act A Life of Tom Stoppard, page 323. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight’. in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 40. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight’. in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 42.

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what has gone before is an act. Stoppard briefly uses a version of this illusion in The Dog It Was That Died, a radio play written nearly contemporaneously with The Real Thing. In that radio play Blair visits a ‘rest home for people who crack up’,78 which is where spies with mental problems are treated. On arrival he is met by Arlon, ‘an old buffer who is mowing the lawn’79 and who, at first sight, convinces Blair that he is the gardener cum warden. It is later revealed by Matron that Arlon is not who he appears to be but rather, in Matron’s words, ‘one of our more difficult guests’.80 When Blair finally gets to meet Dr Seddon, who is in charge of the home, it is revealed that Blair has also been taken in by Matron who is also one of the patients. By this stage Blair begins to think that Seddon may also be a patient when he, in fact, turns out to be in charge after all. Many of the techniques of repetition and similarity of situation also occur in Stoppard’s adaptation of Havel’s Largo Desolato, a play which its Czech author dedicated to Stoppard. Leopold repeats his routines of looking through the peephole to see if he is about to get visitors and disappearing into the bathroom and gasping several times over, Chaps 1 and 2 have some of the characteristics of First Sidney and Second Sidney. Perhaps most significantly in comparison to The Real Thing, Leopold’s scenes with Lucy and Marguerite reverberate to the point that he confesses to both of them the personal revelation that he is, ‘lacking a fixed point out of which I can grow and develop’.81 Reality is interwoven into the plays within the play of The Real Thing.82 ­Brodie’s play recalls the real encounter he had with Annie on a train83 which is reflected, not literally, but in tone in the encounter between Annie and Billy on a train84 (just as Brodie asks if Annie minds if he sits next to her, so does Billy). In Act 2, scene 5 the inquisition by Henry over Annie’s whereabouts when he suspects her of an affair in Glasgow with Billy mimics Max’s inquisition of Charlotte in the opening scene, which is actually the House Of Cards. Furthermore, in the same way that Charlotte’s dispensed-with lover had ‘been through

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The Dog It Was That Died, page 172. The Dog It Was That Died, page 172. The Dog It Was That Died, page 175. Largo Desolato, pages 23 and 51. ‘In betraying one ‘reality’ after another, Stoppard toys with the very nature of theatrical illusion’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 160. William Demastes makes a remark of Shakespeare in Love that, in part, might just as easily apply to The Real Thing: ‘the difference between rehearsals and real life blurs’. – W. Demastes, The Cambridge ­Introduction to Tom Stoppard, page 106. The Real Thing, page 31. The Real Thing, page 37.

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my bathroom cabinet…And then,…he went through everything else’,85 so Charlotte accuses Max in The House Of Cards with, ‘You go through my things when I am away?’.86 Henry gets in on the act by going through Annie’s effects when he suspects her infidelity. Stoppard does, indeed, offer three versions of the same situation; the discovery by a man of his partner’s infidelity.87 Max, the man, who cries, breaks down and tries to pretend it’s not important in the context of his marriage to Annie: ‘All right. It happened. All right. It didn’t mean anything’.88 Max, the actor, who in a calculating manner allows Charlotte to incriminate herself during his rather forensic interrogation of her about her supposed trip to Switzerland. Finally, Stoppard presents Henry, author of Max’s reaction to Charlotte, in his own life who thinks his wife’s affair is his fault; ‘It’s as though I’ve been careless, left a door open somewhere while preoccupied’.89 The reaction of the women is similarly diverse. Annie’s instant reaction when confronted by Henry is, ‘I’ll stop’.90 When confronted by her first husband, Max, her reaction is more one of relief, ‘I’m sorry it’s awful. But it’s better really. All that lying’.91 Charlotte, as an actress, reacts to Max’s discovery at first with shocked guilt – ‘Jesus God’92 – but quickly becomes aggressively defensive to the point where Max admits, ‘I think I just apologized for finding out that you’ve deceived me’.93 Plays and reality get deliberately intermingled in the audience’s perception: Stoppard’s stage directions for Act 2, scene 5 are, ‘Henry is alone, sitting in a chair, doing nothing. It’s like the beginning of Scene 1 and Scene 3 from Act 1’94 – scene 1 being House Of Cards and scene 3, like scene 5 of Act 2, being The Real 85 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94

The Real Thing, page 44. The Real Thing, page 4. Stoppard commented to David Deveaux and Lucy Davies on how much this device ­appealed to him in the programme notes of the 1999 Donmar warehouse production of The Real Thing. ‘I find it quite titillating to have structural cross-references, which are ­really quite separate from the real subject’. He cites the scene in which a man is in a room and a woman enters and he believes that the woman has been unfaithful. He also cites the scene in the railway carriage which becomes a play-within-a-play. ‘That kind of layering’, Stoppard says, ‘always appealed to me’. – see J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 157. The Real Thing, page 22. The Real Thing, page 52. The Real Thing, page 52. The Real Thing, page 22. The Real Thing, page 4. The Real Thing, page 4. The Real Thing, page 46.

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Thing. Stoppard noted, ‘When I was writing the stage directions, I took pains to make sure the geography of doors and furniture remained consistent so that you didn’t miss the point’.95 Stoppard’s instructions for Act 1, scene 3 state: ‘The disposition of furniture and doors makes the scene immediately reminiscent of the beginning of Scene 1’.96 Annie’s real infidelity is set up in the same context as Charlotte’s in House Of Cards. Likewise for Act 1, scene 2: ‘The disposition of door and furniture makes the scene immediately reminiscent of Scene 2’.97 This time, Annie and Henry’s relationship is set into exactly the same context as Charlotte and Henry’s. This effect is emphasised even further by Annie and Charlotte’s entrance. Charlotte’s is described as, ‘Charlotte enters barefoot from the bedroom, wearing Henry’s dressing-gown which is too big for her’.98 Annie is presented almost identically: ‘Annie enters from the bedroom door, barefoot and wearing Henry’s robe, which is too big for her’.99 The mingling of illusion and reality is repeated in the entrance of Charlotte in House Of Cards in which she arrives ‘wearing a top coat’100 and soon after carries in a small suitcase and plastic duty-free airport bag. When Annie arrives back from Glasgow she ‘­enters wearing a topcoat and carrying a suitcase and a small travelling bag’.101 The audience’s sense of deja vu is intentional. All the while other plays are replayed throughout. Tis Pity She’s A Whore and Miss Julie, are being rehearsed, whilst Brodie’s play is read and Henry’s re-write of it is recorded in a television studio and, later, watched by Henry, Annie and Brodie. The stage design in the original London production also reflected the ­concept of illusion and reality. It comprised grey panels and screens. ‘The screens were arranged to create different apertures for viewing the action at the beginnings and ends of scenes before they were flown out as a scene proper began. This had the effect of framing each scene so that the “life” which the actors were portraying was at the same time perceived by the audience as though it were a work of art’.102 The effect was continued, as John Fleming notes, in scene design, such as the portrait of Henry on the wall of Charlotte and Henry’s living room. A portrait, he quotes Jenkins, ‘which exactly reproduced 95

Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight’. in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 40. 96 The Real Thing, page 21. 97 The Real Thing, page 22. 98 The Real Thing, page 6. 99 The Real Thing, page 23. 100 The Real Thing, page 1. 101 The Real Thing, page 46. 102 R. Gordon, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, the Real Thing, quoted in J. Fleming, Tom Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 159.

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the characteristically stooped-shouldered stance of Roger Rees (who played Henry in the original production) 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’.103 Even Henry’s favourite book, Finnegans Wake – which he admits to never having read – might be said to be a small allusion to the concept of illusion and reality. Joyce, its author, admitted that it, ‘ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence’.104 The circularity of its nature raises the question of whether it is a story or the illusion of a story. Illusion and reality is reflected in several incidents in the storyline. ­Charlotte and Max, the actors who experience infidelity in the opening scene, are in reality each married to Henry and Annie who really are unfaithful. In reality Annie is also unfaithful to Henry with Billy who acts the part of Brodie who really does fancy Annie. The web of the illusion is continually woven. Billy and Annie act out the parts of Annabella and Giovanni in Tis Pity She’s A Whore, both in rehearsal but also as Stoppard metamorphoses the scene where Billy meets Annie on the train for the first time into Tis Pity She’s A Whore. (It is a technique Stoppard also employs in the last scene of Dalliance in which the story of the flirtation between Fritz and Christine is conveyed into a rehearsal of an opera featuring two lovers in the same situation. ‘During the transition Christine hurries on holding sheets of music’,105 which it is her profession in the play to copy out.). ‘Bill’ Brodie is played by an actor called Billy. Even the language of the play at times reflects the duality of illusion and reality. For instance, when Annie relays and comments on Brodie’s arguments to Billy he retorts, ‘He sounds like rubbish, but you know he’s right. You sound all right, but you know it’s rubbish’.106 It’s a play into which lies – illusion and reality rolled into one – permeate. Charlotte lies to Max about where she has been. Annie lies to Henry about which train she caught – ‘I fibbed about the train because that seemed like infidelity’.107 Despite Annie and Max’s commitment to Brodie’s cause it isn’t genuine – Annie skips a committee meeting to see Henry and 103 A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 159. 104 J. Joyce, Letters i. A number of Stoppard’s early works are based upon a similar structure of a perpetual loop – notably, The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, ‘M’ is for Moon Among Other Things and the unpublished Higg and Cogg. The Chaos algorithms of Arcadia depend upon iterated loops. Similarly, the Nash Equilibrium, derives from the repetition of the Game Theory mentioned in The Hard Problem. Note also Stoppard’s use of the Chinese box self referentiality in The Real Thing and Leopold’s reverberated routines in Largo Desolato. 105 Dalliance, page 60. 106 The Real Thing, page 38. 107 The Real Thing, page 48.

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Max gives priority to squash. But, the biggest illusion of all is Brodie’s. The man with ­supposedly ‘sheer moral courage’108 has no compunction about stealing a video recorder and in relation to the demonstration he had no ethical convictions at all: instead, ‘he’d been in some trouble’ and was merely ‘going absent without leave’.109 But, the biggest example of illusion and reality in The Real Thing is a Stoppardian joke: the playwright himself. ‘Do you mean how autobiographical is it?’, Stoppard asked his interviewer, Joan Juliet Buck, in January 1984. He answers his own question: ‘It’s a kind of game. You write about a parallel world. You write truthfully about a parallel possibility. That’s the game: This is how it might be if it would be’.110 Stoppard was slightly more candid, in July 1983 in an interview with Gussow: ‘I don’t know if it’s autobiographical, but a lot of it is auto something’.111 John Fleming notes, ‘The parallels between Stoppard and his protagonist, Henry, are numerous’.112 Ira Nadel agrees, but Stoppard doesn’t: ‘Autobiographical parallels between the protagonist and Stoppard are ­undeniable but, according to Stoppard, inapplicable’.113 In Night And Day Stoppard repeats the exercise he conducts in The Real Thing to explore the difference between the public and private persona. In order to do so he comes up with a peculiarly Stoppardian device – Ruth’s private thoughts. He explains; The audience is occasionally made privy to Ruth’s thoughts, and hers alone. When Ruth’s thoughts are audible she is simply called ‘RUTH’ in quotes and treated as a separate character. It is yet another way in which Stoppard gives himself freedom as the playwright to introduce a different perspective, just as he does in some instances with the time shift phenomenon he uses in other plays. It allows Stoppard flexibility which, for example, he exploits to alert the audience, but not her husband, 108 The Real Thing, page 18. 109 The Real Thing, page 55. 110 Stoppard, in an interview with JJ. Buck, ‘Tom Stoppard: Kind Heart and Prickly Mind’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 170. 111 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight’. in Gussow, M Conversations with Stoppard, page 41. 112 J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 156. Michael Billington goes further, arguing, ‘(The Real Thing) is extremely self-referential. Stoppard has put a lot of himself into Henry and turned the play into something of a self-indictment’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 149. 113 I. Nadel, Double Act A Life of Tom Stoppard, page 323.

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Carson, of her fling with Wagner in London, which is a key point in the story. But, it also introduces the question of illusion and reality into Night and Day. It allows the audience inside Ruth’s mind which is not always consistent with the image she appears to project on stage. Stoppard makes greatest use of the illusion this creates at the opening of Act 2. In it the inner ‘Ruth’ fantasises about seducing Milne and the audience, as in the opening scenes of The Real Thing and The Hard Problem, is for a time unsure about what is true reality: Ruth:   …It’s nice that you’ve got us to come back to. Milne: Yes – a line to London on tap – one couldn’t ask for more. Oh – and present company included, of course. ‘Ruth’: Help. Milne: Well, I expect you’d like to go to bed. ‘Ruth’: I’m over here. Milne: I’ve got a piece to write. ‘Ruth’: To hell with that. Milne: You won’t mind if I try to get to London later? ‘Ruth’: And to hell with London. Milne: I’m sure Geoffrey wouldn’t mind. Is he in k.c.? ‘Ruth’: Why don’t you shut up and kiss me. Milne: He said I could help myself. ‘Ruth’: So kiss me.114 Travesties is manifestly not a play about the idea of illusion and reality. But a thin mist of illusion, raising in the audience’s mind the question of what actually is real, lays lightly over the play. This is engendered by the fallibility of old Carr’s memory as he tries to recall the events of years before. ‘Most of the ­action takes place within Carr’s memory’115 and as he admits, ‘I stand open to correction on all points’.116 Stoppard employs the same trick with aeh’s memory in The Invention of Love as the old Housman confesses at the end of the 114 Night and Day, pages 35–36. 115 Travesties, page 1. CWE. Bigsby notes the relevance of Oscar Wilde’s comment in The Critic as Artist that, ‘I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering’. Bigsby adds, ‘This proves all too accurate a description of Carr’s memoirs, which tend to confuse his own fictions with those of The Importance of Being Earnest in which he scored a minor success’. – CWE. Bigsby, Tom Stoppard, page 25. Bigsby fails to add Wilde’s conclusion that, ‘the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it’. 116 Travesties, page 9.

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play, ‘Which is not to say I have remembered it right’.117 The audience learns just how unreliable Carr’s memory is when, even though he worked in the British consulate, he recalled incorrectly that the Prime Minister at the time was Mr Asquith. Old Cecily has to remind Old Carr that, ‘you never got close to Vladimir Ilyich’, and that, ‘he was leader of millions by the time you did your Algernon’.118 The undercurrent of illusion is engendered by a few events in the play. Lenin and Nadya, impelled by their desire to return to Russia adopt several disguises in preparation for the journey during the play. At one stage Lenin dresses in the guise of a parson (1993 text) and soon thereafter dons a blond wig (in the 1975 text he enters wearing a wig). More illusory still is the confusion caused by the mistaken interchange of manuscripts in the library in the opening scene. ­According to the stage instructions, ‘(It is now necessary that the audience should observe the following: GWEN has received from JOYCE a folder. CECILY receives an identical folder from LENIN.…Each girl has cause to place her folder down on a table or chair, and each girl then picks up the wrong folder)’.119 At the end of the play it is revealed that this results in Gwendolen having given Tzara Joyce’s chapter of Ulysses to read while Cecily gave Carr one of Lenin’s tracts when the intention was that each man should have got the opposite document. The resulting verdicts are, not surprisingly: Carr:    Rubbish! He’s a madman! Tzara: Bilge. It’s unreadable!120 The confusion is compounded as Tzara, then, gives the Lenin tract to Joyce which Gwendolen assures Joyce is the draft she typed for him. Joyce is unimpressed with the receipt of ‘an ill-tempered thesis purporting to prove…that Ramsey MacDonald is a bourgeois lickspittle gentleman’s gentleman’.121 A further addition to the play’s lingering sense of illusion is the confusion Stoppard borrows from Wilde. Just as Algernon pretends to Cecily to be Jack’s brother in The Importance of Being Earnest (and later on as the plot of that play unravels it does turn out to be the case that they really are brothers), so Carr pretends to be Tzara’s brother in Zurich:

117 118 119 120 121

The Invention of Love, page 100. Travesties, page 70. Travesties, page 3. Travesties, page 67. Travesties, page 69.

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Tzara: …I haven’t got a brother. – Oh my God. Carr:  Brother Jack, I have come to tell you that I am sorry for all the embarrassment I have caused you in the past.122 Stoppard fosters the sense of illusion and reality with several dramatic ­devices. The first he takes from Wilde: just as Wilde has both Jack and Algernon p ­ retend to be Earnest, so Stoppard allows Carr to deceive Cecily into thinking he is Tristan Tzara by handing her the visiting card Tzara presented to Bennett. In the second act Carr ‘eavesdrops on the LENINS’ as if in the role of a spy; a role on the edge of reality. However, by far the most prominent allusion to the subject occurs when Joyce is interrogating Tzara. In the course of doing so he ‘conjures from (his) hat a white carnation’,123 apparently made from bits of p ­ aper Tzara had earlier torn up. Thereafter, he produces from the hat silk hankies and flags. What could be a more significant reference to the phenomenon of illusion and reality than a magic trick? Illusion is a key tool of the apparatus of a totalitarian state. The gap between the illusion of the state’s propaganda and the reality of its repression is a theme embedded in the dna of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. The theme is ably demonstrated, adopting the metaphor of the play, by the presence of two orchestras: one imaginary, in Ivanov’s head; the other, the real one in which the Doctor plays. In typical Stoppardian fashion the situation is explained by the Doctor to Ivanov: I play in an orchestra occasionally. It is my hobby. It is a real orchestra. Yours is not. I am a doctor. You are a patient. If I tell you you do not have an orchestra, it follows that you do not have an orchestra. If you tell me you have an orchestra, it follows that you do not have an orchestra. Or rather it does not follow that you do have an orchestra.124 The underlying illusion behind the Communist authoritarian state is explained by Sacha’s Teacher: Things have changed since the bad old days. When I was a girl there were terrible excesses. A man accused like your father might well have been blameless. Now things are different. The Constitution guarantees freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, of assembly, 122 Travesties, page 54. 123 Travesties, page 40. 124 egbdf, page 21.

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of worship, and many other freedoms. The Soviet Constitution has always been the most liberal in the world, ever since the first Constitution was written after the Revolution.125 The Teacher then shows the true, chilling reality when she explains that the Constitution’s author, Bukharin, was shot soon after he wrote it. In the Russian hospital, as if to reinforce the question about whether people on the inside are sane or insane the figures of Ivanov and the Doctor blend. Both ask Alexander substantially the same question: ‘Do you play a musical instrument?’,126 asks the Doctor, whilst Ivanov asks, ‘What is your instrument?’.127 When Sacha arrives Ivanov sits in the Doctor’s chair and interviews Sacha as if he is the Doctor. The boundary between illusion and reality in such a system is, unintentionally, highlighted by the Doctor when he says to Alexander: The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while the people walking about outside are all mad is merely a literary conceit, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you that there’s not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there and the sick are in here. For example, you are here because you have delusions, that sane people are put in mental hospitals.128 In the totalitarian state the truth is a crazy concept. Alexander, the sane of the two prisoners, is imprisoned because he ‘did something really crazy’,129 which was to speak the truth. ‘Papa, don’t be crazy!’,130 sings Sacha in exclamation to his newly released father with the implication that he will be telling the truth again, as Fainberg, indeed, in reality did do so upon his release. The biggest, and in many ways most sinister by implication, assault on reality is that of Alexander’s release, which contains two elements to the illusion. It is, to borrow the play’s metaphor, orchestrated. Alexander has become an embarrassment to the Russians. He stubbornly refuses to recant and he goes on hunger strike. Not even a visit from his son Sacha can persuade him otherwise. The authoritarian state does not want the blood of a martyr’s death on its 125 126 127 128

egbdf, pages 29–30. egbdf, page 26. egbdf, page 17. egbdf, page 27. Michael Billington describes this scene in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour as, ‘Lewis Carroll in the Soviet Union’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 113. 129 egbdf, page 24. 130 egbdf, page 37.

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hands. So, it needs a way out. In an ending which has been misunderstood, but is beautifully explained by John Fleming,131 the ‘Colonel – or rather Doctor – Rozinsky’132 (note the slip of the Doctor’s tongue) has taken over Alexander’s case and ‘chose (his) cell – or rather ward-mate personally’.133 This act is not an accident – either by the state or Stoppard. The Colonel is a psychiatrist, but ‘he was not actually trained in psychiatry as such’.134 Instead, his speciality is ‘­semantics’.135 Verbal propaganda is a key tool of repressive societies, in particular the former Communist bloc. For example, the German Democratic ­Republic, the former Eastern Germany, was anything but democratic in the Greek sense of the word. Both Ivanov the madman and Alexander the dissident share the same full name – Alexander Ivanov. In the second instance of ­illusion the Colonel turns up and interviews both, but (deliberately) transposes them so that he asks Alexander if he has an orchestra – to which he answers correctly, No – and Ivanov if he believes sane people are put in mental hospitals – to which he, too, correctly answers, ‘I shouldn’t think so’.136 The state has got the answer it needed and the Colonel – whom the Doctor calls a ‘genius’137 – is able to declare, ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these men. Get them out of here’.138 There is a final ambiguity within the metaphor of illusion. It is a subtle but very important one. The phrase ‘everything is going to be all right’139 is spoken by Alexander to Sacha. Four times, later in the play, Sacha repeats it back to Alexander, but changes the is to can. Indeed, the very last words of the play are ‘Everything can be all right’.140 In the repressive world of the totalitarian state the certainty of Alexander’s version is replaced by the possibility of Sacha’s. Only in certain circumstances will it definitely be so and it only can be if the individual has the strength of character to stick to his beliefs in the face of overwhelming physical and mental pressure. But, Stoppard’s ambiguity does not end there. The last paragraph of George Orwell’s novel about state repression, Nineteen Eighty-Four, contains the phrase ‘everything was all right’.141 It 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, pages 124–127. egbdf, page 27. egbdf, page 27. egbdf, page 27. egbdf, page 28. egbdf, page 37. egbdf, page 36. egbdf, page 37. egbdf, page 25. egbdf, page 37. Nineteen Eighty-Four, page 311.

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refers to Winston’s ‘victory over himself’142 in which the former re-writer of newspaper articles to ensure conformity with Big Brother’s regime, having fallen in love with the politically incorrect Julia, is tortured into betraying her. He is re-educated by the Thought Police and he utters the words Stoppard adapts/ mimics as he succumbs to the regime. The significance of the repeated phrase in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and the nuances of the tenses of the verb illustrate the sinister duality of the authoritarian regime using Stoppard’s metaphor of illusion and reality.143 The same sense of illusion being used to shore up a totalitarian state occurs in Squaring the Circle. Stoppard refers to the ‘normally cosmetic’144 changes that the Communist government accedes to in order to placate its opposition. A practical illustration occurs when Jaruzelski, the Communist Prime Minister, visits a grocery shop. Stoppard’s directions describe the illusion of totalitarian government. (There is busy activity in the shop. Groceries of all kinds are being hastily unpacked from boxes and placed on empty shelves. When the shelves look fairly full, the PRIME MINISTER and his ENTOURAGE are seen to enter the shop.…) Jaruzelski:  And how is the food distribution? Party Official: It is working very well, Comrade. Jaruzelski:  Good, good. 142 Nineteen Eighty-Four, page 311. 143 There is a further echo of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the references to one and one is ­sometimes three (egbdf, page 35) and is always two (egbdf, page 36). In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston’s assertion that, ‘Two and two are four’, is met with O’Brien’s ­response that, ‘Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three’. (Nineteen Eighty-Four, page 263). In the Coda in Jumpers Dotty sings, ‘Two and two make roughly four’, (Jumpers, page 86), thereby emphasising the relativity and totalitarianism of Archie’s world. It is worth ­noting that Alexander and Sacha’s phrase has echoes of a personal experience for S­ toppard which he wove into another play, Where are They Now?, in a completely different sense. When interviewed by M. Gussow Stoppard recalls when, ‘I was about seven. I was at school in India, and I remember walking along a corridor, suddenly being overtaken by a great sense of everything being all right, or nothing being wrong’. – ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 82. In the same interview he admits he, ‘pillaged my own ­childhood’, when writing Where Are They Now?: Gale says, ‘I remember walking down one of the ­corridors…and I was suddenly totally happy’ – Where Are They Now?, pages 105–106. 144 Squaring the Circle, page 235.

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(He passes rapidly through. As soon as he has gone all the groceries are quickly removed and repacked.)145 The illusory nature of the role of a ‘parliament’, prevalent in so many totalitarian regimes, is derided by the Narrator as, ‘The usual ventriloquist act had fallen apart. The dummy had come to life’.146 One of its Speakers explains that the Communist state is a giant illusion: We are a sham society built on propaganda which has become a joke. We have sham planning, sham achievements in industry and science, sham debates, sham elections, sham socialism, sham justice, sham morality, and finally sham contentment because no one can tell the sham from the real.147 Wagner, in Night And Day, also reminds one of the ambiguous methods States employ: ‘There’s a government press officer here who’s the usual lying jerk, but there’s no way of telling whether he’s lying because he knows the truth or because he doesn’t know anything, so you can’t trust his mendacity either – he could be telling the truth half the time, by accident’.148 Language carries an ambiguity even when it is not being used disingenuously, as Professional Foul demonstrates. Stoppard has Anderson, one of the philosophers, drop in the casual sentence which contains its very own illusion: ‘A lot of chaps pointing out that we don’t always mean what we say, even when we manage to say what we mean’.149 Not one to let the idea drop easily ­Stoppard writes the play with several instances of scenes in which one conversation between characters is had against the background of other dialogue. At the colloquium ‘at different points during STONE’s speech, there is conversation between ANDERSON and MCKENDRICK’,150 while simultaneous translations of the speech into three other languages are also going on. In another scene a radio plays the commentary of a football match against the dialogue. In addition to spying and being a magician the other activity which most obviously relies on the relationship between illusion and reality is acting. Therefore, Stoppard’s decision to take a Shakespearean play about acting and turn it 145 146 147 148 149 150

Squaring the Circle, pages 235–236. Squaring the Circle, page 221. Squaring the Circle, page 221. Night and Day, pages 8–9. Professional Foul, page 44. Professional Foul, page 61.

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into one of his own merely demonstrates how the concept is written into the heart of his plays. Despite the presence in Hamlet of a troupe of players the biggest actor is the Prince himself. His response to his father’s command ‘to revenge’151 is ‘to put an antic disposition on’152 and, thus, begin a long process of acting to deceive Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, and Polonius. It works; in a direct demonstration of illusion and reality Claudius remarks, ‘nor th’exterior nor the inward man resembles that it was’.153 Stoppard picks up Shakespeare’s baton. Referring to Hamlet, Rosencrantz says of him, ‘He’s the Player’.154 Stoppard seizes on this opportunity to develop into one of the main themes of ­Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead the nature of acting which, like spying, is the process of creating an illusion against a background of reality. Stoppard’s play considers via the metaphor of the Players a range of aspects that expand upon Hamlet’s response to his mother’s enquiry as to what seems to be his problem:155 ‘Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not “seems”’.156 Stoppard is quickly on to the concept of seeming. One of Guildenstern’s ­hypotheses as to why the coin continuously comes up heads when tossed is to highlight as an explanation a possible duality in the role of probability in these unlikely outcomes, at the same time relating the idea of illusion and reality to the principal theme of the play, the role of chance and determinism in fate: Now –…tricky one, follow me carefully, it may prove a comfort. If we postulate, and we just have, that within un-, sub- or supernatural forces the probability is that the law of probability will not operate as a factor, then we must accept that the probability of the first part will not operate as a factor, in which case the law of probability will operate as a factor within un-, sub- or supernatural forces.157

151 152 153 154 155

Hamlet, Act i, scene v, line 9. Hamlet, Act i, scene v, line 172. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 6–7; Rosguil, page 27. RosGuil, page 108. See W. Demastes, Comedy Matters, page 43: ‘As the play unfolds…it becomes increasingly clear that it is nearly impossible for Hamlet to distinguish between seeming and being, despite his claims to know the difference’. 156 Hamlet, Act i, scene ii, line 76. See also Largo Desolato in which the same idea occurs: Page 23 – Leopold: ‘I sometimes have the feeling that I’m acting the part of myself instead of ­being myself’.; Page 24 – Leopold: ‘Outwardly I go on acting my role as if nothing  has happened but inside I am no longer the person you all take me for … it’s an illusion’. 157 RosGuil, pages 7–8.

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So much is not what it seems. In the mime the actor playing the murdered king becomes the English King: ‘An exchange of headgear creates the English King from the remaining player – that is, the Player who played the original murdered king’.158 Just as significantly, in the mime the Spies become representations of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: ‘…under their cloaks the two Spies are wearing coats identical to those worn by Ros and Guil…’.159 At one point Alfred, one of the players, enters in a robe and a blond wig impersonating Gertrude. In Act 3, in a scene missing from the film version, when the pirates board the ship, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet and the Player all leap into the three barrels on deck: ‘Hamlet…leaps into the left barrel. The Player leaps into the right barrel. Ros and Guil leap into the middle barrel’.160 The lights dim and then come up, by which time nothing is as it appeared to be: ‘The middle barrel (Ros and Guil’s) is missing. The lid of the right-hand barrel is raised cautiously, the heads of Ros and Guil appear. The lid of the other barrel (Hamlet’s) is raised. The head of the Player appears’.161 The barrels contain a further visual trick upon the arrival of the players on the boat: ‘Impossibly, the Tragedians climb out of the barrels’.162 Stoppard also uses the same running joke as Shakespeare does about the identity of the two courtiers. In Hamlet Claudius can never tell them apart. So it is in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Guil: (Claudius) couldn’t even be sure of mixing us up. Ros:   Without mixing us up.163 Furthermore, in Stoppard’s version even one of the eponymous protagonists cannot tell the difference, as Rosencrantz demonstrates when he introduces themselves to the players: Ros:   My name is Guildenstern, and his is Rosencrantz.     (Guil confers briefly with him.)    (without embarrassment) I’m sorry – his name’s Guildenstern, and I’m Rosencrantz.164

158 159 160 161 162 163 164

RosGuil, page 74. RosGuil, page 74. RosGuil, page 110. RosGuil, page 110. RosGuil, page 105. RosGuil, page 95. RosGuil, page 13.

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The English King presents a different problem: ‘He won’t know what we’re playing at’,165 predicts Rosencrantz. The play raises the issue of belief. In what is, perhaps, a playwright’s commentary on his audience Stoppard has the Player claim, ‘Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in’.166 Conversely, Guildenstern has ‘lost all capacity for disbelief’.167 What really marks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead out as play about illusion and reality are the continual references to acting. It is grounded in Hamlet’s condition and his response to it, as Guildenstern describes in a passage which sums up very concisely just how Shakespeare had made the same point: It really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise, loss of mirth, hints of claustrophobia, not to say delusions of imprisonment; invocations of camels, chameleons, capons, whales, weasels, hawks, handsaws – riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations…168 Rosencrantz’s analysis of it all has a similar duality: ‘It does not mean he is mad. It does not mean he isn’t. Very often, it does not mean anything at all’.169 It is the Player who explains the nature of acting’s illusion: ‘We’re actors – we’re the opposite of people!’.170 Pursuing the theme of dissembling, he explains that, ‘For some of us it is performance, for others, patronage. They are two sides of the same coin…’.171 In a demonstration of a relativist argument his point is that actors only exist by reference to their audience and not in their own right: We’re actors…we pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade; that someone would be watching. And then, gradually, no one was. We were caught high and dry.…habit and stubborn trust that our audience spied upon us from behind the nearest bush, forced our bodies 165 166 167 168 169 170 171

RosGuil, page 96. RosGuil, page 76. RosGuil, page 91. RosGuil, page 108. RosGuil, page 108. RosGuil, page 55. RosGuil, page 13.

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to blunder on long after they had emptied of meaning…No one shouted at us. The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself upon us; it was obscene.172 Note the reference to spying. The Player reinforces his point of the relativism of his profession: We can’t look each other in the face! … You don’t understand the humiliation of it – to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable – that somebody is watching…173 When asked by Rosencrantz what his ‘line’ in acting is he replies in terms which emphasise the dual nature of his work: ‘Tragedy, sir. Deaths and d­ isclosures, universal and particular, dénouements both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels including the suggestive…’.174 The key fact is that ‘We transport you into a world of intrigue and illusion’.175 Reality gets a different treatment: ‘– flagrante delicto at a price, but that comes under realism for which there are special terms’.176 Stoppard uses the licence the medium of his film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead gives him to reinforce the contradiction of illusion and reality inherent in the process of acting. At several points the players ­appear in costumes and masks,177 just as Rosencrantz sleeps in a mask when on the boat. In a vignette, using both masks and a mirror, Stoppard highlights his theme unequivocally when he has Guildenstern open a hatch within a door to reveal in the aperture the sight of a Tragedian, on the other side, adjusting his mask (which, for the sake of the theme of duality, he is doing using a mirror).178 The film includes a Player who appears through a haze of smoke,179 a puppet ­theatre (which also appears out of a red smoke bomb) and a scene in which behind Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the players in silhouette. 172 173 174 175 176 177

RosGuil, pages 55–56. RosGuil, page 54. RosGuil, page 14. RosGuil, page 14. RosGuil, page 14. In the film Stoppard omits the reference to realism. Stoppard uses the medium of film very powerfully in this scene to emphasise duality in a way he cannot on stage. 178 In another subtlety to emphasise duality Stoppard introduces this scene with echoes of voices. 179 To add to the sense of illusion/duality The Player is dressed as an English King.

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During the rehearsal of the mime show of the events of Hamlet Rosencrantz and ­Guildenstern appear at the back of the stage, staring out at the audience who are watching them. In a passage in both the film and the play, but much more obvious in the film because of the nature of the medium, the Player explains (in words which echo Hamlet’s rationale for acting that it should ‘hold… the mirror up to nature’180) what the dumbshow is for: ‘…it’s a device really – it makes the action that follows more or less comprehensible; you understand, we are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style’.181 Acting, like life, is a perpetual occupation. When asked by Guildenstern when he is going to change into his costume The Player replies: Player: I never change out of it, sir. Guil:  Always in character. Player: That’s it.182 It follows, therefore, that the actor regards himself as always on stage: Guil:  Aren’t you going to – come on? Player: I am on. Guil:  But if you are on, you can’t come on. Can you? Player: I start on.183 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern realise that there’s an aspect of acting in all of us. Guildenstern complains that, ‘we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to act’.184 The Player’s answer is simple,

180 Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, line 21. The Inspector in Cahoot’s Macbeth, when gate-crashing the illicit performance of Macbeth says, ‘I come here to be taken out of myself, not to be shown a reflection of the banality of my own’. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 187. In an argument in support of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’s ‘value as theatre of criticism’, Berlin suggests that, ‘Stoppard’s play is holding the mirror of art up to the art that holds the mirror up to nature’. – N. Berlin, ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Theatre of Criticism’, Modern Drama, xvi (Dec. 1973) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 112. 181 RosGuil, page 69. 182 RosGuil, page 25. 183 RosGuil, page 25. 184 RosGuil, page 58.

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linking the acting theme to one of the play’s other themes, the nature of truth (‘You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn’.185), but selfreferential: ‘Act natural’.186 Linking to the play’s theme of the determinism of fate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, like actors, need instructions. Hence, they become concerned to find the letter that had gone missing, only to turn up in Guildenstern’s pocket. Words are, after all, as Guildenstern remarks, ‘all we have to go on’.187 The crux of the acting metaphor is related to one of the play’s other themes; death. The Player seems to specialise in it (note, again, the duality of the last method): ‘Deaths for all ages and occasions! Deaths by suspension, convulsion, consumption, incision, execution, asphyxiation and malnutrition –! Climactic carnage, by poison and steel –! Double deaths by duel’188 But the subject is as problematic for him as the need for an audience, ­albeit in a different way. The Player explains the point, highlighting an inverted duality: I had an actor once who was condemned to hang…so I got permission to have him hanged in the middle of a play…and you wouldn’t believe it, he just wasn’t convincing! It was impossible to suspend one’s disbelief…he did nothing but cry all the time – right out of character –189 Guildenstern is left to conclude; ‘You die so many times; how can you expect them to believe in your death’.190 He continues his explanation, now relating the matter both to the exit/entrance structure of the play and to another of its themes; the nature of truth: …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

185 186 187 188 189 190

RosGuil, page 58. RosGuil, page 58. RosGuil, page 32. RosGuil, page 116. RosGuil, page 76. RosGuil, page 76.

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unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death191 But, again emphasising the duality of illusion, Stoppard shows that one can act death. For when Guildenstern stabs the Player and he dies only to get up and brush himself down, because the dagger is a theatrical blade which slides into the handle, Rosencrantz, at least (and perhaps most of the audience) admits he was completely convinced the murder was real: ‘Oh, very good! Very good! Took me in completely – didn’t he take you in completely –’192 Stoppard continues his exploration of Shakespearean illusion and reality in his short play, Cahoot’s Macbeth. Macbeth is, in part, an exploration of what seems real, involving the ‘horrible shadow’193 of Banquo’s ghost, Apparitions and, most notably, the witches, who stand on the cusp of humanity and imagination: ‘What are these, so withered and so wild in their attire, that look not like the inhabitants o’the earth, and yet are on’t?’,194 asks Banquo. In the world of Macbeth ‘Confusion…hath made its masterpiece’195 and there is a duality in its nature: ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’.196 The witches, like the Player on board the ship in the film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, are ‘vanished…into the air’197 In the midst of it is a man who, like Hamlet, is playing a role. Macbeth decides to ‘play the humble host’198 while Malcolm’s damning verdict on his reality reflects the same difference between the inner and outer man that Hamlet (acting) exhibited: ‘To show an unfelt sorrow is an office which the false man does easy’.199 There is a near identical sense of illusion in the real world of Czechoslovakia. There is the same dichotomy between the inner and outer man as the Inspector states, ‘just because I didn’t laugh out loud it doesn’t mean I wasn’t enjoying it’.200 Non-conformity is seen as ‘an identity crisis’201 and the Inspector identifies Wittgenstein’s point that the meaning of language is contextual,

191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201

RosGuil, pages 76–77. RosGuil, pages 115–116. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 200; Macbeth, Act iii, scene iv, line 106. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 179; Macbeth, Act i, scene iii, lines 39–42. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 188; Macbeth, Act ii, scene iii, line 68. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 179; Macbeth, Act i, scene i, line 11. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 180; Macbeth, Act i, scene iii, lines 80–81. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 198; Macbeth, Act iii, scene iv, line 4. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 190; Macbeth, Act ii, scene iii, lines 138–139. Cahoot’s Macbeth, pages 190–191. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 194.

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not absolute: ‘Who’s to say what was meant?’.202 The whole exploration of the theme of illusion and reality is crystallized in the Inspector’s threat that, ‘you’d better get rid of the idea that there’s a special Macbeth which you do when I’m not around, and some other Macbeth for when I am around which isn’t worth doing. You’ve only got one Macbeth’.203 The actors, using Wittgenstein’s process of learning language through speaking it, adapt and are enabled to keep performing Macbeth, despite the Inspector’s attempts to close down the production, because they in the course of the play learn Dogg’s language from Easy and can carry on the show by playing it in Dogg: Macbeth: Frantic, Macduff! Fry butter ban loss underlay – November glove!…[Lay on, Macduff; and damned be him that first cries ‘Hold enough!’.]204 Stoppard’s point is one of linguistic duality. Shakespearean English is to the modern ear hard to understand. But, applying Wittgenstein’s theory, it can be more easily understood by paying attention to context, the nature of the actors’ delivery etc. In the totalitarian world of Cahoot’s Macbeth Shakespearean English is to modern English what Dogg’s language is to English. The audience recognises the words of Dogg’s language, but it can only understand them by reference to their context. The dissident actors can converse in it but the symbol of the repressive state, the Inspector, cannot understand them. Structurally the most illusory aspect of acting is the play-within-a-play which occurs on several occasions in Stoppard’s canon. Whilst Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play-alongside-a-play which contains a play-withina-play and Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth are plays about people producing plays Stoppard delivers, in The Real Inspector Hound, a play not only within a play but a play about people watching a play who at some point become involved in the play they are watching. Anyone sitting in the audience who hasn’t already decoded the duality in the title of The Real Inspector Hound as it commences will soon know that illusion and reality are going to be the order of the play when they see themselves reflected in mirror. The theme runs through the play205 until the murder/mystery is explained by Magnus’ line, ‘I have been 202 203 204 205

Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 191. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 188. Cahoot’s Macbeth, pages 209–210; Macbeth, Act v, scene viii, lines 33–34. Michael Billington observes that, ‘(The Real Inspector Hound) is not a Pirandellian play about the world of reality invading that of illusion: it is about two parallel worlds coming into collision’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 64.

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leading a double life – at least!’.206 The Real Inspector Hound contains a number of mysteries, all of which are resolved through dualities sewn into the plot by Stoppard. Lord Albert Muldoon went missing ten years ago while out for a walk along the cliffs. His half-brother, Magnus, has curiously ‘turned up out of the blue from Canada just the other day’.207 A critic, Higgs, has gone missing while his understudy, Moon, raises questions about his own stand-in, Puckeridge, and an unexplained body lies dead on the floor from the very start of the play. In a play about illusion and reality it is Moon who sums up its resolution with, appropriately enough, a double entendre in the review he is writing: ‘It is my belief that here we are concerned with what I have referred to elsewhere as the nature of identity’.208 Higgs turns out to be the body on the floor. Magnus confesses, ‘I am not the real Magnus Muldoon’.209 Rather, as he removes the pretence of his moustache and gets up out of his wheelchair, thereby ending his simulation of a cripple, he reveals himself to be not only ‘the real Inspector Hound’210 but also ‘Albert – who lost his memory and joined the force, rising by merit to the rank of Inspector’.211 Simultaneously, Moon recognises him as Puckeridge. The Real Inspector Hound is founded on an illusion from its very start: the two critics are part of the audience but they are, at the same time, in a play in which their role is to review a play, a pastiche of an Agatha Christie country house whodunit, which both they and the audience are watching. The illusion gets overlaid upon itself when the two critics become involved in the murder/ mystery itself. Birdboot takes a telephone call from the handset in the stage setting. To reinforce the duality the call is from his wife – ‘For god’s sake, Myrtle’, he explodes, ‘– I’ve told you never to ‘phone me at work!’.212 From that point on the country house drama, in another example of duality, starts to repeat itself with Birdboot finding himself in the role of Simon Gascoyne. The opening confrontation between the country house characters, Felicity and Simon, Felicity: You! Simon:   Er, yes – hello again.213 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213

The Real Inspector Hound, page 48. The Real Inspector Hound, page 17. The Real Inspector Hound, page 28. The Real Inspector Hound, page 48. The Real Inspector Hound, page 48. The Real Inspector Hound, page 48. The Real Inspector Hound, page 36. The Real Inspector Hound, page 20.

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is replicated when Felicity enters and encounters Birdboot214 and recalls the ­liaison they had as actress and critic the previous night. The other critic assumes the role of Inspector Hound while two of the play’s characters, Hound and Simon, usurp the roles as critics. The Real Inspector Hound and the Christie spoof become like a dramatic Mobius strip,215 twisted around on itself, as the reality of the first and the fiction of the second intermingle. There are striking similarities between some of the plot and characters of The Real Inspector Hound and those of one Agatha Christie play in particular, The Mousetrap,216 which allude to another element of duality. The Mousetrap,217 it should be noted, is the name of the play-within-a-play that the Hamlet amends for the Players to act before Claudius and Gertrude. The Real Inspector Hound is, thus, constructed around the framework of a play-within-a-play.218 Stoppard’s interest in ‘that within which passeth show’219 may explain his decision to undertake a number of adaptations of middle-European plays. He explores the affected formality and mannerisms of Viennese society in Undiscovered Country, his adaptation of Schnitzler’s Das Weite Land (The Distant Land). It is a world in which hidden relationships are never far from the s­ urface – Genia has an affair with Otto, her husband Friedrich finishes one affair with Mrs Natter and commences another one with Erna Wahl while for von Aigner ‘women have always been putty in his hands’,220 according to Friedrich. But, in an example of what comes close to being an application of Occam’s razor, ­Genia and Mauer encapsulate the illusion of Viennese society in their ­exchange about the ‘foolish games…(of)…love affairs’:221 Genia: Lies? Can one have lies in a game? That’s called bluff, all part of the fun. 214 The Real Inspector Hound, page 37. 215 Terry Hodgson comments, ‘Christie’s Mousetrap is formulaic. Hound mocks the formula’. – T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, page 54. 216 Having seen a production of The Mousetrap in London I am unable to expand upon this observation any further because, like all members of the audience, I took an oath at the end of the production not to reveal details of the plot. 217 Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, line 224. 218 June M. Schlueter comments, ‘Stoppard is able to use the play-within-a-play not simply in the traditional way, for enhancing reality, but rather to suggest the nature of role-playing and the power of illusion over reality’. – JM. Schlueter, ‘Moon and Birdboot’ in H. Bloom (ed), Tom Stoppard, pages 76–80. 219 Hamlet, Act i, scene ii, line 85. 220 Undiscovered Country, page 107. 221 Undiscovered Country, page 174.

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Mauer: A game? Oh yes, if that’s how it was played! I assure you, Genia, I would have nothing at all against a world in which love really was in fact nothing but a delightful game…But in that case…in that case let it be played honestly if you will, let it be rotten with honesty, then perhaps you have a point. But this hole-in-thecorner posturing, this bogus civility between people made wretched by jealousy, cowardice, lust –…– This much-vaunted freedom one finds here lacks conviction. That’s why the happiness it seeks eludes it…and why its laughter dies in a grin.222 The pretences are obvious from the start, when Stoppard describes Mrs Wahl as if ‘she speaks through her nose in an aristocratic manner which is not quite convincing’,223 and continues right until the end when Friedrich ‘speaks to Mrs von Aigner in his laughing mischievous vein, which is now mask-like’.224 Undiscovered Country is stocked full of examples of the illusionary facades that the mores required. Genia admits that, ‘I lie, I’m a hypocrite. I act out this farce for everybody…I act the part of a respectable married woman – and at night leave my window open for my lover’.225 Friedrich tells Adele that he ‘had the impression that you like ambiguous (relationships)’,226 which is a charge she denies. The play culminates in a duel between Friedrich and Otto which Genia describes as, ‘this charade of a foolish vanity defending a travestied honour’.227 Stoppard pursues the nature of illusion in Rough Crossing. The structure of the play contains not a play-within-a-play but a musical-within-a-play as the writers and cast re-write and rehearse a musical bound for Broadway while on a cruise liner to New York. Within the musical itself Ivor, the actor playing the part of the leading man, reveals that, ‘neither of us is what we seem’.228 His character, Justin Deverell, turns out to be just so. He is revealed as a famous ping-pong player, called Bobby Tomkins, who is a mask for an international jewel thief. As in Undiscovered Country the subject of lying gets consideration when Turai, Ivor and Natasha concoct a ruse to convince Adam that when he heard Ivor professing his love for Natasha they were really rehearsing the f­inal scene of the musical in the roles of their characters. The real scene 222 223 224 225 226 227 228

Undiscovered Country, page 175. Undiscovered Country, page 79. Undiscovered Country, page 184. Undiscovered Country, pages 158–159. Undiscovered Country, page 109. Undiscovered Country, page 180. Rough Crossing, page 247.

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is repeated in the musical. Stoppard even goes part of the way to repeating the trick he pulled off much more extensively with Moon and Birdboot in The Real Inspector Hound when Dvornichek, the cabin steward in the play, appears momentarily as Murphy (the name by which Turai refers to him in the play), the Irish policeman, in the musical. At one stage the passengers are taken in by a lifeboat drill which has them believing that the ship really is sinking and Dvornichek develops a curious capability of swaying when the ship has no obvious motion and not swaying with the motion of the ship when all the other passengers do. Stoppard’s stage directions emphasise the duality of this visual impression: ‘…when the boat is in a storm, and when everybody else is staggering about, the boat’s movements seem to cancel out Dvornichek’s so that he is the only person moving about normally’.229 The multiplicity of possible endings for the play – Turai and Gal’s original, the pretence that Ivor and Natasha were just rehearsing, Ivor’s own suggestion and the version offered by the unseen Captain which involves a whole new musical entitled All In The Same Boat – merely reiterates the interplay between the real and the illusory. Duality We’re two of a kind, you and I.230 prisoner, The Gamblers

∵ Whilst the paradox of illusion and reality dominates the Stoppardian stage because of the allegorical implications of its relativism it is really just the most powerful subset in the universal whole of duality. Nowhere is this more evident in Stoppard’s works than in the personalities of particular individuals and there is a recurrent theme of characters with two sides to their nature.231 It is most obvious in the opening scene of The Invention of Love, as Charon demonstrates: 229 Rough Crossing, page 197. 230 The Gamblers, page 13. 231 Toby Zinman argues that Stoppard’s emphasis on doubling is greatest in Travesties. He refers to, ‘Stoppard’s inclination to doubling and twinning, linguistically and structurally, an inclination more intensely rendered in (Travesties) than in any other, in that the impulse to travesty is itself an impulse to double, to twin the original’. – T. Zinman, ‘Travesties,

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Charon: A poet and a scholar is what I was told. aeh:   I think it must be me. Charon: Both of them? aeh:   I’m afraid so. Charon: It sounded like two different people.232 Stoppard admits it is the case: ‘What initially attracted me to Housman was the two sides of him. The romantic mind of the poet and the analytical mind of the classical scholar’.233 In what is seemingly a conscious Stoppardian joke he adds, ‘I shall think twice about doing it again’. ‘How am I to make my mark?’,234 Housman asks his older self, aeh. The answer underlines the duality Stoppard wishes to explore:235 aeh:   Do you mean as a poet or a scholar? Housman: I don’t mind.

232 233

234 235

Night and Day, The Real Thing’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 124. Weldon Durham also points out the recurrence of duality in Travesties. He notes that, ‘in Act i Joyce wears a jacket from one suit and the trousers from another; in Act ii, he wears the other halves of the outfit’. – W. Durham, ‘The Structure And Function of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties’ in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook, page 204. He also notes (op cit, pages 200–203) that, ‘each of the two acts of Travesties is divisible into five episodes’, where, ‘structural parallels are evident’. The Invention of Love, page 2. Stoppard, in an interview with T. Hill, in the Daily Telegraph 4 October 1997. Fleming ­rather  concisely explains how this facet of Housman fits into Stoppard’s overall works: ‘Like the metaphor that undergirds both Hapgood and Arcadia, one sees Stoppard’s continuing interest in the duality of the human temperament and the reconciliation of seeming ­opposites’. – J. Fleming, Finding Order amid Chaos, page 226. Jernigan, on the ­other hand, argues that Stoppard was more attracted by the fact that Housman symbolises scholarship for scholarship’s sake – ‘It is my contention’, Jernigan says, ‘that it is this  aspect of Housman – perhaps even more than Housman’s duality – which drew ­Stoppard to him’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 146. Hersh Zeifman notes the imbalance between the two sides of Housman: ‘If Housman’s head (the  classicist) outweighed his heart (the romantic), it is because the head was given full rein while the heart was intentionally repressed’. – H. Zeifman, ‘The comedy of Eros: Stoppard in love’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 194. The Invention of Love, page 35. Stoppard subtly reinforces his point about the duality of character with his introductory stage direction for The Invention of Love: ‘The two groups of characters appearing only in Act One or Act Two, respectively, may be played by the same group of actors’. (The Invention of Love, Characters). Harold Bloom argues that, ‘The Invention of Love is an admirable play, but hardly just to the poet Housman’. – H. Bloom (ed), Tom Stoppard, page 11.

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aeh:    I think it helps to mind. Housman: Can’t one be both? aeh:    No. Not of the first rank. Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship.236 Hapgood, Stoppard explains to Michael Billington, was written to explore the duality of personality. If there’s a central idea it is the proposition that in each of our characters…the person who gets up in the morning and puts on the clothes is the working majority of a dual personality, part of which is always there in a submerged state.237 It is an idea that Stoppard must have been mulling over for years as he had ­referred to it, as if in a note to himself, in Enter a Free Man when Linda says of her father, George Riley, the dreamer-inventor who spends half of his life at home and half down the pub, ‘There’s two of everyone’.238 It’s as if it is ­essential to the persona as Linda twice adds, ‘You need that’.239 More than that, Stoppard sees the duality of personality as a key to his work: ‘I could write an a­ wfully good book about The Plays of Tom Stoppard’, he told Macaulay, ‘to me, it’s obvious: many of my plays are about unidentical twins, about double acts’.240 One such example, Ezra Chater in Arcadia, is at the heart of the mystery in the play 236 The Invention of Love, pages 35–36. 237 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Billington, ‘Stoppard’s Secret Agent’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 194. 238 Enter a Free Man, pages 6 and 51. Richard Corballis plays down the significance of Linda’s statement: ‘I wonder if Linda’s “two of everyone” speech really means very much’. – R. Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork, page 32. See also T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, page 16 for a brief commentary on the significance of duality in Enter a Free Man. John Knapp cites Kahneman who ‘suggests that human beings have, in effect, two selves’, arguing that Stoppard exploits the difference between the experiencing self and the remembering self in members of the audience at the final scene in Arcadia – see J. Knapp, ‘Stoppard’s Arcadia: “This is not Science; this is story-telling”’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, pages 116–118. 239 Enter a Free Man, pages 6 and 51. 240 Stoppard, in an interview with A. Macaulay, ‘The Man Who Was Two Men’, Financial Times, 31 October 1998, page 17. Even the two forms of language Gladys uses in If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank – one for the speaking clock and the other free verse (but both spoken with the rhythm of the speaking clock) – suggest duality of personality: see I. Mackean, Sir Tom Stoppard. In Search of Reality.

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of what Byron did during his stay at Sidley Park and Stoppard’s characterisation of him reveals the importance of the dual personality: Bernard: (wildly) Ezra wasn’t a botanist! He was a poet! Hannah: He was not much of either, but he was both. Valentine: It’s not a disaster.241 Septimus, too, has a dual personality: tutor to Thomasina and, thereafter, a reclusive hermit. Flora Crewe’s personality is a combination of dualities which her sister, Mrs Swan, reminiscing, reveals. In the 1980s she has, ‘her name all over the place and students and professors so interested and so sweet about her poetry’. But, back in the 1930s, ‘Nobody gave tuppence about her while she was alive except to get her knickers off’.242 The two Ruths of Night And Day ­allow Stoppard to present someone whose inner thoughts are not mirrored by her outer expressions. For Stoppard, the duality of personality extends even as far as God, whom George Moore identifies as having the twin roles of Creator and the source of morality. Hapgood gives Stoppard his chance to explore the idea further and in multiple dimensions as ‘the idea’, he told Stephen Schiff, ‘was to use the dualities in quantum physics as a metaphor for the duality in people’.243 He was much more explicit about the nature of Hapgood in a note: The play is about dualities and uncertainties and about two people ­ retending to be one person and one person pretending to be two people, p and a cartload of such things…244 Stoppard also explains how this idea meshes with the light metaphor: ‘… the dual nature of light works for people as well as things, and the one you meet in public is simply the working majority of that person. It’s a conceit. 241 Arcadia, page 119. 242 Indian Ink, page 26. 243 Stoppard, in an interview with S. Schiff, ‘Full Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 216. Paul Delaney comments, highlighting both the dualities of Hapgood and their fusing: ‘Drawing a link between the ambiguities of human personality and the mysteries of the cosmos, suggesting a join between that which is random and that which is divinely ordered, between happenstance and goodness, the dualities of Hapgood embody dichotomies which permeate Stoppard’s plays’. – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 126. 244 Stoppard, in ‘Hapgood says’ (quoted in J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 287, Note 8, Chapter 9).

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It may have some truth to it’.245 The light metaphor also led to a play about espionage: ‘I didn’t research quantum mechanics but I was fascinated in the mystery which lies in the foundation of the observable world, of which the most familiar is the wave/particle duality of light. I thought it was a good metaphor for the human personality. The language of espionage lends itself to this ­duality – think of the double agent’.246 Kerner expresses Stoppard’s interest in the d­ uality of personality, at one stage incorporating the spy metaphor, in his conversation with Blair: We are all doubles. Even you. Your cover is Bachelor of Arts first class, with an amusing incomprehension for sciences, but you insist on laboratory standards for reality, while I insist on artfulness. 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.247 This duality of personality, (to which Kerner was not referring, although he might just as well have been, when he described his anti-matter programme as, ‘like needing two trains to arrive together on the same line without destroying each other’,248) is best illustrated in the character differences between Elizabeth Hapgood and the false twin she impersonates, Celia. This is Stoppard’s one person pretending to be two. In Elizabeth’s creation both applied to be spies as ‘they were seeing twins’249 but, as Celia admits (in an intentionally ambiguous malapropism), ‘I failed the attitude test. Betty was exactly their cup of tea so they kept her anyway’.250 Celia smokes and swears liberally, whereas Elizabeth, by routine, does neither. As Celia, Hapgood sums up the difference in the two characters: ‘…she was always the scholarship girl and I was the delinquent’.251 In the office Elizabeth is consummately organised and capable whereas Celia is flustered. It is in the office that the duality is nearly undone: 245 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 78. 246 Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater vii’ in P. ­Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 180. 247 Hapgood, page 53. 248 Hapgood, page 41. 249 Hapgood, page 50. 250 Hapgood, page 50. 251 Hapgood, page 57.

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there, when with what he thinks is Celia, Ridley is ‘unsettled, somehow thrown by seeing her in this office, in these clothes…She is so obviously Hapgood’.252 One is a photographer, the other a spy. Stoppard emphasises the difference in his stage directions: Hapgood comes flying out from the other door. We haven’t seen her like this. She is different from her other self as the flat is different from her office; the office being rather cleaner and better organized…253 Hapgood impersonates a twin sister as part of the plot to expose Ridley. Ridley is completely taken (as is, probably, most of the audience): ‘The sister is perfect’,254 he tells Blair. She plays her alter ego sister consummately, sleeping with Ridley, calling him by his Christian name and remembers to feign unfamiliarity in her office. Stoppard has Ridley reinforce the differences between them: She may be your twin but there the resemblance ends. She’s a pot-head, it reeks, she’s growing the stuff in the window-box, she won’t stop talking, she bites her nails…255 The essence of the duality in personality which the two Hapgood twins symbolises is best summed up in Celia’s admission to Ridley: ‘I’m your dreamgirl…– Hapgood without the brains or the taste’.256 The duality of personality between the two ‘sisters’, but actually inside Elizabeth, is emphasised as Blair observes to her: You use the security link with Ottawa to play chess, you arrive in Vienna after dog-legging through Amsterdam on a false passport and then proceed to send postcards home as if you’re on bloody holiday, you use an intelligence officer on government time to dispatch football boots around the Home Counties…For someone who’s so safe you’re incredibly, I don’t know, there’s a little anarchist inside you…257 For those of his audience who have not followed how the Celia twin works in relation to Elizabeth Hapgood Stoppard explains, ‘It’s not really dual 252 253 254 255 256 257

Hapgood, page 56. Hapgood, page 47. Hapgood, page 62. Hapgood, page 49. Hapgood, page 61. Hapgood, page 46.

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personality. It’s just that one chooses to “be” one part of oneself, and not another part of oneself. …It’s that sort of duality.…they’re both part of the whole person’.258 He continues: What it is inclined to mean is that circumstances lead her to take on what she would initially think of as a false personality, but in doing so she discovers she is using part of herself that she simply hasn’t used but has no difficulty in expressing, in assuming. So the woman who wouldn’t touch Ridley with a bargepole begins to fancy him in a different set of coordinates. The woman who rather disdains him begins to find him sympathetic. These two arcs intersect at the moment where she kills him, where the working majority of Hapgood pulls the trigger.259 Stoppard splits Hapgood’s personality beyond its duality. She is referred to or addressed in different ways by different characters: Blair calls her ‘Elizabeth’; Merryweather, ‘Mrs Hapgood’; Kerner, Russian versions of Elizabeth or diminutives thereon; Wates, ‘ma’am’ etc.260 This suggests multiplicity of character, but even Stoppard admits that this is not so: ‘It’s not multiple personalities. It’s a complex personality only part of which runs the show’.261 He also extends her duality to her progeny. Elizabeth’s son is a metaphorical extension of the same point. The product of a liaison between Hapgood and a Russian scientist – Kerner – his father, is left to point out right at the end of the play, ‘Of course, he is half English’.262 Stoppard takes the duality metaphor to its conclusion in Kerner’s speech about square roots. By implication there is a (square) root to all our personalities which, to use another metaphor, is two sides of the same coin: Kerner: …what is the square root of sixteen? Blair: Is this a trick question? Kerner: For you, probably. Blair: Four, then. 258 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, one goes through’ in M. Gussow Conversations with Stoppard, page 79. 259 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 79. 260 Paul Delaney also observes how Stoppard distinguishes between Christian names and surnames in Hapgood to suggest duality – see P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, pages 132–133. 261 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 80. 262 Hapgood, page 66.

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Kerner: Correct. But also minus four. Two correct answers. Positive and negative. I am very fond of that minus, it is why I am what I am.263 Stoppard even manages to get Kerner to tie this point in with quantum physics by reference to one of its contributor’s other famous theories264 – the theory of relativity (relativity being a subject which plays a significant role in Stoppard’s analysis of the moral universe): But the famous equation was not precisely found in its famous form, it was really the square of that, and E equals mc squared is the square root. But, of course, so is E equals minus mc squared, an equally correct ­solution…Nobody took any notice of the minus for years, it didn’t seem to mean anything…you’d need a minus-world, an ­anti-world, with all the charges reversed, positive for negative, ­negative for positive. But finally someone trusted the mathematics and said – Well, maybe there is antimatter as well as matter; anti-atoms made of anti-particles. And lo!, they started to find them.265 It’s the very same anti-matter that Kerner thinks he has found a way to slow down, which is the nature of his scientific research – ‘…he’s the man with the anti-particle trap’.266 To complete his point, Kerner runs the human duality point into the spy metaphor:

263 Hapgood, page 52. 264 Stoppard largely eschews chance to utilise (or, at least discuss via the dialogue) the ­metaphorical possibilities inherent in quantum theory concerning the interrelationship between small sub-atomic items. The act of measurement on one of a pair of protons and the consequent change in behaviour of the first proton has been shown to influence the behaviour of the second proton in the form of an opposite change (see JC. Polkingthorne, chapter on ‘Real Togetherness in The Quantum World’). This is implied in the relationship between the two Hapgood ‘twins’ and is most evident in the scene where Celia Hapgood visits Hapgood’s office and is best summed up by Celia’s explanation of her marriage; ‘Actually it was Mr Newton who did for Betty and me. She said he’d go bad, warned me off, sister to sister. So, I crossed her off my list and married him. Then he went bad. So of course I never forgave her’. (Hapgood, page 56). Stoppard completely ignores any metaphorical potential in another quantum mechanical idea that there are qualities which are latent within atomic entities (see JC. Polkingthorne, The Quantum World, page 81). 265 Hapgood, page 52. 266 Hapgood, page 12.

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You have been too long in the spy business, you think everybody has no secret or one big secret, they are what they seem or they are the opposite. You look at me and think: Which is he? Plus or minus? If only you could figure it out like looking into me to find my root.267 In Hapgood the two people pretending to be one person are the identical ­Ridley twins (shadowed by the Russian identical twins, too). However, S­ toppard does not explore that part of his assertion of what the play is about to anywhere near the same extent as he does the reciprocal. Two people pretending to be one appears to result in negative conclusions. It is only by means of two Ridleys pretending to be a single person that the illusion of the briefcase ­opening and swap in the opening pool scene can be pulled off. Similarly, it results both in Ganchev’s death in Paris and the Athens operation being destroyed to the benefit of the Russians. The Russian twins are ‘reflectors’268 (decoys, in spy parlance, like the milk-bottle tops in the missiles and the ­non-sensitive material that Kerner is allowed to pass) who enable the Russians to get what they want. The only main duality seen in the Ridleys is that the Ridley who is mad with Hapgood at the end of Act 1 because she tells him, ‘You’re not safe’269 is a different Ridley from the one who leaps at the opportunity to get Joe back when he is deceived into thinking he has been kidnapped. Implicit in the idea of duality within personality and in the acceptance of the unpredictable world of Heisenberg, in contrast to the determinism of ­Newton, is the idea of choice. This, too, is not an avenue Stoppard travels very far down. The main choice in the play is Hapgood’s. She has ‘a choice between losing a daddy and losing a prize double’.270 Hapgood chooses ‘joes’ in preference to Joe. By the end of the play she has ceased to enjoy this choice, the change in her personality perhaps reflected in the one swear word she utters as ­Elizabeth. Her other big choice is to shoot the man she has just slept with; a choice that is made in an instant. Kerner also has choices. He chose to defect and he, seemingly, has allowed himself to be turned back. Blair, on the other hand, sees life as a constant choice: he is an ‘either-or’271 man. In a double dose of duality the spy story is only explained by the appearance of twins: two sets of real ones, the Russian agents and the Ridleys, and the

267 268 269 270 271

Hapgood, page 52. Hapgood, page 34. Hapgood, page 33. Hapgood, page 60. Hapgood, page 64.

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fake Hapgoods – all sets of identical twins. This second metaphor of duality is also derived from quantum mechanics, as Kerner explains to Hapgood; ‘an electron is like twins, each one unique, a unique twin’.272 The twin metaphor quickly becomes part of the spy story because of ‘the famous kgb twins’.273 To emphasise the point and complicate the story the twins are identical twins, as Hapgood relates: Ridley’s by the pool, Ridley’s Russian is getting dressed. Merryweather’s Russian arrives. Merryweather follows his Russian in and he follows the other Russian out and why not? – they’re identical and he only saw them one at a time,…Now Ridley comes from the pool and the same thing happens to him. He followed one Russian in and he follows the other out, and why not? – they’re identical and he only saw them one at a time. Then he comes to me and he says, ‘You didn’t tell me it was twins’.274 Blair has worked it out, too: ‘It wasn’t Georgi today, it was twins’,275 he remarks to Kerner. The final explanation of how Kerner’s briefcase could have had material ­removed from it without it being opened is only revealed when the British and Americans realise that there are identical Ridley twins, too. In the 1988 text this knowledge is only fully revealed in the second pool scene and is made obvious in the stage directions: nb. There are two Ridleys in this scene, and the actor playing Ridley plays both of them, i.e. he plays whichever Ridley is in plain view, since the Ridley twins only appear one at a time (Except at the beginning when a ‘double’ is required to re-enter behind the torch beam)276 The ultimate proof of the solution to the puzzle is given to the audience: Man’s voice: (on radio) You know it’s twins? Hapgood:  Yes, I know it’s twins.277

272 273 274 275 276 277

Hapgood, page 36. Hapgood, page 13. Hapgood, page 14. Hapgood, page 11. Hapgood, page 61. Hapgood, page 63.

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Stoppard also has a structural twinning in the play. Most scenes have their twin in terms of both location and content. There are two pool scenes. In the first there is a switching scene which is designed to catch the agent leaking information. The trap fails. The second pool scene contains another switching scene which, this time, succeeds in catching the Ridley twins. There are two scenes at the zoo. They are the venue for two scientific discussions between Blair and Kerner, which have implications for duality: the first, on the wave/ particle light experiment and quantum mechanics; the second on square roots and the theory of relativity. There are two scenes in Hapgood’s office, the first of which sees the British and Americans trying to resolve what went wrong with the first swimming pool trap and the second which sees the commencement of the second trap. A third scene in Hapgood’s office has no twin, but that is because in the third scene it is Hapgood’s twin ‘sister’, Celia, who is involved. There are also two scenes on the rugby field at Joe’s school: the first is with Hapgood and Blair, the second with Hapgood and Kerner – the two men in her life. Stoppard’s use of the structure of the play to be part of the vehicle can be compared with the use of bifurcating time periods in Arcadia to achieve the same vehicular effect. The duality of personality is a subject Stoppard just cannot let go as it ­recurs in his Chekhov adaptations. Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, Nina in The Seagull and Ivanov in general are studies in the duality of personality. The same duality is inherent in Alexander Herzen, the key character in Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia trilogy. He describes himself thus: ‘I wasn’t an accident. I was the child of an affair of the heart, given my surname for my mother’s German heart. Being half-Russian and half-German, at heart I’m Polish, of course…I ­often feel quite partitioned’.278 Ironically, Herzen the pragmatist saw only difficulties with duality as he saw it as a confusion of reality with abstract theories, as Berlin explains: ‘“Dualism” for Herzen is a confusion of words with facts, the construction of theories employing abstract terms which are not founded in discovered real needs, of political programmes deduced from abstract p ­ rinciples unrelated to real situation’.279 His wife, Natalie, puts dualism

278 Shipwreck, page 12. 279 I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, page 89. Herzen identifies another duality in his own life: ‘How and whence did I acquire this habit of yielding with a grumble, of combining docility with protest and revolt? On the one hand, the conviction that I ought to act in such a way; on the other, willingness to act quite otherwise. This immaturity, this inconsistency, this indecision, have done me in the course of my life an infinity of harm…’. Quoted from A. Herzen, My Past And Thoughts in EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 203.

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into practice by leading what EH. Carr calls ‘her double life’280 in which she is married to Herzen but carries on an affair with George Herwegh under husband’s nose and, when in Nice, in the lodgings above their house. Not satisfied with real people who exhibit duality Stoppard creates one in the form of Jerry Krohl in The Hard Problem. In a play whose premise is founded upon the ‘mind-body dualism’281 of its chief protagonist, Hilary – whom her boss, Leo accuses of having ‘outed yourself as a Cartesian dualist’,282 – Stoppard presents a character who has two careers: that of a hedge fund manager whose wealth has enabled him to found an institute for brain science of which he is the head. As such he is both malefactor and benefactor.283 Spike defines Jerry’s two-fold nature with a comment which, in turn, reflects a key aspect of behaviour in a play which explores the nature of game theory: ‘it raises the interesting question’, he tells Hilary, ‘Is Krohl an altruist or an egoist?’.284 Within the institute Hilary works for Leo whose objective is ‘to crack the Hard Problem’,285 a theory of consciousness which it turns out, according to David Chalmers who first identified it, is an ‘ambiguous term’286 which, he postulates, can be best explained by what he refers to as ‘naturalistic dualism’.287 Jerry’s life in the play is dominated by coincidences, everyday examples of duality. As he explains to his inquisitive daughter, Cathy, a coincidence occurs ‘if two things which you don’t normally expect to happen at the same time, happen at the same time’.288 In an outcome which reflects the ambiguity of his role at both the brain science institute and Krohl Capital he hires Spike, a ‘behavioural psychologist’,289 for his hedge fund on the basis of an academic paper he has written entitled ‘“The Physiology of High Stakes”290 which Jerry has realised can be applied to his f­ inancial markets’ traders because, as Leo at 280 EH. Carr, The Romantic Exiles, page 69. Carr also adds that ‘(Herzen) failed to understand the “dualism” of Natalie’s heart’. The Romantic Exiles, page 86. 281 The Hard Problem, page 55. 282 The Hard Problem, page 56. 283 The terms ‘malefactor’/‘benefactor’ are used by Matt Wolf in an interview with John Wilson on Front Row on bbc Radio 4 29 January 2015. 284 The Hard Problem, page 13. 285 The Hard Problem, page 24. 286 D. Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3) 1995. 287 D. Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3) 1995. 288 The Hard Problem, page 27. 289 The Hard Problem, page 56. 290 The Hard Problem, page 47.

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the institute explains, ‘It ­monetises the hormonal state of your trading desk’.291 The ultimate coincidence occurs in Jerry’s life when it turns out that the baby Hilary gave up when she gave birth aged fifteen is the child he and his wife adopted. Cathy, thereby, has two sets of parents; biological and adoptive. As Leo observes: ‘…that takes care of the the Hard Problem! The reason it’s hard… is that mind-body is the problem’.292 Given the implications that the mind-body duality of the ‘hard problem’ implies for the motivation of human behaviour and, therefore, relativist versus absolute morality the only wonder is why Stoppard took so long to write a play about it. The phrase ‘the hard problem’ was coined by David Chalmers to categorise what he saw was a two-part structure of consciousness. He argues that, ‘there is not just one problem of consciousness…At the start it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into “hard” and “easy” problems’.293 When Hilary invites Spike to ‘Explain consciousness’,294 he responds by saying, ‘Flame – finger – brain; brain – finger – ouch. Consciousness’.295 He is describing an example of what Chalmers sees as ‘The easy problems of consciousness…(which) are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms’.296 Hilary responds by saying to Spike, ‘Now do sorrow’.297 What she is doing is highlighting Chambers’ other category. ‘The really hard problem of consciousness’, Chambers continues, ‘is the problem of experience…when we think and perceive, there is a whir of information processing, but there is also a subjective aspect’.298 It is what happens when one sees , for example, a colour which evokes, through one’s own experience, a feeling i­nside. That is not a mechanical function. ‘The hard problem is hard precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions’.299

291 The Hard Problem, page 57. 292 The Hard Problem, page 55. 293 D. Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to Studies 2 (3) 1995. 294 The Hard Problem, page 11. 295 The Hard Problem, page 11. 296 D. Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to Studies 2 (3) 1995. 297 The Hard Problem, page 11. 298 D. Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to Studies 2 (3) 1995. 299 D. Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to Studies 2 (3) 1995.

the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness

the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness

the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness

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Instead, any e­ xplanation of it requires what he calls an ‘extra ingredient’.300 It has a parallel in the argument George makes in Jumpers where he suggests that man is more than just a biological entity and which Stoppard recalls as, ‘In 1972 there was a play Jumpers which had as its central character a moral philosopher essentially talking about whether there is more to us than meets the scanner’.301 Chalmers’ ingredient, he postulates, is experience stored in the form of information. Interestingly, Stoppard eschews the opportunity to recall Stankevich’s ­description of Kant’s philosophy in Voyage, in which the Russian thinker ­acknowledges Descartes’ question of ‘How can we be sure there is a world of phenomena…?’,302 and answers it in a way which seems consistent with Chalmers: ‘Cause and effect. Relations between things. These concepts already exist in my mind, I must use them to make sense of what I observe’.303 Chalmers’ most favoured explanation of how what he calls the ‘explanatory bridge’304 is crossed is information: ‘…once a fundamental link between information and experience is on the table, the door is opened to some grander metaphysical speculation concerning the nature of the world’.305 Hilary, using a reference from Hamlet, demonstrates that she understands George’s distinction and Chalmers’ hypothesis when she tells Spike, ‘You can explain the mechanics…Tell me my dna is seventy per cent banana, and I think, well, fine, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.306 The extra ingredient that George Moore cannot see under the microscope and Hilary cannot see on the scanner is the rationale behind mind-body duality.307 300 D. Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3) 1995. 301 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Lawson, Front Row 19 August 2013. 302 Voyage, page 19. 303 Voyage, page 19. 304 D. Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3) 1995. 305 D. Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3) 1995. 306 The Hard Problem, pages 11–12. 307 Hilary is also relying on an argument proposed by Thomas Nagel in a paper entitled ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’. Nagel argues that there is ‘a subjective character of experience’ on the basis that ‘An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism to be itself’. This argument leads to a distinction between the experiences of an organism and the physical operation of that organism. Nagel’s paper is also particularly relevant to Stoppard’s works because it emphasises the unique subjectivity of an organism. Furthermore, in opposition to the principles of Occam’s razor, it argues against reductionism in the

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The bridge between the subset of illusion and the whole of duality is ­shortest in The Coast of Utopia because the duality presented therein is specifically ­related to the nature of reality. In Stoppard’s trilogy about the development of Russian socio-political thought in the nineteenth century the Russian intelligentsia derives much of its early ideas from their German counterparts who lived under similarly authoritarian government. The Romantic philosophers, particularly Schelling and Fichte, developed a philosophy that distinguished between the squalor of everyday life, which was regarded as a mere outward appearance, and what they regarded as the higher reality of universal harmony, which they called ‘the Absolute’. This philosophy owed much to Kant’s idea of transcendental idealism in which he contends that in order to experience an object the mind has to process sensory information about the object which is affected by the mind’s intuition of time and space. This gives arise to the idea that objects are not things in themselves but merely representations. There is a clear duality between the outer representation and the inner reality of it in the observer, as Stankevich explains to Liubov: ‘The inner life is more real, more complete, than what we call reality – which has no meaning independent of my observing it’.308 This distinction between the insignificance of everyday reality and inner reality appealed to the Russian intelligentsia as a way of explaining the poverty and servitude of so many Russians under the rule of Nicholas I. Belinsky shows evidence of this view when he comments to Katya, his mistress, that, ‘…my everyday life, which was banal, meaningless, degrading, was merely illusion’.309 It follows, therefore, that the world is one of appearances only, not reality, as Stankevich’s observation on governance to Herzen demonstrates: ‘Political ­arrangements are merely changing forms in the world of appearances’.310 The same philosophy applies to people who have an inner self. In a nearly satirical scene on the subject Michael Bakunin explains to Natalie Beyer that in transcendental idealism there is a ‘separation of spirit and matter’.311 Full of double entendres about romanticism and enlightenment the scene includes

308 309 310 311

analysis of consciousness – ‘it is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain’. Nagel’s argument that one organism knows only what it is like to be itself recalls Ivanov’s comment to Lvov that, ‘I don’t understand what’s going on inside you; you don’t understand me’. (Ivanov, page 58). Ivanov’s problem is that he doesn’t understand himself. Voyage, page 19. Voyage, page 92. Voyage, page 59. Voyage, page 76.

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the ­following conversation which highlights the duality of the philosophical genre that the Russians had so eagerly embraced: Natalie: (Your sisters) love you but do they see you? – your inner reality? Michael: Perhaps not. Natalie:  They haven’t transcended the objective reality in which you’re just their brother.312 But, the greatest illusion, or duality, in The Coast of Utopia lies not in the mainstream of the intellectual arguments but in the vehicle of the family saga. In a highly confusing example of duality Alexander Herzen’s wife is called Natalie. After her death he has a long affair with the wife of his friend from childhood, Nicholas Ogarev. Her name is also Natalie and, as if to reinforce the duality, both Natalies formed a romantic relationship between themselves. Natalie Herzen, on her deathbed, commits her children to the second Natalie’s care and the Herzen children are brought up by Natalie Ogarev as if she were a quasi-mother to them. She even refers to the Herzens’ daughter as ‘my little Olga’.313 Equally confusing is the comparison in the nature of love that Herzen has for the two Natalies. The second Natalie tells him that what is between them is not, ‘the deep pure love we talked about’,314 about while the first Natalie laments the change in the nature of the love between her and Alexander. The love for a wife and the love for a mistress are not, however, the same and in a painful admission towards the end of Salvage Natalie Ogarev tells Herzen, ‘I am not the real Natalie. The real one is in the sky’.315 As Michael Bakunin tells his sister, Alexandra, in a phrase that seems to apply to so many of Stoppard’s plays, ‘Illusion…it’s only illusion’.316 Stoppard is notable for the duality of both place and time in his plays.317 Rock ‘N’ Roll takes place in the twin cities of Prague and Cambridge. Arcadia is set in the dual time periods of the modern day and the early nineteenth century while The Invention of Love alternates between the time of Housman’s youth and old age. One play combines the duality of both time and place. Indian Ink 312 313 314 315 316 317

Voyage, page 77. Salvage, page 45. Salvage, page 68. Salvage, page 112. Voyage, page 13. See also T. Zinman, ‘Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, pages 124–125 for a note on the two locations of Travesties.

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is infused with examples of duality and, as with all Stoppard’s work, there are no coincidences about this outcome. The key to understanding how Stoppard has used the play’s sense of duality lies in a combination of the advice given by Felicity Kendal, who played Flora in the original productions of both Indian Ink and In the Native State, and in the irony of the satire against researchers, who are represented by the character of Pike. The clue to interpretation that Kendal provides is in her comment on the radio version, In the Native State, which Stoppard later adapted for stage: This play is to do with language rather than action and it lends itself particularly to radio; it isn’t the story that’s the thing, it’s the spider’s web of ideas and circumstances, written very carefully with a lot of loops that loop into something else.318 Nevertheless, in Indian Ink, the devil is also in the detail, perhaps more so than in any other of Stoppard’s plays, and the audience would do well to heed Mrs Swan’s grudging advice (given despite her frustration with Pike, the very ­essence of the footnote himself) that, ‘You should read the footnotes’.319 Prima facie the play presents numerous examples of duality from the smallest details through to significant aspects of the characters themselves. A particular feature of the play itself is a debate over the governance of India: is it best governed by the British or by the Indians? The play is a mixture of real and imaginary. While Flora, Mrs Swan, Das and Anish are fictional there is a host of individuals to whom reference is made who were real: HG. Wells, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Nancy Cunard, Charlie Chaplin to name but a few. The action in India in 1930 is set against the background of ‘Gandhi’s ‘March to the Sea’ to object to the Salt Tax’;320 a real event as Pike helpfully reminds us. There is a strong sense in Indian Ink of the fictional mixing with the factual. In Indian Ink things seem to come in pairs. ‘I like to have two kinds of cake on the go’,321 announces Mrs Swan while her sister, Flora, notices Nazrul’s offer of ‘two kinds of cake!’.322 The catering arrangements seem to revolve around

318 F. Kendal, quoted in R. Twisk, ‘Stoppard Basks in a Late Indian Summer’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 252. 319 Indian Ink, page 68. 320 Indian Ink, page 33. 321 Indian Ink, page 3. 322 Indian Ink, page 29.

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a choice of ‘Victoria sponge or Battenberg?’.323 Stoppard offers up two kinds of cola to wash it all down: ‘Thumbs Up Cola’,324 (the local brand) and ‘reassuringly American cola’.325 One of the play’s mysteries is solved by the existence of two paintings of Flora, one clothed and one in the nude. Rather ironically the Rajah exclaims to Flora that, ‘I go to the South of France every year…for my health. But you have come to India for your health!’.326 Most of the characters have two sides to them. Flora sees two people in Das. ‘…you sounded just like someone else’,327 drawing comparison with Dr Aziz from EM. Forster’s novel, A Passage To India. Flora notes that he is ‘­enthralled’328 by all things English while her sister draws his son’s, Anish’s, attention to the fact that his father rebelled against the British: ‘He must have surprised you too. The terror of the Empire Day gymkhana, the thrower of mangoes at the Resident’s Daimler’.329 Flora is keen to avoid putting the Rajah in a situation such that ‘he does not need to wear two hats’.330 Mrs Swan has her own two sides. She is conducting an affair with Chamberlain and, despite the conservatism of her later life in Shepperton she admits that in the 1930s she, ‘was working for a communist newspaper’,331 which just proves, as she admits, that, like Das,332 ‘one alters’.333 She remarks, again with a gentle irony that lays like a blanket across much of the play, that, ‘In India we had pictures of coaching inns and fox hunting, and chintz covers from Liberty’s and all sorts of knick-knackery from home …and now I’ve landed up in Shepperton I’ve got elephants and prayer wheels cluttering up the window ledges’.334 The attempt to replicate England in India – what Stoppard calls ‘that recreation of the E ­ nglish Eden’,335 – recalls how in Empire of the Sun the English community in the Shanghai I­ nternational 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335

Indian Ink, page 15. Indian Ink, page 31. Indian Ink, page 57. Indian Ink, page 61. In In the Native State, page 264 it is the Rajah’s father who went to the South of France for his health. Indian Ink, page 30. Indian Ink, page 43. Indian Ink, page 79. Indian Ink, page 60. Indian Ink, page 79. When compared to Dr Aziz, Das questions Flora as to whether, ‘he alters’. Page 30. Indian Ink, page 79. In the Native State, page 215: Indian Ink, page 25 ‘In India we had pictures of coaching inns and foxhunting, and now I’ve landed up in Shepperton etc’. Stoppard, in an interview with P. Allen, ‘Third Ear’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 242.

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Settlement attempted to do the same in China.336 Pike, too, is dissembling; writing, so Mrs Swan suspects, a book about Flora under the guise of writing the footnotes to the Collected Letters of Flora Crewe: ‘He’s waiting for me to die so that he can get on with Flora’s biography which he thinks I don’t know he’s writing’.337 Like Housman and Hapgood the character of Flora is dominated by the duality in her character. Or, rather in Flora’s case, she is a combination of dualities. The basis of her relationship with Modigliani is ambiguous. He had painted her as a nude: ‘Unusually. He painted his friends clothed. For nudes he used models. I believe I was his friend. But perhaps not. Perhaps he used a model only’.338 Flora is, herself, seemingly aware of her split character as she confesses to Das and apologises for being hard to paint across several sessions: ‘Yesterday I was writing a poem, and today I have been writing a letter to my sister.…I am not the same sitter’.339 She is even accused of ‘posing as a poet’340 by JC. Squire. The two-fold nature of her character is best illustrated by her sister’s comment, which itself is one of Stoppard’s best double entendres, about her decision to pose naked for Das: Mrs Swan: How like Flora. Anish:   More than a good likeness, Mrs Swan. Mrs Swan: No … I mean, how like Flora!341 Any painting is a form of ‘replication’,342 particularly so when it is, then, reproduced ‘not once but repeated twenty times over’343 in a shop window display advertising a collection of Flora’s poems. Introducing a question of illusion and reality Anish describes to Mrs Swan how, ‘It was like seeing a ghost. Not her ghost; his. It was my father’s hand, his work’.344 Moreover, there is an interaction between artist and subject which Flora identifies: ‘You’re trying to paint me from my point of view instead of yours’.345 Reinforcing the metaphor, 336 They even built their houses in the same architectural style as if they were in England. 337 Indian Ink, page 25. 338 Indian Ink, page 20. 339 Indian Ink, page 34. 340 Indian Ink, page 31. 341 Indian Ink, page 41. 342 Indian Ink, page 14. 343 Indian Ink, page 67. 344 Indian Ink, page 67. 345 Indian Ink, page 43.

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there are two portraits of Flora, as Anish realises and explains to Mrs Swan: ‘My father abandoned this portrait…He began another one’.346 Flora resembles, as far as Durance is concerned, Emily Eden whose observation on the nature of empire ends the play – ‘she reminds me of you’,347 he tells Flora just before sunrise. However, the most significant double aspect of Flora’s personality is her likeness to Radha which is apparent from the second, nude painting and which Flora describes, at the same time emphasising the distinction between her soul and her physical self: ‘…perhaps my soul will stay behind as a smudge of paint on paper, as if I’d always been here, like Radha who was the most beautiful of the herdswomen, undressed for love in an empty house’.348 It introduces further dualities. The first is Radha’s relationship with Krishna ‘whom she fell p ­ assionately in love with’.349 Reflecting Nell’s affair with Chamberlain, Krishna’s physical person ‘had a great love affair … with a married lady, Radha’,350 while his spiritual aspect also contains a double essence: ‘Krishna said, “Whichever god a man worships, it is I who answers the prayer”’.351 But by far the most significant and interesting duality in the play is the other aspect of Das’ second, nude painting of Flora: rasa. Stoppard observes that rasa, ‘became very important to the play’.352 He immediately goes further when he adds that it, ‘became a central image in the play’.353 Stoppard produces a definition of rasa in the words of Das: Rasa is juice. Its taste. Its essence.354 A painting must have its rasa… which is not in the painting exactly. Rasa is what you must feel when

346 347 348 349 350 351 352

Indian Ink, page 41. Indian Ink, page 77. Indian Ink, pages 82–83. Indian Ink, page 28. Indian Ink, page 28. Indian Ink, page 28. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 127. 353 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 127. 354 Even Stoppard’s definition has a complex linguistic double meaning. ‘Its taste. Its essence’ is written in the possessive form indicating that rasa has within it the concepts of taste and essence. Stoppard could easily have written it’s (ie: as a verb) which would imply that taste or essence is what rasa is, rather than what it contains. Pike would surely have a footnote on this point (and it would just as surely be incorrect).

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you see a painting, or hear music; it is the emotion which the artist must arouse in you.355 It is a Hindu concept in which an emotion in an audience is aroused by a performer or an object of art. It is, by definition, a double act between artist and audience which explains its importance to Stoppard. Important within the play, therefore, is Dilip’s verification that, ‘a portrait is a relationship’.356 Stoppard is keen to emphasise the interactivity of the process of painting the picture. Flora writes, ‘if you see a picture of me in my cornflower dress you’ll know I was writing this’.357 What Stoppard calls ‘this circular situation’358 is a visual allegory of the process that rasa induces. The staging of the play underscores the exploration of rasa. Stoppard pays tribute to the music and the lighting effects in the original London production: ‘There’s a lot of rasa in those things’,359 he says. Das explains to Flora that there are different types of rasa: There are nine rasa, each one a different colour. I should say mood. But each mood has its colour. – white for laughter and fun, red for anger, pale yellow for tranquillity…Each one has its own name and its own god, too.360 Not all rasas are complementary: ‘If you arouse emotions which are in opposition to each other the rasa will not…harmonize’.361 The rasa which dominates the play is that of erotic love. Once again, Das explains: ‘The rasa of erotic love is called Shringara. Its god is Vishnu, and its colour is shyama, which is blueblack’.362 Das tells Flora that, ‘Poetry is a sentence whose soul is rasa’,363 (or more particularly in In the Native State, ‘Without rasa it is not a poem, only

355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363

Indian Ink, page 29. Indian Ink, page 59. Indian Ink, page 31. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 120. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 124. Indian Ink, pages 29–30. Indian Ink, page 30. Indian Ink, page 30. Indian Ink, page 29.

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words’.364) and the audience learns that some of her poems are designed to evoke the rasa of Shringara: Heat collects and holds as a pearl at my throat, Lets go and slides like a tongue-tip down a Modigliani, Spills into the delta, now in the salt-lick, Lost in the mangroves and the airless moisture, a seed-pearl returning to the oyster – et nos cedamus amori…365 The play is replete with references to the heat of India. ‘I am in heat like a corpse in a ditch … Heat has had its way with me’,366 recites Flora in one her poems. Just as in Arcadia it is equated with sexual passion: Das: Your poem is about heat. Flora: Yes. Das:    But its rasa is perhaps…anger? Flora: Sex.367 The rasa of Shringara is fused between Flora’s poem in which she declares, I am in heat like a bride in a bath, without secrets, soaked in heated air… I am discovered, heat has found me out,… Yes, think of a woman in a house of net That strains the oxygen out of the air thickening the night to Indian Ink…368 and Das’ nude painting which portrays Flora, as her sister later realises, ‘as anyone can see…(in) a mosquito net’369 and which Flora herself says, ‘has

364 In the Native State, page 221. 365 Indian Ink, pages 74–75. See also Virgil, Eclogues, Book x, line 69: ‘omnia vincit Amor; et nos cedamus Amori’. The first half of the quotation is a double entendre as the love (‘Amor’) referred to may be physical love or spiritual love. 366 In the Native State, page 218. 367 Indian Ink, page 30. 368 Indian Ink, page 11. Flora thinks that in her poem, ‘the emotion won’t harmonize’ – Indian Ink, page 29. 369 Indian Ink, page 68.

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rasa … Shringara. The rasa of erotic love…Whose colour is blue-black’.370 Das describes the conditions of Shringara: Vishvanata in his book on poetics tells us: Shringara requires, naturally, a lover and his loved one, who may be a courtesan if she is sincerely enamoured, and it is aroused by, for example, the moon, the scent of sandalwood, or being in an empty house.371 These conditions are fulfilled on the night Das returns to see Flora with whom he is left alone (Nazrul is advertised as being ‘not here’372 and Coomaraswami has left to find his horse and buggy). When ‘the moon is rising’,373 Flora remarks to Das that, ‘Your handkerchief smells faintly of…something nice’374 and Das gives her his ‘Rajput miniature’375 in which Flora is depicted alone ‘in a house within a house’.376 Rasa is not the limit of Stoppard’s use of duality within Indian Ink. It is reinforced by the word game Flora and Das play in which Das is credited by Flora as ‘The Hobson-Jobson champion!’.377 Hobson-Jobson was A Glossary of ­Colloquial Anglo Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, published in 1886 by Messrs Yule and Burnell. It comprises definitions of words that derive from dual Indian and English sources and usage, such as are used in Flora and Das’ linguistic duel – viz: Flora’s riposte: ‘I went doolally at the durbar and was sent back to Blighty in a Dooley feeling rather dikki with a cup of char and a chit for a chotapeg’378 Stoppard on two separate occasions in the play uses examples of such rhyming language – ‘Humpty Dumpty’379 and ‘Namby pambi’.380 Apart from the twin sources of the words and their aptitude to replicate their sounds through rhyme the Hobson-Jobson itself carries strong connotations of duality. The

370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380

Indian Ink, page 74. Indian Ink, page 30. Indian Ink, page 68. Indian Ink, page 73. Indian Ink, page 73. Indian Ink, page 74. Indian Ink, page 68. Indian Ink, page 19. Indian Ink, page 19. Indian Ink, page 18. Indian Ink, page 16 – See also the reference to a paper by Traci Nagle of Indiana University in B. Zimmer, The Story Behind ‘Hobson-Jobson’, 4 June 2009.

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a­ uthors chose the title because they considered it ‘a veiled intimation of dual authorship’.381 Moreover, Hobson and Jobson were two archetypal Victorian characters who were regarded as a pair of clowns.382 The authors describe the book as ‘a double-columned edifice’383 (referring to its dual authorship) and characterise it in dual terms as well, as both a dictionary and a glossary. It carries, too, connotations which fit into the themes Stoppard explores with Indian Ink. ­According to one commentator, ‘it is expressive of (a group of the B ­ ritish in India) ­defining anxieties and its cultural predicament in India…These ­anxieties centred on what British imperialist writers saw as the dangers of ­being “­assimilated” into India’.384 Stoppard alludes to this aspect of imperialism, via the different attitudes to colonisation adopted in two other empires, in Mrs Swan’s remark to Anish: ‘We were your Romans, you know. We might have been your Normans’.385 There was also an internal division in some ­British minds over whether the more autocratic rule in parts of the empire carried an implied threat to the more liberal, democratic rule at home. For a playwright so deft in his use of words and wordplay it is only to be ­expected that he adapts so readily the nuances of language to reflect the duality that so fascinates him. The duality of The Real Inspector Hound is both textual as well as structural. The textual duality comprises a number of instances of cross purpose. Mrs Drudge, who is delightfully without artifice, initiates one with the philanderer, Simon: Mrs Drudge: It was on such a week-end as this that Lord Muldoon who  had lately brought his beautiful bride back to the home of his ancestors, walked out of this house ten years ago, and his body was never found. Simon:   Yes, indeed, poor Cynthia. Mrs Drudge: His name was Albert.386 381 H. Yule and AC. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, ix. 382 See B. Zimmer, The Story Behind ‘Hobson-Jobson’, 4 June 2009. 383 H. Yule and AC. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, vii. 384 J. Majeed, ‘“The Bad Habit”: Hobson-Jobson, British Indian glossaries and imitations of mortality’ in Henry Sweet Society Bulletin, November 2006. 385 Indian Ink, page 17. 386 The Real Inspector Hound, page 17.

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Hound and Cynthia tread a similarly well-worn comic path with another cross purpose when Cynthia thanks Hound for his attendance as he motions to make his way out: Cynthia: Thank you so much for coming. Hound:   Not at all. You never know, there might have been a serious matter. Cynthia: Drink? Hound:   More serious than that, even. Cynthia (correcting): Drink before you go?387 The play is also infused with examples of that other linguistic symbol of duality; the double entendre. It ranges from Magnus’ envious question to the object of his affections, Cynthia, who is partnered with Simon for bridge, ‘Will Simon and you always be partnered against me, Cynthia?’388 to Felicity’s question in the same card game to Simon, who has had a dalliance with her previously, ‘I’ve had my turn, haven’t I, Simon? – now, it seems, it’s Cynthia’s turn’.389 The most amusing example occurs when Hound is trying to reassure Cynthia that he is on the case: Hound:   Please, Lady Cynthia, we are all in this together. I must ask you to put yourself completely in my hands. Cynthia: Don’t, Inspector. I love Albert. Stoppard employs the same use of double entendre to emphasise duality in On the Razzle. The most apt occurs when Weinberl offers to escort Mrs Fischer to breakfast at Zangler’s: Weinberl:   May I take you in Hildegarde? Mrs Fischer: You’ve been taking me in for months, Herr Weinberl.390 Zangler is an habitual muddler of words. His wordplay is formidable at times:

387 388 389 390

The Real Inspector Hound, page 31. The Real Inspector Hound, page 24. The Real Inspector Hound, page 24. On the Razzle, page 391.

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Zangler:    Everything’s arranged. The constable is poised to pursue Sonders. He’s emptied my seal but his lips are pursed. No – he pursed to suppose – no – Melchior: Supper is served – Zangler:   No! – Oh, supper is served!391 Occasionally his word muddles veer into malapropisms, such as when he describes Marie as ‘of mortgageable age’.392 On the Razzle is a farce of mistaken identity embellished with other devices of duality. Unbeknown to the audience, in what is virtually a minor statement of intent by Stoppard, the play begins with Sonders ‘incognito’393 amongst the customers in Zangler’s shop. By the end of the play many of the other players have masqueraded as characters in a misleading romp which lives up to billing suggested by the play’s title. Weinberl puts on one of Zangler’s uniform tunics and manages to con Gertrude into thinking he really is Zangler and he, then, repeats the turn by convincing Sonders and Marie that Zangler is blessing their relationship (in defiance of Zangler’s averred opposition to it as Marie’s guardian). Weinberl’s impersonations are far from over. Forced to avoid bumping into his boss, Zangler, outside Madame Knorr’s shop in Vienna, Weinberl and his assistant, Christopher, pose rigidly in her shop window, pretending to be ‘two voluminously tartaned mannequins’.394 Soon thereafter Weinberl, with some adept quick-thinking to explain why he is the shop at all, has to pretend to be Herr Fischer, the husband of one of the shop’s best customers, the (unfortunately from Weinberl’s perspective) widowed Mrs Fischer. Weinberl is later mistaken for Sonders by the Constable and Fraulein Blumenblatt before, in the end, he is revealed as the man behind the nom de plume, ‘Scaramouche’, who has been corresponding with ‘Elegant and Under Forty’ who turns out to be Mrs Fischer after all. One impersonator is, of course, for Stoppard nowhere near enough. Melchior impersonates an Italian waiter at The Imperial Gardens Café. He is accused, mistakenly, by Fraulein Blumenblatt of rendering a ‘false impersonation’395 of Zangler’s servant. In fact, he is by that stage a man more sinned against than sinning as he complains, ‘I am about the only person here who

391 392 393 394 395

On the Razzle, page 362. On the Razzle, page 389. On the Razzle, page 293. On the Razzle, page 332. On the Razzle, page 377.

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isn’t pretending to be somebody else!’.396 In an example of inversion Sonders introduces himself to Fraulein Blumenblatt as ‘Weinberl’ before he passes himself off ‘wearing the Coachman’s hat and coat’.397 He, too, is not immune from being taken in as he mistakes Christopher for Marie and tries to escape with him. Christopher is also mistaken for Marie by the Constable and Fraulein Blumenblatt, to whom he introduces himself by alluding both to the fact that she is, at the time, a man who seems to be dressed as a woman and that, even as a woman, her identity is incorrect: ‘I’m not the woman you think I am. I’m not even the woman you think is the woman you think I am’.398 This cross gender duality was given added piquancy in the Royal National Theatre’s original production of the play in 1981 as the part of Christopher was played by Felicity Kendall. Rather like Christopher, Fraulein Blumenblatt also announces, ‘I am not the woman you think I am’,399 referring to the fact that her spinster-like appearance conceals a lost passion for a man she met on a horse-tram who was unfortunately knocked down by another tram as he alighted. The unfortunate victim is revealed to be Madame Knorr’s first husband. The illusion of the personalities is completed by the Coachman who ‘has two personalities, one for his sexual interests and the other for everything else’.400 Parsimony The heart of Stoppard’s morality is the two-fold debate about absolutism and relativism and the pattern of duality which emanates from it goes on to pervade most of Stoppard’s plays. The perspective that derives from relativism is reflected most powerfully in the constant references to and metaphors of illusion and reality – the linguistic illusions of Cahoot’s Macbeth, the facades and mannerisms in Undiscovered Country, the cosmetic benefits of totalitarianism in Squaring the Circle and the ambiguous paintings in Artist Descending A Staircase, to name but a few. It is significant that the three activities which most assiduously reflect that theme are so prevalent in Stoppard’s works: spying (The Dog It Was That Died, Neutral Ground and Hapgood); acting (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Shakespeare in Love, The Real Thing, The Real Inspector Hound, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth and Rough Crossing), including the 396 397 398 399 400

On the Razzle, page 378. On the Razzle, page 385. On the Razzle, page 369. On the Razzle, page 372. On the Razzle, page 338.

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device of the play-within-a-play; and, to a much lesser extent, magicians (Travesties, The Cherry Orchard and a brief allusion in Jumpers). Duality is most clearly found in Stoppardian characters themselves: the scholar/poet, Housman (and his older and younger self); the GermanoRussian Herzen; Celia and Elizabeth Hapgood; the identical Ridley and Russian twins; ‘half English’401 Joe; Jerry Krohl; both Chater and Septimus in Arcadia; George Riley; Herzen’s two Natalies; and, the Chekhovian character dualities. In addition, On the Razzle is a compendium of personalities undergoing masquerade. Two plays – The Real Thing and Hapgood – grew, in part, out of Stoppard’s interest in the distinction between what he sees as the inner person and the face that is presented to the world. Moreover, duality is extended far beyond that of character. Hapgood delivers the ultimate metaphor of duality; quantum mechanical theory holds that an electron can be in two places at once. The Hard Problem furnishes the audience with the dualism of consciousness. The double action of rasa in Indian Ink underscores the interaction of audience and actors which Stoppard interweaves in The Real Inspector Hound. Even the language of a Stoppardian play is pervaded with dualities of form, such as double ­entendres and cross purposes. The most significant duality in Stoppardianism, however, comes from Stoppard himself.402 As Coveney so aptly remarks: ‘No one like Stoppard for 401 Hapgood, page 66. 402 Several commentators have noted the duality in Stoppard. Ira Nadel called his biography of Stoppard Double Act. Jim Hunter probes a psychological analysis: ‘I believe that this sequence, of sharp disturbance overlaid by security gratefully cherished, is a key to the man and his work’. – J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 6. Paul Delaney gives a long analysis which highlights the duality in Stoppard’s work – see P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 113. Alastair Macaulay argues that, ‘pluralism and ambiguity are central to Stoppard’s thought. His plays – The Invention is a virtuoso example – abound in remarks or questions that have two or more different but equally valid answers, in puns and paradoxes, in multiple layers that tell us of the complexity of humanity’. – A. Macaulay, ‘Tom Stoppard, A.E. Housman, and the Classics’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, pages 157–158. Michael Vanden Heuvel argues that Stoppard has a split attitude towards postmodernism: ‘Stoppard expresses keen interest in certain intellectual, aesthetic, and ideological positions associated with postmodern art and drama, while he is at the same time antipathetic to, and even staunchly critical of, some of the more radical notions and claims of postmodern social theory and its image of the human subject’. – M. Vanden Heuvel, ‘“Is postmodernism?”: Stoppard among/against the postmoderns’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 213. For a further consideration of Stoppard’s postmodernism see (1) DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern; (2) T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, pages 192–193; (3) the chapter

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making you feel both spoilt and inadequate as an audience’.403 The point is reinforced by another commentator, Charles Spencer: ‘One of Tom Stoppard’s greatest achievements is to make audiences feel cleverer than they actually are’.404 But, he also notes the other side of Stoppard’s coin: ‘the playwright is far cleverer than we are’.405 Stoppard seems to be aware of Spencer’s and Coveney’s accusations. He acknowledges that, ‘periodically I am told, or I read, that my plays, in some sense, flatter the audiences’. But, he adds that he does not see it in those terms: ‘I don’t look at it like that. I look at it as reaching some part of that person sitting out there, which my plays happen to reach. It doesn’t mean that they’re better or worse for it. They are just responsive to that kind of play’.406 Stoppard’s duality was present in the prime tool of his trade right from the start: ‘I was born into one language and grew up in another’,407 he told Mel Gussow. Many of Stoppard’s plays are almost public exhibitions of him arguing

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entitled ‘Postmodern Polyphony: Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood’ in K. Kelly, Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play, pages 137–158; (4) J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, pages 2–3 and Note 2, pages 255–257; and, (5) T. Davis and K. Womack, ‘Reading (and Writing) the Ethics of Authorship: Shakespeare in Love as Postmodern Metanarrative’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, pages 136–149. M. Coveney, Observer review of Arcadia 18 April 1993. Milton Shulman’s verdict on the London premiere of Travesties is a good example: ‘All Stoppard’s passion for paradox, pastiche and puns are here, displayed with little regard for the educational limitations of his audience’. – M. Shulman, Evening Standard, 11 June 1974. C. Spencer, The Telegraph review of Hapgood 16 April 2008. C. Spencer, The Telegraph, 19 November 2009. Richard Eyre commented, for example, ‘I was slightly alienated by Jumpers; I did think at the time it was too clever by half’. – J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 215. Stoppard sees the issue differently, preferring to see his plays as the product of luck rather than how clever he is: ‘The actual thing which I really wish to say with as much conviction as…possible…is this…that…when things work out right…it’s good news for what you’ve written if you feel lucky, not if you feel clever.…You have to just cross your fingers and just get into it and just see where it takes things, where it takes you…and then…the play is doing some of the work for you. You can make all sorts of plans if you like. If you don’t get ahead of it and treat it like some kind of organism it will actually take you places…and then something you might have been slightly worried about…suddenly the play provides the answer’. – Stoppard, in an interview with J. Biggins, ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’. He made the same point to Andrew Upton: ‘When things come out right…the playwright doesn’t feel clever, he feels lucky’. – Stoppard, in an interview with A. Upton, Artworks, 24 February 2008. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like ­delinquency which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 80.

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with himself, as if he were playing himself at chess.408 Stoppard, too, seems to be aware that he exhibits within his own self that duality of character409 he likes to explore in his plays’ characters and the contrast between private motivation and public persona that he delivers in The Real Thing and Hapgood: One has a public self and a submerged self. It’s that sort of duality.410 His own duality, deriving in part from his self-confessed lack of certainty, is at the core of the Stoppardian stage debate and the fusion of the vehicle and the idea. More than anything, Stoppard’s duality is reflected in his union of comedy and ideas, which he confessed to ACH. Smith, reflects the twin nature of his own mind: My objective is to perform a marriage between the play of ideas and farce. As to why this should be a desirable objective, I have no idea. It may not be. But it’s become an objective simply as a projection of the two sides of my character, the serious side and the frivolous.411 Stoppard’s debates would, however, be considered no more than schoolroom exercises were it not for their format as plays. To sustain consistent success in the harsh crucible of the commercial theatre requires something more. It demands an attention grabbing style of entertainment. 408 Jernigan puts a different emphasis on the duality of Stoppard’s arguments: ‘Stoppard can’t quite help pointing to the mystery behind the clockwork with one hand even while working towards understanding it with the other’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, pages 82–82. Stoppard even admitted to Nancy Shields Hardin that, ‘One has two or three minds battling with each other’. – NS. Hardin, ‘An Interview with Tom Stoppard’, Contemporary Literature, xxii (1981) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 161. 409 For example: ‘I have 51 per cent contempt for the artist who is very serious about himself and ploughs a lonely furrow and occasionally a few pages are released to the millions, and 49 per cent admiration’. – Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, ‘Second Interview’ in Hayman, R – Tom Stoppard, page 142. Jim Hunter comments on this quotation – ‘A and minus A, of course’. – J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 107. 410 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like ­delinquency, which one goes through’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 79. Michael Billington contends, ‘Stoppard, I would claim, has a dual political as well as emotional identity’. – ‘Stoppard’s Secret Agent’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in C ­ onversation, page 195. 411 Stoppard, in an interview with ACH. Smith, Flourish, Issue One 1974.

chapter 6

Stoppard’s Theatricality I am quite hot on the theatricality of theatre.1 stoppard

∵ Part of Stoppard’s impulse for dramatic plenitude is his awareness of the need for theatrical impact – ‘One is judged as a writer on the strength of what one manages to bring off theatrically’.2 For him there is no doubt that he is producing an event, not a text.3 ‘This distinction I’m trying to make between the text and the event. It’s very easy to talk about one’s plays as though they were texts whereas what they really are are attempts to transcribe an event which hasn’t happened yet. The text is a means towards an event’.4 There can be few playwrights who are more aware, in a practical sense, of both the constraints imposed and the possibilities offered by the respective media of the stage, in particular, and radio,5 television and film. The result with Stoppard is almost always a spectacle of some sorts,6 although he has been accused of ‘intellectual window dressing’.7 1 Stoppard, in an interview with Melvyn Bragg, ‘The South Bank Show’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 118. 2 extract from Ronald Hayman, Tom Stoppard, 4th edition in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 29. 3 William Demastes describes Stoppard as, ‘the consummate entertainer’. – W. Demastes, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard, page 2. 4 Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994. 5 Stoppard told Roger Bolton, ‘the potential of radio was something playful’. – Feedback, bbc Radio 4, 5 January 2016. 6 The spectacle should not be confused with the mayhem it often appears to be. Michael Billington notes, ‘All art is, by definition, an attempt to order chaos, but Stoppard brings a librarian’s zeal to the business of coding and arrangement: deep down, I suspect, he’s a writer who loves order and control’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 22. The title of John Fleming’s book, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, suggests he has arrived at a similar conclusion. Paul Delaney adds, ‘Stoppard’s drama celebrates a realm beyond the material, a universe which however complex is not the least random but rather…is pervaded by order’. – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 62. See also his note 12, op cit, page 166. Daniel Jernigan also appears to arrive at a similar conclusion, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_007

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Nevertheless, there is a pattern to the theatricality embodying a rationale which is, frequently, illustrative of or linked to the idea. Stoppard’s theatrical devices and his humour tend to achieve maximum effect when they reflect or enhance the themes in his plays. Jumpers is a fine example in which the seeming chaos actually has an explanation within the framework of the debate on morality. The incredible, radical, liberal Jumpers represent the philosophical gymnastics of the relativists, whose argument crumbles in the face of altruism just as their pyramid collapses when McFee is shot. Dotty’s moon songs reflect her sudden realisation of the localness of laws which were previously seen to be universal. George’s accidental slaughter of both his hare and tortoise8 illustrates the moral question of good and bad. But, without the dramatic fireworks a Stoppard play would be little more than a lecture or an articulate debate on stage. At their best they are not only mechanisms for grabbing the audience’s attention (Maddie’s states of undress in Dirty Linen), providing entertainment (the magician in The Cherry Orchard) and amusement (the running joke of nearly inventions in the film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) but are integrated into the vehicle (the Wildean aphorisms of Travesties) or are deployed to highlight part of the argument (the light experiment in Hapgood). In an article he wrote for The Times Literary Supplement in 1972 Stoppard makes it plain that he has a strong sense of the pragmatic when it comes to

although not quite in the same way – ‘In Stoppard’s ontology there is a place for everything and everything is in its place, and if only we stick around long enough, we will find out where everything goes’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, pages 40–41. Joan Fitzpatrick Dean comments, ‘Stoppard’s plays demonstrate the possibility of dealing logically with an ostensibly disordered world’. – JF. Dean, Tom Stoppard Comedy As A Moral Matrix, page 53. Gabrielle Scott Robinson asserts that, ‘Disorder is the order of the day, which is reflected in the incoherence, the lack of sustained action in his plays’. – GS. Robinson, Plays Without Plot: The Theatre of Tom Stoppard. Neil Sammells’ analysis of Jumpers, Arcadia and The Real Thing also drives at the same point: ‘the deliberate artifice of (Jumpers’) construction is – just as with Henry’s cricket bat in The Real Thing – its own point: a demonstration of pattern, order, certainty, skill, in a world which seems to want to do without them, qualities emblematized so dramatically in the climactic ‘dance to the music of time’ in Arcadia’. – N. Sammells, ‘The early stage plays’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 115. John Bull’s view is, in one aspect, slightly contrary: ‘Uncertainty is all. This characterizes all Stoppard’s early work’. – J. Bull, ‘Tom Stoppard and politics’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 138. 7 eg: Charles Isherwood’s review of The Invention of Love: ‘Much of the intellectual window dressing is lively and entertaining, although less would probably suffice for the play’s purposes’. – ‘“The Invention of Love”’ in Variety 382, 7 (2–8 April 2001) pages 28 and 31, quoted in H. Bloom (ed), Tom Stoppard, page 137. 8 Jumpers, page 81.

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writing stage material. He knows that he must not lose his audience: ‘While a reader can put a book down and return to it another day, when an audience leaves it leaves for good, and will not be kept in its seats by ideas’.9 The reason, he says, that he uses the ‘sponge’ scene but not the recorders scene from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is ‘because we are not sitting in a classroom, we are sitting in a theatre, and we have been sitting here for rather a long time’.10 As a result Stoppard’s audiences have throughout his works for all media been treated to an absolute feast of dramatic events. Stoppard explained the appeal of the theatrical in an interview with Peter Wood (although, note that Wood puts emphasis on the impact of the theatrical devices rather than their role in the stage debates) Tom Stoppard: …Not that the origin of (Jumpers) was exclusively intellectual. Simultaneously I fell for the image of a pyramid of gymnasts occupying the stage, followed by a gunshot, followed by the image of one gymnast being shot out of the pyramid and the others imploding in the whole…11 Peter Wood: It seems to me that scattered through this play, and others, especially Travesties, is a series of purely theatrical moments which are not themselves to do either with the arguments or with the narrative, at least not in origin. They grow into place, but their attraction is their theatricality, rather than their function. Tom Stoppard: Absolutely. I like theatre. I like show biz, and I think it’s important that the theatre is run by people who like show biz as much as they like ‘The Drama’. Peter Wood: Perhaps you never quite admit to yourself how important that part of the equation is to you when you are putting your abstract ideas into dramatic form. Tom Stoppard: It became slightly more important in practice than I wish it to be. There is a side of me which leans heavily towards ‘literature’ – say, a play would work reasonably well if it were read from lecterns in the event – the event being 9

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extract from Stoppard’s article, ‘Doers and Thinkers: Playwrights and Professors’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 October 1972, page 1219 in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 32. extract from Stoppard’s article, ‘Doers and Thinkers: Playwrights and Professors’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 October 1972, page 1219 in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 32. The idea of a human pyramid arose in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: ‘Guil: …a short, blunt human pyramid’ – page 32.

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the play on stage – we end up with more overt ‘theatricality’, music, dance, and so on, than I originally envisaged (I’m thinking of your productions of Jumpers and Travesties) – and I find I love it…I begin to suspect that it is not merely desirable but necessary.12 Part of the theatricality is the unexpected – in what Stoppard regards as a series of ambushes,13 as he explained to Elizabeth Farnsworth: I think theater ought to be theatrical. I like the theatricality of, as it were, you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it’s – there’s always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You’re being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.14 However, what really distinguishes Stoppard is the intensity with which he feels compelled to inject the spectacle into the play. He focusses on putting the ambush into every line, as he describes his approach with reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: I tend to write through a series of small, large and microscopic ­ambushes – which might consist of a body falling out of a cupboard, or simply an unexpected word in a sentence. But my preoccupation as a writer, which possibly betokens a degree of insecurity, takes the form of contriving to inject some sort of interest and colour into every line, rather than counting on the general situation having a general interest which will hold an audience.15 12 13

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Stoppard, in conversation with Peter Wood, programme notes to 1976 production of Jumpers at the Royal National Theatre. Stoppard told Richard Mayne, ‘I like to proceed by a series of ambushes, not necessarily anything as dramatic as an ambush but perhaps the word quirk might be useful here, a series of quirks, a series of small unimportant surprises and this is…the need to just surprise – it might be a small joke or a large murder’. – Stoppard, in an interview with R. Mayne, ‘Arts Commentary’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 34. Stoppard, in conversation with E. Farnsworth, 10 March 1999. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in C ­ onversation, pages 57–58. As far as Hersh Zeifman is concerned, ‘this kind of ­ambush in Stoppard’s plays is fundamentally comic’. – H. Zeifman, ‘Comedy of Ambush: Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing’ in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook, page 303. He also adds (op cit, page 314), ‘Stoppard’s ambushes never cease’.

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The result is that, for Stoppard, ‘Plays are written to entertain.…No plays are written to be studied and discussed any more than pictures are painted to be discussed’.16 And, entertain they certainly do. Underneath the plenitude of spectacle clear patterns of dramatic method, device and influence can be discerned. A master of words, his signature is comedy. But his plays rely extensively on the effects of poetry and music, too. He knows how to titillate with nudity but he knows, also, how to intrigue with mystery. And, surely, no playwright ever grabbed his audience’s attention in the way Stoppard does with his opening scenes. But, in addition to all the visual, aural and sensory devices a key element of Stoppard’s theatricality is his rich harvest of other literary and artistic influences. Comedy That tomfoolery.17

carmen, Enter a Free Man

...

In one way or another I don’t think I’ve written anything that wasn’t supposed to get a laugh.18 stoppard

∵ Comedy is a salient feature in most of Stoppard’s works19 – ‘I tend to see everything through a comic prism’,20 he told Jon Bradshaw. In terms of Stoppardian 16 17 18 19

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Stoppard, in an interview with J. Bradshaw, New York magazine, 10 January 1977. Enter a Free Man, page 24. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Biggins, ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’. Benedict Nightingale commented in his review of Travesties in 1974, ‘get Stoppard stuck into a joke and you have to prise him out with a crowbar’. – B. Nightingale, New Statesman, 14 June 1974. Richard Eyre commented that, ‘I think the dna of British comedy is found in The Goon Show and Tom Stoppard’. – J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 215. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Bradshaw, ‘Tom Stoppard, Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 95.

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pattern it may be described as his theatrical calling card. He went further in a conversation with Colin McEnroe: ‘Pretty much everything I’ve written I’m not sure if there’s even a single exception…these plays and pieces are supposed to work on a comedic level, some way or other, one level or another’.21 Stoppard sees no difference between comedy and serious pieces – ‘I am a comedic writer as much as I am a serious writer, I think. I don’t really make a distinction’.22 However, he prefers an emphasis on recreational entertainment23 and believes that it is an unintentional consequence of his work: I write comedy. I don’t write essays. I don’t really write Shavian polemics…But I do write comedy. I don’t intend to write comedy. It’s just that my mind goes that way. Although one doesn’t think of Coast of Utopia as being primarily a comedy, and it isn’t, you may remember there is a surprising amount of laughter in the production. For me, this hinges on the whole concept of what it means to entertain people. ‘Comedy’ is a word I am sometimes scared of, because it tends to take on colors which I don’t mean. I like to think of the word ‘recreational’ rather than ‘comedy’.24 The impetus for comedy is, however, almost an unconscious obligation. ‘I think I have a definite preoccupation with what I think of as being an obligation to make things funny’,25 he says. Stoppard explains that he is really after a balance: ‘What I try to do, is to end up by contriving the perfect marriage between the play of ideas and farce or perhaps even high comedy…and occasionally…I’ve got fairly close to a play which works as a funny play and which makes coherent, in terms of theatre,

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Stoppard, in an interview with C. McEnroe, Tom Stoppard in Conversation with Colin McEnroe, 8 September 2014. Stoppard, ‘Tom Stoppard and David Parfitt on Parade’s End’. Anthony Jenkins has a different interpretation (which reflects the duality in Stoppard): ‘Ideas and wit go together for Stoppard because only through that union can he achieve the objectivity needed to rein in his volatile, impressionable senses’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 101. Stoppard’s view of theatre as a recreation is passionately held: ‘I believe in theatre as a recreation…in fact, I don’t much see the point of it otherwise’. – Tom Stoppard in Conversation with Colin McEnroe, 8 September 2014. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Mayne, ‘Arts Commentary’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 33.

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a fairly complicated intellectual argument’.26 He added with Jon Bradshaw that, ‘I want to write plays that are just funny enough to do their jobs but not too funny to obscure them’.27 At times, however, it is debateable whether it is the comedy or the subject matter which has primacy in a Stoppard play. He acknowledges the point himself in a highly self-deprecating tone. ‘It is a matter of taste whether one says they’re wonderfully frivolous saddened by occasional seriousness, or whether there’s a serious play irredeemably ruined by the frivolous side of man’s nature’.28 Stoppard’s humour works best when it is also emphasising his argument or a theme he is exploring. Cahoot’s Macbeth highlights the plight of dissident actors in Communist Czechoslovakia whose activities are banned by the repressive authorities. This encounter between the heavy-handed Inspector and one of the actors, playing Lady Macbeth, illustrates the fundamental issue in the play perfectly: Inspector:

    …I saw your Romeo with what’s her name – wonderful girl, whatever happened to her? Oh my God, don’t tell me! – could I have your autograph, it’s not for me, it’s for my daughter – ‘Lady Macbeth’: I’d rather not – the last time I signed something I didn’t work for two years. Inspector:        N  ow, look, don’t blame us if the parts just stopped coming. Maybe you got over-exposed. ‘Lady Macbeth’:     I was working in a restaurant at the time. Inspector:                         (Imperturbably) There you are, you see. The public’s very funny about that sort of thing. They don’t want to get 26

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Stoppard, interview in R. Hudson, S. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’, Theatre Quarterly, iv, 14 (May/July 1974) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, pages 32–33 and in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 59 (where S. Itzin is C. Itzin). Stoppard told M. Gussow, ‘My objective has always been to perform a marriage between a play of ideas and a farce. As to whether this is a desirable objective, I have no idea’. – ‘“Seriousness compromised by frivolity or…frivolity redeemed by my seriousness”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 14. Jim Hunter presents a view contrary to Stoppard’s assertion, arguing, ‘Its coherence isn’t always obvious in the theatre’. – see J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 71. Stoppard, in conversation with J. Bradshaw, ‘Tom Stoppard, Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 95. Stoppard, in an interview with S. Grant, Time Out. Quoted in O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 155.

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dressed up and arrange a baby-sitter only to find that they’ve paid good money to see Hedda Gabler done by a waitress.29 A briefer example of the same point occurs in Squaring the Circle when two Polish workers complain that the televised broadcast by the Polish First Secretary, Gierek, makes yet another attempt to placate the Polish people: First Electrician:   I think I’ve seen this before… Second Electrician: Typical bloody August…nothing but repeats.30 The significance of comedy, however, to Stoppard is about far more than simply telling gags. To be sure, it gives him satisfaction – ‘I am a writer of comedy. My favourite noise is an audience laughing in the theatre’,31 he told Robert Berkvist. But, much more significantly, it is Stoppard’s barometer of whether his audience understands. ‘There are times’, he says, ‘when laughter is valuable because it’s the sound of comprehension’.32 Stoppard’s comedy is most obvious in his words. It is truly extraordinary that a man whose country of birth’s language is not English33 should have such

29 30 31 32

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Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 187. Squaring the Circle, page 203. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Berkvist, ‘This Time, Tom Stoppard Plays It (Almost) Straight’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 136. Stoppard, in an interview with N. Hytner, 6 February 2015. Stoppard made a similar comment with specific reference to comedy to David Leveaux and Lucy Davies in the programme notes to the 1999 production of The Real Thing at the Donmar Warehouse: ‘In comedy, laughter is often the sound of comprehension’. – see J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 158. Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia. According to Stoppard, ‘English had always been my own language’. – R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: ­Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 52. He wrote in an article about his family (‘Unidentified article re. Stoppard’s family’), a version of which was published in Miramax’s magazine, that, ‘English is the only ­language I can remember speaking’. He also told M. Gussow that, ‘(English) was my first tongue, from the time I went to India’. – ‘“I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 132. Stoppard also says that, ‘I myself have never been literate in any other language (than English)’. – O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 171. By contrast, Stoppard told John Russell Taylor that, ‘I was actually brought up to speak two languages at least, in that I was born Czechoslovakian’. – Stoppard, in an interview with JR. Taylor, ‘Our Changing Theatre,

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a command of it. He has a fascination with what is the main tool of his trade.34 ‘I don’t do crossword puzzles’, he says, ‘But the way language and logic can be used or misused amuses me’.35 Although not to everyone’s taste because of his occasional lapse into the cheap gag and perhaps because some people just cannot stand others being clever (more particularly, cleverer than they are) Stoppard seems to be able to conjure up ideas in a witty or memorable way that each member of his audience wishes it could have come up with but has never been able so to do. How many other playwrights have, on the one hand, to deal in quantum mechanics or Alexander Herzen and, on the other, exhibit the capacity to conjure up lines such as, ‘Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up’,36 or, ‘Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?’.37 In the comedy of words Stoppard fires off an impressive range of verbal artillery, such as puns, malapropisms, intellectual jokes, the double entendre and cheap gags. But Stoppard also deals in the comedy of situation. High farce, as seen in On the Razzle and Dirty Linen, and the running gag are frequent visitors to

34

35 36 37

No. 3: Changes in Writing’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 26. This assertion is corroborated in Stoppard’s interview with Mel Gussow in August 1983: ­‘English is my language…English became my first language and Czech my second l­ anguage when I was five. By the time I got to England, I wasn’t speaking Czech at all’. – ‘“Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, pages 59–60. This last remark was further corroborated by Stoppard in an interview with Jonathan Biggins on 17December 2011. Nevertheless, Stoppard attributes no relevance in his Czech birth to his dexterity with the English language: ‘Whatever is going on with me and language it’s not to do with being born in Czechoslovakia’. – Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Kenneth Tynan wrote, ‘You have to be foreign to write English with that kind of hypnotized brilliance’. – K. Tynan, ‘Withdrawing with Style from Chaos’. Tynan compares Stoppard with Nabokov. Thomas Whitaker notices a parallel with two other writers: ‘Stoppard shares with Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov a brilliantly detached mastery of English’. – T. Whitaker, ‘Tom Stoppard’, pages 3–4. Stoppard’s adroit use of language is apparent from his early works. For example, Susan Rusinko comments on the short story Reunion, ‘In “Reunion” language is all’. – S. Rusinko, Tom Stoppard, page 19. Stoppard explained his fascination with language very early in his career, in 1968. ‘I am preoccupied with things I find difficult to express. One element of this preoccupation is simply an enormous love of language itself. For a lot of writers language is merely a fairly efficient tool. For me the particular use of a particular word in the right place, or a group of words in the right order, to create a particular effect is important; it gives me more pleasure than to make a point which I might consider to be profound’. – ‘Something to Declare’ in J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 110. Stoppard quoted in O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, pages 170–171. Where Are They Now? page 106. RosGuil, page 63.

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S­ toppard’s theatre along with the cross purpose. Moreover, on occasion, he employs the devices of satire and parody – both in The Real Inspector Hound.

The Pun From as long – literally as far back as I can remember – I’ve liked puns, word-jokes. stoppard38

∵ A pun is a play on words and Stoppard plays with a linguistic dexterity not seen in the English language since Shakespeare.39 Just as ‘a little more than kin, and less than kind’40 and ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York’41 tickled the intellectual fancy of the first Elizabethan age, so ‘I never took semaphore as a sophomore, morse the pity’42 and Dotty’s revelation that, ‘our (philosophy) tutorials descended, from the metaphysical to the merely physical’,43 appealed to the theatregoers of the second.44 Some of Stoppard’s most significant puns appear in the titles of his plays.45 The Real Thing may refer to the essence of reality or act as a euphemism for love, both of which are addressed in the play. Jumpers reflects both the ­physical 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45

Stoppard, in an interview with John Tusa, bbc Radio 2002, in J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 160. For example, Matt Wolf of the International New York Times in an interview with John Wilson on bbc Radio 4’s Front Row believes that, ‘in Arcadia the language is sort of an aphrodisiac’. Richard Corballis argues that, ‘Stoppard toss(es) off puns and epigrams at a rate unequalled even by Oscar Wilde’. – R. Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork, page 9. Hamlet, Act 1, scene 2. Richard iii, Act 1, scene 1. After Magritte, page 51. Jumpers, page 35. Jim Hunter describes some puns as ‘groan-worthy’. – J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber C ­ ritical Guides, page 3. See also Hersh Zeifman’s analysis of the possible interpretations of the title ‘The ­Invention of Love’. – H. Zeifman, The comedy of Eros: Stoppard in love in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 197. Alastair Macaulay produces his own analysis of the title of Invention Of Love in ‘Tom Stoppard, A.E. Housman, and the Classics’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, pages 151–152.

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agility of the acrobats who symbolise McFee’s relativist world and the intellectual acrobatics that George has to perform in order to prove the existence of God. After Magritte is almost a double entendre.46 The Dog It Was That Died may be taken as a reference to Goldsmith’s 1766 ‘An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog’, itself an ironic lampoon of the elegiac style. One of his best puns occurs in reference to the title of The Love for Three Oranges when Fata Morgana tries to deceive the Prince by substituting Smeraldina for Ninetta. ­Leander comments to Clarissa rather dryly, ‘She turned out to be a lemon and has given him the pip’.47 Conversely, one of his worst appears in Doctor Masopust, I Presume, a radio play, in which the doctor who aspires to domination of England attempts to interrogate Mr X with the words, ‘Tie him to the laser beam couch. It’s laser than he thinks’.48 Sometimes the pun is used as part of the metaphorical vehicle of Stoppard’s play in order to reinforce the idea that he is addressing. For example, the title of his play, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, about repression in a totalitarian society (which uses as its metaphor an orchestra) is a mnemonic used to remember the location of the treble clef notes on a musical stave. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour recalls the letters Alexander gives to various dissidents, in order to protect their identity, when he is recounting the story of dissent in Russia – eg: ‘E, F, G and H…were all arrested’.49 The ‘Da, da, da! (Yes, yes, yes!)’,50 that Nadya utters in the opening scene of Travesties is an allusion to the ­Dadaism of one of the play’s characters, Tristan Tzara. Travesties is a particularly fertile source of puns with perhaps the most memorable coming in Carr’s famous opening monologue51 – ‘my art belongs to Dada’.52 Puns assist Stoppard in the act of fusing unrelated ideas. As Ronald Hayman observes, ‘Part of the appeal that puns have for (Stoppard) may lie in the means they provide of coupling the unrelated meanings of a single sound’.53 They are part of what Stoppard describes as the ‘ironic juxtapositions’54 of his humour.

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

See T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, pages 58–59. The Love for Three Oranges, page 34. M. Loppert, in the Financial Times of 13 October 1983, describes this pun as ‘perhaps the ne plus ultra in this particular vein’. Doctor Masopust, i Presume, Episode 1, page 17. egbdf, page 23. Travesties, page 4. Carr’s opening speech was described by Irving Wardle in his review of the premiere of Travesties as, ‘one of Stoppard’s star turns’. – I. Wardle, The Times, 11 June 1974. Travesties, page 8. R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 99. Stoppard, in a conversation with J. Bradshaw, ‘Tom Stoppard, Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 95.

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In The Invention of Love Housman observes of Oscar Wilde that, ‘It’ll be a pity if inversion is all he is known for’,55 which refers not just to his capacity for witty phrases (by changing the expectations of the reader) but also his homosexual proclivity. In this case it also underlines the narrative of the play. The Intellectual Joke The intellectual joke is one of the things that gets Stoppard into trouble with his audience. He complains that no one laughed when Spike gives Hilary some advice about what not to do with her paper in The Hard Problem: Spike:          If you circulate it with your name and the Krohl’s name on it, don’t call it ‘Is God the Last Man Standing?’. Hilary: Why? Spike:          Because it will make you unemployable. You’d have to do philosophy.56 Similarly, in Darkside, a play about morality and moral dilemmas, Baggott, a lecturer in moral philosophy, says to Emily in a self-serving observation, ‘You’re an intuitionist. If it caught on it would lead to widespread unemployment among moral philosophers’.57 Flirting with what is dangerously close to being an example of a cheap joke, but, nevertheless, reflecting one of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’s principal themes, Stoppard comes up with a little humorous gem: Guil: What’s the last thing you remember? Ros: I don’t wish to be reminded of it.58 A prime example of a Stoppardian intellectual joke concerns a piece of etymology in The Invention of Love, which is not only amusing but reflects not one, but three key topics of the play – scholarship, morality and masculine love – and helps define Housman’s pedantic nature: Chamberlain: …We belong to a secret society…We discuss what we should call ourselves. ‘Homosexuals’ has been suggested. aeh: Homosexuals? 55 56 57 58

The Invention of Love, page 15. The Hard Problem, page 48. Darkside, page 32. RosGuil, page 52.

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Chamberlain: We aren’t anything till there’s a word for it. aeh: Homosexuals? Who is responsible for this barbarity? Chamberlain: What’s wrong with it? aeh: It’s half Greek and half Latin.59 One of Stoppard’s most formidable jokes is his play on what is probably Shakespeare’s most famous speech – ‘To be or not be, that is the question’60 – in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In a play dominated by both the act of interrogation, which alludes to the theme of truth, and the question of destiny Stoppard produces the following encounter: Ros: Where’s it going to end? Guil: That is the question.61 Often the intellectual joke can exemplify the argument Stoppard is proposing. In Dalliance Mizi’s revelation that she is a seamstress lures Stoppard to put into Theodore’s mouth a Shakespearean pun: ‘Seams, madam? I know not seams’.62 But, the joke is all the more amusing because of the later pertinence of the theme of illusion which Stoppard adds through the device of the staged operatic rehearsal playing out a similar love scene to that which is occurring in the play itself between Fritz and Christine. Sometimes the intellectual joke may be simply gratuitous and too alluring for Stoppard to resist. In Neutral Ground there is a Montebiancan welder called Stanislavsky who uses chewing gum while he works. In an allusion to the ­Method School of acting pioneered by the welder’s namesake, Acherson remarks, ‘Stanislavsky works with nothing else. It’s his method’.63 Perhaps even better is Cocklebury-Smythe’s attempt to convince Maddie Gotobed in Dirty Linen of the propriety of their illicit assignation using metaphorical gymnastics that are surely just as worthy of Birdboot in The Real Inspector Hound or Turai in Rough Crossing: ‘I think I can say, and say with confidence, that when the smoke has cleared from the Augean stables, the little flame of our love will still be something no-one else can hold a candle to so long as we can keep our heads down’.64 59 60 61 62 63 64

The Invention of Love, page 91. Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, line 56. RosGuil, page 35. Dalliance, page 25. Hamlet, Act 1, scene ii, line 76: ‘“Seems,” madam? Nay, it is; I know not “seems”’. Neutral Ground, page 103. Dirty Linen, page 87.

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Stoppard can presume too much of his audience. In Cahoot’s Macbeth, a play about how language only has meaning in context, the hostess at an illicit performance of Macbeth says ‘He says his postilion has been struck by lightning’.65 This is a reference to what is now generally regarded – because of its total ignorance of context – as an absurd example given in phrase books and linguistic lexicons. For those who are unaware, a postilion is ‘a person who rides the leading nearside horse of a team or pair drawing a coach or carriage, when there is no coachman’.66 Similarly, the closing words of the first act of Travesties are for the cognoscenti: Carr says to Joyce in a dream, ‘I flung at him – “And what did you do in the Great War?” “I wrote Ulysses”, he said. “What did you do?’’’.67 It refers to a British poster campaign in the First World War in which the pressure of society was brought to bear on men of fighting age to sign up in the days before conscription was introduced. The Double Entendre If one accepts Stoppard’s assertion that Shakespeare in Love ‘was almost entirely rewritten from an existing script by Marc Norman’68 – and there seems to be absolutely no reason not to, despite the fog of explanation sometimes concerning its authorship – then one of Stoppard’s finest double entendre scenes is surely that involving Shakespeare, explaining his writer’s block to Dr Moth on the psychiatrist’s couch: the Tudor doctor’s misinterpretation of Will’s description of the symptoms of his writer’s block as those relating to sexual impotence 65 66 67 68

Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 203. Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Travesties, page 44. Interview with Victoria Glendenning, Intelligent Life magazine, September/October 2012. Stoppard told Jonathan Biggins, ‘There was an existing script by Marc Norman which had the foundational thought of young William Shakespeare in Love… – good for Marc – but, I didn’t want to do it and when I did want to do it I changed everything’. – ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’. See S. Price, ‘“The Illusion of Proprietorship”’; Tom Stoppard’s Parade’s End’, Note 4, in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 134 about the contractual explanation of Stoppard and Norman’s roles. William Demastes suggests that Shakespeare in Love might be considered another of Stoppard’s adaptations: ‘This screenplay is so quintessentially “Stoppardian”. Then again, given Stoppard’s tendency to adapt other people’s work into plays and movies, it may in fact be appropriate that Stoppard’s strongest work in film is indebted to someone else for its inception’. – W. Demastes, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard, page 103. An account of the complexities surrounding the authorship of a film script (Empire of the Sun in this case) is given in S. Stalcup, ‘Who Rules the Empire?’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, pages 243–261. The second draft of Marc Norman’s screenplay contains no such scene with Dr Moth.

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is quite hilarious. Double entendre divertissements abound in Stoppard. A further prime example occurs in the form of the card game in The Real Inspector Hound. References to showing one’s hand and holding the cards can be interpreted both in terms of the card game and the plot of the whodunit that is unfolding around its participants. Just for good measure, Stoppard does not pass up the chance to turn the card game vignette, when it returns in its repeated scene, into a parody of bridge and other games. Much of the humour of Dirty Linen is based upon the sexual double entendres of the members of the Select Committee on Promiscuity in High Places. There is a running double entendre of heat, both temperature related and sexual, which appears in a number of Stoppard’s plays: most notably in Arcadia, where heat is the key both to some of the science and the social goings-on at Sidley Park, but also in the heat of India and Flora’s poetry in Indian Ink and even in The House of Bernarda Alba. Moreover, the titles of some of Stoppard’s plays are whimsical examples of the device – If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank, Professional Foul and In the Native State, for example – while one, New-Found-Land, takes its name from John Donne’s famous double entendre poem.69 Many of Stoppard’s double entendres are one-liners, as in Bone’s explanation to Crouch as to why his wife cannot help him with his enquiries because the doctor he suspects of carrying on with her is visiting her at the time: ‘My wife’s in bed with the doctor at the moment’.70 Perhaps the most intriguing of Stoppard’s double entendres is neither one of his own making nor, strictly speaking, a joke. In Arcadia Lady Croom draws Thomasina’s attention to the idyll of Sidley Park with the words, ‘“Et in Arcadia ego!” “Here I am in Arcadia”’.71 Septimus, contrariwise, takes his cue from the gamebooks and tells Thomasina, ‘A calendar of slaughter. “Even in Arcadia, there am I!”’.72 It is a reference to Poussin’s painting The Shepherds of Arcadia in which shepherds gaze upon a tomb inscription in Latin.73 The programme notes for the inaugural production of Arcadia at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1993 explain the ambiguity. ‘Picture of Poussin’s Et In Arcadia Ego (1629–30) shows shepherds discovering a tomb with an inscription whose meaning is controversial. It could be read as, ‘I who am now dead, also once lived in Arcadia’, or from death itself, ‘I, Death, exist even in Arcadia’.74 To emphasise the connection to Poussin stage designers have sometimes used a 69 70 71 72 73 74

See J. Donne, ‘Elegy XIX’. Another Moon Called Earth, page 64. Arcadia, page 16. Arcadia, page 18. See J. Fleming, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, page 57. programme notes, 1993 production of Arcadia at the Royal National Theatre.

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Poussin-like mural as part of the set design for Arcadia.75 The allusion to Poussin’s Arcadia is more than just about the name. It may be taken to be a warning about the play – Thomasina’s academic idyll is also the venue of her death and that of Septimus. Malapropisms The most intensive proponent of malapropisms in Stoppard’s works is Brenda, secretary to the lexicographers – appropriately enough – in The Boundary, a play co-written with Clive Exton. What is probably her most amusing example incorporates a reference to Psalm 2376 as she explains to Johnson and Bunyans how she has overheard their conversation, having been knocked unconscious by a cricket ball – ‘eardropping on your conversation as I drifted back from the chateau of death, I heard every syllabub of your farinaceous attack on my parson’.77 She offers up a reference to Hamlet by describing her near-death experience as, ‘I drifted back from the barn from which no traveller returns’,78 before launching into her most extensive array of malapropisms which are directed at her husband: I have demoted my life to toxicology and slavering over a hot stove…my late lamentable mother saw you for the hypocritical greasy piccolo that you have proven yourself to be. But you incinerated yourself into my affections with your swarthy talk and I succumbed to your brandysnaps… I was never a croquette. I have been fidelitous to a fault. And I am repaid by a vivacious blow on the head.79 Once again, in Salvage, Stoppard demonstrates that the best jokes also contain the essence of his argument. In clear deference to Mrs Malaprop Olga H ­ erzen makes little attempt to conceal her feelings about her father’s mistress, ­Natalie Ogarev – ‘When she gets historical the only thing that calms her down is intimate relations’,80 she tells her tutor Malwida. The confusion of ‘historical’ for ‘hysterical’ (made by someone for whom English is not a first language and

75 76 77 78 79 80

See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 196 and page 291, Note 2. Psalm 23, The Bible, King James Version – ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death’. The Boundary, page 17. The Boundary, page 17. See Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, lines 79–80: ‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’. The Boundary, pages 17–18. Salvage, page 84.

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is, therefore, understandable) cleverly harks back to one of the play’s main themes, the nature of determinism. In Another Moon Called Earth Stoppard presents his audience with a delightful malapropism that might also qualify for categorisation as a cheap gag, as Bone introduces himself to Albert, his wife’s doctor: Bone: …I’m something of a logician myself. Albert: Really? Sawing ladies in half – that kind of thing?81 More Freudian slip than malapropism in Dirty Linen, a play about the loose sexual morality of members of the British parliament, is Cocklebury-Smythe’s request to his colleague, McTeazle, to search out the missing members of their Committee: ‘…why don’t you have a quick poke, peek, in the Members’ Bra – or the cafeteria, they’re probably guzzling coffee and Swedish panties’.82

The Cheap Gag …like a lot of writers I’ve got a cheap side and an expensive side.83 stoppard

∵ Perhaps ‘clever gag’ would be a kinder epithet. However, Stoppard would probably not mind: ‘I just like jokes and I quite often work quite close to the line of the cheap joke’,84 he once told Melvyn Bragg. There is a sense with Stoppard that at times he can be a little too clever for his own good and this is perhaps a cause of objection for some. I prefer to see it as the consequence, or possibly by-product, of a fertile intellect and imaginative mind and confess to a sneaking admiration. It is also in the best tradition of English music hall comedy, particularly in the form of a double-act, such as this extract from The Invention of Love: 81 82 83

84

Another Moon Called Earth, page 58. Dirty Linen, page 86. Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 160. Such a comment is in keeping with his own duality. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Bragg, ‘The South Bank Show’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 117.

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aeh: (pleased) Chamberlain! I haven’t thought about you for years! You’ve got a moustache. Chamberlain: Hello, old chap. I’m not sure about it, but it’s growing on me.85 or this one from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Guil: …shut up and sit down. Stop being perverse. Ros: (near to tears) I’m not going to stand for it!86 Can it be that the hand that wrote ‘The days of the digital watch are ­numbered’87 also wrote the cricket bat speech? Examples of such quick-fire humour are legion and the following is but an amusing selection: ‘The tape recorder speaks for itself’.88 ‘Is Switzerland at war? – things have come to a pretty pass, is it the St. Bernard?’.89 ‘Suicide is no more than a cheap trick played on the calendar’.90 ‘…a column of tanks is a great leveller’.91 ‘We consume everything. We’re dying of consumption’.92 Some cheap gags need a context in which to work. Erna’s certainty in Undiscovered Country about the nature of Korsakow’s death belies a spontaneously naïve appraisal of him: ‘Korsakow wouldn’t be seen dead with a suicide note’.93 Not all the cheap gags are one-liners, as this little exchange in Salvage demonstrates: Turgenev: I’m agreeing with you. Herzen: You agree with everyone a little. 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

The Invention of Love, page 87. RosGuil, page 67. The Real Thing, page 3. Artist, page 116. Artist, page 124. The Dog It Was That Died, page 189. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 192. Darkside, page 52. Undiscovered Country, page 82.

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Turgenev: Well, up to a point.94 Likewise, in The Real Inspector Hound: Magnus: How long have you been a pedestrian? Simon: Ever since I could walk.95 Darkside witnesses an even more convoluted gag during the Witch Finder’s interrogation of Emily and the Boy who are considered to be witches: Witch Finder: Bring up the prisoners! Prisoner A and Prisoner B!…Which is which? Boy: I’m the witch Witch Finder: And which are you? Emily: It’s me who’s the witch, doctor. Witch Finder: No, it’s me who’s the witch doctor.96 New-Found-Land sees a quick-fire exchange between two civil-servants considering an application for British nationality by an American that could be described as playing to the gallery: Bernard: Does he say why he wants to be British? Arthur: Yes, because he’s American.97 Sometimes the added bite of the cheap joke can reinforce a point. The LivingRoom Theatre that the Czech dissident actors are forced to resort to in Cahoot’s Macbeth is brought into sharper focus by the repressive Inspector’s sneer, ‘…if you had any pride in your home you wouldn’t take standing-room only in your sitting-room lying down’.98

94 95 96 97 98

Salvage, page 98. The Real Inspector Hound, page 23. Darkside, page 33. New-Found-Land, page 123. Cahoot’s Macbeth, pages 185–186.

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Farce One false move and we could have a farce on our hands.99 zangler, On the Razzle

We want a really funny farce.100

...

music hall buffs, The Love for Three Oranges

...

You’re turning it into a complete farce!.101 moon, The Real Inspector Hound

∵ Stoppard’s comedy is derived from much more than just the manipulation of words. It is also humour of situation and Stoppard proves to be the master of the farcical scene. A particularly good example occurs in his radio play The Dog It Was That Died. Blair’s wife, Pamela, runs a donkey sanctuary. In one memorable episode Blair enters his drawing room to find his wife, assisted by Mrs Ryan, the cleaning lady, performing a minor operation on one of her donkeys, Empy. She has got to the point where she needs to stitch him up. Concerned about the risk to his clock collection, which adorns the room, Blair is pressed into service by his wife, first by holding the donkey’s legs (having initially misconstrued her command as an exhortation to hold Mrs Ryan’s legs) and latterly in picking up the forceps which Pamela has been sterilising in the grate. Burning himself as he grasps the hot forceps ‘(Blair) yelps louder as the donkey kicks him. The donkey brays. All the clocks start to chime and strike. The donkey gallops across the wooden floor and then out of earshot’.102 With scant concern for her husband Pamela can only utter, ‘Good job the french windows were open’.103 Stoppard concludes the amusement

99 100 101 102 103

On the Razzle, page 309. The Love for Three Oranges, page 3. The Real Inspector Hound, page 43. The Dog It Was That Died, page 170. The Dog It Was That Died, page 170.

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with Mrs Ryan trying to use the vacuum cleaner in the following exchange with Blair, Mrs Ryan: Can you lift your leg, dear? Blair: No, I can’t. The knee is swelling visibly. Mrs Ryan: Don’t you worry, dear. I’ll vacuum round you.104 The aforementioned example is particularly interesting because it also demonstrates Stoppard’s awareness of his medium and how to take advantage of it. The whole scene with the donkey could never be performed on stage. On the radio, however, it can be made to work to hilarious effect. One of Stoppard’s funniest scenes occurs in Professional Foul and, typically Stoppard, he uses the farce of the scene to emphasise the point he is making. Stone, a philosophy lecturer, is giving a speech demonstrating ‘the confusion which often arises from the ambiguity of ordinary language’.105 As examples he gives various contextual uses of the word ‘well’ – ‘You eat well’, ‘You cook well’ – interspersed with its colloquial uses as part of his normal speaking – ‘Very well’, ‘Well I might reply’.106 The amusement is caused by the fact that the speech is being simultaneously translated into French, German and Czech and the interpreters grow exasperated and baffled in equal measure as their prowess and understanding is, literally, tested to the limit, all the while reinforcing the point about the ambiguity of language. Stoppard similarly applies farce in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour to demonstrate the absurdity of the way the totalitarian system equates dissidence with insanity.107 The doctors use brightly coloured pills and suggest that the dissident may be cured with laxatives. The Real Inspector Hound contains a delightful farcical vignette. The play develops an aura of farce when one of the two critics, Moon, answers a telephone which rings in the middle of a play he is in the audience reviewing. This is the cue for his fellow critic, Birdboot, to join the play, taking the part of one of its characters, Simon Gascoyne. The high point of the farce comes when Magnus, the ‘crippled half-brother of Lord Muldoon’,108 enters – telegraphed by the sound of him coming down the stairs – on his wheelchair, knocking over Simon with the words, ‘Never had a chance! Ran under the wheels!’.109 104 105 106 107

The Dog It Was That Died, page 170. Professional Foul, page 61. Professional Foul, pages 61–63. See R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 136. See also Billington: ‘Stoppard’s technique is to destroy the barrier that divides the comic and the serious’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 113. Stomil (Tango) compares farce with fine art. 108 The Real Inspector Hound, page 17. 109 The Real Inspector Hound, page 23.

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When Birdboot enters the play and assumes the role of Simon the play repeats itself and, therefore, when Magnus enters again Birdboot knows what is coming. Stoppard’s stage directions illustrate the joke: The sound of a wheelchair’s approach as before. Birdboot prudently keeps out of the chair’s former path but it enters from the next wing down and knocks him flying.110 Dirty Linen, described by Jenkins as a ‘knickers farce’,111 requires very precise timing to deliver much of its highly comic effect. On several occasions the lascivious mps on the Select Committee on Promiscuity in High Places all seek to brief Maddie Gotobed, its obliging secretary, on what she should say about their various indiscretions with her, which requires them to pretend to have formal conversations with her when within earshot of each other, but surreptitious asides when opportunity allows. The asides have to be carefully timed to coincide with the momentary disappearance of the other mps and the formal cover-talk must occur when the mps reappear. Stoppard’s stage directions for McTeazle’s attempt to explain to Maddie how he must account for his recent dalliance with her demonstrate the need for the timing required of the best of farces: The italicized words correspond to Cocklebury-Smythe’s momentary reappearances, in the first case to take a bowler hat off the hatstand and in the second case to change hats because he has taken out McTeazle’s hat the first time. McTeazle: Maddiening the way one is kept waiting for ours is a very tricky position, my dear.…it could be a case of constituency business, they’re not necessarily scre – oo-ooge is, I think you’ll find, not in ‘David Copperfield’ at all, still less in ‘The Old Curiosity Sho’ – cking though it is, the sight of a Member of Parliament having some out-of-the-way nookie with a lovely young woman.112 The sense of farce is heightened by the quick bout of hanky-panky that Maddie and Mrs Ebury indulge in as they pass behind a blackboard leaving Mrs Ebury to emerge as follows: ‘her hair, which had been done up in a bun, is now about her shoulders and her buttoned-up suit is in discreet disarray’.113 A further farcical 110 111 112 113

The Real Inspector Hound, page 39. A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 125. Dirty Linen, page 89. Dirty Linen, page 97.

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element is McTeazle’s bungled attempts to give Maddie back her skirt which only results in additional pieces of clothing being shed from her body. Farce features prominently in some of Stoppard’s adaptations. The whole storyline of Rough Crossing, based as it is around the need to explain away to Adam a conversation he has heard between his paramour, Natasha, and Ivor which leads him to conclude that Ivor and Natasha have rekindled a former romance, is, in structure, if not in detail, the staple diet of many a farce. The ridiculously complicated plot lines suggested for the musical under rehearsal also add to the mental mayhem. The small encounter between the two leading players and Gal, part-author of the musical, merely reinforces the uproar: Natasha: You don’t have to tell us the plot – we’re in it, aren’t we, Ivor? Ivor: Absolutely. Gal: I can’t follow it at all. Ivor: But you wrote it. Gal: That’s what worries me.114 Surrounding all of the labyrinthine storylines, which are more contrived than those of The Real Inspector Hound, is a series of visual jokes which depend on the farce’s requirement for timing, as when Dvornichek sweeps off a drinks tray a cognac bound for Turai and downs it himself or the scene in which Adam, Turai and Gal play the music for Natasha’s song ‘using cutlery to accompany themselves by setting up a percussion beat on the various pots and dishes and silver domes on Turai’s breakfast table’.115 On the Razzle is, as its title suggests, a delightful romp with all the ingredients of a farce. The Stoppardian ambush gets into full swing as at one point Christopher arrives on stage in the nick of time via the trap door in Zangler’s shop whilst his accomplice, Weinberl, makes an even more spectacular entrance as he ‘plummets out of (a) chute and arrives behind the counter in a serving position’116 thereby just avoiding giving Zangler suspicion as to what he has been up to. The play revolves around a series of mistaken identities and impersonations en route to the romantic union of Zangler and Madame Knorr. The play is replete with all kinds of humour. Stoppard finds a legitimate home for his cheap gags. ‘The wurst is yet to come’,117 opines Weinberl, seated in a

114 115 116 117

Rough Crossing, page 253. Rough Crossing, page 242. On the Razzle, page 386. On the Razzle, page 358.

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Viennese restaurant choosing from the menu as he suspects the chaos that is about to unfold. Perhaps more amusing still is the scene in which Zangler is trying on a new uniform, made for him by his tailor, Hupfer, which appears to be far too tight of fit: Zangler: …it’s a bit tight isn’t it? It is a bit more than tight. Hupfer: Snug. Zangler: Snug? I’d be in trouble if I knelt down. I’m thinking of my nuptials. Hupfer: It’s the pressing. Zangler: Exactly. I don’t want them pressed.118 The running gag, a device frequently used in farces, is employed gratuitously. When Melchior is impersonating an Italian waiter every time he enters the kitchen a crashing noise is heard indicating some form of culinary accident. Zangler has an effect of speech which involves him constantly muddling up his sentences and words to comic effect. Scolding Sonders for scoffing at his third place in the local rifle club and his over-protectiveness of his niece, M ­ arie, ­Zangler responds with, ‘Do you suppose I’d let my airedale be hounded up hill and – my heiress be mounted up hill and bank by a truffle-hound – be trifled with and hounded by a mountebank?!’.119 Even his servant Melchior catches his master’s verbal disease: ‘…he’ll alter you before the dessert’, he warns ­Christopher, ‘– no – he’ll desert you before the altar’,120 as he struggles to explain away Zangler’s ladies and the restaurant bill his Boss has just picked up. As with many farces much of the humour is visual and involves near-misses or concealment. In the Imperial Gardens Café a fortuitously placed Chinese screen separates Zangler and Melchior from Madame Knorr, Mrs Fischer, Christopher and Weinberl at an adjacent table. Stoppard’s stage directions to describe how Sonders and Marie dive into a cupboard in Zangler’s shop to avoid encountering its owner without realising it is already occupied by Weinberl (who is also in hiding) illustrate the farce at perhaps its highest point: (Sonders) dives into Weinberl’s cupboard, pulling (Marie) after him. Christopher enters from a second door with Weinberl’s clothes, calling for him and running out of the shop. The cupboard door bursts open. Marie comes

118 On the Razzle, page 304. 119 On the Razzle, page 295. 120 On the Razzle, page 374.

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out, Sonders comes out and Weinberl’s legs come out. Weinberl is lying on his front.121 Weinberl, dressed in Zangler’s uniform, and with his face hidden confuses Sonders and Marie into thinking he really is Zangler. Weinberl in his disguise, impishly, uses the opportunity to appear to bless Sonders and Marie’s relationship when he knows full well that the Boss vehemently disapproves of it. The farce relies upon several pieces of comic timing, including Gertrud’s ­accidental revelation to Sonders of the secret address to which Zangler has sent her to keep them separate and Zangler missing Christopher in the ­Viennese restaurant because his attention is temporarily distracted by an item in his newspaper as the young man creeps past him. As with most farces the machinations of the plot all resolve themselves into a combination of happy endings for the sets of lovers and in which even Christopher, the downtrodden shop dogsbody, gets himself a Ragamuffin assistant. The Cross Purpose The structural twin of the verbal Double Entendre is the Cross Purpose, in which two (or more) characters talk about two unconnected matters, the effect of which is amusing through juxtaposition.122 One of Stoppard’s finest examples occurs in Arcadia when Chater is interrogating Septimus Hodge over his love making with Mrs Chater in the gazebo. At the same time Lady Croom, Noakes (the garden designer) and her brother Brice enter in the midst of a discussion about Noakes’ proposals for altering the garden: Lady Croom: Oh, no. Not the gazebo! Mr Noakes! What is this I hear? Brice: Not only the gazebo, but the boat-house, the Chinese bridge, the shrubbery – Chater: By God, sir! Not possible! Brice: Mr Noakes will have it so. Septimus: Mr Noakes, this is monstrous! Lady Croom: I am glad to hear it from you, Mr Hodge.123 Chater believes that Brice is describing further locations as scenes of his wife’s infidelity whilst on the punchline Lady Croom believes Septimus’ expostulation of horror, at what the tutor understands to be Brice’s suggestions, 121 On the Razzle, page 325. 122 John Fleming comments, ‘One of Stoppard’s favourite comic devices is cross talk’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 89. 123 Arcadia, page 13.

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refers to his stylistic objections to Mr Noakes’ proposals for the redesign of the garden. One of my own favourites – and, it is beautifully crafted – is in Jumpers and happens when Crouch attempts to console George over the death of McFee and George believes Crouch is talking about his pet hare, Thumper: George: I’m sorry, Mr. Crouch…I’m very sorry. I was upset. It’s just been the most awful day. (He comforts himself with the tortoise.) Crouch: I quite understand, sir. I’m upset myself. I just came up to see if there was anything I could do, I knew you’d be upset… (GEORGE looks at him.) I got to know him quite well, you know…made quite a friend of him. George: You knew about it? Crouch: I was there, sir. Doing the drinks. It shocked me, I can tell you. George: Who killed him? Crouch: Well, I wouldn’t like to say for certain…I mean, I heard a bang, and when I looked, there he was crawling on the floor… (GEORGE winces) …and there was Miss Moore…well – George: Do you realise she’s in there now, eating him? Crouch (pause): You mean – raw? George (crossly): No, of course not! – cooked – with gravy and mashed potatoes. Crouch (pause): I thought she was on the mend, sir.124 Once again, with Stoppard nothing is wasted. The punchline allows Stoppard to run a quick joke about Dotty’s deteriorating mental state. Another most amusing cross purpose occurs in Teeth when George, who is having an affair with a dentist’s wife, is sitting in the dentist’s chair being treated by the dentist, Harry: Harry: …You’ve been letting yourself go a bit, haven’t you? (GEORGE’s worried eyes) I am 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.) 124 Jumpers, pages 76–77.

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I can spot the signs you know, a mile off, so you better watch it, hadn’t you? I must say, I wouldn’t have thought it of you. (He withdraws long enough for –) George: Now hold on, Harry – (HARRY flicks on the spotlight. The glare is on GEORGE’s eyes. GEORGE grips the sides of the chair.) Harry: I’m giving you fair warning – and Mary (George’s wife) wouldn’t thank you for it if it came to the worst, would she? George: Look here – (HARRY squirts.) Harry: Gums – it’s your gums you have to watch.125 The scene is made all the funnier by its construction as a pastiche of a war-time interrogation. The whole play, in the style of Roald Dahl, is one long cross p ­ urpose. The amusement hits its summit as Harry suddenly turns around brandishing a mallet and chisel. ‘GEORGE sits bolt upright and squawks’ (as no doubt does the audience) until ‘HARRY puts the chisel against the head rest bracket and gives it a good thump with a mallet’ uttering as he does so, ‘Must get that seen to’.126 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, furthermore, provides a cleverly constructed mix-up by Rosencrantz of the Player’s analysis of Hamlet’s problem. Guil: Why is he mad?! Ros: I don’t know! Player: The old man thinks he’s in love with his daughter. Ros: (appalled) Good God! We’re out of our depth here. Player: No, no, no – he hasn’t got a daughter – the old man thinks he’s in love with his daughter. Ros: The old man is? Player: Hamlet, in love with the old man’s daughter, the old man thinks.127 Not all the cross purposes are convoluted. One with a more crisp punch is the nubile Maddie Gotobed’s confusion with McTeazle over the status of her shorthand: McTeazle: Do you use Greggs or do you favour the Pitman method? Maddie: I’m on the pill.128 125 126 127 128

Teeth, pages 33–34. Teeth, page 38. RosGuil, page 60. Dirty Linen, page 83.

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The Running Gag The running gag is the repeated reference to or use of a device, the repetition of which causes humour. Perhaps the most famous running gag in the whole of theatre is to be found in Hamlet with Claudius’ continual inability to ­distinguish between two minor courtiers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Stoppard easily transfers the same joke to his own Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, developing it further to the point where even Rosencrantz cannot tell which of the two he is. Stoppard runs his own version of the joke in other plays. The Real Inspector Hound sees several repeated jokes – the question of whether Cynthia kisses with her mouth open, the scene setting Mrs Drudge describing the atmospheric fog ‘beginning to roll off the sea’129 and the continuing amorous disclosures of Birdboot, the Lothario ‘ladies man’.130 In Jumpers Inspector Bones is forever addressing George by the wrong Christian name. He starts off by calling him Charlie. By the end of the play he has called him Ferdinand, Sidney, Clarence and Sigmund. In fact, anything but George. Stoppard had an early, almost half attempt, at this joke in Enter a Free Man when Riley keeps getting the ‘almost anonymous’131 Brown’s name wrong. Stoppard had used this form of joke as early as If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank in which he runs a repeated reference to the ‘scrupulous morality’132 of various male characters being, incorrectly, impugned by Frank, the bus driver, who keeps asking what they have done with his wife, Gladys. He puts the device into excess in Rough Crossing when he runs repeated gags of the cabin steward, Dvornichek, consuming Turai’s cognac,133 Gal’s addiction to food (to the extent that when he thinks the ship is sinking his first action is to have ‘gathered up a few necessary provisions’134), Natasha’s continual confusion as to the name of her leading man’s character in the musical she is rehearsing and ­Dvornichek’s early ignorance of nautical terms – which culminates, when he gets the hang of it, in his subsequent realisation that, ‘When you’re coming from the front starboard’s on the left’.135 Slightly more convoluted is Adam’s ‘nervous disability’ which ensures that ‘in certain situations…Adam is always answering the last question but one’.136 129 130 131 132 133

The Real Inspector Hound, page 23. The Real Inspector Hound, page 22. Enter a Free Man, page 5. If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank, pages 45, 46 and 49. Michael Billington comments, ‘The first couple of times the gag…is quite funny but it stales with repetition’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 164. 134 Rough Crossing, page 258. 135 Rough Crossing, page 239. 136 Rough Crossing, pages 199–200.

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In The Dog It Was That Died Stoppard treats his audience to the repeated joke that Blair, a British spy, has no apparent interest in or understanding of Communist beliefs. More amusing, and more deeply explored, is the running gag in Travesties of Carr, the employee of the consulate, having a far inferior knowledge of political events than his butler, Bennett: Bennett: There is a revolution in Russia, sir. Carr: Really? What sort of revolution? Bennett: A social revolution, sir. Carr: A social revolution? Unaccompanied women smoking at the Opera, that sort of thing? … Bennett: Not precisely that, sir. It is more in the nature of a revolution of classes contraposed by the fissiparous disequilibrium of Russian society.137 Not a running gag, as such, but Stoppard plays the same humorous tune in Jumpers when he has a seemingly not so well educated character make a very incisive intellectual comment. Crouch, the porter, casts his eye over George’s typewritten speech about morality and comments, in a very erudite way, on George’s argument in defence of the existence of God: Saint Sebastian died of fright! – very good! (To SECRETARY: surprisingly.) Of course, the flaw in the argument is that even if the first term of his infinitely regressing series is zero rather than infinitesimal, the original problem remains in identifying the second term of the series, which however small must be greater than zero – you take my point? I grant you he’s answered Russell’s first point, I grant you that – the smallest proper fraction is zero –138 The identically named Hall Porter in Another Moon Called Earth, Crouch, also shows signs of remarkably similar comic erudition when he observes, uninvited, that ‘The Etruscans soon fizzled out’,139 to the historian, Bone. The joke is repeated in Rough Crossing when Dvornichek displays a better knowledge of Latin than the two playwrights,140 turns out to be a better piano player than Adam, the composer141 and, in general, exhibits a far greater understanding of plot than any of the on-board acting/production company. 137 138 139 140 141

Travesties, page 12. Jumpers, page 79. Another Moon Called Earth, page 63. Rough Crossing, page 239. Rough Crossing, 282.

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In a similar vein Maddie Gotobed, the secretary/clerk to the Select Committee in Dirty Linen, despite the parlous nature of her shorthand and constant deshabille, knows far more about politics and parliamentary procedure than the Members of Parliament she serves. At one moment she is defining more precisely than they the meaning of quorum while next she is exhibiting the common touch they lack by advising them, ‘People don’t care what m.p.s do in their spare time, they just want them to do their jobs properly bringing down prices and everything’.142 She displays incisive intelligence far beyond the mps’ capability when analysing why newspapers run salacious stories: ‘They only write it up because of each other writing it up. Then they try to write it up more than each other – it’s like a competition, you see’,143 she explains to the Committee. Eventually she ends up writing the Committee’s report and is shown to be fluent in French to boot. The subject of parliamentary sleaze is a particularly fertile subject for Stoppard’s humour and Dirty Linen contains other examples of running gags, notably the propensity of the mps to keep producing pairs of women’s knickers and McTeazle’s repeated attempts to reacquaint Maddie with her skirt. Stoppard runs a rather more contrived version of the running gag in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when he repeats various derivations of a line from ‘The Lord’s Prayer’,144 but always as part of a rhyme. The reference to the bible may be to reflect a running sense of religion that exists in Hamlet (hinting at both fate and the nature of truth which Stoppard’s play focuses on), the mirror image play from which Stoppard’s is derived. It begins with: Ros: (an anguished cry) Consistency is all I ask! Guil: (low, wry rhetoric) Give us this day our daily mask.145 and carries on through, Ros: (quietly) Immortality is all I seek Guil: (dying fall) Give us this day our daily week146 142 Dirty Linen, page 99. 143 Dirty Linen, page 105. 144 See also Stoppard’s short story Life, Times: Fragments: ‘Give us this day our daily press, and forgive us our intrusions into private grief…Lead us into sensation and deliver us from libel’. Quoted in S. Rusinko, Tom Stoppard, page 21. 145 RosGuil, page 30. 146 RosGuil, page 37.

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to, Ros: … (in anguish) All I ask is a change of ground! Guil: (coda) Give us this day our daily round…147 and, Ros: (in anguish) Plausibility is all I presume! Guil (coda) Give us this day our daily tune…148 with a slight variation of: Guil …(a cry) All I ask is our common due…Give us this day our daily cue.149 Note, too, the playwright’s directions, underscoring the religious nature of the phraseology. As is usually the case the best humour, in addition to being funny, also makes a point. In The Coast of Utopia trilogy Michael Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary, is always in an impecunious state, which he shamelessly exploits – much to his father’s disgust – as he accuses him thus: ‘Your own life you have wasted at every turn, and sponged off friends and strangers until your name is a byword for bad faith…’.150 Always trying to launch yet another revolution somewhere in Europe Michael continually solicits the Russian intelligentsia for funding, repeating in salesman-like fashion the words, ‘This is the last thing I’ll ever ask of you –’.151 Bakunin’s constant habit of adopting the latest philosophical fad may also be counted a running gag.152 The film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead contains a delightful running visual joke in which Rosencrantz stumbles upon several great scientific discoveries or inventions but does not have the wit to understand 147 148 149 150 151 152

RosGuil, page 85. RosGuil, page 105. RosGuil, page 93. Voyage, pages 47–48. Salvage, eg: to Turgenev, page 96; to Herzen, page 114. See J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 103. See also DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 168: ‘the running gag of Bakunin jumping from one strained philosophical position to another’.

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their significance.153 It begins with Rosencrantz dropping an Indian club and a shuttlecock from the badminton gallery as he nearly foresees Galileo’s discovery that the speed of an object’s descent is independent of its mass.154 It continues in the garden scene with an apple falling on Rosencrantz’s head in homage to Newton’s moment of inspiration in discovering gravity and continues through numerous discoveries and devices – including Newton’s cradle, a windmill, a steam powered ‘Magimix’ and Archimedes’ principle – culminating in a paper bi-plane which Guildenstern crumples up. Satire Satire’s the thing.155

martin, Funny Man

∵ Stoppard’s wit is often at its best when deployed against himself, his profession or aspects thereof.156 The Living-Room Theatre of Cahoot’s Macbeth affords him a fine opportunity to exercise what some might regard as his occasional saeva indignatio. Here, in words he gives to the Inspector, is his rather merciless take on the plight of the playwright in front of his audience: Don’t you think it rather inconvenient, having a lot of preening exhibitionists projecting their voices around the place? – and that’s just the audience. I mean, who wants to be packed out night after night by a crowd of fashionable bronchitics saying, ‘I don’t think it’s as good as his last one’.157

153 154 155 156

See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 266, note 14. See also the musical near-miss involving Beethoven’s Fifth. Funny Man, i – 8. Not all Stoppard’s satire is deployed against himself or his profession. Jim Hunter argues that, ‘Jumpers satirises twentieth-century relativist thinkers’, and that the simplest starting-point for understanding the play is to consider it as a satire – see J. Hunter, Tom ­Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 63. John Fleming unearthed in Stoppard’s Translator’s Notes the playwright’s intention that George’s long speeches in Jumpers are ‘a recognizable parody of a philosophical discourse’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 274, Note 14. 157 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 185.

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Even more amusing is Birdboot’s direct reference to Stoppard: It is at this point that the play for me comes alive. The groundwork has been well and truly laid, and the author has taken the trouble to learn from the masters of the genre. He has created a real situation, and few will doubt his ability to resolve it with a startling denouement.158 Close to home, too, is Henry’s wry comment in The Real Thing on his own back catalogue – ‘I suppose that’s the fate of all us artists…People saying they ­preferred the early stuff’.159 Stoppard also takes a swipe at artists in general: Inspector: I can see you’re not at the bottom of the social heap. What do you do? Hostess: I’m an artist. Inspector (Cheerfully) Well it’s not the first time I’ve been wrong.160 It is no surprise how often journalists are the butt of Stoppard’s satire. In Professional Foul a pack of sporting hacks report on an international football match and are interrupted by Anderson, an ‘Oxbridge don’,161 as they are filing their reports for their papers. This is a cue for Stoppard’s satirical parody of their very particular journalistic style of hyperbolic mixed metaphor: There’ll be Czechs bouncing in the streets of Prague tonight as bankruptcy stares English football in the face, stop, new par…Make no mistake, comma, the four-goal credit which these slick Slovaks netted here this afternoon will keep them in the black through the second leg of the World Cup Eliminator at Wembley next month, stop. New par…You can bank on it.…Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers, stop. Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers, stop.162 A similar exercise in satirising journalists comes in Voyage with Alexander Bakunin’s exasperated verdict on his son, Michael’s, latest attempt to find himself a profession by writing revolutionary material: ‘The final straw. Journalism’.163 158 159 160 161 162 163

The Real Inspector Hound, page 35. The Real Thing, page 41. Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 185. Professional Foul, page 43. Professional Foul, pages 73–74. Voyage, page 26.

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But, the most sustained and amusing satire on journalism comes much closer to Stoppard’s home in The Real Inspector Hound in which the butt of the humour is the theatre critic. A former critic himself164 Stoppard enjoys himself mightily at their expense, although he retains a self-deprecating sense of proportion about it. ‘Hound’, he says, ‘doesn’t lend itself to deep scrutiny. It’s an entertainment, just like a mechanical toy. It waves a flag, squeaks and turns a turtle and carries on’.165 The two hapless theatre hacks, Moon and Birdboot, are displayed in a pompous light with some of the most delicious lines in the whole of Stoppard’s works. Birdboot is a sleazy wordsmith who cannot resist the lure of the opposite sex despite his wife Myrtle – ‘all cocoa and blue nylon fur slippers’166 – for whom the evening’s fare is ‘not exactly her cup of tea’.167 Originally having ‘flattered’, the nubile Felicity, ‘a little over a drink’,168 his attention soon switches to the actress playing Cynthia, whom he invites out to ‘a very good hotel, discreet – run by a man of the world’.169 Moon is obsessed with his role as ‘the second string’170 critic, a mere stand-in, and his chances of preferment. Birdboot shares Moon’s conceit of his profession, claiming that, ‘a word from us and we could make (the actress playing Felicity)’,171 while ‘keeping a few colour transparencies’172 of one of his reviews in neon lights outside the Theatre Royal. It is the pompous verbosity which makes these two characters such a perfect satire and what must be an actor’s delight to play. Only a wordsmith of 164 While working at Scene magazine in London Stoppard reviewed approximately 132 shows and while at the Bristol Evening World (1959–1960) he wrote reviews of both theatre and film. See J. Fleming, J, ‘Tom Stoppard: A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, pages 37 and 42 and Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, pages 11–12. I. Nadel, in Double Act A Life of Tom Stoppard, page 64 notes that ‘For the amalgamated papers (in Bristol) Stoppard not only did general news reporting, but was occasionally the second or third-string drama critic, again reporting on amateur theatrical productions and subbing for…the first string. This would generate the situation he later developed in The Real Inspector Hound’. 165 Stoppard, in an interview with A. Goreau, ‘Is the Real Inspector Hound a Shaggy Dog Story?’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 258. 166 The Real Inspector Hound, page 39. 167 The Real Inspector Hound, page 11. 168 The Real Inspector Hound, page 42. 169 The Real Inspector Hound, page 38. 170 The Real Inspector Hound, page 11. 171 The Real Inspector Hound, page 12 172 The Real Inspector Hound, page 15.

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­ irdboot’s hackneyed style could describe his philandering as, ‘hole in the B ­corner innuendo’,173 which is, ‘vilified and pilloried in the stocks of common gossip’.174 Mixing his metaphors, Birdboot, the lesser of the two in terms of intellect but the equal of Moon in verbal dexterity, observes at one point in the play that, ‘The skeleton in the cupboard is coming home to roost’,175 and confirms many people’s suspicions that many a review has been written by committee in the bar with an opening line in which he says to Moon, ‘Me and the lads have had a meeting in the bar and decided it’s a first class family entertainment but if it goes on beyond half-past ten it’s self-indulgent’.176 Their reviews are suffused with a form of cod-intelligence which is the stuff of mirth. Such supercilious nonsense oozes easily from the more intellectually bombastic Moon’s pen: ‘Already in the opening stages we note the classic impact of the catalystic figure…(who)…will strip these comfortable people – these crustaceans in the rock pool of society – strip them of their shells and leave them exposed as the trembling raw meat which, at heart, is all of us’.177 He later on opines, ‘Let me at once say that it has e’lan while at the same time avoiding e’clat’,178 and concludes imperiously that, ‘I will not attempt to refrain from invoking the names of Kafka, Sartre, Shakespeare, St. Paul, Beckett, Pinero, Pirandello, Dante and Dorothy L. Sayers’.179 Birdboot lags not far behind Moon’s adulteration of the genre with his suggestion that, ‘The part is written as a mere cypher but she manages to make Cynthia a real person’.180 Even when the critics change place with the actors Stoppard does not spare his satirical whip and Simon offers up, ‘Those of you who were fortunate enough to be at the Comedie Francaise on Wednesday last will not need to be reminded that hysterics are no substitute for e’clat’.181

173 The Real Inspector Hound, page 13. 174 The Real Inspector Hound, page 14. Brenda uses a similar phrase in The Boundary, page 17, to demonstrate her propensity for malapropisms: ‘I will not stand here and be pillarised and vitrified’. 175 The Real Inspector Hound, page 19. 176 The Real Inspector Hound, page 10. 177 The Real Inspector Hound, page 19. 178 The Real Inspector Hound, page 28. 179 The Real Inspector Hound, page 36. Michael Billington points out that this list of names is, in part, a satirical reference to some of the playwrights whose influence is supposedly seen in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. See M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 65. 180 The Real Inspector Hound, page 27. 181 The Real Inspector Hound, page 44.

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In a satire worthy of Swift Stoppard takes the political class to task with a highly entertaining lash of his pen in Dirty Linen. The setting for such savage but humorous invective is Room 3b, ‘an overspill meeting room for House of Commons business in the tower of Big Ben’,182 in which the ‘Select Committee on Promiscuity in High Places’183 has been commissioned, at the behest of the Prime Minister following a series of sexual revelations involving mps by the newspapers of the day, ‘to report on moral standards in the House’.184 The aptly named Miss Maddie Gotobed is welcomed to her new role as the committee’s secretary/clerk and left in no doubt as to the calibre of the ruling elite by Cocklebury-Smyth, one of its members: Cocklebury-Smyth: You will find the working conditions primitive, the hours antisocial, the amenities non-existent and the catering beneath contempt. On top of that the people are for the most part very very very boring, with interests either so generalised as to mimic wholesale ­ignorance or so particular as to be lunatic obsessions. Their level of conversation would pass without comment in the lavatory of a mixed ­comprehensive … Maddie: It has always been my ambition to work in the House of Commons.185 But, Maddie has not been employed for her abilities to take shorthand. Rather, ‘Miss Gotobed has been recommended, by different people…in a period of some difficulty’,186 which is to say that the male committee members have all become so sexually compromised with her that she has got the job as a quid pro quo for her discretion and because it gives the members a chance to ogle her. Her slow pace of dictation ensures the comical situation of the members having to talk slowly so that she can keep up. The ruling class is institutionally corrupt, as Cocklebury-Smyth illustrates with his confession that, ‘the p.m. offered me a life peerage, for services which he said he would let me know more about in due course if I were interested’.187 Withenshaw’s peerage has been bought: ‘I’ll have you bloody know that Mrs. Withenshaw and I

182 Dirty Linen, page 79. 183 Dirty Linen, page 91. It is also referred to on page 92 as ‘The Select Committee on Moral Standards in Public Life’. 184 Dirty Linen, page 83. 185 Dirty Linen, page 81. 186 Dirty Linen, page 109. 187 Dirty Linen, pages 81–82.

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personally ­donated the Botticelli-style painted ceiling in the Free Church assembly Hall. I’ve bought and paid for more naked bums than you’ve had hot dinners’,188 he tells the committee. The committee conducts its business at ‘absolute break-neck speed because it’s pure ritual’189 and French is forced to admit that, ‘we haven’t heard any evidence’,190 – but that is because, in CockleburySmyth’s words, ‘we aren’t going to call any witnesses’.191 A decision is taken on the nod to approve an American’s application for British nationality solely on the grounds that ‘One more American can’t make any difference’,192 while all the mps, up to and including the Home Secretary, appear to have had some form of amorous fling with the spectacularly accommodating Miss Gotobed. Stoppard’s lampoon spares no part of the politicians’ corruption, even to the point of highlighting their vested interests as Cocklebury-Smyth is alone in voting against one element of the report because, as a member of the National Union of Journalists, he explains, ‘I have to make a living in my spare time too, you know’.193 Parody I’ve always loved parody. I’ve always enjoyed it. And I’ve used it a lot.194 stoppard

∵ There is often a fine line between satire and parody.195 Unlike satire, which is used as a form of literary highlighter pen and often implies comment, parody implies a connection to some other literary form or source and is closer to the vehicle than the idea in that it provides the situation from which the argument can be delivered.196 Sometimes Stoppard delivers two parodies for the 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195

Dirty Linen, pages 93–94. Dirty Linen, page 108. Dirty Linen, page 108. Dirty Linen, page 94. Dirty Linen, page 135. Dirty Linen, page 105. Stoppard, ‘A Play In Three Acts’, The Pennsylvania Gazette, April 1996, page 28. CWE. Bigsby, however, notes Stoppard’s, ‘penchant for parody rather than satire’. – CWE. Bigsby, Tom Stoppard, page 24. 196 Katherine Kelly sees a greater significance in Stoppard’s use of parody: ‘In its broadest and most accompanying sense, Stoppard’s craft of comedy is his commitment to sharing with

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price of one. The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of an Agatha Christie murder/mystery with a small dose of Sherlock Holmes thrown in197 (as well as an hilarious satire on the behaviour of theatre critics). It has all the traditional tools of Christie’s stage whodunits.198 As Stoppard describes it, ‘It’s a logical structure with a vein of parody going through it’.199 The usual country house setting is ‘the drawing-room of Muldoon Manor’200 which is, rather predictably, ‘cut off from the world’201 as ‘the fog rolls off the sea without warning, shrouding the cliffs in a deadly mantle of blind man’s buff’,202 as a mysterious stranger, answering the police description, appears on stage. Complete with a Mrs Drudge, the Help, and the crippled old-boy, Magnus, who repairs

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spectators the coded secrets of play. And his chief means of opening up these secrets is parody – the distorted repetition of source texts and genre markers that define the rules of the cosmic game. Stoppard’s recycling of the literary past shares with the Russian Formalist movement a belief in the power of parody to rejuvenate both the artist’s creating energy and the spectator/reader’s interpreting energy’. – K. Kelly, Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play, page 159. Gabrielle Scott Robinson, in her analysis of Durrenmatt and Stoppard, gives even greater emphasis to the role of parody in Stoppard’s craft: ‘(Durrenmatt and Stoppard) use parody to force a realization of (the) lack of absolutes. They distort a situation to farcical extremes in order to bring out the truth, to make us feel that which has been lost’. – GS. Robinson, ‘Nothing Left But Parody: Friedrich Durrenmatt and Tom Stoppard’ in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook, page 124. ‘The Real Inspector Hound is partly a parody of an old-fashioned stage thriller, and partly a satire on theatre critics’. – O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 154. Daniel Jernigan comments, ‘Whether or not what we are witnessing in Hound qualifies as parody or pastiche is difficult to determine’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 28. Jernigan sees Stoppard’s use of parody as a sign of his progression from a postmodernist playwright to a modernist one: ‘as his career develops Stoppard becomes increasingly overt in how he uses parody to critique various political and philosophical attitudes which he finds to be ontologically, epistemologically, and even aesthetically distasteful, pointing to one more way in which Stoppard becomes increasingly modern during the course of his career’. – Jernigan, op cit, page 28. For Anthony Jenkins this is a weakness. He says, ‘The problem with Hound, and why it seems the least satisfactory of all Stoppard’s plays, is that the theatrical whodunit tends to be transparently banal in the first place, so that to parody its emptiness simply restates the obvious’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 51. Stoppard, in an interview with A. Goreau, ‘Is the Real Inspector Hound a Shaggy Dog Story?’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 258. The Real Inspector Hound, page 9. The Real Inspector Hound, page 15 The Real Inspector Hound, page 16.

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to ‘go and oil (his) gun’203 Stoppard’s play has the usual Christie collection of ­lovers – Felicity takes a fancy to Simon who is having a fling with Cynthia, the lady of the manor, who happens to be the object of Magnus’ affections. The repeated interruptions on the radio with increasingly minatory warnings from the police about an ‘escaped madman who is on the run’204 are given a touch of Conan Doyle with the sound of ‘the cry of a gigantic hound’.205 Like many of Christie’s stage plays Muldoon Manor is a closed environment and with the telephone lines cut no one (except the police) can get in or out, thereby ensuring that the murderer is amongst the characters. In true Christie style each of the main characters utters a death threat: ‘I’ll kill you for this, Simon Gascoyne’,206 threatens Felicity; Magnus, equally, offers to Cynthia to, ‘kill (Simon) if he comes between us;’207 Simon, in his turn, offers to Cynthia to, ‘kill anyone who comes between us!’;208 and, not to be outdone, Cynthia threatens, ‘if I find that you have falsely seduced me from my dear husband Albert – I will kill you, Simon Gascoyne’.209 After a regulation bout of ‘You mean – ?’s210 Mrs Drudge reports each of the threats by turn with the words, ‘I hope you don’t mind my mentioning it’.211 Finally, in true Christie style, Magnus concludes that, ‘I think we all had the opportunity to fire the shot’,212 and everyone is asked, ‘to go to the positions they occupied when the shot was fired’.213 New-Found-Land (the title of which is derived from a line in Donne’s ‘Elegy xix’214) contains a parody of all things American, but one that is nuanced and operates on several different levels. In particular, whilst seeming superficially to extol America215 it contains images, such as the ‘screaming hydra-headed 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214

The Real Inspector Hound, page 26. The Real Inspector Hound, page 13. The Real Inspector Hound, page 30. The Real Inspector Hound, page 21. The Real Inspector Hound, page 24. The Real Inspector Hound, page 23. The Real Inspector Hound, page 26. The Real Inspector Hound, page 34. The Real Inspector Hound, page 46. The Real Inspector Hound, page 45. The Real Inspector Hound, page 45. ‘O my America! My new-found-land’ – J. Donne, ‘Elegy xix. To His Mistress Going To Bed’. In Donne’s poem the poet compares his desired sexual exploration of his mistress’ body to that of the discovery and exploration of America. 215 Richard Corballis describes Arthur’s monologue as ‘idealistic’. See R. Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork, page 102.

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mob’,216 the ‘golden calf or Cadillac’217 and the ‘nightmare of acrylic lights’218 which portray a subtext of critical social commentary reflecting the Beckettian A, minus A structure Stoppard often adopts. Whilst Bernard’s brief summary is of the brash, self-confident transparency associated with American society – ‘Americans are a very modern people… They say what they mean and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. They admire everything about them without reserve or pretence of scholarship’219 – Arthur’s is a more granular parody: ‘Could this be paradise? – or is it after all, purgatory?’,220 he enquires. It is also a parody of a travel journal, written as if on a train journey around America, containing passages such as: The Silver Chief is rolling through vineyards and orchards, a sun-bathed Canaan decked with peach and apricot221 and (again with a sting of social criticism), The sun hangs like a copper pan over boarding houses with elaborately scrolled gingerbread eves. In the red-lit shadow of wrought-iron balconies octaroon Loreleis sing their siren songs to shore-leave sailors, and sharp-suited pimps push open saloon doors, spilling light and rag-time to underscore the street cries of old men selling shrimp gumbo down on the levee.222 Arthur’s extended monologue223 is, in part, a parody of the American Dream (with a touch of bile thrown in): The lower decks are crowded with immigrants from every ghetto in the Continent of Europe, a multitude of tongues silenced now in the common language of joyful tears.…The men wave their straw hats. Shawled women hold up their babies, the newest Americans of all, destined, some 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223

New-Found-Land, page 129. New-Found-Land, page 129. New-Found-Land, page 128. New-Found-Land, pages 123–124. New-Found-Land, page 129. New-Found-Land, page 129. New-Found-Land, page 127. Felicia Hardison Londre comments, ‘Arthur’s monologue is a virtuoso piece of writing, in that it manages to be at once both lyrical and funny’. – FH. Londre, Tom Stoppard, page 175.

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of them, to become the captains and the kings of industrial empires, to invent the modern age in ramshackle workshops, to put a chicken in every pot, an automobile by every stoop, to organise crime as never before, and to fill the sky over Hollywood with a thousand stars!224 The language seems to reflect, intentionally or otherwise, touches from a host of America’s literary royalty. Arthur quotes directly from Emma Lazarus’ ‘The New Colossus’: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore’.225 At one point it reeks of the Deep South found in the works of Tennessee Williams (once again with the underlying bite of social comment): ‘We doze and wake in thundery oppressive heat. Thick groves of oak and magnolia darken the windows of the speeding train – and encroach, too, upon the fly-blown shutters of white-porticoed mansions which stand decaying sill-high in jungle grasses that once were lawns’.226 There is more than a whiff of the tone of F. Scott Fitzgerald about the end of the monologue: ‘…for now beyond the city, beyond America, beyond all, nothing lies before us but an endless expanse of blue, flecked with cheerful whitecaps. With wondering eyes we stare at the Pacific, and all of us look at each other with a wild surmise’.227 In much the same style as Walt Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, which never has death far from its mellifluous depiction of the American panorama, is Stoppard’s memorable description of modern America, containing the minatory undercurrent of social decay and commercial exploitation: Where once the corn stood high as an elevator boy, and the barns shook with dancing farmhands changing partners to a fiddler’s call, now screen doors bang endlessly in the wind which long ago covered up the tyre tracks of bone-rattling pick-ups taking the Okies on their tragic exodus to the promised lands of El Dorado.228 Darkside sees Stoppard parodying another American literary phenomenon; the ‘Is it a bird? Is it a plane?’229 style of comic-books. He uses it to illustrate 224 225 226 227 228 229

New-Found-Land, page 124. New-Found-Land, page 124: E. Lazarus, ‘The New Colossus’. New-Found-Land, pages 126–127. New-Found-Land, page 129. New-Found-Land, page 128. Darkside, page 15.

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an example of the first of several moral dilemmas that comprise one of the themes of the play: Voices: Look there! – That’s a train coming through! The signal must have failed! It’s speeding toward where the bridge got washed away in the flood! It’s certain death for those people on the train! It’s going in the river unless someone – Ethics Man: Let me through! I’m a moral philosopher! Voices: Why, it’s Ethics Man! Ethics Man! What’s he going to –? Look! He’s switched the points! Just in time! Nice work, Ethics Man!230 Straightforward Wit Much of Stoppard’s humour is just plainly funny. Witness Archie and George Moore’s exchange over the death of McFee: Archie: …– McFee’s dead. George: What?!! Archie: Shot himself this morning, in the park, in a plastic bag. George: My God! Why? Archie: It’s hard to say. He was always tidy.231 Echoing the taxi driver’s tendency to boast about whom he has had in his cab to other passengers, Stoppard amusingly has Charon tell aeh, as he rows him across the Styx, ‘I had that Dionysus in the back of my boat’.232 As Stoppard told Ronald Hayman, ‘If it’s worth using once, it’s worth using twice’.233 He ­repeats it in Shakespeare in Love with further embellishment. On this occasion the Boatman responds, in the typical Cockney accent of a London black cab driver, consenting to Will’s entreaty, as in the best scenes involving taxi drivers, to follow the Thames river taxi into which an escaping Viola has just jumped. Parodying the stereotype of a chauffeur, the Boatman proceeds to attempt to

230 231 232 233

Darkside, pages 7–8. Jumpers, page 68. The Invention of Love, page 27. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, ‘First Interview’ in Tom Stoppard, page 2.

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engage Shakespeare in conversation by claiming that he has seen him somewhere before, in this case in the production of a play. Unintentionally compounding the irritation he is causing Will, the Boatman goes on to add, in the manner of Charon to AEH, that he once transported the Bard’s greatest rival, Christopher Marlowe, in his boat, too.234 Stoppard’s sense of humour can be deliciously wicked, as in Rosencrantz’s summary of Hamlet’s problems: To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped on to his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?235 In a similar vein is the encounter between the feisty Hostess of the Czech dissident’s theatre and the bully-boy Inspector: Inspector: …I’ve had this place watched you know. Hostess: I know. Inspector: Gave themselves away, did they? Hostess: It was the uniforms mainly, and standing each side of the door.236 Stoppard even manages to make a scene change into a joke. In Salvage ­Alexander Herzen is almost continually moving house during his stay in ­London which Stoppard, somehow in order to keep to the historical narrative, has to reflect in the play. At one point Worcell, the Polish revolutionary, falls asleep and when he wakes Stoppard produces the following vignette: Worcell looks about. Worcell: You’ve changed the furniture. Herzen: Yes, we moved house whilst you were asleep, we’re in Finchley.237 Likewise, Stoppard adopts a humorous approach to setting the scene with Mrs Drudge in The Real Inspector Hound. The audience receives information about the setting of the country house murder/mystery when the Help answers the telephone with the words, ‘Hello, the drawing-room of Lady Muldoon’s 234 Stoppard cannot resist a later version of the joke when a second boatman asks Will to review his memoirs. 235 RosGuil, page 42. 236 Cahoot’s Macbeth, page 191. 237 Salvage, page 41.

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c­ ountry residence one morning in early spring’.238 The joke is allowed to run on when she again answers the telephone, this time with, ‘The same, half an hour later’.239

Visual Effects

Stoppard’s plays invariably produce a visual feast and very rarely is it just spectacle for spectacle’s sake.240 The opening and closing scenes of After Magritte, imitating the surrealist style of a Magritte painting, are the very essence of the play and central to the operation of Occam’s razor, of which the play is a live demonstration. The waltz in Arcadia metaphorically emphasises the themes of the play whilst the dance sequence at the end of Travesties is part of Stoppard’s replication of The Importance of Being Earnest. The physical agility of the gymnasts in Jumpers, leaping and flipping into a pyramid, is an allegory for the moral gymnastics of the play. The visual machinations are often part of Stoppard’s eternal awareness of the need to hold an audience. The stage direction of ‘Music! Lights!…a track from DOTTY’s record, playing in the bedroom, and DOTTY swinging and miming to it’,241 followed by a ‘little simple improvised choreography between the ­JUMPERS and DOTTY’242 is inserted immediately after a very long speech by George Moore. Jumpers is a very visual play. It includes a split set243 (Dotty’s bedroom, George’s study and a third space), a game of charades played by Dotty and George,244 a hare, called Thumper, and a tortoise, called Pat (who is not the only tortoise in the Stoppardian world – Arcadia has Plautus/­Lightning). The play contains Bones’ first encounter with George – covered in shaving 238 The Real Inspector Hound, page 15. 239 The Real Inspector Hound, page 28. 240 The visual impact of Stoppard’s television plays should not be ignored. Terry Hodgson comments on Neutral Ground, ‘Stoppard’s visual imagination and capacity to develop plot by intercutting camera shots and varying lenses from long shot to close-up reveals a writer at the top of his profession’. – T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, pages 48–49. Anthony Jenkins describes Stoppard as modern theatre’s, ‘most adroit manipulator of stage pictures’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page ix. 241 Jumpers, page 55. 242 Jumpers, page 56. 243 See T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, pages 65–67 for a full exploration of the visual impact of Jumpers and of the split set. 244 Jumpers, page 43. Charades are also played by a husband and wife in Lord Malquist and Mr Moon.

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foam, carrying a bow and arrow, talking to a tortoise – a murder and a dead Jumper hanging on the back of a door. Stoppard has had access to increasing amounts of stage technology, particularly at the Royal National Theatre in London, which has given him a range of visual options. Jumpers makes use of ‘a SCREEN, forming a backdrop to the whole stage’. The stage directions continue to explain its use. ‘Film and slides are to be back-projected on to this SCREEN on a scale big enough to allow actors and furniture to mask the images without significantly obscuring them’.245 At one moment the screen is displaying a map of the moon, the next pictures of a political procession in the streets of London. Later the television set displays images from a dermatograph which Archie is using on Dotty. Video, deployed on an ‘upstage cyclorama of seven curved panels’246 was extensively used in the inaugural productions of the three plays in The Coast of Utopia in 2002.247 The prompt scripts and production notes call for 37 phases of video in Voyage, 32 in Shipwreck and 56 in Salvage.248 The video included a multitude of images, such as black and white pictures of Moscow rooftops, the sea at Nice, a Saxony prison, the barricades and kite flying. In order to achieve the numerous scene changes extensive use was made of the revolving stage. It employed 19 movements in Voyage, 27 in Shipwreck and 29 in Salvage.249 The initial staging of The Hard Problem used an intertwined complex of neon strip lights, suspended above the stage which lit up in short bursts to represent brain impulses. The technology was not confined to London’s South Bank. The inaugural production of Hapgood at London’s Aldwych Theatre involved the projection of a red dot onto a map of London showing the tracking of the pursuit of agents through the streets of London. The scale of the map gradually grows smaller and the map became more and more detailed.250 The introductory note to his draft of Galileo – ‘This script of ‘Galileo’ has been prepared for performance in the London Planetarium’251 – suggests that, were it to have been produced, the technical wizardry of a projection of the heavens would have been a backdrop to the play. 245 Jumpers, page 13. 246 National Theatre Magazine, Issue 01, April 2015, page 19. 247 See I. Nadel: ‘computerized video projections visualize the constant swirl of historical and physical events’. – I. Nadel, ‘Chekhov’s Stoppard’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 24. 248 Prompt ‘Bible’ Scripts and Production Notes – RNT/SM/1/481c; RNT/SM/1/482b; RNT/ SM/1/483. 249 Prompt ‘Bible’ Scripts and Production Notes – RNT/SM/1/481c; RNT/SM/1/482b; RNT/ SM/1/483. 250 see J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 182. 251 Galileo, NOTE.

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Stoppard has an uncanny knack of knowing what will create an impression on stage and his plays contain several iconic images. Henry brandishing ‘an old cricket bat’252 or George Moore a bow and arrow stay in the memory, as does Hannah accepting Gus’ apple.253 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern peeking out of the top of a barrel alongside Hamlet and the Player, both in their own barrels, is one of the stage’s great scenes. Alongside such imagery the scenes in Stoppard’s farces rely upon a considerable amount of visual impact. All the scenes in On the Razzle are particularly rich in it – at The Imperial Gardens Café, Madam Knorr’s Fashion House, Zangler’s shop and Fraulein Blumenblatt’s flat. Stoppard’s stagecraft also shows in the timing of much of his imagery, often coming right at the end of a scene, such as the ‘snowstorm (which) envelops the stage’254 when Max shakes Charlotte’s miniature Alps snow scene at the end of the first scene of The Real Thing. Given their relevance to Stoppard’s interest in illusion and reality it is surprising that acts of magic do not appear more often in his works. In Travesties Joyce, prompted by the observation that Dada and Tzara are, ‘names to conjure with’,255 parodies a magic act as he ‘conjures from (a) hat a white carnation’256 which he proceeds to put in his buttonhole.257 He, then, starts to ‘pull silk hankies from the hat’,258 after which he produces flags. The Cherry Orchard sees Charlotta begin a magic show at a party. Her initial efforts comprise card tricks but the visual impact is increased as she announces in time-honoured magical fashion, ‘And now, for my final trick’,259 and, waving a cloth, she produces, first, Anya and, then, Varya from behind it. Although it involves no magic Jumpers 252 The Real Thing, page 34. 253 Amanda Smothers notes the significance of the apple: ‘The apple not only transcends time, but it also connects to two central concepts in the play: Newton’s physics and the search for knowledge (both in the academic and the Biblical senses of the word)’. – A. Smothers, ‘Lost and Found: The Search for “Truth” in Arcadia’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 234. 254 The Real Thing, page 5. Susan Rusinko comments, ‘This initial scene serves as an introduction to the real storm to unfold in the life of a dramatist named Henry’. – S. Rusinko, Tom Stoppard, page 142. 255 Travesties, page 60. 256 Travesties, page 60. 257 Jim Hunter notes the significance of magic in Travesties: ‘All Stoppard’s drama uses (the) pattern of deception and surprise; but Travesties most of all, and it seems appropriate that this is the play which includes a conjuring act’. – J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 131. 258 Travesties, page 60. 259 The Cherry Orchard, page 48.

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contains a theatrical nod of deference when ‘ARCHIE…like a magician about to demonstrate a trick, takes from his pocket a small square of material like a handkerchief, which he unfolds and unfolds and unfolds until it is a large plastic bag, six-feet tall, into which the body of the dead Jumper is thrown’.260 Poetry There is an obvious pattern behind Stoppard’s deployment of poetry. When he uses poetry it is with purpose. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour contains a section in which the political prisoner, Alexander, gives his son, Sacha, advice. It is delivered in the form of rhymes: Dear Sacha, don’t be sad, It would have been ten times as bad If we hadn’t had the time we had, So think of that and please be glad. I kiss you now, your loving dad. Don’t let them tell you I was mad.261 The use of rhymes reflects the habit political prisoners in Soviet Russia had, when denied writing instruments and paper, to commit things to rhymes in order to aid remembrance.262 With similar effect Stoppard has Hannah quote Bryon’s poem, ‘Darkness’: ‘The bright sun was extinguished…and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air…’,263 thereby using the words of one of the key (but unseen) characters in the Arcadia narrative to paint a picture of one of the play’s themes, the ultimate destiny of the ever cooling deterministic world. Stoppard’s employment of limerick in Travesties complements the Joycean theme. Although Joyce did not make extensive use of limericks in Ulysses there are some examples.264 Moreover, the limerick is redolent both of Joyce’s Irish 260 Jumpers, page 56. 261 egbdf, page 34. 262 J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, footnote 6 to Chapter 6, page 279. 263 Arcadia, page 105. 264 eg: Lenehan’s Limerick, Ulysses, page 129. ‘There’s a ponderous pundit MacHugh. Who wears goggles of ebony hue.

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origins and his wordplay. Stoppard comes up with his own limericks, such as the one Gwendolen bestows upon Tzara: Mr Tzara writes poetry and sculpts, With quite unexpected results. I’m told he recites And on Saturday nights Does all kinds of things for adults.265 Stoppard sees Joycean possibilities in the limerick beyond the conventional. He adapts it to provide dialogue – for instance: Gwen: I’m sorry! – how terribly rude! Henry – Mr Joyce! Carr: How d’you do? Joyce: Delighted! Tzara: Good day! Joyce: I just wanted to say How sorry I am to intrude.266 Stoppard’s greatest and most effective use of poetry comes, not surprisingly, in a play about a poet, The Invention of Love. Reflecting Housman’s dual talents as classical scholar and poet the play is laced with both Roman poetry and ­Housman’s own. ‘Catullus 5’ is an ode to his lover Lesbia, illustrating early in the play (page 12) the intensity of love: Suns can set and rise again: when our brief light is gone we sleep the sleep of perpetual night. Give me a thousand kisses, and then a hundred more, and then another thousand, add five score… Housman’s own poem, ‘Oh Who Is That Young Sinner’, is used to illustrate ­Wilde’s sentence of hard labour for his crime of homosexuality:



As he mostly sees double. To wear them why trouble? I can’t see Joe Miller. Can you? 265 Travesties, page 17. 266 Travesties, page 16.

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Now ‘tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet And the quarry-gang at Portland in the cold and in the heat, And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.267 One of Stoppard’s plays, a short radio piece called On ‘Dover Beach’, is a commentary on one of Matthew Arnold’s poems. ‘Dover Beach’ is a complicated piece and it is notable for what Stoppard chooses to take out of it, reflecting both one of the themes of his work and the debate format he often employs. It is seen by some as a ‘honeymoon poem’268 but Stoppard’s play dwells on its contradictions and the duality contained within them. Rather like the parts of The Invention of Love where Housman269 debates with his older self, aeh, the play is a discussion between Matt and Himself – both Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet and critic – which turns on an extract from a letter Arnold wrote to his mother in which he raises the subject of duality; in terms of two other poets, their poetic capabilities and modern versus (implied) Romantic poetry: Tennyson and Browning each lack what the other has in abundance: ­intellectual vigour and poetic sensibility. In the fusion of the two, I, perhaps, have more than either, and I had more of the modern, you see, so I expected to have my turn with the public as they had theirs.270 Using the environment of a Stoppardian stage debate Himself hints at a sense of illusion within the poem when Matt rounds on him: Matt: You call my poem to bear witness against me. Himself: We must try to see things as they are.271 The essence of the poem, as Matt admits, is a contradiction: ‘You find a contradiction? Heaven forbid that a husband’s delight in his new-found land can’t 267 The Invention of Love, pages 83–84. 268 For example, see Poem of the week: Dover Beach in The Guardian, 20 October 2008. 269 Just like Housman, Arnold was a public servant (a school’s inspector) as well as a poet and he became an Oxford scholar and Fellow of an Oxbridge college. 270 On ‘Dover Beach’, page 289. Arnold’s letter to his mother of 5 June 1869 actually says: ‘It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn as they have had theirs’. 271 On ‘Dover Beach’, page 288.

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bear a small contradiction like the world going down the drain’.272 ­Written and prompted by a trip with his new wife (Frances Lucy Arnold) to Dover Arnold’s ‘world was made new to the senses, and beautiful’273 by the love he experienced but it results in a poem which argues that ‘the bleak last vision of mankind striking blindly at one another on a battlefield, tends towards an elevation, a sanctification of the love between two people’.274 Himself, using a controversial metaphor which derives from the poem itself, concludes that, ‘The poem turns like the tide on that “eternal note of sadness”. There is indeed no suggestion of happiness in that room where the poet stands by the window; quite the opposite: absolute despair’.275 Although considered by Himself (on behalf of posterity) to be a ‘masterpiece’276 as Matt observes, ‘no one took the slightest note of it at the time’.277 Matt complains that, ‘my poetry is depreciated as “academic”…since I am told they share the viewpoint of Oxford’s dreaming spires’,278 while Himself highlights the paradox of both the poem’s success and Arnold’s life: Poor Matt! You were never born to be a poet except for one sublime moment in Dover when the good Lord paid you in advance and you hit the spot with a lyric that bobs up like a cork whatever anyone throws at it – the hackneyed recourse to the sea and moon, the vagueness of whatever point it doesn’t quite make, the name dangling of famous dead Athenians.279 But, as Himself continues, there is an even more fundamental (double) ­contradiction – what he calls ‘the metaphor problem’.280 Matt uses the image of the tide ebbing to reflect the Victorian crisis of faith ebbing away – ‘When the church forgets its business and promotes miracles, mysticism and general camel-swallowing, it removes itself from ordinary lives’.281 However, as Himself points out, ‘Tides don’t just go out, they invariably come back in. Give it twelve 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281

On ‘Dover Beach’, page 289. On ‘Dover Beach’, page 288. On ‘Dover Beach’, page 290. On ‘Dover Beach’, page 288. On ‘Dover Beach’, page 290. On ‘Dover Beach’, page 290. On ‘Dover Beach’, page 291. On ‘Dover Beach’, page 293. On ‘Dover Beach’, page 293. On ‘Dover Beach’, page 292.

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hours, the Sea of Faith will be banging up against those glimmering cliffs, and the world will be right as a trivet again’.282 Furthermore, in pursuing the tide metaphor Matt has made a mistake in recalling how: Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery283 because, as Himself corrects Matt, ‘there’s no tide in the Aegean anyway’.284 The final contradiction is revealed by Himself to be, the fact you wrote the ending first, the peroration, Ah, love, let us be true To one another! – Where, then, did it come from, that apocalyptic despair285 Matt provides the enigmatic answer which encapsulates the duality Stoppard brings out from the poem: ‘Must it come from somewhere? Perhaps it was rhetorical despair’.286 Music Music is not only present as a pattern in the form of an element of Stoppardian theatricality but is also part of the underlying vehicle of some of the plays. ­Stoppard is by his own, rather harsh, admission a ‘musical illiterate’287 282 283 284 285 286 287

On ‘Dover Beach’, page 293. M. Arnold, Dover Beach. On ‘Dover Beach’, page 293. On ‘Dover Beach’, page 289. On ‘Dover Beach’, page 289. Stoppard, letter to Carson, R of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 5 May 1983. Some critics argue that Henry in The Real Thing represents Stoppard’s own position on classical music, or, at least, opera. For example, see M. Billington, in Prima Le Parole? in the Glyndebourne Festival Opera programme 1993, page 65: ‘there’s always been a sneaking suspicion that Henry – the dramatist in The Real Thing – who argues over his choice of records for Desert Island Disks and who describes being taken to Covent Garden to hear Callas “in a sort of foreign musical with no dancing which people were donating kidneys to get tickets for” might be half-jokingly speaking for his author’. Henry continues, ‘The idea was that

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although he admits that modern rock/pop music is a form of subliminal accompaniment to his writing process. I tend to write each play to one record.…I just kept playing (‘Mother’, by John Lennon) while I was writing Jumpers. It has nothing to do with the play, of course, but I always find it an extraordinarily moving track. For Hapgood, I listened to two or three tracks of Graceland – you know, Paul Simon – interminably, for three or four months. And with Rosencrantz there were two Bob Dylan tracks, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, which is a lyric I’ve admired ever since.288 Whatever his own proclivities he deploys a full range of musical armaments in his plays. Travesties gives some clues as to the breadth of his range and belies his self-deprecation on the subject as he uses various forms of music to reflect the variety of language structures that are part of the play. ‘The Appassionata Sonata of Beethoven is quietly introduced’289 as Lenin and Nadya speak, with the former referring to it as, ‘Amazing, superhuman music’.290 It ‘degenerates absurdly into “Mr Gallagher and Mr Shean”’,291 a vaudeville song – Gallagher: Why Mister Shean, Why Mister Shean. On the day they took away Our old canteen, Cost of living went so high That it’s cheaper now to die Shean: Positively, Mister Gallagher.292 – which Stoppard parodies extensively, repeating the exclamatory introduction and confirmatory end of each verse – eg: Cecily: …Oh Gwendolen! Oh, Gwendolen! It sounds ez pretty ez a mendolen! 288 289 290 291 292

I would be cured of my strange disability. As though the place were a kind of Lourdes for the musically disadvantaged’. See also The Real Thing, page 13. Stoppard, in an interview with S. Schiff, ‘Full Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, pages 213–214. Travesties, page 61. Travesties, page 62. Travesties, page 62. A. Shean and E. Gallagher, Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean.

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I hope that you’ll feel free To call me Cecily… Gwen: Absolutely, Cecily.293 As part of the play’s linguistic acrobatics Stoppard lobs in references to Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Iolanthe…Pirates! Pinafore! … Ruddigore!’294 and extracts from music hall songs, such as Tzara’s ‘at five o’clock when tea is set I like to have my tea at five o’clock’295 from I Love The Ladies.296 A distinctively Irish song, ­‘Galway Bay’, is sung by Joyce297 early on in order to help define his background. Stoppard has written several plays specifically to incorporate music and it becomes the vehicle for the play itself: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Rock ‘N’ Roll and Darkside.298 The preamble to Every Good Boy Deserves Favour makes it clear that it is ‘a work consisting of words and music, and is incomplete ­without the score composed by its co-author Andre Previn’.299 Previn’s score complements the theme of dissidence in Russia by including musical references to Russian composers such as Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky.300 Stoppard’s stage directions specify ‘organ music’301 to accompany the impressive entrance of the Colonel while ‘the orchestra jumps into a few bars of the “1812”’302 as a preamble to Ivanov’s minatory clasping of Alexander’s shoulders. Like his use of lyrics elsewhere Stoppard uses the music to set the mood at various points, particularly when Alexander recounts his arrest.303 Darkside is ‘a play for radio incorporating The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd’.304 Unlike some stage musicals, such as Mama Mia, which have concocted a story by stringing together the songs of a particular artist Stoppard says, 293 294 295 296 297 298

399 300 301 302 303 304

Travesties, page 63. Travesties, page 50. Travesties, page 39. See N. Bartlett and J. Walker, The Girl I left Behind Me, page 28. Travesties, page 5. Stoppard also adapted Tango, by Mrozek, in which, as the title suggests, the tango is significant in the final scene in which Eugene and Eddie dance together. Stoppard’s stage directions specify very precisely the form and the manner of the tango, “La Cumparsita”, which is to be played. egbdf. See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 122. egbdf, page 36. egbdf, page 30. See A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, pages 134–135. Darkside, frontispiece.

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‘I didn’t try to make a story which was the album writ large’.305 He continues, ‘I invented a little story in the spirit of the album, taking some kind of clue from the album as to what level of reality this story might be on’.306 Nevertheless, he concedes, the process of creating Darkside was one of considerable subtlety in the interplay of the album and the play: ‘Although I’m far from being a musician the music itself – even individual instruments – in some way, did somehow nudge me into keeping the play here or there or elsewhere’.307 Stoppard uses Pink Floyd’s music and, in particular, Roger Waters’ lyrics to ‘underscore’308 points or events that occur in the play. What Stoppard takes from The Dark Side of the Moon is ‘some kind of emotional clues from the music’.309 When Baggott explains that, ‘We define happiness as a state of wellbeing, starting off with being alive instead of dead’,310 the play cuts to Pink Floyd’s song ‘Breathe’, the opening lines of which are, ‘Breathe, breathe in the air’.311 Similarly, when Emily and the Boy are about to consult the Wise One the play cuts to ‘Time’ whose lyrics include, ‘Waiting for someone or something to show you the way’.312 Stoppard employs exactly the same technique in Rock ‘N’ Roll. When Jan suggests that Czechoslovakia under Husak is breaking the mould of its own history by avoiding its usual response to the threat of getting ‘done over by big powerful nations’313 the scene ends with ‘“Break On Through” by the Doors’.314 A sarcastic reference to the Grateful Dead by Jan elicits ‘“Chinatown Shuffle” by the Grateful Dead’315 and, as if to emphasise the lack of progress on Czech human rights Act 2, which is first set in 1987 (nineteen years after the Prague Spring), commences with ‘“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” by U2’.316 Stoppard uses similar examples of mood association by music or song both when Dotty sings in Jumpers317 and when Ruth does so in Night And Day.318 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318

Stoppard, in an interview with M. Lawson, Front Row 19 August 2013. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Lawson, Front Row 19 August 2013. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Lawson, Front Row 19 August 2013. Stoppard tells M. Lawson that, ‘I ended up essentially writing a 40 minute play, which is to say that I used a lot of the album…as a kind of underscore’. Front Row, 19 August 2013. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Lawson, Front Row 19 August 2013. Darkside, page 9. Darkside, page 10: Pink Floyd, ‘Breathe’. Darkside, page 20: Pink Floyd, ‘Time’. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 30. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 31. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 51. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 69. For example, ‘Shine on Harvest Moon’, page 19 and ‘Sentimental Journey’, page 55. For example, ‘The Lady is a Tramp’, pages 25 and 55.

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He repeats the same effect during The Real Thing which concludes with the Monkees’ ‘I’m A Believer’319 and plays ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’ on the radio as Max and Annie’s marriage falls apart.320 However, the use of Pink Floyd’s music in Darkside becomes more effective when the lyrics themselves are part of the play’s argument. ‘There’s someone in my head but it’s not me’321 alludes to the idea that within mankind there is an innate sense of moral rectitude stemming from the idea of God as the fount of morality. The confession of the soldiers in ‘Us And Them’, ‘God only knows it’s not what we would choose to do’,322 demonstrates a moral dilemma in a play that is full of examples of the ‘thought experiment’. When Stoppard is, in a world post the global banking crisis of 2007/2008, putting his spotlight on the morality of bankers and the complicity of politicians in their trade, the Pink Floyd song ‘Money’ is used to make the point more memorably than Stoppard’s own text. He describes this subject as, ‘the main interest of the play in itself’, which is, ‘in the question of materialism and immaterialism, its own interest in itself is much more to do with spiritual dimension and whether that has any kind of reality and so on:’323 Money, get away… Money, it’s a gas… Money, get back… Money, it’s a hit… Money, it’s a crime.324 Stoppard pursues his commentary on the bankers with Hilary and Bo’s discussion in The Hard Problem as to whether Jerry Krohl’s (the hedge fund manager) money that he made from trading and has now used to seed the brain research institute is ‘good money’325 or not.

319 The Real Thing, page 57. William Demastes makes the observation that, ‘Consider that throughout the play audiences are directed to be critical of Henry’s lowly taste in music. Then, as the play ends, we are treated to a final scene that strives to touch us with that same music’. – W. Demastes, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard, page 97. 320 The Real Thing, page 22. 321 Darkside, page 51: Pink Floyd, ‘Brain Damage’. 322 Darkside, page 46: Pink Floyd, ‘Us And Them’. 323 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Lawson, Front Row 19 August 2013. 324 Darkside, pages 38 and 44: Pink Floyd, ‘Money’. 325 The Hard Problem, page 42.

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Rock ‘N’ Roll differs from the other two principal musical plays in the sense that the rock music is part of the idea of the play. It comes to symbolise freedom of expression. Jan, in his frustration, puts his finger on the point when he complains to Nigel about the way journalists treat the music of the Czech band, The Plastic People of the Universe: ‘We read in the foreign press about the band but they never mention the music…only about being symbols of resistance’.326 The ability of bands to play Rock ‘n’ Roll music is a barometer of the Czech regime’s tolerance of human rights and Stoppard uses it as reason to reference or introduce music from just about every well-known rock band or musician – The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Cream, Kinks etc. The centrepiece of both the music and the story behind the play is the history of the Czech band, The Plastic People of the Universe. They are explicitly identified metaphorically by Stoppard through their musical cover versions of The Rolling Stones’ ‘It’s All Over Now’327 and the Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’.328 It is the imprisonment of their manager and some band members that triggers the presentation of Charter 77. But, Stoppard adds another element to the metaphorical musical vehicle by introducing a Cambridge based musician, Syd Barrett. Barrett (born Roger Barrett – there is a reference to Roger in the play329) was the founding muse behind Pink Floyd and it’s first album Piper at the Gates of Dawn, itself a quotation from Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows and a reference to Pan, the Greek God of rustic music who made a flute from reeds which had been produced when Syrinx, the object of his desire, had been turned into reeds by her sisters. According to Esme, Barrett, ‘blew his mind and the band sort of dropped him’,330 – he made a solo album, Madcap Laughs, and a compilation album, Opel (both of which are referred to in Rock ‘N’ Roll331 and from the first of which a track, ‘Terrapin’, is played332) – and he remained a recluse in Cambridge, the location of Max’s university and much of the play. Introducing Barrett gives Stoppard an opportunity to reinforce the musical metaphor and introduce a classical element into Rock ‘N’ Roll. He is directly identified by Esme with Pan as she describes seeing him, ‘on the wall tootling 326 327 328 339 330 331 332

Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 84. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 23 Rock ‘N’ Roll, pages 27 and 118. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 99. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 77. Rock ‘N’ Roll, pages 43, 98 and 113. Rock ‘N’ Roll, pages 35 and 44.

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on a pipe, like Pan’.333 She keeps seeing him, much to her daughter, Alice’s, consternation and corroborated by Jan, in what she describes as the guise of, ‘the Great God Pan’,334 when, ‘he played on his pipe and sang to me’.335The audience first sees the Piper at the opening of the play, ‘squatting on his heels high up on the garden wall, his wild dark hair catching some light, as though giving off light. His pipe is a single reed, like a penny whistle. He plays for Esme’.336 The fusion of the Barrett and Pan characters has two main effects. He repeatedly sings a song called ‘Golden Hair’ which Stoppard describes, ‘as recorded by Syd Barrett…based on a poem by James Joyce from Chamber Music… Barrett’s lyrics, however, do not conform to Joyce’s poem (where “Goldenhair” is one word and where the phrase “in the midnight air” does not occur)’.337 Barrett’s song, extracts of which the Piper sings on several occasions, comprises the following lyrics (which Stoppard very slightly amends): Lean out your window, golden hair I heard you singing in the midnight air My book is closed, I read no more Watching the fire dance, on the floor I’ve left my book, I’ve left my room. For I heard you singing through the gloom Singing and singing a merry air Lean out of the window, golden hair338 The song is significant because the lyrics both by Joyce339 and Barrett place emphasis on singing, which is the metaphor Stoppard’s play uses to symbolise 333 334 335 336 337 338 339



Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 78. Rock ‘N’ Roll, pages 43 and 70. Rock ‘N’ Roll, pages 16 and 70. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 15. Stoppard, in Author’s Notes, Rock ‘N’ Roll. S. Barrett, ‘Golden Hair’. Rock ‘N’ Roll, pages 15 and 40. J. Joyce’s poem ‘Lean Out Of The Window’ from Chamber Music: Lean out of the window. Goldenhair. I hear you singing. A merry air. My book was closed. I read no more. Watching the fire dance.

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freedom of speech. Barrett’s separation of the word ‘golden hair’ gives S­ toppard a double rationale for including the song because the deliberate failure to cut his hair by the manager of The Plastic People of the Universe – ‘Jirous doesn’t cut his hair’340 – symbolises non-conformity with the state regime and, hence, the manifestation of freedom of expression. Barrett’s addition of the reference to ‘midnight’ resonates with the demise of the Plastic People of the Universe which Stoppard captures at the play’s end when Esme asks Jan whom he has been talking to in Prague. ‘He’s a friend’, Jan replies, ‘from Plastic People. Now he’s in a new band, Pulnoc – it means “midnight”’.341 It is an example of what Stoppard accepts is almost serendipitous in the way his works combine disparate and unlikely combinations of ideas: ‘My plays are full of moments of extraordinary good luck where one part makes sense with another part in a way you could not have known’.342 Unusually for a God in Greek mythology Pan dies. His demise is recounted in Deirdre’s translation of Plutarch’s The Obsolesence of Oracles as she translates the story of Thamous, the Egyptian helmsman: ‘So when he got near Palodes… Thamous in the stern shouted towards the shore as he’d been told – “Great Pan is dead!”’.343 The announcement in the play of Pan’s death turned out to be sadly prescient as Barrett died344 within weeks of its opening at the Royal Court theatre in London. The death is juxtaposed with the culmination of Rock ‘N’ Roll in which The Rolling Stones give a concert in Prague. It is as if the singer and the song have fulfilled their purpose as free speech is restored. In Dogg’s Hamlet Stoppard uses music not as the vehicle of the play but in order to make a point which is central to the subject matter of his play. Dogg’s

340 341 342

343 344

On the floor. I have left my book. I have left my room. For I heard you singing. Through the gloom. Singing and singing. A merry air. Lean out of the window. Goldenhair. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 48. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 118. Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 117. Plutarch – Moralia, De Defectu Oraculorum, 17. 7 July 2006.

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Hamlet is a dramatic example of Wittgenstein’s theory that language is contextual – its meaning depends on how and where it is used – and that it can only be learned by active interaction. In the play one of its characters, Easy, and the audience have to learn a new language, Dogg’s language, by listening to the other characters converse in it. Charlie, later joined by Baker, sings a version of the song ‘My Way’ in Dogg’s language, which, using Sabina Rehman’s translation345 (which corrects Charlie’s forgetfulness in line three346), goes thus: ‘My Way’

‘Satisfied Egg’

And now, the end is near And so I face the final curtain My friend, I’ll say it clear I’ll state my case, of which I am certain I’ve lived a life that’s full I travelled each and ev’ry highway And more, much more than this, I did it my way

Engage congratulate Moreover state abysmal fairground Begat perambulate This Aerodrome chocolate éclair found Maureen again (pecan) dedum – (Marauder fig) de-da ultimately cried egg Dinosaurs rely indoors If satisfied egg347

‘My Way’ was, at the time of the writing of the play, a world famous song. ­Stoppard is using it to symbolise a universal language (most people can, at least, hum the tune). But, in Dogg’s Hamlet its use conveys both the concept of duality – it sounds like ‘My Way’, but the words are different – and how a new language can be learnt using Wittgenstein’s theory. Music is used by Stoppard with the same objective of reinforcing the central issues in other plays. The moon music songs in Jumpers recall the impact of the moon landings on Dotty’s moral perspective whilst her song in the Coda demonstrates her moral uncertainty. In Dalliance Stoppard gives the song ‘The False Hussar’ a double role. It reinforces the story of the tryst and farewell on false pretences by Fritz, who neglects to tell the object of his flirtation, Christine, about the duel that he must fight over another woman. It takes the form of a tale of a Hussar (Fritz is actually a ‘Yellow Dragoon’348) who is taking his reluctant leave from a girl who, just like Christine, has pledged herself to him. 345 S. Rehman, ‘Wittgenstein’s Language-games, Stoppard’s Building-blocks and context based learning in a Corpus’. 346 Line three in the play, line five in Rehman. 347 Dogg’s Hamlet, page 151. 348 Dalliance, page 15.

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Sweetheart, please don’t send me away. Sweetheart, there’s no war on today. Sweetheart, won’t you dally, do. Or I’ll die Or I’ll die for love of you.349 However, Stoppard has a second use for the song when he uses it in the scene of a rehearsal of an opera in which the opera-within-a-play suggests one of Stoppard’s most frequent themes, that of the difference between illusion and reality. The Tenor and Soprano sing another verse of ‘The False Hussar’ in the form of disagreeing lovers, just as Fritz and Christine are in the play, and, for additional good measure, the Soprano sings the word ‘Liebelei’ which is the original title of Schnitzler’s play (translated as ‘Flirtation’) that Stoppard adapts into Dalliance. Mother told me all about you Mother told me what I should do Mother said it’s all Liebelei Daughter mine Daughter mine, you must reply –350 Stoppard uses music both for dramatic effect and to enhance his narrative. A particularly good example of this effect occurs in The Invention of Love. Wilde admits his flamboyance, a key point of contrast with Housman, as he recounts, ‘I was said to have walked down Piccadilly with a lily in my hand’.351 Earlier in the play he places Bunthorne from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience singing: Though the Philistines may jostle, You may rank as an apostle In the high aesthetic band, If you walk down Piccadilly With a poppy or a lily In your medieval hand …352

349 350 351 352

Dalliance, page 29. Dalliance, page 61. The Invention of Love, page 93. The Invention of Love, page 52.

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The excerpt, from Gilbert’s poem ‘The Aesthete’, not only prepares the audience for Wilde’s character but also refers to the concept of aestheticism which is to recur throughout the play. Music is used quite conventionally (a Stoppard rarity) to convey the mood or nature of a scene. In the dining room of the Prague hotel in Professional Foul ‘gay Czech music’353 sets the ambience in the same way as when ‘The ­“Marsellaise” is faintly heard’354 in The Invention of Love it makes the audience realise that Oscar Wilde is now in exile in France. The same tune is used in S­ hipwreck to signify events in the 1848 uprising in Paris. More lyrically, in ­Indian Ink, the nostalgic tone of what was originally a poem by Kipling sets the colonial scene in ‘The Jummapur Club after sundown’.355 (…The Kipling fan, unseen, is singing) Englishman: ‘On the road to Mandalay Where the flyin’ fishes play An’ the dawn come up like thunder outer China crost the Bay!’.356 The film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opens and closes to ‘Seamus’, a very blues influenced song incorporating a howling dog, from the Meddle album by Pink Floyd. The track serves to set and reinforce the scene of desolation that accompanies the film at the start and to reprise it following the two leading characters’ deaths at the end. Perhaps it is delving too far to suggest that the choice of song conveys more than the feeling it creates. On the cover of the Meddle album is a picture of an ear under water, collecting waves of sound while the album’s principal track is a song entitled ‘Echoes’. In the film Stoppard, as both writer and director, uses the echoing of footsteps in Elsinore357 and has Guildenstern listen to a voice distorted by the sound of gurgling water.358 On more than one occasion the audience hears the echoes of a shout from one of the two protagonists – the effects of which are to emphasise the sense of illusion of the repetition in contrast to the reality of the original sound, thereby underscoring one of the play’s/film’s main themes.359 353 354 355 356 357 358

Professional Foul, page 75. The Invention of Love, page 91. Indian Ink, page 47. Indian Ink, page 48: R. Kipling, ‘Mandalay’. Stoppard also uses shafts of light to emphasise the concept of duality. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern overhear Hamlet instructing the First Player in Hamlet Act II, scene ii; a scene with an emphasis on acting. 359 Unlike in the stage play Stoppard uses the opportunity of this scene to contain further references to acting and death - two of the play/film’s main topics.

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Disappointingly, Stoppard was forced to drop one of his ideas for the running gag about Rosencrantz nearly making various significant discoveries and inventions in the history of humankind: ‘I tried to make Rosencrantz play the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth by accidentally rattling broken bannisters but the music director said that one was not on’.360 Stoppard should have had more faith in his own judgement. Sometimes Stoppard employs music to assist the audience’s comprehension. He uses it in Hapgood to provide the audience with a clue that there are two Ridleys, the key to explaining the story. In a rehearsal script in the Harry Ransom Center a musical convention for distinguishing between the two Ridleys is posited.361 Ridley wears a Walkman which plays two sounds which the audience hears, as if through his headphones. When the first Ridley appears the music is that of the saxophone music of Johnny Hodges. The second Ridley listens to Vivaldi. When Ridley and Celia become passionately involved the saxophone music plays and in the last pool scene, when both Ridleys are present, both Vivaldi and the saxophone music are heard. There is also the phenomenon of Stoppardian background music which, ­being Stoppardian, is far more than just background in meaning. In Arcadia Septimus gives his pupil, Thomasina, a ‘waltz lesson’.362 In the words of John Fleming, ‘A waltz is emblematic of deterministic chaos in that there is a prescribed series of steps, but that “deterministic equation” can still yield any number of patterns’.363 The close proximity of the dancers also recalls the imagery and allegory of sexual heat in the play. In the final scene ‘party music’364 emanates from the marquee outside, its beat echoing the rhythm of Noakes’ machine. Eventually the waltz music and party music blend, again ­emphasising the play’s theme of order within chaos and the contrast of the old and the new that permeates the play. Earlier in Arcadia Stoppard has used music to demonstrate his point in a different way. Thomasina’s music lesson produces ‘a badly played piano’.365 In the next scene, two centuries later, 360 M. Owen, ‘Stoppard and the Nearly Man’ in Evening Standard, 17 May 1991. Quoted in J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, note 14, page 266. 361 Quoted in J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 289, Note 14, Chapter 9. 362 Arcadia, page 127. 363 J. Fleming, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, page 70. Fleming recounts how Trevor Nunn’s original London staging emphasised the significance of the waltz with the choreography which took the path of Septimus/Thomasina’s dance between Bernard and Chloe. 364 Arcadia, page 124. 365 Arcadia, page 54.

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Valentine illustrates the difficulty in deriving order from chaos by using a musical metaphor: ‘It’s all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano playing in the next room, it’s playing your song, but unfortunately it’s out of whack…’.366 In The Hard Problem Bach’s ‘Prelude’367 in C major Bwv 846 is played by a pianist in between scenes. This music is not mentioned either in the text of the play or in the Royal National Theatre’s programme notes for its inaugural production in 2015. Therefore, how much of its inclusion is down to Stoppard is hard to say. Its use, however, very cleverly reflects the discussion on the nature of consciousness that is the basis of the play. The hard problem is an idea developed by David Chalmers who characterises consciousness as the operation of two forms of cognitive behaviour: one is based on a mechanistic process; the other – the hard problem – is based on the application of experience. Bach’s Preludes are examples of the use of counterpoint, a musical device in which two or more melodies sound simultaneously.368 The music – haunting beautiful as it is – is an allegory for the operation of consciousness. Unusually for Stoppard Rough Crossing contains not a play but a musical. But, no subject is too sacrosanct for Stoppard’s wit and pen and it is the object of considerable satire within the songs in a manner reminiscent of Mel Brooks. The satire contained within Stoppard’s lyrics is truly painful, as in the scene where the two lovers plot to run away together: We just said hello and how do you do, And both of us know I’m leaving with you, The signs are all too clear But where do we go from here?369 It reaches a nadir when Natasha sings as she believes the ship is sinking: I’ll never see eighteen again Or twenty-eight or nine I’ll never be so green again To think that love’s a valentine.370 366 Arcadia, page 60. 367 See M. Coveney, Stoppard’s parting gift to Nicholas Hytner is unashamedly clever in What’s On Stage, 29 January 2015. 368 Stoppard refers to the concept of counterpoint in If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank (see page 25) where he uses Gladys’ tim voice as a background to her thoughts. 369 Rough Crossing, page 242. 370 Rough Crossing, page 259.

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Andre Previn, Stoppard’s musical collaborator on Every Good Boy Deserves ­Favour, must have found this reprise of their musical partnership toe-curling.

Opening Scenes

Perhaps the most obvious pattern in Stoppard’s theatricality is the way he starts his plays. Stoppard is the king of the opening scene and if he is remembered for nothing else at all it will be for the opening scene of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In what John Fleming calls, ‘one of the most memorable opening scenes in twentieth-century theatre’,371 the protagonists of the title toss coins ninety-two times and, contrary to probability and expectation, they all come up heads. In one sense the pressure was on Stoppard right from the start as its parallel play, Hamlet, crackles with tension as it begins with one of the most charged opening scenes of any play in which Elsinore’s guards (Bernardo and Francisco) and, later Horatio and Marcellus, chilled by the cold and fearful of reports of a ghost, encounter each other on the battlements. Such suspense was guaranteed to grab the attention of any Elizabethan audience from the very beginning. Stoppard excels at grabbing his audience’s attention. In Night And Day ‘there is the sound of a telex, which gets louder until it is very loud and then blends into the sound of a helicopter and, a few moments later, machine gun fire’.372 Some of his beginnings are simple, but effective, ways of getting attention. Jumpers commences with a stripper on a swing,373 Voyage, the first of The Coast of Utopia trilogy, begins in the middle of a conversation as Alexander Bakunin is saying, ‘Speaking of which –’.374 The helicopter gets another ­outing at the commencement of Darkside, this time as part of Pink Floyd’s song ‘Speak To Me’ along with the sounds of a heartbeat and a scream. Humour, often clever humour, invariably plays some part. The opening dialogue of Dirty Linen concerns two members of parliament going through the process of arriving at a committee room. All of their initial communications are in a foreign language, mostly French, as a form of affected politeness:375 371 J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 54. 372 Night And Day, page 1. 373 The opening scene of Jumpers is described by Jim Hunter as a ‘sensational opening ­sequence’. – J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 57. 374 Voyage, page 3. 375 ‘Like Travesties, Dirty Linen begins as if Stoppard had set himself the task of finding out how many minutes of comic dialogue he could write without introducing a single phrase of straightforward English’. – R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 129.

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The first door is now opened by McTeazle who holds it open for CockleburySmyth. Cocklebury-Smyth (entering): Toujours la politesse. McTeazle (closing the door): Noblesse oblige.… (…They doff their bowler hats and attempt to put them on the same peg.) Mea culpa. (Courteously.) Cocklebury-Smyth: Après vous. (McTeazle signals that Cocklebury-Smyth should hang up his hat first. They put their brollies in the umbrella stand. Cocklebury-Smyth sits down.) J’y suis, j’y reste. (He opens the Daily Mail.) Quel dommage. McTeazle (sitting down): Le mot juste.376 This repartee continues until McTeazle utters a profanity – ‘Bloody awkward though’377 after which Stoppard puns his faux pas with, ‘Pardon my French’378 (an English idiom which refers to swearing). No stone is left unturned in Stoppard’s desire for an arresting start. The Real Inspector Hound’s start involves not a sound or sentence but the instruction that, ‘The first thing is that the audience appear to be confronted by their own reflection in a huge mirror’.379 This opening is followed the sight of a corpse ‘sprawled face down on the floor in front of a large settee’380 and two theatre ­critics making their way to their seats. And, thus, Stoppard has produced an entrance into the three main ideas of the play: the theme of illusion and reality; the vehicle of a whodunit; and, a satire on theatre critics. The opening scene for Stoppard, however, is far more than just a means of commanding attention. It can be part of the process of Occam’s razor as ­Stoppard employs it to set up part of the puzzle to which the application of the razor supplies the only rational explanation. Most obviously demonstrated in After Magritte the Stoppardian device of the opening puzzle which leads to 376 Dirty Linen, pages 79–80. 377 Dirty Linen, page 80. 378 Dirty Linen, page 80. This joke is played in reverse in The Boundary, page 17, when Johnson, the compiler of a dictionary, refers to, ‘Your grasp of – to put it in plain English – le mot juste’. 379 The Real Inspector Hound, page 9. Jim Hunter comments, ‘we are not sure whether we are on the outside looking in or on the inside looking out’. – J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 54. 380 The Real Inspector Hound, page 9.

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audience bafflement with a series of seemingly unconnected events or phenomena is repeated in the chaos of the opening scene of Jumpers.381 Even the novel Lord Malquist and Mr Moon has an opening chapter which describes several characters in apparently random situations382 – Moon playing Boswell to Lord Malquist in his carriage, a fat lady waving a toilet roll, two cowboys – Long John Slaughter and Jasper, a lion on the loose, a near delirious woman, a Christlike figure on a donkey, Jane sitting at her toilette and a bomb. The remainder of the book resolves the puzzle in the same manner that the plays unravel their openings into an explanation. Stoppard’s opening scenes work best, in a theatrical sense, when they both compel interest and also nudge into the audience’s mind either elements or themes that are to come. William Demastes particularly emphasises this effect with respect to Hapgood and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which he describes the opening scenes as ‘crucial starting points explaining and explained by the play’.383 In that respect some of Stoppard’s attentiongetters act like an overture in an opera. The coin toss at the start of Rosencrantz and ­Guildenstern Are Dead suggests the work of fate which is the key theme of the play. The confusion of the Travesties prologue,384 in addition to catching the audience’s curiosity, introduces the main protagonists and, although the audience does not at that point realise it, through the metaphor of the language used by Joyce, Tzara and the Lenins, the basis of the debate that is to come on the nature of art. It is clear from Hapgood’s opening scene that the theme of i­ llusion and reality385 is going to get an outing in the play which is to follow, just as Charon’s expectation of two men – and not a combination poet/

381 John Fleming comments, ‘Jumpers begins with a favourite device of Stoppard’s early career: a melange of provocative and seemingly disconnected images that jolt the audience’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 86. 382 William Demastes notes, ‘(Lord Malquist and Mr Moon) opens with a series of engagingly inscrutable sketches initially left for the reader to muddle into coherence’. – W. Demastes, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard, page 54. 383 W. Demastes, Theatre Of Chaos, pages 43–44. 384 ‘The prologue is not only trompe-l’oeil – this (sic) is, we are not in the Library but in Carr’s mind – but trompe l’oreille as well, making this first scene aurally as well as visually deceptive’. – T. Zinman, ‘Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing’ in K. Kelly (ed), The ­Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 123. 385 The same theme is less clear in the opening scene of The Real Thing until scene 2 explains it. Jim Hunter, nevertheless, describes the opening scene of The Real Thing as ‘gripping’ – see J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 5.

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scholar – at the start of The Invention of Love alerts the audience to the theme of duality. Stoppard’s most intriguing (if not perplexing) opening occurs in Hapgood. It is deliberately obfuscatory, as he explains to Thomas O’Connor, which he suggests is the rationale behind other opening scenes: As in other plays I’ve written, the first scene is supposed to be virtually incomprehensible. I spent weeks with two pieces of paper, doing diagrams of where everybody could go. It wasn’t that I had to work it out in order to make it intelligible to the audience, but to make it intelligible to me.386 Stoppard does not jest and here it is – Stoppard at his best (or worst) – just to show how perplexing a Stoppard opening scene can be.387 The scene the audience is greeted with is part of a men’s changing room at a swimming pool in which there are some numbered cubicles and a shower which is in use whilst a man is shaving. Following a short radio play the action commences as follows: A man enters from the lobby. We call this man Russian One, because he is Russian and because there are going to be two of them. He wears a colourful tracksuit and running shoes. He carries a towel rolled up in a sausage, we assume the swimming trunks and cap are inside. He carries a key on a loop of string which might make it convenient to wear as a pendant. He is otherwise empty-handed. Russian One enters Cubicle One. (This numbering has nothing to do with the actual numbers on the cubicles, it is only for our convenience.) Russian One enters his cubicle and closes the door behind him. Ridley enters from the lobby. He is carrying a briefcase (but the briefcase may be inside a sports holdall). Ridley now goes on a perambulation. The essence of the situation is that Ridley moves around and through, in view and out of view, demonstrating that the place as a whole is variously circumnavigable in a way which will later recall, if not replicate, the problem of the bridges of Konigsberg (and which will give Russian One time to undress). It is possible that on his entrance Ridley will dump his briefcase into 386 Stoppard, in an interview with T. O’Connor, ‘Welcome to the World of Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 227. 387 Stoppard describes it as, ‘It’s like the beginning of Travesties or Jumpers. For ten minutes, it’s just sort of “Hellzapoppin”’. – Stoppard, in an interview with T. O’Connor, ‘Welcome to the world of Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 227.

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a laundry basket overflowing with used towels, and then reclaim it when he has finished coming and going. Back to the plot. Russian One, dressed to swim, leaves his cubicle, locks it, swings his towel over the lintel and leaves it hanging there. Russian One goes off to the pool. When he has gone, Ridley posts his briefcase under the door of Cubicle One, and pulls the towel off the door. (As a matter of interest, the Ridley who posts the briefcase is not the same Ridley who entered with it.) Ridley enters Cubicle Two and closes the door behind him. The towel appears, flung over the lintel, hanging down. Wates continues to shave. The shower continues to run. Kerner enters from the lobby. He carries a briefcase. He has a towel and key. Kerner looks around and posts his briefcase under the door with the towel showing (Cubicle Two). He pulls the towel off the door and tosses it over the door into the cubicle. Kerner enters another cubicle (Cubicle Three) and closes the door behind him. A moment later his towel appears over the lintel. Ridley leaves Cubicle Two, bringing Kerner’s briefcase with him, and also the towel. He chucks the towel over the door of Cubicle One. With the briefcase, Ridley disappears in the direction of the showers. The shower cubicle may be in full view, in which case we see Ridley delivering his briefcase to the occupant. Russian One leaves the pool, wet of course, and enters the cubicle. Ridley comes back into view, from the showers, without the briefcase. He goes to the pool. Russian Two enters from the lobby. He is the twin of Russian One, dressed like Russian One. He carries a similar rolled-up towel. However, he also carries a briefcase. Russian Two glances round briefly, and notes the towel on Kerner’s door. He posts his briefcase under Kerner’s door. He enters a cubicle, Cubicle Four. Merryweather, a boyish twenty-two-year-old in sports jacket and flannels, enters from the lobby. His manner is not as well calculated as Ridley’s had been. He is at first relieved and then immediately disconcerted by the absence of the Russians. Russian One, now dressed, leaves the cubicle, carrying his rolled-up towel but leaving the briefcase (which Ridley posted) behind. Russian One leaves to the lobby. Merryweather, whose idea of making himself inconspicuous has been, perhaps, to examine himself in Wates’s mirror, follows Russian One out to the lobby.

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Kerner, dressed, leaves Cubicle Three, with the briefcase which has been posted there, and leaves to the lobby. Russian Two appears from Cubicle Four, and enters Cubicle One to collect the briefcase which has been left in there. As he leaves the cubicle: Ridley enters from the pool. Russian Two leaves to the lobby. Ridley follows him out. Wates has finished shaving. He is packing up his shaving tackle. The shower stops running. There is a pause. The occupant of the shower, Hapgood, approaches, somewhat encumbered by a briefcase (Kerner’s original), a leather rectangular clutch handbag with a shoulder strap, and an umbrella which she is at the moment taking down and shaking out. From her appearance, the umbrella has been an entire success. She comes down into the light and leans the umbrella carefully against the cubicles and stands pensively for a moment. She is apparently too occupied to acknowledge Wates, who himself is preoccupied with something that makes him shake with silent laughter. He is putting a heavy steel wrist-watch on his right wrist.388 In the original production the whole episode was choreographed to music and by now the audience is either absorbed with fascination or utterly bamboozled. As with Hapgood, so with Travesties. During a short prologue the audience is entertained to what must seem, without the explanation of what follows, little more than gibberish. Tzara is writing, cutting up the words individually with scissors, placing them into a hat and pulling them out randomly to construct sentences that reflect the anti-art output of Dadaism: Eel ate enormous appletzara key dairy chief’s hat he’ll learn oomparah! Ill raced alas whispers kill later nut east Noon avuncular ill day Clara!389

388 Hapgood, pages 2–4. 389 Travesties, page 2. Jim Hunter noticed that Tzara’s seemingly incomprehensible words comprise a limerick in phonetic French – see J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 135. Paul Delaney’s discussion of the opening exchanges of the three protagonists is illuminating – see P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, pages 58 and 63–64.

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Joyce is dictating, in language that only Joyce could use, the opening to a ­chapter in Ulysses which lampoons/celebrates/illustrates (take your pick) the development of the English language. Meanwhile Lenin and his wife, Nadya, gabble away in Russian. By this stage Joyce is reading from scraps of paper he takes from his pocket – ‘Entweder transubstantiality, oder consubstantiality, but in no way substantiality’390 – and starts muttering away in snippets of German and French. Anybody who takes risks invariably makes mistakes. Stoppard proved the point with his original draft of the opening of Act 2 of Travesties in which ­Cecily gives a long monologue (balancing Carr’s of Act 1) summarising Lenin’s story and the history of the impact on Marxism on pre-revolutionary Russia. The audience could, perhaps, be forgiven for thinking the same as Birdboot; ‘The second act, however, fails to fulfil the promise…’.391 Expecting his audience to sit through a four page history lesson392 proved too much, ‘almost crushing the life’393out of the play’s comedy according to Jim Hunter. Stoppard very soon cut the speech down.394 Stoppard explains his rationale behind the original formulation of this speech and his humility in correcting the problem: I thought it would be quite nice if (the audience) all went out thinking ‘oh this is fun isn’t it’, came back, and [I] hit them with this boring thing, as though they’d come back into the wrong theatre. So, (the actress playing Cecily) learned it, then we did the previews and from the first moment it was clear that I’d overplayed my hand here, so I started cutting from the top and in the end (I’m very pragmatic about these things) she did the last paragraph.395 Stoppard had forgotten that most people’s minds don’t think like his.396 390 391 392 393 394

Travesties, page 3. The Real Inspector Hound, page 29. Travesties 1975 version, pages 66–70. J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 120. The prompt book to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s original production of Travesties at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 1974 shows considerable hand drawn deletions from the typed text and a much shorter version of the speech inserted. 395 Stoppard, ‘The Event And The Text’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 206. 396 John Fleming believes that, ‘When Stoppard writes a play he assumes an audience similar to himself’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 4. I am reminded of Alexander’s observation to Ivanov: ‘You see all the trouble writers cause. They spoil things for ordinary people’. (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, page 23).

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Adapting other writers’ plays solves Stoppard’s self-confessed difficulty in coming up with a story. However, it does so at the expense of his creative freedom and one of the areas in which this restriction is most keenly felt is the opening scene. Whilst Dalliance begins with ‘Fritz practising marksmanship with a duelling pistol’397 and Ivanov sees a tipsy Borkin, carrying a rifle, who on ‘Catching sight of Ivanov…tiptoes up to him and, coming alongside him, points the gun at Ivanov’s face’398 neither is in the same dramatic class as the opening scenes of most of Stoppard’s own plays. The other adaptations and translations are even less arresting in their commencement. Nudity Stoppard is well aware of the ability of nudity to awaken an audience’s interest, although he has never used it in a vulgar way.399 In Jumpers he offers up Dotty en deshabille, as he does Natalie Herzen in the Dejeuner sur l’herbe tableau in Shipwreck and Maria Ogarev elsewhere in Shipwreck, while in Night and Day it is Ruth who is ‘nearly naked’.400 Flora Crewe, ‘entering naked’,401 provides the point of departure for the nude painting Das eventually paints which is the fulcrum about which Indian Ink turns.402 Even Stoppard misses a trick, occasionally, however. Stoppard explains: (Travesties) was going to be done in Paris and the director gets in touch with me and he says this and that, and any thoughts, notes, and I said, ‘No, that’s fine – oh one thing. Cecily’s speech, top of Act Two, don’t feel you have to do it all’. And he said, ‘Mais pourquoi pas? C’est magnifique’. ‘No, no, listen, I’ve been there, I promise you, I thought it was a good idea but I promise you – listen, in London we actually cut it down to one paragraph’. And he said, ‘But you know, you’re crazy’. He wanted to do it all. So, I said, ‘OK, I mean you to do it’, and so on, ‘sur votre tete be it’; back he went to Paris. I carried on with my work and they did the play. I heard it went

397 Dalliance, page 7. 398 Ivanov, page 3. 499 See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, Note 8, pages 272–273 for his assessment of the impact of nudity on Jumpers. 400 Night and Day, page 38. 401 Indian Ink, page 39. 402 See also Tango, in which Ala refers to her near nakedness.

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pretty well, and the chap phoned up and he said everything was fine, and I said, ‘How was Cecily’s speech at the top of Act Two?’. And he said, ‘Formidable, superbe!’. I was thinking, God, this is the sort of audience I deserve. So, I go to Paris to see it, and it’s fine, and Act Two starts and he was right. She did every word and you could have heard a pin drop. But she was stark naked!403 Carr mentally undresses Cecily soon thereafter as ‘Faintly from 1974, comes the sound of a big band playing “The Stripper”’.404 Stoppard gets closer to the bone with a stripper on a swing to start Jumpers: Like a pendulum between darkness and darkness, the SECRETARY swings into the spotlight, and out. She is on a swing, making an arc from wing to wing, in sight for a second, out of sight for a second, in sight for a second, out of sight for a second…back and forth. The swing itself hangs from a chandelier.…Each time she reappears she has taken off some clothing.405 Not a case of nudity, the various states of undress in which Maddie Gotobed finds herself in Dirty Linen are a metaphor/pun on the play’s theme of corruption in high places. Mystery It’s a whodunit, man!406

birdboot, The Real Inspector Hound

∵ There is a pattern of mystery in many of Stoppard’s plays. His most obvious use of the mystery as a tool to sustain an audience’s interest is in The Real I­ nspector

403 Stoppard, ‘The Event And The Text’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, pages 206–207. 404 Travesties, page 52. 405 Jumpers, page 17. 406 The Real Inspector Hound, page 11.

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Hound which is a parody of the murder/mystery whodunit.407 But, for Stoppard, one missing person or dead body is nowhere near enough. Before the action has even started the audience sees a body on the stage which, at various times during the play, gets tantalisingly hidden under a settee. There is also a missing theatre critic, Higgs for whom Moon is the stand-in. ‘Where’s Higgs?’,408 both Moon and Birdboot want to know. Also missing is Cynthia’s husband, ‘Lord Albert Muldoon who ten years ago went out for a walk on the cliffs and was never seen again’.409 Not all mysteries have to be related to murder or large in scale in order to prick or sustain an audience’s interest. What is the ‘ulterior motive’410 for Anderson’s trip to Prague? Why has a seemingly perfectly well John Brown checked himself into the Beechwood Nursing Home?411 Will Moon’s bomb explode, as it ‘ticked on with implacable confidence’,412 in Lord Malquist and Mr Moon and, if so, where and how? Why did Housman fail to get a degree at ­Oxford, despite his brilliant and precocious scholarship? According to Housman, ‘everybody expects me to get a First’.413 In the end he got neither a First, ‘nor a Second, nor a Third, nor even a pass degree’.414 His sister sets up the mystery: Kate: But what happened, Alfred? Housman: That’s what they all wanted to know.415 The audience’s interest is instantly triggered. Indian Ink contains three mysteries to hold the audience’s attention. It knows that Flora was painted by Das ‘in my cornflower dress’.416 Many of the scenes in India in the 1930s occur when Flora is sitting for Das who, tellingly, informs Flora that he ‘work(s) in oils’.417 The central puzzle Stoppard delivers is the question of whether there is ‘a second portrait of Flora Crewe’418 in which 407 Michael Billington observes that the mystery often has a much wider purpose: ‘As so often in his plays, Stoppard uses a whodunit as a framework for a discussion of serious matters’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 93. 408 The Real Inspector Hound, page 10. 409 The Real Inspector Hound, page 15. 410 Professional Foul, page 46. 411 A Separate Peace. 412 Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, page 119. 413 The Invention of Love, page 98. 414 The Invention of Love, page 45. 415 The Invention of Love, page 50. 416 Indian Ink, page 31. 417 Indian Ink, page 8. 418 In the Native State, page 239.

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she is ‘In the Native State’. Pike, the footnote specialist, reasons to himself that there must be a second, nude painting from a remark Flora has made in a letter. He cross-examines Flora’s sister, Mrs Swan, who is sceptical perhaps not only of Pike’s intuition but also his motives: Pike: She says paint on paper. Mrs Swan: Yes Pike: ‘…a smudge of paint on paper…’ – ‘Perhaps my soul will stay behind as a smudge of paint on paper’…She’s referring to an actual painting, isn’t she? Mrs Swan: I don’t know. Pike: And ‘undressed’. She says ‘undressed’. Like a nude. On paper. That would be a watercolour, wouldn’t it?419 The hare of mystery is, thus, set running. Stoppard provides lots of tantalising clues as to whether such a second painting was made. ‘Am I to lay myself bare before you?’,420 asks Flora as she sits for Das, albeit in a metaphorical sense in answer to a personal question. She later asks him directly, ‘whether you would prefer to paint me nude’.421 Meanwhile, Pike has the bit between his teeth. On his research trip to India in the 1980s the question of the second portrait looms large in his enquiries when an academic might be expected to have more erudite matters to investigate. To Dilip he proposes his theory: Pike: He painted her nude. Dilip: I don’t think so. Pike: Somebody did. Dilip: In 1930, an Englishwoman, an Indian painter…it is out of the question.422 The mystery is resolved by Das’ son, Anish, but in two parts. Initially he reveals to Mrs Swan the existence of the second painting: Anish: He began another one. Mrs Swan: How do you know, Mr Das? Anish: Because I have it.423 419 420 421 422 423

Indian Ink, page 9. Indian Ink, page 11. Indian Ink, page 40. Indian Ink, page 59. Indian Ink, page 41.

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Mrs Swan expresses surprise at the content of the painting, which is not at that point revealed beyond all doubt as Stoppard cuts the action back to 1930s India. Before the play returns to the conversation between Mrs Swan and Anish Stoppard has Pike turn up a red herring of a picture that was given to Flora by the Rajah. Eventually, the narrative returns to Anish and Mrs Swan and all is revealed: a nude portrait which Mrs Swan verifies in likeness with, ‘Oh yes, it’s Flora’.424 By contrast, In the Native State does not accentuate this mystery nearly as much as its stage sibling. The second mystery is the rather more salacious one of whether Flora slept with anyone during her stay in Jummapur. Her sister leaves the audience in no doubt as to the voracity of her appetite. ‘Flora’s weakness was always romance’,425 she informs Anish. More than that, ‘She used (men) like batteries. When things went flat, she put in a new one’.426 There are a few candidates, as Mrs Swan concedes: Anish: She had a romance with my father. Mrs Swan: Quite possibly. Or with Captain Durance. Or His Highness the Rajah of Jummapur. Or someone else entirely.427 Durance, who does not ‘run to a wife’,428 makes a fool of himself by proposing marriage to Flora. Flora’s visit to the Rajah for tiffin would have been enough to set local society tongues wagging. But it is Flora’s ‘relationship’, as Pike puts it to Dilip, with Das that is the subject of most contention. Dilip accuses Pike of, ‘constructing an edifice of speculation on a smudge of paint on paper’,429 but it is an edifice which Stoppard helps to erect. The ambiguity is deliberate, as he explains to Mel Gussow: Gussow: Did she sleep with the painter? Stoppard: …It struck me that in the scene in which Mrs Swan, the old lady, is saying, ‘Maybe she had a romance with him, or with him, or with somebody else entirely’, it was not a scene in which the audience should know more than the character. They do know it wasn’t Durance, they know it wasn’t the Rajah. That part of it was intentional. What was not 424 425 426 427 428 429

Indian Ink, page 68. Indian Ink, page 79. Indian Ink, page 80. Indian Ink, page 79. Indian Ink, page 23, Indian Ink, page 59.

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intentional on my part was that they should know it was the painter she had a romance with.430 Stoppard has explained that examples of the rasa of erotic love are the moon, the smell of sandalwood and an empty house. All three of these pre-conditions exist the night that Das is alone with Flora (the sandalwood is not mentioned explicitly but she refers to the nice smell of his handkerchief). Most tellingly, when Durance arrives the next morning before sunrise he advises Flora of, ‘the damnedest thing’, that just happened – ‘That fellow Das was on the road. I’m sure it was him’.431 What is more, Das strangely avoids him: ‘I gave him a wave and he turned his back’,432 continues Durance. The audience must make up its own mind over the ‘did she or didn’t she?’ question. Perhaps Das’ comment, much earlier in the play, is suitably prophetic: ‘The truth will never be known, only to God who is merciful’.433 The third mystery in the play is a comparatively minor one. Flora’s medical condition – the primary reason for her visit to India – seems to be an open secret in Jummapur. This frustrates Flora who is determined to find out who is responsible for the leak. ‘It seems that everyone from the Rajah to the R ­ esident knows all about me. I told no one except you’,434 she throws accusingly at Das. Flora’s painter provides a simple solution by referring to the lecture arranged by the Theosophical Society: ‘Mr Chamberlain’s letter said exactly why you were coming’.435 Reflecting the nature of British governance, Das also adds that the Rajah and Resident would have known because mail regarded as sensitive would have been opened before reaching its recipient. It is also the case that not all mysteries are ‘whodunits’. Hapgood is an instance of a ‘How did he do it?’. The British and Americans set a trap to identify who is leaking secrets to the Russians. It reveals the traitor to be a British agent, Ridley, but what the British and Americans – and, therefore, the audience – cannot establish is how he has pulled off a seemingly impossible trick of removing secret material from a booby-trapped and bugged briefcase without opening it:

430 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, pages 121–122. 431 Indian Ink, page 76. 432 Indian Ink, page 77. 433 Indian Ink, page 28. 434 Indian Ink, page 72. 435 Indian Ink, page 72.

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Wates: Ma’am, it’s beautiful, it’s so beautiful it has to be right. The Russians put Kerner in place and they don’t care if he’s a double or a triple, they put him in as a channel for Ridley. It’s perfect. Packing Kerner’s briefcase is Ridley’s job. Kerner is delivering to the Russians. It’s made in heaven. Yesterday it nearly came apart but only because of the leak from Moscow. The luggage was going to be inspected. Ridley had to get there first. He removed the films and handed you the briefcase in the shower. But now he had the bleep. He dropped it in the pool. Blair: He did it all without opening the briefcase? Wates: That’s the bit I am still working on. Your best chance is to make him do it all again.436 In fact, Stoppard has given notice in his stage directions in the middle of the first pool scene, the play’s opening scene, that there is another Ridley and the constant references to twins might enable an attentive viewer to work it out. Rather cheekily Stoppard allows Kerner, in his explanation of his literary taste for but frustration with spy novels, to reveal exactly how the plot of Hapgood is structured. Kerner complains that he only reads spy stories and that he reads, ‘in hope but they all surprise in the same way’.437 His aim, once he has learned English properly is to write his own spy book and it will be different from other spy novels: ‘The traitor will be the one you don’t like very much, it will be a scandal. Also, I will reveal him at the beginning’.438 This is exactly how Stoppard structures Hapgood. The traitor, if one’s attention is very sharp, is revealed at the beginning. Stoppard, never one to have one device when two will do, is trying to do a little bit more with the nature of the plot in Hapgood. ‘In a normal spy thriller you contrive to delude the reader until all is revealed in the denouement. This is the exact opposite of a scientific paper in which the denouement – the discovery – is announced at the beginning. Hapgood to some extent follows this latter procedure. It is not a whodunit because the audience is told who has done it near the beginning of the first act, so the story becomes how he did it’.439 436 437 438 439

Hapgood, page 28. Hapgood, page 34. Hapgood, page 34. Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater viii’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 181. Stoppard told W. Mortimer, that, ‘I don’t go in much for the whodunit form’. – Programme notes for the 2015 production of Hapgood at the Hampstead Theatre.

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In The Hard Problem Stoppard attempts to tantalise his audience with the tale of Hilary’s adopted daughter, although Stoppard, for once, is compromised because a sense of suspense is never really created by the very nature of the play. The audience knows that Hilary, a researcher at the Krohl Institute for Brain Science, gave birth at the age of fifteen to a daughter and gave her up for adoption. When asked by Julia, an old school friend, Hilary yields a clue when she confesses that, ‘I don’t know if she’s still Catherine’.440 In a play about coincidences most members of the audience are too tuned in to Stoppard’s theme not to work out that Cathy, the daughter of Jerry Krohl (the brain institute’s patron), is the same girl long before Hilary works it out when given further clues by her boss, Leo. There is little possibility of somnolence or boredom in a Stoppard play but, just to make sure, his plays are decorated with the casually dropped litter of mystery. Was Chater killed in a duel with Byron? Who was Sidley Park’s mystery hermit? Who is the dead jumper and where is the missing hare? Who owns the penknife in Voyage? Who is Joe’s father? Who is Cathy’s mother? A Stoppardian audience is rarely without a mystery to preoccupy it. Art Not all Stoppard’s inspiration is literary. After Magritte opens with a pastiche tableau of a Magritte painting. The attraction of Magritte to Stoppard is partly driven by the artist’s use of the idea of a painting-within-a-painting which is like the duality of the play-within-a-play structure so favoured by Stoppard.441 440 The Hard Problem, page 20. 441 Stoppard told Mel Gussow that his intention with After Magritte was after the manner of Magritte to ‘exhibit an absolutely bizarre set of components within an academic context’. – Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Stoppard Refutes Himself, Endlessly’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 32. Daniel Jernigan argues that, ‘the similarity of the play to the Magritte painting is that in each collage we recognize a combination of bizarre items grouped together in ways that are not commonly found in the real world’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 36. He goes on to suggest (op cit, page 41) that this allusion to Magritte demonstrates Stoppard’s use of what he refers to as the empirical method – viz. ‘After Magritte doesn’t…simply privilege coherence, but also the idea that the empirical method is essential in establishing such coherence’. Hayman observes, ‘Magritte often used the painting-within-a-painting to make statements about the human condition. This is probably one of the reasons he fascinates Stoppard, whose use of the play-within-the-play is comparable’. – R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 83. Stoppard said that, ‘After Magritte is in a mild and humble way a homage to (Magritte)’. – interview with M. Gussow, ‘“Writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself”’ in Conversations with Stoppard, page 7.

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Arcadia takes part of its inspiration from a Poussin painting. The Royal National Theatre programme had a print of Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcadia in its explanatory notes. Arcadia also evokes the paintings of Salvator Rosa442 to illustrate the Romantic/Gothic style of landscape gardening. Intruigingly, the title Artist Descending a Staircase is derived from Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending A Staircase, Number 2. It is tempting to think that Stoppard formed the idea of the staggered time shifts in the play from the staggered image in Duchamp’s painting.443 In The Coast of Utopia, however, Stoppard turns a famous painting into a whole scene. In a scene in Shipwreck set in June 1849, fourteen years before ­Manet painted Dejeuner sur l’herbe, Stoppard produces a ‘…tableau which anticipates…the painting by Manet. Natalie is the undressed woman sitting on the grass in the company of two fully clothed men, George and Herzen. Emma, stooping to pick a flower, is the woman in the background. The broader composition includes Turgenev, who is at first glance sketching Natalie but in fact sketching Emma. The tableau, however, is an overlapping of two locations, Natalie and George being in one, while Herzen, Emma and Turgenev are together elsewhere’.444 The scene in the painting evokes an image described in From the Other Shore, a collection of Herzen’s essays. The scene, which Stoppard complicates by using action in two locations simultaneously within Manet’s overall image, illustrates the affair Natalie Herzen is having with George Herwegh which, at the time, was unknown to their respective spouses, Alexander and Emma. But it is also highly symbolic within the framework of the trilogy.445 Stoppard begins by quoting Herzen’s essay in which the philosopher in exile reminisces about how the view at Montmorency reminds him of Zvenigorod in his homeland, Russia. But 442 Arcadia, page 34. 443 Gordon House, director of the production of Artist Descending a Staircase which was first broadcast on 10 January 2016 on bbc Radio 3, asserted that, ‘the structure of the play mirrors the advancing, repeated image of Duchamp’s Cubist, futurist nude’. 444 Shipwreck, pages 73–74. 445 See A. Kelly, ‘“A Glowing Footprint”: Herzen, Proudhon And The Role Of The Intellectual Revolutionary’ in Modern Intellectual History Vol 2, number 2, August 2005, page 190: ‘The essays collectively entitled From the Other Shore, in which Herzen points the moral of the failed revolution, reflect Proudhon’s influence in helping him put a positive construction on his disillusionment with republican ideals, as a turn away from wishful thinking toward a sober realism based on empirical observation of human behaviour and historical circumstances’. William Demastes highlights that Stoppard’s use of the painting may have another implication relevant to Stoppard’s canon: ‘the point that this…painting makes, namely that art is where reality and idealism creatively interact. It is a painting that implicitly asks whether the combination can exist anywhere other than in art’. – W. Demastes, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard, page 125.

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the image derives a further significance from Herzen’s essay. He remarks upon the sight of Rousseau’s house. Rousseau’s philosophy was one of those which attracted the emerging Russian intelligentsia. Alexander Bakunin admits his influence – ‘…call me liberal if you like, I read Rousseau as a young man’446 – and Herzen at one stage idolized his view of man, free and uncorrupted in his natural state, to the extent that in the essay Herzen describes the house as ‘the rock of Prometheus of a great man’.447 In what Berlin calls, ‘his political profession du foi, written as a lament for the broken illusions of 1848’,448 From the Other Shore amounts to a political manifesto of the beliefs Herzen came to espouse after the failed revolutions of 1848.449 It describes his repudiation of history as a deterministic process: ‘If humanity marched straight towards some kind of result, then there would be no history…there is no libretto. If there were a libretto, history would lose all interest, become unnecessary, boring, ludicrous’.450 Rather, history operates in a haphazard way – ‘In history, all is improvisation, all is will, all is ex tempore’451 – and man is capable of influencing events: ‘A large part of our destiny lies in our hands’,452 he continues. He rejects the idea that each generation should sacrifice itself for a vague goal that would benefit future generations, arguing that, ‘an end that is infinitely remote is not an end, but, if you like, a trap’,453 and insists that life should be lived for the present as, ‘Each age, each generation, each life had and has its own fullness’.454 It also displays his pragmatism, realising that people want their basic needs fulfilled rather than theories: ‘The masses want to stay the hand that impudently snatches from them the bread they have earned – that is their fundamental desire. They are indifferent to individual freedom, to freedom of speech; the masses love authority’.455

446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453

454 455

Voyage, page 3. A. Herzen, From the Other Shore, page 100. I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, page 92. A. Kelly, in Views from the Other Shore, page 75, describes From the Other Shore as ‘the leitmotif of Herzen’s political writings’. A. Herzen, From the Other Shore, pages 38–39. A. Herzen, From the Other Shore, page 39. A. Herzen, From the Other Shore, page 127. A. Herzen, From The Other Shore, page 37. See also Herzen, A – From the Other Shore, page 128: ‘If only people wanted to save themselves instead of saving the world, to liberate themselves instead of liberating humanity, how much they would do for the salvation of the world and the liberation of humanity!’. A. Herzen, From the Other Shore, page 37. A. Herzen, From the Other Shore, page 133.

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From the Other Shore furnishes some clues as to the rationale behind the trilogy’s name, The Coast of Utopia, and those of its component parts. In his essays contained therein Herzen acknowledges the cyclicality of nations, their rise and fall. It very clearly carries the idea of a journey, both intellectual and political. Berlin describes its purpose as, ‘designed as a post mortem on the liberal and democratic doctrines – and phraseology – which had suffered shipwreck in the failure of the (Paris 1848) revolution’.456 Herzen’s mental trauma at the catastrophes of 1848 is graphically illustrated in his lament to Herwegh: Those Marseillaise-singing orators of the left won’t let go of the nurse.... They’re preparing for themselves a life of bewilderment and grief…because the republic they want to bring back is the last delirium of two thousand years of metaphysics…the elevation of spirit over matter, brotherhood before bread, equality by obedience, salvation through sacrifice.457 His fear is that the winner from 1848 will be Marx. ‘To save this tepid bathwater, they’ll chuck out the baby and wonder where it went. Marx gets it’.458 Herzen needs a response. He quotes an eighteenth century Russian historian, NM. Karamzin, in his own Author’s Introduction, alluding to a metaphorical arrival on the seashore of a new land of human social development: Slowly the dense darkness was dispersed, slowly the light broke through the thick gloom. And at last the sun blazed forth; good and credulous humanitarians reasoning from triumph to triumph perceived the approaching goal of perfection and in joyful ecstasy exclaimed: ‘The shore!’, but suddenly the sky was overcast and the fate of mankind hidden in the storm clouds. Oh posterity! What destiny awaits thee!459 Herzen’s arrival is From the Other Shore. Berlin goes on to describe Herzen’s new philosophy contained therein as ‘as an expression of a moral and social philosophy of arresting originality’.460 Herzen dedicates the Russian edition of his book, published in 1855, to his son, Sasha, with Stoppard adapting Herzen’s actual dedication thus: 456 457 458 459 460

I. Berlin, Introduction to Herzen, A From the Other Shore, page xiv. Shipwreck, pages 60–61. Shipwreck, page 61. A. Herzen, From the Other Shore, page 8. I. Berlin, Introduction to Herzen, A From the Other Shore, page xiv.

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Sasha…I wrote this book in the year of revolution, six years ago now. It was only ever published in German. But here it is at last in Russian as I wrote it. I put into your hand this occasionally impudent protest against ideas which are obsolete and fraudulent, against absurd idols that belong to another age. Don’t look for solutions in this book. There are none. ­Anything which is solved is over and done with. The coming revolution is the only religion I pass on to you, and it’s a religion without a paradise on the other shore. But do not remain on the shore. Better to perish. Go in your time, preach the revolution at home to our own people. There they once loved my voice, and will perhaps remember me.461 Herzen’s new philosophy, conceived out of the wreckage of 1848 and born into the tradition of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, is offered as hope for the future. The chapter in Yarmolinsky’s history of the Russian intellectuals which ends with Herzen’s presentation of his book to Sasha at a New Year’s Eve party for 1855 is entitled ‘The Coasts Of Utopia’.462 Herzen never got further than the coast. Early optimism on the death of the autocratic Nicholas I in 1856 and the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 by ­Alexander ii – ‘A decent fellow’,463 according to Herzen – came to nought. He never returned to Russia, remaining in exile; in Stoppard’s saga he reaches ­Geneva, not long before his death. He loses command of the minds of the revolutionary intelligentsia as the next generation tells him, ‘You flap your wings and dream that you are still our leader and guide’.464 As Yarmolinsky puts it, ‘The boy (Sasha) did not become a revolutionary. The peasants did not rise. The soldiers did not mutiny’.465 Despite Michael Bakunin’s assertion that, ‘Marx’s

461 Salvage, page 34. Herzen’s actual words were: ‘Do not look for solutions in this book – there are none. The religion of the coming revolution is the only one that I bequeath to you. It has no paradise to offer, no rewards, except your own awareness, except conscience…When the time comes go and preach it amongst us at home; my language was once loved there and perhaps they will remember me’. – A. Herzen, From the Other Shore, pages 3–4. 462 A. Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution, pages 57–85. See also I. Nadel, Double Act A Life of Tom Stoppard, page 526. Nadel argues that title The Coast of Utopia is an allusion to Shakespeare. ‘The title of the work is The Coast of Utopia, a phrase which echoes Stoppard’s love of Shakespeare, since it alludes to Twelfth Night and the arrival of Viola and Sebastian after their shipwreck on the coast of Illyria’. 463 Salvage, page 40. 464 Salvage, page 109. 465 A. Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution, page 85.

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day is done’,466 Herzen’s fears were realised; Marx inherited Hegel’s deterministic philosophy and his manifesto, then, bequeathed Lenin the Kremlin. Adaptations Translation and adaptation are very appealing jobs for a writer.467 stoppard

∵ One of the clearest of Stoppardian patterns is his enthusiasm for adapting other playwright’s plays. When asked why he does so Stoppard replies, ‘simply because I’m asked. If I’m not doing something of my own, I enjoy adapting’.468 Undertaking an adaptation or translation resolves one of Stoppard’s self-confessed difficulties: the need to find a vehicle for his ideas. ‘I seem to have accepted uncritically (and, unconsciously, actually) the principle that the playwright’s job is to tell a story.…But the problem is that I become stimulated by the subject – which is nothing to do with a story. The difficult part has always been that I don’t have any stories ready to tell about anything, so there’s a long period where I’m unable to write anything that I’m supposed to be writing because, whether it’s going to be about the Empire or journalism or whatever, I can’t work out who is in it and what they are doing. I know what they’re saying and what they’re arguing about but I don’t know who they are’.469 Perhaps the adaptation provides more than just a plot. ‘I do like being given something concrete to work from’,470 he told Mark Lawson in 2013 in a reference to Darkside, which betrays a desire for some solid foundations for all his works. ‘It’s liberating’, says Stoppard, ‘to be given the plot and characters, because the bit I like doing best is then there to be done’.471 When adopting another 466 Salvage, page 114. 467 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. 468 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Jaggi, ‘You can’t help being what you write’ in The Guardian, 6 September 2008. 469 Stoppard, in an interview with S. Smith, ‘Script Jockey: The Flickering Images of Theatre’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 237. 470 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Lawson, Front Row 19 August 2013. 471 Stoppard, in an interview with G. O’Connor, ‘Two Men on an Ocean Wave’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 172.

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author’s narrative scheme ­Stoppard is left to do, as he admits, what he finds very appealing – the tasks of translation and adaptation: ‘Certainly for me, because the way I look at it is that somebody else did the hard part, and I am left to do the part that I really enjoy most, which is dealing with the utterance’.472 In adapting works he is presented with less of a problem because the story is there from the start. He may, however, choose to adapt the structure or narrative for dramatic effect. In Molnar’s Play At The Castle the guests arrive at a castle on the Italian Riviera, whereas Stoppard sets his adaptation, Rough Crossing, on a cruise liner, the ss Italian Castle, ‘sailing between Southampton and New York via Cherbourg’.473 Play At The Castle ends with a rehearsal of a comedy while in Rough Crossing it is a musical bound for Broadway which is being rehearsed. Sometimes the adaptation is more structural. The last scene of Schnitzler’s Leibelei takes place in Christine’s room. Stoppard transposes it in his adaptation, Dalliance, to ‘backstage at the Josefstadt theatre’.474 This change enables Stoppard to add an overlay of the theme of illusion into the play and reinforce the storyline of his play with a similar story being enacted by the Tenor and Soprano in the opera under rehearsal. Adapting or translating removes a part of Stoppard’s own process. He admits, in an interview with Peter Wood, to not knowing the outcome of some of his narrative when he starts work: Peter Wood: When I first asked you what (Jumpers) was about you said, ‘It’s about a man trying to write a lecture’. But for me it was about a man trying to write a lecture while his wife was stuck with a corpse in the next room. Tom Stoppard: Point taken. In fact, I have to confess that the plot, the story, comes so far behind the initial impetus for the play that in this case 472 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. ­Stoppard told Hayman that, ‘I’m very fond of the situation where somebody else has done the bit I’m bad at – you know, plot and character “Here’s the story; here are the people.” All you’ve got to do is the dialogue, and that’s the part I like doing. It’s what I’m best at’. – Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman on bbc Radio 3 in R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 161. 473 Rough Crossing, Characters’ page. 474 Dalliance, page 60. Michael Billington is critical of Stoppard’s licence. He argues, ‘If Schnitzler deliberately set the last two acts in Christine’s frugal and modest room was that not for an artistic purpose? If his style is one of dignified sobriety, is it not a bit odd to trick it out with Stoppardian puns? Stoppard has not destroyed the original play as in Rough Crossing. But he has added his own ‘improvements’ in a manner that is artistically questionable’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, pages 167–168.

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I didn’t even know who the corpse was, or who had shot him, or why. That was a little problem which I would settle in due course.475 By contrast, translating another playwright’s work avoids this phenomenon but introduces a different problem of linguistic comprehension: You do know what’s coming up when you’re translating. I suppose the concentration then is on finding a formulation which is speakable and in character – and economical as well, actually. And in that task perhaps it’s actually quite helpful to know what the comeback is going to be, what the next line is going to be. Because you’re dealing in rhythms, really. When I’m looking at a speech, parts of it I find immediately – I think half the time I get there in one. But as to the rest, it seems as if you don’t get it in one, you feel you never get it – you’re into your seventh or eighth try, and then you’re into your ninth, which you discover to your surprise is the same as your first. It’s a strangely maddening process…What happens is that some kind of reverb sets in between your natural sense of the language and your translator’s brain-load, and you lose touch with some fundamental level of English discourse.476 Stoppard has produced texts of a number of plays by mostly mid- and eastEuropean playwrights – Schnitzler, Chekhov, Nestroy, for example – that are adaptations rather than translations. He explains in the programme notes to On the Razzle how the process works: ‘When working on Undiscovered Country (with the essential help, as with On the Razzle, of a literal translation) I was seldom stuck. The right word or phrase was on the tongue or on the tip of it’.477 Stoppard accepts that in this process of adaptation he gets a lot of help on top of the initial translation he commences with. To begin with, the standard practice is to have a literal version prepared for oneself. In the case of Chekhov, a woman called Helen Rappaport, who is well known in London for doing exactly this, especially for Chekhov, prepared a word-for-word translation – which is more than it sounds, because she would offer alternative translations for various words and phrases, with a whole slew of footnotes to explain other things, including 475 Stoppard, in conversation with Peter Wood, programme notes to 1976 production of Jumpers at the Royal National Theatre. 476 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. 477 On the Razzle – Programme notes of the Royal National Theatre production 1981.

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the social and political background, for example. So you get quite an apparatus to start you off.478 Thus, the final product is far more than just a translation. The Royal National Theatre programme for the first production of Dalliance refers to it as ‘in a version by Tom Stoppard’,479 while the frontispieces of both Rough Crossing and On the Razzle describe them as ‘adapted from’ their original sources. However, there are marked differences between the adaptations in Stoppard’s approach.480 Stoppard explains, ‘In the case of Undiscovered Country the Ibsenesque undercurrents of the play made it important to establish as precisely as possible what every phrase meant, root out the allusions, find the niceties of the etiquette and so on, and generally aim for ambivalence. Such obligations turn out to be unhelpful in the case of Nestroy – the closer one gets to exactness the deader is the English on the page’.481 He continues that, ‘with On the Razzle I abandoned quite early on the onus of conveying Nestroy intact into English. I am not really a believer’, he adds, ‘in the hypothesis of true translation. The particularity of a writer’s voice is a mysterious collusion of sound and sense. The certain knowledge that a translation will miss it by at least an inch makes it less dreadful to miss it by a yard’. He concludes, ‘I have aimed in the general direction’.482 Freed from the obligation to translate word for word Stoppard felt able to produce an adaptation which was not hide-bound to the original. ‘Crucial to Nestroy in the original … is the language, in particular the remarkable games he plays with the Viennese dialect. All of the main characters and most of the plot comes from Nestroy, but not much of the dialogue attempts to offer a proper translation in the strictest sense. My method must be compared to cross-country hiking with map and compass, where one takes a bearing on the next landmark and picks one’s way towards it’.483 One play which defies the analysis of adaptation is Heroes. It is much closer to a literal translation484 of the original than Stoppard’s other adaptations. 478 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. 479 Dalliance – Programme notes of the Royal National Theatre production 1986. 480 See Stoppard’s interview with R. Hayman, on bbc Radio 3. ‘In the case of the Schnitzler play, I went through the literal translation line by line with a linguist, so that the nuance level could be revealed to me. I didn’t do that with the Nestroy play at all, because it was fairly clear quite early on that this was a different situation altogether. The point wasn’t to transpose Nestroy into English: the point was to do in English what he’d done’. R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 161. 481 On the Razzle – Programme notes of the Royal National Theatre production 1981. 482 On the Razzle – Programme notes of the Royal National Theatre production 1981. 483 On the Razzle – Programme notes of the Royal National Theatre production 1981. 484 Unlike his other adaptations, it is referred to as a translation.

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‘After months of translating’, Stoppard admits, ‘I thought I knew what every word meant – and I’ve just discovered I was wrong’.485 But, even with this approach a word-for-word translation is not the final product. ‘The starting point is to be utterly faithful to the original’, he says. ‘But if you abide by that completely you are doing the author a disservice. An absolutely strict translation would not have enough give in it, so instead you have to turn it into dialogue that sounds natural in English. But I’m rather pleased that at one point Henri says, “Voilà!”’.486 With Heroes Stoppard had the luxury of being able to work with the original writer, Gérald ­Sibleyras, and the result is a play which is shorter than the original and one that both writers consider to be a better play: The first version of the play was too long, a defect that the French production failed to improve. As Stoppard explains: ‘Together we managed to do what Gérald was prevented from doing in that production because the director and actors were very defensive about cutting any lines. This production gave him the chance to improve the play. I think Gérald was surprised to find that in London the author is welcome to all rehearsals’.487

Literary Influences The guy who wrote this? Sir Tom something? He needs to read more books. The Times, 9 February 2015

...

(The Dissolution Of Dominic Boot) was the first and last self propelled idea I ever had. stoppard488

∵ 485 486 487 488

Stoppard, in an interview with A. Sierz, The Daily Telegraph 10 October, 2005. Stoppard, in an interview with A. Sierz, The Daily Telegraph 10 October, 2005. Stoppard, in an interview with A. Sierz, The Daily Telegraph 10 October, 2005. Tom Stoppard: Plays 2, Introduction.

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The Dissolution Of Dominic Boot was first broadcast in 1964. Therefore, by his own estimation virtually all of Stoppard’s canon owes something to other influences489 and it is almost as ironic as the Times’ leader column that the man who has given his own name to an adjective which exemplifies his own very idiosyncratic style – ‘Stoppardian’ – should have proved to be so very adept at imitating, adapting and incorporating the distinctive styles of other playwrights and literary influences. It is style that matters to Stoppard, as he told Giles Gordon: I’m not actually hooked on form. I’m not even hooked on content if one means message. I’m hooked on style.490 The Stoppardian style, at its core, contains a number of clearly defined characteristics, or patterns.491 There is the normally arresting start to one of his shows which ensures that his audience – no matter whether it is perplexed – is instantly engaged: who else would start a play with a man reading his own suicide note (The Dog It Was Died) or a nineteenth century teenage girl asking, ‘what is carnal embrace?’492 (Arcadia). Right from his earliest days he was associated with the clever manipulation of the language – such as, ‘…one thing led to another until causality was dead’.493 – and that has never diminished. S­ toppard has invariably been the creator of hilarious comedy, often bordering on high farce, such as in Rough Crossing or Dirty Linen. Above all, Stoppard’s plays have been plays of argument about profound ideas: morality, as in ­Jumpers; ­science, 489 Stoppard was initially reluctant to admit to influences of any sort. He claimed in 1968, ‘One is…the beneficiary and victim of one’s subconscious: that is, of one’s personal history, experience and environment. It took me quite a long time to reconcile myself to this, because I liked to feel that I was in total control of my material’. – ‘Something to Declare’ in J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 110. John Fleming comments, ‘eclecticism is one of the hallmarks of Stoppard’s canon’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 2. 490 Stoppard, in an interview with G. Gordon, ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 23. Felicia Hardison Londre comments, ‘For Stoppard, style is cleverness, and cleverness is funny’. – FH. Londre, Tom Stoppard, page 102. Fleming adds a rider: ‘While Stoppard champions style, it is not…an end in itself. Stoppard’s stylistic bravura and theatricality are always yoked to, and in service of, some more substantial ideas’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 2. 491 For a definition of ‘Stoppardian’ see (1) W. Demastes, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard, page 3; (2) T. Zinman, ‘Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, pages 120–122. 492 Arcadia, page 2. 493 Hapgood, page 36.

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as in Hapgood or Arcadia; freedom of speech – a theme which runs from Night and Day to Rock ‘N’ Roll. He provides the drama of the conflict of debate and, then, leaves the audience to draw its own conclusion. And, he typically does so by uniting in a vehicle two disparate elements with a common nature which he has observed from an odd perspective – for example, moral philosophy and gymnastics. By and large audiences who pay to go and see a Stoppard play have a very good idea of the format of what to expect when they turn up – if not the detail and the subject matter. Notwithstanding the peculiar nature of a Stoppardian work another great characteristic of Stoppard’s plays is his use of genre, borrowed from other literary sources. Of all Stoppard’s plays Travesties most obviously owes much to other styles, both in structure and words. In addition to borrowing the structure of The Importance of Being Earnest, Travesties also displays considerable Wildean influence in the text, in particular in the form of epigrams.494 The best is probably: Carr: I’m not sure that I approve of your taking up this modish novelty of ‘free association’, Bennett. I realise that it is all the rage in Zurich – even in the most respectable salons to try to follow a conversation nowadays is like reading every other line of a sonnet – but if the servant classes are going to ape the fashions of society, the end can only be ruin and decay. Bennett: I’m sorry, sir. It is only that Mr. Tzara being an artist – Carr: I will not have you passing moral judgements on my friends. If Mr. Tzara is an artist that is his misfortune.495 Such Wildean aphorisms occur elsewhere in Stoppard’s work; for example Theodore’s observations about womankind in Dalliance: ‘Women have no business to be fascinating, their job is to be pleasant’.496 Moreover, Wildean structure also recurs, as in a small episode to explain the convoluted loss of an ear-ring in Rough Crossing. Conversely, the Joycean language in Travesties complements the more obscure instances of the adoption of parts of the structure of Ulysses.497 Like 494 See O. Kerensky, The New British Drama, page 160. Irving Wardle wrote in his review of the first production of Travesties that, ‘one of the great pleasures of the evening is Stoppard’s skill in moving in and out of Wilde’s dialogue’. – I. Wardle, The Times, 11 June 1974. 495 Travesties, pages 30–31. 496 Dalliance, page 12. 497 Jernigan comments, ‘In Travesties, Stoppard goes well beyond the simple “borrowing” of characters … He also borrows the genres and aesthetic ideals of (Tzara, Joyce and Lenin), so that at any point during the play we might … find a pastiche of character, genre, and form’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 66.

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Archie’s opening speech in the Coda of Jumpers,498 Travesties adopts Joycean language: Stoppard imitates both his stream of consciousness and, as in this comment from Carr, his repetitions; ‘We’re here because we’re here…because we’re here because we’re here…we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here…’.499 But, Travesties also imitates parts of Ulysses (which Joyce, in turn, borrowed from Homer) – notably the Ithaca catechism and the linguistic history lesson of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’.500 Helpfully, Stoppard provides a small clue to this influence – ‘Did I or did I not give you to type a chapter in which Mr Bloom’s adventures correspond to the Homeric episode of the Oxen of the Sun?’,501 Joyce asks Gwendolen. The point of doing so is that it enables Stoppard to reinforce constantly the metaphoric role the Joycean form of art performs in the play’s debate about the nature of art itself. Not surprisingly Stoppard’s earliest efforts were, by his own admission, influenced by other plays.502 His description of his first attempt at a play, crediting both Arthur Miller and Robert Bolt, says as much: ‘A Walk on the Water was in fact Flowering Death of a Salesman’.503 He continues, ‘…a first play…tends to be the sum of all the plays you have seen of a type you can emulate technically and have admired’.504 He describes his unpublished, early play The Gamblers as ‘a Waiting for Godot type play’.505 ‘There are certain things written in ­English’, 498 According to Katherine Kelly the speech is ‘written in a Joycean dialect’. – K. Kelly, Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play, pages 102–104, quoted in H. Bloom (ed), Tom Stoppard, page 65. 599 Travesties, page 23. 500 Stoppard even goes so far as to mimic some of Joyce’s words. For example: (1) Travesties, page 40 – Tzara: ‘He thought that he thought that he knew what he was thinking, whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he did not’; (2) Ulysses, page 634 – ‘He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not’. 501 Travesties, page 69. 502 Michael Billington’s verdict on Enter a Free Man is that, ‘it lacks the fingerprints of originality’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 17. 503 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 55. Fleming explains that it was heavily influenced by Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Robert Bolt’s Flowering Cherry – see J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 11. 504 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 55. 505 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 115.

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Stoppard admitted to Ronald Hayman, ‘which make me feel as a diabetic must feel when the insulin goes in. Prufrock and Beckett are the twin syringes of my diet, my arterial system’.506 In fact, he credits Eliot more than most critics seem to: ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were wooed out from under the shadow of Godot by “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”’.507 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead has been ascribed to a plethora of influences.508 A passage from John Fleming’s Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos illustrates by just how much: In an article that appeared in the National Theatre program, Irving Wardle cited the play’s indebtedness to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot… In his book on Stoppard, Michael Billington argues that ‘philosophically, 506 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 55. 507 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 55. Hayman also argues that one of Stoppard’s three short stories (Reunion, Life, Times: Fragments and True Story) also owes something to The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock: ‘Life, Times: Fragments…swerves eccen­ trically between anecdote and parody (of Eliot’s Prufrock)’. – R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 22. Corballis also draws attention to the link with Eliot’s poem – see R. Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork, pages 159–160. Hayman also notices the similarity between some of the verse given to Gladys in If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank and that of Eliot: ‘No other playwright…would have been prompted by (tim’s) rhythmic time-­ announcements to compose verse in the style of TS Eliot’. – R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 55. Anthony Jenkins makes a similar reference to the influence of Eliot – see A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 17. 508 It is seen by many as being in the tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd. For example: ‘Philosophically, Stoppard’s play belongs to the tradition of Theatre of the Absurd as defined by Ionesco in an essay on Kafka: “Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose…Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost: all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless”’. – Billington, M, Stoppard: the playwright, page 35. By contrast, Stoppard said that Jumpers, ‘isn’t non-realistic. It suggests that real life can rise to surprising and bizarre effects. I don’t mean absurd – not with a capital A, like I­ onesco – because these are real people talking in a real room’. – Stoppard, in an interview with S. Eichelbaum, “Call Me the Thinking Man’s Farceur” in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 78. Jill Levenson also notes that, ‘No one has pressed Stoppard about Wittgenstein’s influence on R&GAD, but striking reflections of ideas and language from the Philosophical Investigations suggest that this text was the third major paradigm [the first two being Shakespeare and Beckett] for Stoppard’s’. – J. Levenson, Stoppard’s Shakespeare: textual re-visions in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom S­ toppard, page 160.

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[Rosguil] belongs to the tradition of Theatre of the Absurd’.509 The play’s borrowings from or similarities to Shakespeare, Becket and Pirandello510 have been discussed by many scholars…For intertextual analysis Thomas Whitaker goes furthest as he argues for the ways in which Rosguil ‘rewrites’ other texts, and his list includes not only Hamlet and Godot, but also James Saunders’ Next Time I’ll Sing To You (1963), W.S. Gilbert’s 1874 verse burlesque Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as well as Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Importance of Being Earnest, No Exit and The B ­ alcony. Furthermore, Tynan and Faraone see Kafka as an influence, while Ruskino and Brassell add T.S Eliot to the list.511 Some excerpts from Gilbert’s 1891 play were included in the programme notes and Stoppard freely acknowledges some of the aforementioned influences.512 Virtually contemporaneous with the debut of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the publication of Lord Malquist and Mr Moon. Peter Rabinowitz makes a similar reference to the book’s influences: … it provides a window on the author’s early influences: not only such Stoppard staples as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Joyce’s Ulysses, Becket’s Waiting for Godot, and Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock513 but also (among others) the mare-beating dream from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Hemingway’s short stories, Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and countless others as well.514 509 M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright. 510 See DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 12: ‘Stoppard was fully invested in a metatheatrical condition that extends back at least as far as Pirandello’. 511 J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 49. Robert Brustein describes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as, ‘a theatrical parasite, feeding off ­Hamlet, Waiting for Godot and Six Characters in Search of an Author – Shakespeare provides the characters, Pirandello the technique, and Beckett the tone with which the ­Stoppard play proceeds’. – R. Brustein, The Third Theatre, page 149. 512 See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, Notes 6 and 8 on pages 264–265. 513 The influence of Eliot was seen by several commentators in Stoppard’s early works. For instance: ‘Reunion is reminiscent of the early Eliot poems which wryly describe encounters with women who would have preferred the conversation not to fall so far short of the romantic’. – R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 21. 514 PJ. Rabinowitz, ‘Narrative difficulties in Tom Stoppard’s Lord Malquist and Mr Moon’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 56. Jim Hunter notes the

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Stoppard is never slow to acknowledge his debts to others.515 Teeth, for ­example, he admits, is ‘a Roald Dahl-type story (as I hoped)’.516 Like many of Dahl’s stories it has a sting in the tail. George, a dental patient, is thought to be having an affair with the dentist, Harry’s, wife. At the very end of the play, in a combination of devices common to a Greek tragedy (peripeteia and anagnorisis517) which Dahl often employs, it turns out the dentist is having an affair with George’s wife. In response to the following proposition from David Gollob he can only agree: ‘Professional Foul also seems to bear certain similarities with the existentialist drama, the Sartrian theatre of situations, in the way that the central character becomes more aware of his global situation in terms of other men at grips with, engaged in the problems of life’.518 Stoppard advises that ‘Neutral Ground is based on Philoctetes by Sophocles’,519 although in its final

influence of modernism, and particularly that deriving from the 1920s – see J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 11 et al. Other commentators ascribe a legion of influences. For example, Anthony Jenkins asserts that parts of Reunion ‘owe something to Hemingway’, The Story’s, ‘matter-of-fact prose (is) in the manner of Truman Capote’, and in Lord Malquist and Mr Moon the opening scene of Malquist’s carriage ‘seems like a comic rerun of St Evremonde’s coach ride in Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities’ while, ‘Jane is described in purple Barbara-Cartlandese’.– A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, pages 24, 27, 29 and 30. Jenkins develops an interesting analysis of the likeness between Stoppard’s work and that of Havel, emphasising their use of an ordinary element to act as a frame and metaphor for a play’s ideas (op cit, page 144). Terry Hodgson suggests that, ‘A number of articles make comparisons with twentieth century dramatists. Wilde, Beckett, Albee, Shaw, Anouilh, Orton, Bond, Ibsen, Molnar, Schnitzler and Pinter are the most frequent. Shakespeare, of course, looms in the background’. – T. Hodgson, The Plays Of Tom Stoppard, page 180. 515 Perhaps the shrewdest comment about Stoppardian influences is made by Michael Billington: ‘Shaw showed in work like Getting Married and Misalliance that drama could be built out of disquisitory talk, Pirandello proved it could be constructed out of constant conflict between reality and illusion, Beckett demonstrated in Waiting for Godot that it could be derived from a confrontation with the meaningless of existence. Stoppard, formally owes something to all those writers’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, pages 14–15. 516 Teeth, page vii. 517 Peripeteia = a sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances; anagnorisis = the sudden recognition by a protagonist of its own or another character’s true identity or nature. 518 Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 154. 519 Stoppard, Tom Stoppard: Plays 3, page vii. Terry Hodgson comments, ‘In Neutral Ground, as in T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party, the underlying Greek myth is unrecognisable, save for the name of the central role, Philo, and the parallels between

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form it is only the central essence of Sophocles’ story – the rescue of a man by his colleagues, who had abandoned him, after many years – that survives. At one stage he seems to have become quite conscious of his propensity to be influenced: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is built around Hamlet, of course. The Real Inspector Hound is basically an Agatha Christie story. And in Travesties the matrix is The Importance of Being Earnest. There are probably one or two others using the same method. In fact, eventually I got to the point where I thought, ‘I’ve got to stop doing this: it’s becoming a kind of mannerism.520 It would be easier to say who hasn’t influenced Stoppard.521 A walk through Jumpers alone is a journey through a minefield of thinkers and writers and it is very hard to avoid stepping on some. A by no means exhaustive list of references in Jumpers includes George Moore, Bertrand Russell, Cantor, Zeno, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Darwin, Keats, Shelley, Milton, Hobbes, Copernicus, Einstein, Voltaire, Freud, Descartes and Wittgenstein – not to mention ‘Benthamite Utilitarians’ and ‘lapsed Kantians’.522 The impact of many of those names resurfaces in his other works. John Fleming describes Night and Day as ‘resembling a Shavian drawing room comedy’.523 He also identifies ‘Shavian dialects’524 in Travesties.525 Michael Billington talks of Mike Nichols’

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Odysseus and Otis, a cunning spymaster, and Otis’ subordinate spy, Acherson, and ­ eoptolemus’. – T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, page 47. Anthony Jenkins disN agrees slightly, arguing, ‘Stoppard’s inventiveness shows most in the way he has ­transposed major details from Sophocles’. – see A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, pages 22–23. Michael Billington describes it as, ‘a very ingenious adaptation of the original story’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 69. Stoppard, in an interview with S. Smith, ‘Script Jockey: The Flickering Images of Theatre’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 238. See, for example, William Demastes’ analysis of the influences on Arcadia – W. Demastes, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard, page 84. Richard Corballis highlights Tynan’s argument for the possible influence of Havel on Jumpers, for example. – R. Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork, page 126. Jumpers, page 50. J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 139. Thomas Whitaker adds, ‘Reviewers and critics have often described Night and Day as a Shavian debate…that seems strangely subordinate to an irrelevant protagonist’. – T. Whitaker, Tom Stoppard, page 147. J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 105. ‘I keep hearing about my being in some sense a Shavian playwright’. – Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.”’ in M. Gussow,

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d­ irection of the opening scene of The Real Thing being played with ‘a heightened ­Cowardesque camp so that even the slowest member of the audience would realise he was watching a play-within-a-play’.526 Stoppardian comparisons are unstoppable. Michael Coveney sees the influence of EM. Forster: ‘In the Native State, split like Arcadia between past and present, may be his finest work to date, a novelistic, Forsterian epic of painting, poetry, imperialism and literary reputations’.527 The Invention of Love is reminiscent, in particular, of the ‘two pleasant days at Oxford’528 that Three Men In A Boat describes in Stoppard’s own screenplay adaptation. And, nobody can deny the influence of the Whitehall Farce on Dirty Linen. The effect of borrowing other genres offers the chance to parody which opens up the possibility of comedy. In the style of a John le Carré spy thriller two protagonists, Blair and Hogbin, in The Dog It Was That Died have to identify themselves to each other using recognisable, coded phrases. Stoppard parodies it: Blair: Good morning. On the dot. Hogbin: I see the tulips are in glorious bloom. Blair: Absolutely. What can I do for you Hogbin? Hogbin: I am sorry – do we know each other? Blair: I prefer thingummies myself. What’s all this about? Hogbin: I see the tulips are in glorious bloom.

Conversations with Stoppard, page 57. Zinman notes that Jim Hunter and Katherine Kelly see Night And Day as Chekhovian. See T. Zinman, ‘Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 125. Thomas Whitaker also describes Travesties as, ‘a Shavian dialect that wittily explores the claims of rival principles’. – T. Whitaker, Tom Stoppard, page 113. Margaret Gold notes, ‘George Bernard Shaw is the second of the Dadas in Travesties. The political debates in Travesties have an unmistakably Shavian crackle’. – M. Gold, ‘Who are the Dadas in Travesties?’, Modern Drama, xxi (1978) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 186. Gold finds several parallels between Shaw and Stoppard in Travesties (op cit, pages 186–188). 526 M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 147. Stoppard accepts, to a limited extent, the comparison with Coward: ‘The first scene (of The Real Thing) was not intended to be a pastiche. I can see there’s a resemblance to Coward, but it’s not that close’. – S­ toppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 43. Anthony Jenkins claims that, ‘the second scene’s “real-life” conversation parodies the situation between Eliot and Amanda in Noel Coward’s Private Lives’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 160. 527 M. Coveney, ‘Head-scratching in Stoppard’s Arcadia’ in The Observer, 18 April 1993. 528 Three Men In A Boat, Filming Script, scenes 52–56.

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Blair: So you said. I prefer hollyhocks myself. (Pause.) Hibiscus? (Pause.) Come on, Hogbin. I’m Blair. We’ve met.…So stop fooling about. (Pause.) Gladioli? (Pause.) All right, I’ll just sit on this bench and enjoy the view… Hogbin: Hydrangeas. Blair: That was it. I prefer Hydrangeas myself. Hogbin: I’m sorry, sir, but… Blair: Perfectly all right. Keen gardener, are you?529 The le Carré link resurfaces in rather more serious mode in Hapgood where the esoteric nature of the subject proved to be rather baffling. Stoppard explains, for instance, that, ‘John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy uses the word ‘joe’ for an agent who is being run by somebody, and I picked it up. I have no idea whether it is authentic or invented by le Carré’.530 He also concedes that, ‘The intricacies of the spy plot are quite difficult. I think I am not as good as John le Carré at doing that kind of story’.531 When asked how many books he had read as background for Indian Ink Stoppard replied, ‘I’ve probably got 50 or 60 books vaguely related’,532 thereby demonstrating both the diligence of his research and how difficult it really is to say what does and does not affect him. Two books obviously stand out because they are mentioned in the text. Stoppard says, ‘I re-read A Passage To India at some point’, and claims that his reference to it in the play (‘What is your opinion of A Passage To India?’,533 Flora asks Das) ‘was necessary. Otherwise it’s hanging over the play like an unacknowledged ghost’.534 Of considerable significance to Stoppard is Emily Eden’s Up The Country (1866). He confirms that, ‘I read the entire two volumes…and the whole thing was worthwhile for the one thing’.535 ‘Because the last word is given to a real person called Emily Eden’, he says it determines, ‘the flavour I get off the play finally’.536 529 The Dog It Was That Died, pages 161–162. 530 Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater viii’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 181. 531 Stoppard, in an interview with A. Goreau, ‘Is the Real Inspector Hound a Shaggy Dog Story?’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 259. 532 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 138. 533 Indian Ink, page 30. 534 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, pages 125–126. 535 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 129. 536 Stoppard, in an interview with P. Allen, ‘Third Ear’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 243.

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However, it could be argued that the biggest influence on the play is neither a book about India nor one that is mentioned in the play at all. ‘I’ve been interested in the idea of writing a novel in which everything was happening in the footnotes, rather like Flann O’Brien’.537 The author to whom Stoppard refers is the pseudonym of Brian O’Nolan, a twentieth century Irish author. While Indian Ink is not an all-out attempt to write a play with everything in the footnotes the researcher, Pike, exists in the play both as a rather hapless character and the provider of footnotes – ‘The notes is where the fun is!’,538 Pike trills in another element to the play’s double nature. It’s a ‘device of having a voice outside the play, though belonging to a character in the play’.539 There is a notable change in emphasis of Pike’s role in Indian Ink from its radio counterpart where Pike is purely the voice of the footnotes. Rather like Bernard in Arcadia, Stoppard’s treatment of him is not sympathetic. Instead, the play is a satire on Pike’s breed of pedantic researcher who cannot see the real wood of the issues for the trees of the facts as they are regularly encountered. Mrs Swan sums up the overall treatment of Pike in her review of his work on a collection of Flora’s poems: Far too much of a good thing, in my opinion, the footnotes; to be constantly interrupted by someone telling you things you already know or don’t need to know at that moment. There are pages where Flora can hardly get a word in sideways.540 It is a self-serving profession, illustrated by Pike’s belief that, ‘This is why God made poets and novelists, so the rest of us can get published’.541 Pike misses out on the big scoop of the naked watercolour painting of Flora. Despite his persistent search for evidence of it, its secret remains with Mrs Swan, Flora’s sister, and Anish, the painter’s son: ‘(My father) wouldn’t really want it, not even in a footnote’,542 Anish tells Mrs Swan. Worse than that Pike actually gets the story wrong, suggesting Flora went to bed with a British Army Captain: 537 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 121. 538 Indian Ink, page 4. 539 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 121. Stoppard also argues that he achieves a similar effect in both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound. 540 Indian Ink, pages 25–26. 541 Indian Ink, page 4. 542 Indian Ink, page 80.

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‘Mr Pike’s footnote implies that it was the Political Agent, Captain Durance…’,543 reveals Anish before Mrs Swan emphatically quashes that suggestion. Endowing his trade with the aura of ‘a sacred trust’544 Pike is lampooned early on when he fails to realise that The Queen’s Elm is not an actual tree but, as Mrs Swan corrects him, ‘a pub in the Fulham Road’.545 Stoppard does, however, put the role of the footnote to use in the play as Pike fills the audience in on certain historical details which cannot within the constraints of the play be dramatized, such as why Flora broke off her engagement to de Boucheron and her contretemps with JC. Squire, a literary editor. Pike’s role fulfils Stoppard’s acknowledgement of ‘some theme of the commentator making points about the material which he is part of’.546 He sees this theme recurring in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound. However, the question of influence can be pushed too far. It is also rather too easy to see influence where there is none, as Ronald Hayman admits: ‘Enter a Free Man … bears a strong resemblance to Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, though Tom Stoppard assures me he has neither seen it nor read it’.547 Claims that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is existential may be true, but it was apparently not a term in Stoppard’s mind when he originally wrote the play:548 ‘I must say that I didn’t know what the word “existential” meant until it was applied to Rosencrantz’,549 he said when interviewed in 1974. Stoppard addresses the question of influence with specific reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in an interview with Gordon: Gordon: Who do you feel you’ve been influenced by as a writer, or don’t you feel it’s important? Stoppard: It’s not important to me, but I suppose it’s interesting. Influences such as appear in Rosencrantz, and any play of anybody else’s, are I suppose admirations that have been unsuccessfully repressed or ­obscured. I don’t mean consciously. But, of the influences that have been 543 544 545 546

Indian Ink, page 79. Indian Ink, page 4. Indian Ink, page 4. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 121. 547 R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 14. 548 See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, Note 8, pages 264–265 for a commentary on the nature of existentialism. 549 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 58.

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invoked on my behalf, and they have been Beckett, Kafka, Pirandello of course, I suppose Beckett is the easiest one to make, yet the most deceptive. Most people who say Beckett mean Waiting for Godot. They haven’t read his novels, for example. I can see a lot of Beckettian things in all my work, but they’re not actually to do with the image of two lost souls waiting for something to happen, which is why most people connect Rosencrantz with Waiting for Godot, because they had this scene in common.… When I read (Beckett’s humour) I love it and when I write I just guess it comes out as other things come out. As for Pirandello, I know very little about him, I’m afraid. I’ve seen very little and I really wasn’t aware of that as an influence.550 In a line which all Stoppardian analysts would do well to heed Stoppard concludes, ‘It would be very difficult to write a play which was totally unlike ­Beckett, Pirandello and Kafka, who’s your father, you know?’.551 For a man who by his own admission reads copiously552 the effect and question of influence is almost as inevitable as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s own fate,553 but is equally unintentional – ‘I am not really that self-conscious about what might be influencing me’.554 I incline very heavily to Stoppard’s warning. Moreover, the consequential impact of his voracious appetite for literature is surely part of what Stoppard is about. However, there are three literary elephants555 in the Stoppardian room 550 Stoppard, in an interview with G. Gordon, ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom ­Stoppard in Conversation, page 21. 551 Stoppard, in an interview with G. Gordon, ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom ­Stoppard in Conversation, page 21. 552 ‘I read an enormous amount, at least I used to read an enormous amount’. Stoppard in an interview with G. Gordon, ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 22. 553 Stoppard acknowledges the point. ‘If you read a lot and see a lot, you’re bombarded with influences. It’s not always easy to write in your own voice’. – Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“Writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 3. 554 Stoppard, in an interview with Alison Croggon. Stoppard, however, is aware of how to turn the subliminal effects of his influences to his own advantage: ‘You have to work on being the blind beneficiary of your subconscious’. – Stoppard, in an interview with J. Biggins, ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’. 555 Subsidiary cases could be made for Wilde, Joyce and Shaw. Harold Bloom, writing in 2003, notes the influence of Wilde: ‘(Stoppard) long ago transcended the influence of Samuel Beckett. His true precursor has become the divine Oscar Wilde’. – H. Bloom (ed), Tom Stoppard, page 11. In addition to the derivation of the structure of Travesties from

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of influence which must be addressed: Beckett, Chekhov and Shakespeare. It is beholden upon any analysis of Stoppard’s works to explain the significance and nature of the influence of those three playwrights on Stoppard himself. The striking feature is, notwithstanding the great differences in the plays of such a theatrical triumvirate, the patterns of commonality between their works that relate to Stoppard’s. All three exhibit some aspect of duality. They all produce comedy, although that of Beckett and Chekhov relies principally on situation (and often the misery thereof). The way Beckett and Shakespeare employ words and draft the drama of language has relevance to Stoppard’s craft while it is what Chekhov and Shakespeare do with character that stands by greatest contrast with Stoppard, the playwright of ideas. Above all, it is the Bard’s view of a play as a theatrical event which most closely resembles Stoppard’s approach to playwriting and, therefore, Shakespeare is as much of an inspiration as an influence.

The Importance of Being Earnest and Wilde’s appearance in The Invention of Love evidence in favour of Wilde’s influence includes Stoppard’s use of Wildean language and Wilde’s epigrammatic style. Joan Fitzpatrick Dean also emphasises Wilde’s influence, arguing, ‘It is difficult to overestimate Wilde’s influence on Stoppard’. – JF. Dean, Tom Stoppard Comedy As A Moral Matrix, page 7. Her case is articulated in op cit, pages 7–8. Susan Rusinko writes, ‘In the tradition of Shaw and Wilde, Stoppard once again has made the stage a forum for ideas and a showcase for daringly innovative use of the language. Unlike them, however, he elaborately structures his debates in the course of the play, only to dismantle them at the end, sometimes quite suddenly…Stoppard remains apart from both Shaw and Wilde whose wit was purposeful and whose ideas, particularly Shaw’s, were carefully and elaborately explored’. – S. Rusinko, Tom Stoppard, Preface. The influence of Shaw is discussed in the chapter of this book entitled ‘The Stoppardian Stage Debate’. See also Margaret Gold’s case for the influence of Shaw on Travesties in which she argues, ‘Shaw has supplied his complement of characters to Travesties’, and, ‘As was the case with Wilde, where Stoppard finally meets Shaw is within the realm of ideas’. – M. Gold, ‘Who are the Dadas in Travesties?’, Modern Drama, xxi (1978) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, pages 186–188. John Harty identifies the parallels between Joyce and Stoppard’s use of parody and quotation. See J. Harty, ‘Stoppard’s Lord Malquist and Mr Moon: The Beginning’ in J. Harty iii (ed),Tom Stoppard A Casebook, pages 7–8. John Fleming makes a case for both Wilde and Shaw in J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, pages 252–253. Thomas Whitaker argues that Stoppard adopts an operatic form to dialogue just as both Wilde and Joyce did. See T. Whitaker, Tom Stoppard, Chapter 6. The case for Joyce includes his influence on Travesties, both in terms of structure and also language. But, the influence spreads further. For instance, note the interrogative nature of sections of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in particular pages 32–39. Katherine Kelly, for example, describes Archie’s opening speech in the Coda of Jumpers as, ‘written in a Joycean dialect’. – K. Kelly, Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play, pages 102–104, quoted in H. Bloom (ed),

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Beckett Wham, bam, thank you Sam556 archie, Jumpers

∵ The question that Stoppard’s acknowledgement of his debt to Beckett raises is why is it located where it is – in Jumpers, in the Coda?557 Surely it would be more appropriate for Stoppard to have placed his thank you note in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? The parallels between Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are so obvious that they explain ­Stoppard’s Beckettian influence in the view of many.558 It is true that both plays feature two protagonists who are on stage for the most part, considering

Tom Stoppard, page 65. For a discussion of the phraseology of Archie’s speech see J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, Note 16, page 274. See, too, the influence of Joyce on ‘Golden Hair’ in Rock ‘N’ Roll. Stoppard, however, issued a word of caution which critics would do well to heed. In The Times of 13 June 2015 he is quoted as saying, ‘I wrote one play which had James Joyce among the cast of characters. Travesties, it was called. And it’s full of allusions to Ulysses, his masterpiece.…I hadn’t actually read Ulysses, actually. I just as it were, found things in it at random’. 556 Jumpers, page 87. 557 ‘The play’s debt to Samuel Beckett could not have been more clearly emphasized’. – M. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, page 434. Jill Levenson opines, ‘Stoppard’s debt to the Theatre of the Absurd, particularly to Beckett, is often acknowledged without being analysed’. – J. Levenson, Views from a Revolving Door: Tom Stoppard to Date, Queen’s Quarterly, 78 (1971) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, J­ umpers & Travesties, page 45. Victor Cahn argues that the phrase in Archie’s speech, ‘one of the thieves was saved’, refers to a quotation from Beckett in which Beckett uses the same phrase and, thereby, Archie’s speech is ‘a reconciliation with the state of absurdity that Beckett had dramatized’. – V. Cahn, Beyond Absurdity, page 122. Cahn (op cit) ­presents a concise analysis of how the absolutist and relativist arguments in Jumpers are derived respectively from G.E. Moore and A.J. Ayer. 558 For example, (1) R. Corballis, ‘Beneath this Beckettian veneer lie the customary Beckettian problems’. See R. Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork, page 36. (2) T. Whittaker, ‘(Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) is an attempt to go forward from Beckett, back through both Pirandello and Shakespeare’. See T. Whittaker, ‘Mirrors of Our Playing: Paradigms and Presences’ in Modern Drama, page 185. (3) T. Hodgson, ‘(Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) is famously a conflation and extension of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot’. See T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, page 20.

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weighty, philosophical issues against a background of comedy, much of which, as in Chekhov, is the comedy of despair.559 Both sets of characters play games, some highly verbal, and try to cheer each other up – for instance at the point when they need to go and interview Hamlet: Guil: He’s always talking about us – there aren’t two people living he dotes on more than us. Ros: We cheer him up – find out what’s the matter – Guil: Exactly, it’s a matter of asking the right questions and giving away as little as we can. It’s a game. Ros: And then we can go? Guil: And receive such thanks as fits a king.560

(4) R. Brustein, ‘Like Beckett’s two tramps in Waiting for Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are baffled characters imprisoned in a timeless void where they alternate between brief vaudeville routines and ruminations of the vacancy of life in general and theirs in particular’. Brustein describes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as, ‘a form of Beckett without tears’. See R. Brustein, The Third Theatre, pages 150–153. Beckettian parallels are identified in other Stoppard plays by commentators – eg: with reference to John Brown in A Separate Peace – ‘Beckett’s early fiction is full of heroes whose only ambition is to withdraw into isolation and inactivity’. – R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 60. Jim Hunter notes that, ‘Initially the play follows the structure of Waiting for Godot’. – J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard, Faber Critical Guides, page 39. Hunter also argues (op cit, page 38) that, ‘Rosencrantz follows Beckett and many 1950s radio-comedy writers in openly highlighting its need to fill up time’. Stoppard early on acknowledged his debt to Waiting for Godot: ‘Of course’, he said, ‘it would be absurd to deny my enormous debt to (Waiting for Godot), and love for it’. – Stoppard, ‘Something to Declare’ in J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 112. Roger Sales takes a contrary position; ‘It is dangerous to suggest that Stoppard was one of Beckett’s disciples when he wrote Rosencrantz’. – R. Sales, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, pages 149–150 (Quoted in T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, page 23). Neil Sammells postulates an argument that, ‘(Stoppard’s) Scene reviews of Beckett are especially revealing…helping us to understand the exact nature of Beckett’s influence on him in general and…on R&GAD in particular’. – see N. Sammells, ‘The early stage plays’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, pages 107–108. See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, Note 4, page 264 for a list of sources analysing the similarities and differences between Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. 559 See R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, pages 33–36. Hayman, while he highlights the similarities between Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, teases out of Stoppard the real explanation of Stoppard’s debt in an interview on 12 June 1974. Hayman says, ‘Stoppard is considerably less Angst-ridden than Beckett’ (page 33). 560 RosGuil, pages 31–32.

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Vladimir and Estragon clutch at the same straws: Estragon: What am I to say? Vladimir: Say, ‘I am happy’. Estragon: I am happy. Vladimir: So am I. Estragon: So am I Vladimir: We are happy. Estragon: We are happy.561 The theatrical action in both Beckett’s and Stoppard’s plays comes partly out of inaction. It is most obvious in Waiting for Godot: Estragon: Charming spot. Inspiring prospects. Let’s go. Vladimir: We can’t. Estragon: Why not? Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot. Estragon: Ah! You’re sure it was here? Vladimir What? Estragon: That we were to wait. Vladimir: He said by the tree.562 But, it also applies to Stoppard’s play: Ros: Shouldn’t we be doing something – constructive? Guil: What did you have in mind?…A short, blunt human pyramid563…? Ros: We could go. Guil: Where? Ros: After him. Guil: Why? They’ve got us placed now – if we start moving around, we’ll all be chasing each other all night.564 In both plays, too, there is a dramatic sense of determinism which Guildenstern and Pozzo reflect in remarkably similar fashion – ‘They give birth astride

561 562 563 564

Waiting for Godot, page 50. Waiting for Godot, page 5. Stoppard takes up Guildenstern’s suggestion in Jumpers. RosGuil, pages 32–33.

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a grave’565 claims Pozzo while Guildenstern proclaims, ‘The only beginning is birth and the only end is death’.566 But, the similarities between Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and ­Guildenstern Are Dead – patent though they are – explain neither Stoppard’s true debt nor the location of his recognition of it.567 Stoppard’s debt to Beckett is first of all for his duality and it comes as much from Beckett’s books as his plays, as Stoppard explains: It’s only too obvious that there’s a sort of Godotesque element in ­ osencrantz. I’m an enormous admirer of Beckett, but if I have to look R at my own stuff objectively I’d say that the Beckett novels show as much as the plays, because there’s a Beckett joke which is the funniest joke in the world to me. It appears in various forms but it consists of a ­confident statement followed by an immediate refutation by the same voice. It’s a constant process of elaborate structure and sudden – and t­otal – dismantlement.568 Perhaps Stoppard is referring to a passage such as the following from Beckett’s The Unnamable: Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning 565 Waiting for Godot, page 78. Anthony Jenkins explores the relevance of Waiting for Godot to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, arguing that, ‘Ros and Guil share the predicament of the two tramps in Waiting for Godot’, and that, ‘Stoppard uses Godot as part of the game he plays with the audience, juxtaposing its rules with those of Hamlet’, while also highlighting points of difference. See A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, pages 40–41. See also Joseph Duncan’s analysis of the similarities and differences between Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in J. Duncan, ‘Godot Comes’, Ariel, xii, 4 (1981) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, pages 76–85. Duncan argues, ‘If Stoppard consciously depended on Beckett and expected his audience to be aware of the dependence, he was also presenting thought, action, and a theatrical experience distinctively different from that in Waiting for Godot’. (op cit, page 77). 566 RosGuil, page 31. 567 John Fleming also argues that, ‘Scholars have sometimes misconstrued the relationship between Beckett and Stoppard by arguing for an affinity in their views of life, but Beckett’s absurdist leanings contrast with Stoppard’s logical pursuit of answers and his belief in moral absolutes’. – see J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 253. 568 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, 12 June 1974 in R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 7.

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again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.569 In Stoppard’s works it is best illustrated by Lenin’s analysis of Tolstoy (pages 59–60) and Carr’s description of Joyce in Travesties: A prudish, prudent man, Joyce, in no way profligate or vulgar, and yet convivial, without being spend-thrift, and yet still without primness towards hard currency in all its transmutable and transferable forms and denominations, of which, however, he demanded only a sufficiency from the world at large, exhibiting a monkish unconcern for worldly and bodily comforts, without at the same time shutting himself off from the richness of human society, whose temptations, on the other hand, he met with an ascetic disregard tempered only by sudden and catastrophic aberrations.570 It produces the ‘complex personality’571 that so fascinates Stoppard – ­Housman, Herzen and the lesser dual characters of Chater in Arcadia and the Coachman in On the Razzle, for instance. Stoppard continues by saying (and, thereby, ­confirming that the analysis of the similarities between Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is too simplistic), ‘That sort of Beckettian influence is much more important to me than a mere verbal echo of a line or a parallelism at the end of Jumpers’.572 It ultimately leads to a second debt which is that of the dramatic argument. Stoppard explains: 569 570 571 572

S. Beckett, The Unnamable. Travesties, page 6. Travesties, page 6. Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, 12 June 1974 in R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 7.

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Beckett qualifies as he goes along. He picks up a proposition and then dismantles and qualifies each part of its structure as he goes along, until he nullifies what he started out with. Beckett gives me more pleasure than I can express because he always ends up with a man surrounded by the wreckage of a proposition he had made in confidence only ten minutes before.573 ‘What I’m always trying to say’, says Stoppard, ‘is “Firstly A, secondly minus A”‘,574 and, in doing so it is almost as if Stoppard is making external what is an internal activity to him.575 He describes the behaviour of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as if they are acting, ‘in the sense that they’re carrying out a dialogue which I carry out with myself. One of them is fairly intellectual, fairly incisive; the other one is thicker, nicer in a curious way, more sympathetic. 573 Stoppard, Something to Declare in J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 112. 574 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, 12 June 1974 in R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 10. See also J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 17 for a consideration of Stoppard’s contention that his plays are ‘a sort of infinite leapfrog’. Felicity Kendall argues that the sense of dramatic argument within a character also characterises Chekhov’s work – ‘Chekhov…where there are many different voices: he goes into different characters and he’s saying, “On the one hand there’s this, and on the other hand there’s that” – it’s an argument, he’s arguing with himself’. – J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 250. The same methodology of thesis:antithesis is at play in Stankevich’s reference to ‘the dialectical logic of history’. – Voyage, page 97. 575 Richard Corballis has a different interpretation. He believes that the opposite of A is a counter proposition, B, and that Stoppard’s sympathies lie with the refutation (B). ‘The plays are binary in form.…from the start the plays provide evidence of Stoppard’s moral involvement in that there is almost always a last word; the refutation generally triumphs over or at least generates more sympathy than the argument, which means…that the counterpart to ‘A’ has a positive value of its own and should therefore be labelled “B” rather than “minus A”. Specifically…in all Stoppard’s work an abstract, artificial view of the world (“A”) is pitted against the flux of reality (“B”), and the audience is invited to eschew the “clockwork” of the former in favour of the “mystery” of the latter’. – R. Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork, page 15. Paul Delaney comments on Corballis’ overall argument: ‘Corballis uses George’s rueful remark as a springboard to an interpretation of the entire Stoppard canon. Unfortunately the way Corballis skews the terms ­“mystery” and “clockwork” makes Stoppard appear to reject some of the very values he is most concerned to affirm’. – See P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 48. Delaney’s own interpretation of George’s phrase is (op cit, page 48), ‘Clockwork for Stoppard is repeatedly associated with the mechanistic, the materialistic, the perception of the cosmos as a machine, the perception of the human as mere organism. And “mystery” for Stoppard suggests a world beyond the material, a sense of the moral and metaphysical depth of a universe presided over by a transcendent deity’.

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There’s a leader and the led’.576 This process is typical of many of Stoppard’s plays for, as Ronald Hayman observes of Artist Descending a Staircase, ‘(it) could have been written only by a man who enjoys arguing with himself and crystallizing the contradictions into characters’.577 The argument may be quite protracted, such as when George Moore is laying out a debate with himself in preparing his speech, Is God?: Professor McFee bends over backwards to demonstrate that moral judgements belong to the same class as aesthetic judgements…Professor McFee succeeds only in showing us that in different situations different actions will be deemed, rightly or wrongly, to be conducive to that good which is independent of time and place and which is knowable but not nameable.578 Lenin does much the same, only much more concisely, in Travesties. Stoppard points out that, ‘When you read the words on the page there is a sense in which Lenin keeps convicting himself out of his own mouth’,579 as in the following example: On the one hand we have the great artist; on the other hand we have the landlord obsessed with Christ. On the one hand the strong and sincere protestor against social injustice, and on the other hand the jaded hysterical sniveller known as the Russian intellectual beating his breast in public and wailing, I am a bad, wicked man, but I am practising moral self-perfection.580 It is more often the case that the argument is between two protagonists with separate points of view – ‘My plays are actually constructed out of people deflating each other’,581 Stoppard says. For example: Carr: Wars are fought to make the world safe for artists. … Tzara: Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations; for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal; for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. … 576 Stoppard, in an interview with G. Gordon, ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom ­Stoppard in Conversation, page 19. 577 R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 110. 578 Jumpers, pages 52 and 55. 579 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, First Interview in Tom Stoppard, page 10. 580 Travesties, pages 59–60. 581 Stoppard, in an interview with ACH. Smith, in Flourish, Issue One 1974.

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Carr: … I went to war because it was my duty, because my country needed me, and that’s patriotism.582 Just as significant as the Beckettian structure is the effect for Stoppard. He sees it as comical, as he confirms in an interview with Mel Gussow: Gussow: When Beckett said he would use a statement followed by refutation, to you that is the essential Beckett joke: an immediate contradiction. Stoppard: Yes.583 Beckett’s methodology has an intellectual appeal for Stoppard. ‘Paradox and tautology. They don’t have to mean anything, lead anywhere, be part of anything else. I just like them. I’ve got an unhealthy love affair for them’,584 he explained to Stephen Schiff. Arising out of the paradoxical structure Beckett unknowingly bequeaths to Stoppard a particular form of joke, which exhibits part of the operation of ­Occam’s razor. ‘You know the kind of joke I enjoy the most is tautology’, he told Jon Bradshaw. ‘When I was at school we used to listen to the Goon show and there was this joke…“And then the monsoons came, and they couldn’t have come at a worse time, bang in the middle of the rainy season.” Now, that to me is a perfect joke. My kind of joke is a snake in a funny hat eating its own tail’.585 Elsewhere Stoppard ascribes the credit for the construction entirely to Beckett. ‘There’s a certain kind of joke, which consists of constructing something with infinite care and then just, sort of, putting your hand through the bottom layer so the whole thing collapses; this Samuel Beckett construction of that nature where you build up piece by piece a proposition and the last piece negates it’.586 Stoppard deploys it regularly. The Beckettian joke may be very compressed – viz, this extract from Dirty Linen: Withenshaw: You do speedwriting I suppose? Maddie: Yes, if I’m given enough time.587 582 Travesties, page 22. 583 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 68. 584 Stoppard, in an interview with S. Schiff, ‘Full Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 223. 585 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Bradshaw, ‘Tom Stoppard, Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 96. 586 Stoppard, quoted in T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, page 178. 587 Dirty Linen, page 93.

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It may require a modicum of construction, as when Bernard praises Americans in New-Found-Land – ‘… They don’t stand on ceremony. They take people as they are…They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets…etc’.588 – before the bump back down to earth of, ‘Apart from all that I’ve got nothing against them’.589 But, it may entail quite a significant edifice to be built before the comedy shock occurs. A fine example of the largest scale includes the whole of the first act of The Real Thing, in which one is led to believe that Max has uncovered Charlotte’s infidelity, only to realise at the start of the second that they were rehearsing a scene in a play. Stoppard explained to Mel Gussow how this form of joke translates into an issue of perspective which is like the Beckettian construction and is effected by applying Occam’s razor which provides a single resolution to a multiplicity of points of view: It’s a favourite thing of mine: the idea of an absolutely bizarre image which has a total rationale to it being seen by different people. And everybody is absolutely certain about what they see. There are tiny bits of that in Jumpers:590 a man carrying a tortoise in one hand and a bow and arrow in the other, his face covered in shaving foam. A trick I enjoy very much is when, bit by bit, you build up something ludicrous – and then someone walks in.591 Beckett also inspired Stoppard to get the maximum impact. Stoppard wrote in 1968 that, ‘Waiting for Godot…really redefined the minima of theatrical experience.592 Up to then you had to have X; suddenly you had X minus one’.593 Although, tellingly, similar in expression, he was not referring to A, minus A. In 1977 Stoppard went a little further. ‘The early plays of Beckett are 588 589 590 591

New-Found-Land, page 124. New-Found-Land, page 124. The same phenomenon occurs in After Magritte. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“Writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, pages 7–8. William Demastes makes a remark, unconnected to any discussion about Beckettian jokes, which demonstrates a different perspective on the construction: ‘Stoppard loves to set up expectations based on conventional practices and then demonstrate how these expectations hinder and even thwart us on our paths to understanding’. – W. Demastes, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard, page 37. 592 Stoppard also accords Pinter a similar credit. In ‘Pragmatic Theater’, page 7, Stoppard says, “Waiting for Godot’ redefined the minimum, for all time, or at least up to the present time. ‘The Birthday Party’, differently, did the same thing.” 593 Something to Declare in J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 111.

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s­ ignificant for me in that they didn’t rely on elaborate theatrical paraphernalia. They redefined minimums, they show us how much can be done with little’.594 This is a startling observation because there is very little about S­ toppard’s works that could be described as ‘minimalist’.595 In fact, precisely the opposite.596 What Stoppard took from Beckett is really efficiency. He realised that, ‘one gets a little tired with fairly small effects being gigantically arrived at’, and, instead, concentrated on, ‘getting the most effect with the least’.597 Such an approach goes a long way to explaining why Stoppard’s plays are so rich and multi layered in terms of ideas, language and both visual and aural impact. What Stoppard calls ‘the parallelism at the end of Jumpers’,598 is, therefore, an ironic understatement. Stoppard’s acknowledgement to Beckett is in the Coda of Jumpers exactly because it comes at the end of Archie’s speech which is about as Beckettian in its contradictions as anything Stoppard has ever written. Stoppard is bowing to the obvious. But, with Stoppard little is obvious and he knows that, ‘the debt is rather larger than that’.599 Instead, the debt is for ‘A, minus A’ and, in a warning not to confuse chance with influence, S­ toppard gives full acknowledgement to Beckett: 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, one of whom – praise be God – is Samuel Beckett.600 594 Stoppard, in an interview with ce. Maves, ‘A Playwright on the Side of Rationality’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 101. It recalls Lord Malquist’s remark, ‘Nothing is the history of the world viewed from a suitable distance’. – Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, page 8. Stoppard gave a little more insight to Giles Gordon when he said, ‘I find Beckett deliciously funny in the way that he qualifies everything as he goes along, reduces, refines and dismantles’. – Stoppard, in a conversation with G. Gordon, ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 21. 595 John Fleming makes a similar point: ‘Beckett’s minimalism in dialogue, staging, and plotting lies in sharp contrast to Stoppard’s extravagant use of these elements’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 253. 596 cf M. Billington, ‘Tom Stoppard: playwright of ideas delivers a new Problem’, The Guardian, 17 January 2015: “Beckett, (Stoppard) once said, redefined the minima of theatrical validity”. Stoppard has done the opposite by exploring theatre’s maximum potential’. 597 Stoppard, in an interview with JR. Taylor, ‘Our Changing Theatre, No. 3: Changes in Writing’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 27. Stoppard ascribes some of the inspiration to Pinter in the same interview. 598 R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 7. 698 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, 12 June 1974 in R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 7. 600 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, 12 June 1974 in R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 7.

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Chekhov I keep reading Chekhov and wondering how he does it.601 stoppard

∵ The Lincoln Center Theatre’s website described Voyage, the first of Stoppard’s trilogy about the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century, as ‘Stoppard’s nod to Chekhov’.602 The visual impact of the house at Premukhino in the Royal National Theatre premiere in London in 2002 was highly suggestive of a Chekhovian atmosphere and feel. The structure of society in which the wealthy intelligentsia are sustained by armies of serfs and pontificate over the politics of Tsarist Russia only serves to reinforce the Chekhovian imagery. ­According to Nigel Reynolds one of Stoppard’s motivations to write the trilogy was ‘a long-held wish to write in the manner of Chekhov’.603 The intended impact is clear from the stage directions for the opening scene of Voyage which are instantly evocative of those for Ivanov: Voyage Premukhino, the Bakunin estate…Interior, verandah, garden. There are places to sit in the garden, and a hammock.604 Ivanov Outdoors at Ivanov’s estate: the house-front with an open window, a terrace, some garden furniture, a suggestion of a garden beyond and an avenue of trees.605 Indeed, it is in Voyage where the Chekhovian homage is strongest. Anna Muza identifies, in her article ‘The Sound of Distant Thunder: The Chekhovian Subtext in The Coast of Utopia’, ‘numerous specific allusions to Chekhov’s dramatic 601 Stoppard, in an interview with AM. Welsh, ‘Stoppard in Love’, Copley News Service. 14 February 2000. 602 Lincoln Center Theater website. 603 N. Reynolds, Daily Telegraph, 3 August 2002. 604 Voyage, page 3. 605 Ivanov, page 3.

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canon’606 in Stoppard’s trilogy about the Russian intelligentsia. She cites such examples as the foreign governess, the four sisters and brother of the Bakunin family, the distant thunder, the generic Russian elements – family estates, the garden and doleful piano music – and the cry of ‘To Moscow!’.607 In an article entitled ‘The Ominousness of Chekhovian Idyll: The Role of Intertextuality in Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia’ Nina Wieda describes how Voyage, in contrast to the other two plays of the trilogy, is ‘saturated with Chekhovianness’.608What Stoppard borrows from Chekhov, she argues, is his chronotope, which is defined as Chekhov’s version of reality in terms of geographical and temporal peculiarities, cultural background and social expectations which are reflected in the speech and behaviour that Stoppard gives his characters in Voyage. Chekhovian props – such as the tea table (a fascination with tea appears in Ivanov609), the lake (note the significance of a lake in The Seagull) and the fishing rods – are ‘accumulated throughout the play’610 while the time structure – involving prolonged walks and late breakfasts – is ‘recognised as distinctly Chekhovian’.611 The geographical and temporal isolation of the ­Premukhino estate is also described as ‘markedly Chekhovian’.612 Wieda gives examples in Voyage of Chekhovian style language and characters – such as the cavalry officers and Semyon, the senior household servant – and goes on to suggest that Stoppard’s ‘excessive use of Chekhovian techniques’613 is a parody of the way Chekhov plays tend to be staged in the western world. The primary example is the penknife which Liubov holds as a ‘keepsake’614 for her love for Stankevich. In fact, the penknife is Belinsky’s and he retrieves it after it has been thrown into ­Premukhino’s lake when he catches a carp which has swallowed it. ­Belinsky eventually gives it to his mistress, Katya, telling her, ‘It’s all I’ve got left’.615 606 A. Muza, ‘The Sound of Distant Thunder: The Chekhovian Subtext in The Coast of Utopia’. Quoted in H. Sudkamp, Tom Stoppard’s Biographical Drama, page 244. 607 Michael Bakunin, Voyage, page 42: cf Irina: ‘To Moscow!’. – The Three Sisters, Act ii. 608 N. Wieda, ‘The Ominousness of Chekhovian Idyll: The Role of Intertextuality in S­ toppard’s The Coast of Utopia’. 609 Ivanov, pages 22, 30, 31, 38 and 50 (pastries). 610 N. Wieda, ‘The Ominousness of Chekhovian Idyll: The Role of Intertextuality in S­ toppard’s The Coast of Utopia’. 611 N. Wieda, ‘The Ominousness of Chekhovian Idyll: The Role of Intertextuality in S­ toppard’s The Coast of Utopia’. 612 N. Wieda, ‘The Ominousness of Chekhovian Idyll: The Role of Intertextuality in S­ toppard’s The Coast of Utopia’. 613 N. Wieda, ‘The Ominousness of Chekhovian Idyll: The Role of Intertextuality in S­ toppard’s The Coast of Utopia’. 614 Voyage, page 17. 615 Voyage, page 95.

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Its obvious symbolism and contrived odyssey through the play is an example of such ‘parodic excessiveness’.616 The same argument might be made for the gathering of mushrooms which goes on in Shipwreck, firstly with Herzen, Granovsky, Natalie and Sasha at Sokolovo (in both scenes at the start and the end of the play) and, then, with Natalie and George in the Dejeuner sur l’herbe scene in Paris. In Salvage there is a similar, but less intense, fascination with missing gloves. Wieda identifies some scenes in Voyage which are p ­ arallels of scenes in Chekhov’s plays, in much the same way as scenes from The Importance of Being Earnest are translated into Travesties – notably the short flashback when Tatiana recalls her dead sister Liubov which reflects the scene in Act 1 of The Cherry Orchard in which Ranevskaya recalls her dead mother. Wieda notes, however, the novelty that Stoppard introduces. He takes real historical figures – the Bakunins, for example – and turns them into Chekhovian chronotopes. One of the effects of this innovation is in the true Stoppardian tradition of humour as it exploits the juxtaposed difference between the unexpected union of the real, historical character with its Chekhovian type. The transposition of actual, historical characters into Chekhovian types also brings into the sharp relief of the real world the social and political messages that such Chekhovian characters were conveying.617 Stoppard has written adaptations of three Chekhov plays: The Cherry O ­ rchard, The Seagull and Ivanov. Apart from the natural appreciation of one playwright for another there appear to be additional reasons for Stoppard’s attractions.618 He clearly sees the humour in Chekhov which the Russian author intended. In Stoppard’s version of The Cherry Orchard humour is prominent. Whether it be Gaev’s ‘speech to a cupboard’619 (which he later admits is, ­‘ridiculous’,),620 Charlotta’s unsuccessful attempts to sing a baby to sleep or Yasha siphoning off Lopakhin’s rather tactless champagne, Stoppard finds the amusement in Chekhov. Much is humour of situation but Varya’s f­arcical

616 N. Wieda, ‘The Ominousness of Chekhovian Idyll: The Role of Intertextuality in S­ toppard’s The Coast of Utopia’. 617 Ira Nadel also notes the influence of Gorky’s Summerfolk on The Coast of Utopia trilogy. See – I. Nadel, ‘Chekhov’s Stoppard’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, pages 22–24. 618 cf I. Nadel: ‘With Beckett, Chekhov became the most influential dramatist for Stoppard, the appeal being one of character as much as language and structure’. I. Nadel, ‘Chekhov’s Stoppard’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 18. 619 The Cherry Orchard, page 24. 620 The Cherry Orchard, page 24.

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attempt to catch Yepikhodov with a stick that only results in her clipping ­Lopakhin combines it with the humour of language, too: Varya swishes the stick, hitting Lopakhin as he enters. Lopakhin: Deeply obliged! Varya: (ironically) I do beg your pardon! Lopakhin: Think nothing of it, I beg you – humbly grateful for the warm welcome. Varya: Oh, please don’t mention it. Varya moves away, then looks round. (Softly) I didn’t hurt you, did I? Lopakhin: Not at all, nothing to worry about. The bump will be enormous but don’t concern yourself.621 For Stoppard, Chekhov’s interest in comedy reflects his own ability to address the ideas behind the world and the human condition in vehicles which use extensive amounts of comedy.622 In his programme note to the London production of Ivanov in 2008 Stoppard writes: When Karsh623 asked Chekhov for a play, he was expecting a comedy. Did he get one? The question hovers over the five full-length plays. P ­ uzzlingly, Chekhov himself designated The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard as comedies. He frequently chided actors for behaving in an overwrought ‘tragic’ way. But is there really a puzzle? The aim was to show life plain, and the question ‘Are these plays comedies?’ can be answered with another: ‘Is life?’.624 Paul Taylor in his review in The Telegraph notes that, ‘Chekhov, though writing in a very different mode, was way ahead of Beckett in realizing that there is nothing funnier than unhappiness’.625 It is almost as if Chekhov seeks to prove Socrates’ dictum that, ‘the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, 621 The Cherry Orchard, page 59. 622 cf I. Nadel: ‘Appealing most strongly to Stoppard was Chekhov’s designation of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard as “comedies.” Indeed, it is the comic Chekhov that captivated Stoppard the most’. – I. Nadel, ‘Chekhov’s Stoppard’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 20. 623 The owner of a theatre. 624 Stoppard, ‘Chekhov – An Impartial Witness’. 625 P. Taylor, The Independent, 18 September 2008.

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and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also’.626 If the critics are to be believed Stoppard’s version of Ivanov hits the spot exactly. Taylor went on to describe the play as a ‘buoyantly funny (and skillfully filleted) translation’627 while Charles Spencer refers to ‘Tom Stoppard’s new translation which is blessed with a combination of sharp wit and sympathetic humanity’.628 Stoppard invests his versions of Chekhov with Shakespearian allusions which reflect Chekhov’s own interest in Shakespeare629 and the perceived relevance of the latter to the former which is best expressed in Arthur Miller’s verdict that, ‘(Chekhov) is closer to Shakespeare than any dramatist I know’.630 Stoppard sees the link between the two playwrights as well: It’s as though there’s a micro-narrative and a macro-narrative in some way. Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-­ narrative when you’re investigating a text … I daresay that many of these discoveries would have been news to Chekhov himself. Which I think is fair enough: modern theatre does exactly the same thing with Shakespeare.631 The Cherry Orchard, like the other two adaptations contains a character, Yepikhodov, who threatens to shoot himself. In a pun on Hamlet he asserts that, ‘I’ve read all sorts of amazing books, and yet I can’t work out the tendency of my inclination, to be or to shoot myself, that is the question’.632 The introspective Ivanov also reverts to Hamlet, diagnosing himself with, ‘“I have of late, ­wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth”’.633 The Seagull, meanwhile, contains several 626 Socrates – Plato’s Symposium. Stoppard told Richard Mayne that, ‘I think that comedy is something which I understand much more than tragedy and, furthermore, I can recognise a comic moment which works as opposed to one which doesn’t. Were I to write a genuine tragedy, I’m not sure that I’d ever really know for certain whether the thing was working or not’. – Stoppard, in an interview with R. Mayne, ‘Arts Commentary’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, pages 33–34. 627 P. Taylor, The Independent, 18 September 2008. 628 C. Spencer, The Telegraph, 19 September 2008. 629 See M. Sokolyansky, Shakespearian Themes and Motifs in Anton Chekhov’s Work. 630 A. Miller, A – ‘The Shadows of the Gods: A Critical View of the American Theatre’ in Harper’s Magazine, August 1958, page 38 (quoted in AN. Nikoliukin, ‘Chekhov And America’ in N. Saul and R. McKinzie, Russian-American Dialogue on Cultural Relations, 1776–1914, Chapter 10). 631 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. 632 The Cherry Orchard, page 29. 633 Ivanov, page 76.

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­references ranging from Konstantin’s ‘send us asleep, perchance to dream’634 to Arkadina’s allusion to King Lear in her description of Sorin as a ‘foolish, fond old man’.635 Ivanov sees his own life as the ‘the provincial performance of a hand-me-down Hamlet’.636 Kenneth Branagh, who played Ivanov in the 2008 production in London, remarks, ‘I was very taken with the conscious allusion to Hamlet’. He continues, ‘In Hamlet and Ivanov there is a compelling personal journey for all the characters involving everything it takes to be a human being’.637 Just occasionally Stoppard pulls to the fore a contrast between Shakespeare and Chekhov. Ivanov’s ‘What a simple machine is man. But there’s too many cogs and springs and wheels within wheels for such easy judgements’,638 seems to have been written with the comparison in mind of Hamlet’s ‘What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!’.639 Chekhov’s plays reflect some of the themes which recur in Stoppard’s own works.640 There is a sense, as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, of characters in search of their identity trying to understand the meaning of their existence. The impecunious Ivanov complains that he doesn’t ‘understand what’s going on’,641 and admits that, ‘I don’t recognise myself any more’.642 Charlotta, admittedly a minor character in The Cherry Orchard, asks of herself, ‘Who I am and where I’m from, I really don’t know…I don’t know anything’,643 while Liubov, more significantly, admits that, ‘I can’t make sense of my life without the cherry orchard’.644 Konstantin in The Seagull would not be out of place with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when he says, ‘I’m still adrift in a chaos of dreams and images, with no faith in myself, and no idea where I’m going, or what I’m for’.645 Chekhov’s plays also contain characters who have 634 635 636 637 638 639 640

641 642 643 644 645

The Seagull, page 411. The Seagull, page 418. Ivanov, page 75. K. Branagh, interview with M. Grandage, in the programme notes of the London production of Ivanov, 2008. Ivanov, page 58. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 296 to 297. H. Sudkamp highlights what he sees as the Chekhovian contrast between illusion and reality. In reference to The Coast of Utopia he notes, ‘The question of narrative and ideological structure is reflected upon thematically by the antithesis of idealism and realism and structurally by the Chekhovian antithesis of illusion and truth’. – H. Sudkamp, Tom Stoppard’s Biographical Drama, page 333. Ivanov, page 42. Ivanov, page 56. The Cherry Orchard, page 28. The Cherry Orchard, page 51. The Seagull, page 470.

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changed, thereby exhibiting that sense of duality which Stoppard so often sees in his own characters.646 This phenomenon is obvious in Lopakhin, the selfmade man from peasant stock: ‘If my father and grandfather could rise from their graves and see what happened today! – how their Yermolai, their beaten, half-literate Yermolai, who ran barefoot in winter, how that same Yermolai has become the owner of the most beautiful estate on God’s earth!’.647 Ivanov, by contrast, has changed into a different person, too, but for the worse: Hardly a year ago I was a fit man, cheerful, always on the go…I was good with my hands, I could talk to bring tears to the eyes…I knew inspiration, knew the charm and poetry of quiet nights when I’d work at my desk till dawn…I had faith…and now, oh God, I’m so tired, I believe in nothing, idling away the nights. My brain, my hands, my feet won’t do what I tell them.648 Rather than a transformation Nina, in The Seagull, carries an ambiguity, born out of her attempt to become an actress, which reflects both sides of a personality that Stoppard so often finds. ‘I’m the seagull’, she says, ‘– but I’m not really. I’m an actress’.649 The duality of character continues in Ivanov. Michael Billington notes in his review of the London production in 2008: Individuals appear in all their Chekhovian contradiction. Andrea Riseborough as Sasha is both sexually impetuous and a collector of doomed souls. Malcolm Sinclair shows Ivanov’s uncle to be a posturing cynic and a lonely widower. And Tom Huddleston as the accusatory doctor emerges as a well-intentioned prig.650 646 cf I. Nadel: ‘The sense of simultaneity – of domestic action hiding or obscuring another less obvious story often of displaced values – provides both a technique and a theme for Stoppard’s work. The dual story and time shifts of Arcadia, for example, more hidden in the alternate story of Indian Ink, expose the duality Stoppard perceives at the centre of Chekhov offering structural possibilities for his own’. I. Nadel, ‘Chekhov’s Stoppard’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 19. Terry Hodgson also alludes to the Chekhovian nature of In the Native State, particularly the sense of a story behind the characters on stage, and the Chekhovian sense of time and sudden sadness in Indian Ink. See T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, pages 155 and 161. 647 The Cherry Orchard, page 61. 648 Ivanov, pages 55–56. 649 The Seagull, page 469. 650 M. Billington, review of Ivanov in The Guardian, 18 September 2008.

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Chekhov gives Stoppard the opportunity to do with character what his own plays do with ideas.651 Stoppard almost admitted as much to John Tusa in 2002: ‘I came to be sitting in the theatre watching The Cherry Orchard, feeling the sense of instant diminution; I mean as one sort of diminishes in one’s chair one thinks: ‘Yes, I see, it’s really about human beings, isn’t it? It’s not really about language at all’.652 Chekhov saw himself as ‘an impartial witness’ who ‘must not be the judge of his characters or what they say’.653 He went on to say, ‘I still lack a political, religious and philosophical view – it keeps changing every month, so I’ll have to limit myself to the description of how my characters love, marry, give birth, die and how they speak’.654 Stoppard is quite happy to declare his hand in matters political, religious and philosophical. In reference to Hilary’s arguments about motivation in The Hard Problem, for example, he says, ‘this is certainly me’.655 But, he does not declare his hand in his plays. Rather, he usually presents both sides of an argument or explanation – often in the form of a debate – and allows the audience to draw its own conclusion. It might be argued that occasionally he loads the argument – as in the Coda to Jumpers which presents a reductio ad absurdum of the relativist view of the world – but Chekhov just as occasionally loads his characters, too, beyond how they behave with internal insights – witness Ivanov’s lament to Lvov: ‘I don’t understand what’s going on inside you; you don’t understand me, and neither of us understands himself’.656 A, perhaps, initially unintended rationale for the Chekhov adaptations is the role they fulfil in the historical continuum of socio-political ideas between The Coast of Utopia and Rock ‘N’ Roll.657 Stoppard acknowledges the point: ­‘Historically, the story told in Coast of Utopia came to an end about 1860, so there’s a generation in between. But the traditions cross that gap.…Chekhov himself, as all Russian writers would have been, was intensely aware of the 651 Conversely, Katherine Kelly describes Ruth as, ‘a formidably beautiful and witty Chekhovian heroine’. – K. Kelly, Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play, page 138. Kelly also argues (op cit, pages 138–142) for a Chekhovian influence on Night And Day. 652 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Tusa, bbc Radio 2002 in J. Hunter, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 168. 653 A. Chekhov, Letter to AS Suvorin, 30 May 1888. 654 A. Chekhov, Letter to D Grigorovich, 12 January 1888. 655 Stoppard, in an interview with N. Hytner, 6 February 2015. 656 Ivanov, page 58. 657 cf T. Teachout: ‘Tom Stoppard, the second-greatest playwright of our time, is not like Chekhov but loves his plays and – even more to the point – has a consuming interest in Russian history. This doubtless explains why his new English-language version of “The Cherry Orchard” is a structurally faithful but verbally free adaptation in which Mr. Stoppard has turned Chekhov’s best-loved play into a pendant to “The Coast of Utopia”’. – Wall Street Journal, 16 January 2009.

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radical history of the previous hundred years. It would be impossible to discount that history when writing a social play’.658 Hence, he, ‘was very well prepared for translating in a certain historical and social context’.659 The social history of Russia is alive in his adaptations of Chekhov. His version of Ivanov was praised by Nicholas de Jong because, ‘a strong impression is conveyed of provincial Russia’.660 Whilst the three Chekhov plays are works of fiction they ‘show…the very age and body of the time his form and pressure;’661 none more so than The ­Cherry Orchard. ‘The whole of Russia is our orchard’,662 asserts Trofimov, thereby identifying Chekhov’s creation with pre-revolutionary and post-Herzen Russia. Both Stoppard and Chekhov realise that the intelligentsia are sustained by the peasantry. Trofimov contends that, ‘With few exceptions, the intelligentsia…seek nothing, do nothing, they don’t want to work and wouldn’t know how’,663 while Belinsky acknowledges that, ‘the life of a philosopher is an aristocratic affair made possible by the sweat of Premukhino’s five hundred souls who somehow haven’t managed to attain oneness with the Absolute’.664 Russia’s situation is identified by Belinsky in Shipwreck as, ‘We’re so big and backward’,665 and, according to Yasha in The Cherry Orchard it remains the case – ‘this country is so backward’.666 Trofimov, the idealist student, talks in terms that the intelligentsia would understand. His analysis of, ‘we haven’t come to terms with our history…it’s so clear that to live in the present we have to redeem our past, finish with it, and it has to hurt’,667 is not so far away from a combination of Belinsky’s assessment that, ‘Our problem is feudalism and serfdom’,668 and Herzen’s fear that, ‘And then a new war will begin between the barefoot and the shod. It will be bloody, swift and unjust’.669 Both Stoppard and Chekhov portray a society in which Alexander ii’s emancipation of the Russian serfs has failed. Herzen, in Salvage, admits that ‘We got carried away’,670 as Natalie explains that, ‘freedom bears an uncanny resemblance to 658 659 660 661 662 663 664 665 666 667 668 669 670

Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. N. de Jong, review of Ivanov in The Evening Standard, 18 September 2008. Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, lines 19–23. The Cherry Orchard, page 43. The Cherry Orchard, page 39. Voyage, page 101. Shipwreck, page 37. The Cherry Orchard, page 56. The Cherry Orchard, page 43. Shipwreck, pages 37 and 57. Shipwreck, page 104. Salvage, page 89.

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serfdom’.671 Firs, in The Cherry Orchard, simply refers to ‘The Freedom’672 as ‘the disaster’.673 It is a Russia in which the social structure that Herzen, Bakunin and the rest of the Russian intelligentsia of The Coast of Utopia sought to alter is undergoing considerable change. In Herzen’s Russia ‘A landowner’s estate is reckoned not in acres but in adult male serfs’674 and, as Trofimov points out to Anya, ‘your grandfather, and his father, and all your family going back, they owned living souls’.675 Firs, the eighty-seven years old manservant, identifies the change: ‘The peasants belonged to the masters and the masters belonged to the peasants, but now it’s all higgledy-piggledy, you don’t know where you are’.676 Bakunin’s desired ‘peasant revolution’677 has begun to occur, albeit not in the cataclysmic terms or with the fundamental consequences he envisaged. Instead, as Lopakhin puts it, he is the, ‘Son of a peasant, true enough, and here I am in a white waistcoat and fancy shoes like a pig in a parlour, only rich, with money to spend, but look twice and I’m still a peasant to a peasant’.678 Symbolically Lopakhin buys the orchard from Liubov. Just as the Chekhov adaptations act as a bridge backwards in history so they also look forward to the final outcome of the ideas that bred Marxist philosophy. Trofimov’s idealism of Mankind is advancing, developing its powers. Everything which is as yet out of reach is coming closer to our grasp and our understanding, but we have to work, work with all our might, to support those who are seeking the truth of things,679 is both the inheritor of the philosophy of Marx’s speech at the end of Salvage, None of us may live long enough, but when it comes the cataclysm will be glorious…Every stage leads to a higher stage…Then will come the final titanic struggle, the last turn of the great wheel of progress beneath which generations of toiling masses perished for the ultimate victory… 671 672 673 674 675 676 677 678 679

Salvage, page 89. The Cherry Orchard, page 41. The Cherry Orchard, page 41. Voyage, page 59. The Cherry Orchard, page 43. The Cherry Orchard, page 37. Shipwreck, page 103. The Cherry Orchard, page 4. The Cherry Orchard, page 39.

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Everything…will be understood as part of a higher reality, a superior morality,680 and the progenitor of Max’s Communism in Rock ‘N’ Roll: A workers’ state fits the case. What else but work lifts us out of the slime? Work does all the work…‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. What could be more simple, more rational, more beautiful? It was the right idea in the wrong conditions for fifty years and counting.681 Shakespeare Words, words, words.682 hamlet, Hamlet

...

Words! Words! Words!683

arthur, I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby

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Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.684

guildenstern, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

...

It was the sound of the words.685

stoppard, Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?

∵ 680 681 682 683 684 685

Salvage, page 117. Rock ‘N’ Roll, pages 36–37. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 193. I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby, page 4. RosGuil, page 32. Stoppard, ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’, International Shakespeare ­Association Occasional Paper no. 2 (University Press, Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1982), page 10.

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Shakespeare is the wind in Stoppard’s sails. No other playwright has influenced or inspired him quite as much as the Bard of Avon. There is barely a work of Stoppard’s which does not owe something to Shakespeare or quote from one of his works. Hamlet, in particular – partly because of the commonality of its themes and several of Stoppard’s – is a particularly resonant text. But, most significantly, it is Shakespeare’s craft which Stoppard so admires: the craft of the theatre. They both share a sense of the event that is a play. At the heart of the event is the acuity of dialogue which produces the juxtaposition and compression of speech and, for both of them, the most spectacular event occurs in Elsinore. The very first word uttered in one of Stoppard’s earliest plays, ‘M’ Is For Moon And Other Things, is ‘Macbeth’.686 Thus began, at almost the very start of his playwriting career – and, long before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Stoppard’s association with Shakespeare. It is an association which has never left him and little Shakespearian snippets are shot through his works. It is the fate of every playwright to be compared with Shakespeare in some way or other – particularly writers in the English language – and most fall short. One area where Stoppard’s coin is of equal worth, however, is that of linguistic adroitness. Referring to Stoppard’s language Antony Sher remarks, ‘As an actor the only modern playwright to present the same kind of challenges as ­Shakespeare is Stoppard’.687 To be sure, Stoppard does not match Shakespeare for imagery which in Stoppard’s case is more obviously applied to his ideas – the use of the ‘hard-edged shadows’688 of the bars of a cage at the zoo illustrating Feynman’s light experiment in Hapgood being a particularly fine ­example. Both use metaphor, but in entirely different ways. Shakespeare thinks in p ­ ictures and his is the metaphor of poetry – ‘a sea of troubles’,689 ‘the green-eyed monster’.690 For Stoppard, the metaphor is the vehicle for his ideas as he reveals; ‘The central image in Hapgood – the dual nature of light – ­excited me so much…it excited me for its potential as a metaphor. Hapgood is not “about” physics. It’s about dualities’.691 In the

686 Tom Stoppard: Plays 2, ‘M’ Is For Moon And Other Things, page 15. 687 Quoted in J. Nathan, ‘Tom Stoppard: The modern Shakespeare returns to the National for a long-awaited comeback’, The Independent, 15 January 2015. 688 Hapgood, page 7. 689 Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, line 59. 690 Othello, Act iii, scene iii, line 168. 691 Stoppard, ‘The Matter of Metaphor’, page 2.

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same way the design of garden at ­Sidley Park – classical or Romantic – is a metaphor for the science of Newton and Chaos Theory. By comparison with Shakespeare nowhere near as much of Stoppard’s output is as quoted. But, Stoppard’s ability to manipulate and juggle words and play with linguistic ideas – his verbal wizardry – is certainly a match for the Bard’s. Stoppard’s verbal play in Travesties – inspired as it is by Joyce – and, appropriately, the verbal jousting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are ample demonstration of Stoppard’s rare talent of lexical sleight. Both are wordsmiths of the highest order. Shakespeare applied his talent to character; Stoppard applies his to ideas. Many of the references are to Hamlet which, not just in the structure and nature of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, has remained with Stoppard throughout his works. When Herzen so quickly realises his mistake in celebrating the emancipation of the serfs by Alexander ii he borrows from Hamlet’s observation about the proximity of his mother’s marriage to Claudius to her first husband’s funeral with an inverted amendment: ‘The ­celebration baked meats did furnish forth the funeral tables’.692 Referring to his own grief for ­Eleanor, Max in Rock ‘N’ Roll adopts the same theme from Hamlet: ‘A little month or ere those shoes were old’.693 Henry’s parting words to his daughter Charlotte recall those of Polonius to Laertes: ‘There; my blessing with thee. And these few precepts in thy memory’.694 Applying the same shock to the repression of Nicholas I as Hamlet does to the horror of finding out that Claudius has murdered his father, Belinsky announces to Michael Bakunin the news that the Tsar is having a clampdown: ‘O my prophetic soul! The Telescope has been banned! Closed down! They’ve arrested Nadezhdin!…the police have searched my room’.695 Jumpers, meanwhile, contains a humorous example of the ­(sometimes fortuitous) forcing of ideas that Stoppard uses when George, referring to his tortoise called Pat, utters the words Hamlet uses when given the opportunity to kill Polonius: ‘Now might I do it, Pat’.696

692 Salvage, page 90. Hamlet, Act i, scene ii, lines 179–180: ‘The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’. The first part of the quotation is also repeated by ­MacMaster in Parade’s End, Episode 3. 693 Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 100. Hamlet, Act i, scene ii, line 147. 694 The Real Thing, page 43: Hamlet, Act i, scene iii, lines 57 to 58. 695 Voyage, page 42. Hamlet, Act i, scene v, line 40: ‘Oh my prophetic soul!’. 696 Jumpers, page 43: Hamlet, Act iii, scene iii, line 73.

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The relevance to Stoppard’s works of Hamlet is striking. Stoppard himself describes Hamlet as ‘the most famous play in any language, it is part of a sort of common mythology’.697 Shakespeare’s ‘tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind’698 contains references to and an exploration of a number of themes which have come to dominate Stoppard’s works. Stoppard shares Hamlet’s fascination with illusion and reality, exemplified by Hamlet’s rejoinder to his mother, ‘Seems, madam? Nay, it is; I know not seems’.699 In Hamlet Shakespeare also focusses on the questions of morality that have such special relevance to Stoppard’s plays. George Moore’s belief that ‘there is more in me than meets the microscope’,700 is directly analogous to Hamlet’s insistence to Horatio that, ‘there are more things in heaven and earth…than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.701 Similarly, the moral relativism of Hamlet’s ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’702 is the same as Dotty’s sentiment that, ‘good and bad, better and worse, these are not real properties of things, they are just expressions of our feelings about them’.703 Hamlet also raises the profile of other issues that recur in Stoppard’s canon. For example, the nature of determinism is exemplified in the Player King’s observation that, ‘Our will and fates do so contrary run…Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own’,704 and in Hamlet’s exultation, ‘My fate cries out’.705 Again, it is Hamlet’s desire for the truth that leads to his clumsy attempt to put on a play replicating his father’s murder to see if Claudius ‘but blench’,706 whilst the same impulse drives ­Polonius to suggest baiting traps for Hamlet with both 697 Stoppard, in an interview with G. Gordon, ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom ­Stoppard in Conversation, page 18. 698 L. Olivier, introduction to his film of Hamlet 1948. 699 Hamlet, Act 1, scene ii, line 76. 700 Jumpers, page 68. 701 Hamlet, Act i, scene v, lines 166–167. James Morwood contends that the phrase is reminiscent in terms of what it says about the individuality of George’s character to Hamlet’s ‘do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?’. (Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, lines 344–345) – J. Morwood, ‘Jumpers revisited’, Agenda, 18–19 (Winter/Spring, 1981) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 129. Morwood memorably describes George (op cit, page 130) as, ‘Half St George and half a joke vicar’. 702 Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 247–248. 703 Jumpers, page 41. 704 Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, lines 199 and 201. 705 Hamlet, Act i, scene iv, line 81. 706 Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 572.

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Gertrude and Ophelia. Polonius himself advises Laertes with ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’.707 Shakespeare’s references to speaking – Hamlet’s ‘Speak the speech’,708 for example – are more subtle parallels with Stoppard’s arguments for free speech. Many of these themes stretch to other Shakespearean plays. Stoppard is not slow to adopt them as his use of Macbeth’s allusions to speech – ‘Speak, if you can’,709 – in Cahoot’s Macbeth as a basis for an exploration of the right to freedom of speech illustrates. Accordingly, Stoppard casts his Shakespearian net wider than just Hamlet.710 In Night And Day Ruth exclaims, in reference to Mageeba’s confession that he sleeps very little, an allusion to the precariousness of the legitimacy of Henry iv’s reign: ‘Uneasy lies the head that’,711 Ruth goes to say before pulling herself up. The very resolution of Artist Descending a Staircase relies on Beauchamp’s punned reference to Gloucester’s despair in King Lear: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods: they kill us for their sport’.712 Stoppard retains the pun in Albert’s Bridge when Albert sings a song comprising a hotchpotch of lines from other lyrics including Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: ‘Shall I compare me to a summer’s day’.713 Jumpers contains many Shakespearian allusions stretching from Dotty’s adaptation of Macduff’s response to murder, ‘Oh, horror, horror, horror! Confusion now hath made its masterpiece…most sacrilegious murder’,714 to Stoppard’s adaptation of Lear’s words to suit his moral argument – ‘I know that nothing can be created out of nothing’.715 Slightly more obscure is Archie’s sinister line in the Coda to Clegthorpe which derives from Richard iii: ‘My Lord Archbishop, when I was last in Lambeth I saw good strawberries in your ­garden – I do beseech you send for some’.716 More obscure, still, is the Shakespearian reference in the name of Septimus’ tortoise, Plautus. Titus

707 708 709 710

711 712 713 714 715 716

Hamlet, Act i, scene iii, line78. Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, line 1. Macbeth, Act i, scene iii, line 47. cf J. Levenson: ‘It is no surprise that Shakespeare appears everywhere in Stoppard’s plays’. Levenson, J – Stoppard’s Shakespeare: textual re-visions in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 155. Night And Day, page 42: Henry iv, Part 2, Act iii, scene i, line 31. Artist, page 156: King Lear, Act iv, scene i, lines 37 to 38. Albert’s Bridge, page 75: Shakespeare Sonnet 18. Jumpers, page 24: Macbeth, Act ii, scene iii, lines 66 to 69. Jumpers, page 68: King Lear, Act i, scene i, line 86 – ‘Nothing will come of nothing’. Jumpers, page 85: Richard iii, Act iii, scene iv, lines 31 to 33 (Stoppard supplants Lambeth – the location of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s London palace – for Holborn).

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­Maccius ­Plautus wrote Menaechmi, the inspiration for The Comedy of Errors, a play about two sets of identical twins, thereby subtly emphasising the self referentiality of Chaos Theory in Arcadia. More ironic, and used to illustrate Septimus’ point in Arcadia that ‘what we let fall will be picked up by those behind’,717 is the Latin translation which Thomasina has been set: ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne’,718 from the original Latin source from which Shakespeare derived Enobarbus’ speech in Antony and Cleopatra. Arguably Stoppard’s single most intensive use of Shakespeare is applied as part of the vehicle of Travesties in which Stoppard is both illustrating language (a theme of the play) and showing Dadaism’s deconstructive nature. In a fine demonstration of the way in which Stoppard’s mind can both join disparate ideas and manipulate language he takes his cue from the words of a Plebeian in Julius Caesar who is exhorting a physical assault on Cinna – ‘Tear him for his bad verses’.719 Tzara writes down Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (‘Shall I compare thee to a summers’ day…’720) and, then, cuts it up into single words (ie: tears it into pieces) enabling the later reconstruction of the words into random phrases by Gwen and Tzara, thus proving that Tzara’s Dadaist ‘signature is written in the hand of chance’.721 Gwen recites the sonnet after which Stoppard constructs a dialogue between the two by joining together 13 snippets from 9722 Shakespeare plays and a further sonnet, thus: Gwen: You tear him for his bad verses? (JULIUS CAESAR723) These are but wild and whirling words, my lord. (HAMLET  724) Tzara: Ay, Madam. (ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL 725) Gwen: Truly I wish the gods had made thee poetical. (AS YOU LIKE IT  726) Tzara: I do not know what poetical is. Is it honest in word and deed? Is it a true thing? (AS YOU LIKE IT  727)

717 718 719 720 721 722

723 724 725 726 727

Arcadia, page 50. Arcadia, page 51; Antony and Cleopatra, Act ii, scene ii, line 191. Julius Caesar, Act iii, scene iii, line 31. Shakespeare ‘Sonnet 18’ ; Travesties, page 35. Travesties, page 35. Jill Levenson counts 8 (which is not incorrect as ‘Ay, Madam’ also appears in Hamlet, Act i, scene ii, line 74). See J. Levenson, ‘Stoppard’s Shakespeare: textual re-visions’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 155. Julius Caesar, Act iii, scene iii, line 31. Hamlet, Act i, scene v, line 133. All’s Well That Ends Well, Act iii, scene ii, lines 71, 75, 77. As You Like It, Act iii, scene iii, line 15 – ‘I would the gods had made thee poetical’. As You Like It, Act iii, scene iii, lines 16–17.

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Gwen: Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability, and god-like reason to fust in us unused. (HAMLET  728) Tzara: I was not born under a rhyming planet. (MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING729) Those fellows of infinite tongue that can rhyme themselves into ladies’ favours, they do reason themselves out again. (HENRY V  730) And that would set my teeth nothing on edge – nothing so much as mincing poetry. (HENRY IV, PART 1731) Gwen: Thy honesty and love doth mince this matter (OTHELLO732) – Put your bonnet for his right use, ‘tis for the head! (HAMLET  733) I had rather than forty shilling I had my book of songs and sonnets here. (THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR734) Tzara: But since he died, and poet better prove, his for his style you’ll read, mine for my – love.735 (‘SONNET 32’ 736) References to Shakespeare abound especially in Stoppard’s adaptations. He peppers his versions of Chekhov with short extracts737 and modified allusions, again mostly from Hamlet. The Cherry Orchard contains two puns in response to Varya’s tears about the prospect of marriage. ‘Get thee to a scullery’,738 Lopakhin tells her, mocking her forthcoming domesticity which he reinforces with, ‘Nymph, in thy orisons, be all your sinks remembered’.739 The Seagull contains Shakespearian wordplay, such as ‘Read on, Macduff’740 and ‘Life out there is harder than is dreamt of…in your philosophy’,741 while his version of Ivanov 728 Hamlet, Act iv, scene iv, lines 36–39. 729 Much Ado About Nothing, Act v, scene ii, line 40. 730 Henry V, Act v, scene ii, lines 160–163. 731 Henry iv, Part 1, Act iii, scene i, lines 131–132. 732 Othello, Act ii, scene iii, line 243. 733 Hamlet, Act v, scene ii, lines 92–93. 734 The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Act i, scene i, lines 192–193. 735 Travesties, pages 35–36. 736 ‘But since he died and poets better prove, Theirs for their style I’ll read his for his love’. 737 See The Seagull, pages 411, 418, 422, 424, 430 and 439; The Cherry Orchard, pages 29 and 42; and, Ivanov, pages 60, 75 and 76. 738 The Cherry Orchard, page 42. 739 The Cherry Orchard, page 42. 740 The Seagull, page 423. Macbeth, Act v, scene viii, line 33. 741 The Seagull, page 459. Hamlet, Act i, scene v, lines 166–167: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’. Hilary uses the same quotation in The Hard Problem, page 12. See also The Boundary, page 11 for a pun in which Bunyans says to Johnson, ‘I see there is more in you, Johnson, than is dreamt of in our lexicography’.

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quotes Ophelia directly in reference to Ivanov’s own condition: ‘“What a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”’.742 Shakespeare is mined in Undiscovered Country when Friedrich addresses his Viennese circle as, ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen!’,743 and, again, in Rough Crossing with references to Romeo And Juliet and The Merchant Of Venice and Turai’s accusatory ‘Et tu, Brute?’744 as Gal reacts to the lifeboat drill. Rather more obscure is Turai’s invocation of King Lear with ‘ripeness is all’.745 In a clever imitation, rather than parody, Dvornichek fulfils the role of the ‘Chorus in Henry V’746 by setting various scenes in the musical. Above all, like Shakespeare, Stoppard is a man of the theatre.747 They both know how to put on a show.748 ‘I really like theatrical events’,749 Stoppard told Ronald Hayman in 1974750 and this belief is what drives Stoppard’s interest in the Bard. ‘When we refer to Shakespeare as our greatest writer’, Stoppard argues, ‘we refer to him as the author of an event and not merely a text’.751 This analysis is entirely consistent with Stoppard’s view, expressed in 1972, that, ‘Theatre is a 742 Ivanov, page 76. Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, line 149: ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’. 743 Undiscovered Country, page 159: Julius Caesar, Act iii, scene ii, line 75. 744 Rough Crossing, page 258: Julius Caesar, Act iii, scene i, line 77. sondheimguide.com identifies an unpublished half-hour adaptation by Stoppard of The Merchant of Venice in 2005 for the National Youth Theatre. 745 Rough Crossing, page 238: King Lear, Act v, scene ii, line 11. 746 Rough Crossing, page 255. 747 Daniel Jernigan emphasises the importance of the theatre to Stoppard’s technique: ‘one of the unique characteristics of the theatre that Stoppard takes advantage of is its live audience’. DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 23. 748 Stoppard says, ‘When I’m writing a play it is my constant concern that it should be wholly and continuously entertaining’. – Stoppard, in an interview with JR. Taylor, ‘Our Changing Theatre, No. 3: Changes in Writing’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 29. 749 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, 12 June 1974 – in R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 4. 750 In 1980 Stoppard told Hayman, ‘It’s an event rather than a text that one is trying to convey. Text is merely an attempt to describe an event’. – Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, Double Acts: Tom Stoppard and Peter Wood, in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 148. 751 Stoppard, ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’, International Shakespeare Association Occasional Paper no. 2 (University Press, Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1982), page 9. Michael Dean asserts that, ‘While Stoppard has never been solely defined as a Shakespearian writer, his outlook and participation in contemporary drama owe a great deal to his involvement with arguably the most famous playwright in history’. He argues that, ‘The role of drama, from Stoppard’s perspective, exists in the nebulous space between performance and author. Thus, it is entirely fitting that Stoppard views Shakespeare as something more akin to an elemental force, something that might be known theoretically or felt intuitively when the right conditions are met, but which is indefinable under most circumstances’. See Dean’s article ‘Stoppard’s Shakespeare:

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public event holding limitless private possibilities’.752 For S­ toppard this means much more than simply memorable speeches, beautiful poetry and deep psychological insights. What Stoppard learns from Shakespeare, therefore, is that, ‘The theatre turns out to be an event which has to be carefully manipulated. It is crowded with variables which have to be put into balance’.753 What Stoppard really likes in Shakespeare is what his own works specialise in – the drama of conflict through words. He explains, ‘the parts (of Shakespeare) which most bear repeating for me now are not the great speeches or the set pieces. What I find repeatedly thrilling and timeless are the rapid, sharp exchanges which drive the action on’.754 It is remarkably similar to what attracts him to Beckett, although with Beckett the exchanges he admires are the ‘A, minus A’ type. A regret that he has over Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead demonstrates his conviction: I always regretted being unable to fit into my play about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the passage where Hamlet asks Guildenstern ‘Will you play upon this pipe?’ – ‘My Lord I cannot’ – ‘I pray you’ – ‘Believe me, I cannot’ – ‘I do beseech you’ – ‘I know no touch of it, my Lord’ – ‘It is easy as lying!’ – Is it not passages like these which keep Shakespeare vibrant in the modern theatre even more than the great introspective speeches which halt the action.755 He implies that the Shakespearian event is at its best when it gives, ‘literal expression to the central idea which is metaphorically expressed as “different levels of reality”’.756 This is very close to the task Stoppard sets himself of ­finding 752 753 754

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Collaboration and Revision’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, pages 168–182. Stoppard, ‘Playwrights and professors’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 October 1972, page 1219. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘“The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through”’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 110. Stoppard, ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’, International Shakespeare ­Association Occasional Paper no. 2 (University Press, Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1982), pages 10–11. Stoppard, ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’, International Shakespeare ­Association Occasional Paper no. 2 (University Press, Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1982), page 11. Stoppard, ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’, International Shakespeare ­Association Occasional Paper no. 2 (University Press, Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1982), page 7. In his article ‘Is It true What They Say About Shakespeare?’ Stoppard identifies three examples of Shakespeare productions that for various reasons

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a vehicle to match his ideas. And, just like Stoppard, it would seem that Shakespeare did not always find the narrative easy. Stoppard observes: When one reflects how little (Shakespeare) chose to invent, and how much of it comes from various sources, how much of it is from Plutarch or Holinshed, how much of it from obscure translations from the French, the Italian, the classics which appeared during his own lifetime, when one reflects how little of it he created and how little interested he seemed to be in originating tales to tell, and how unimportant it seemed to be to his particular genius and to the needs of that theatre, one sees that one cannot equate the craft of playwriting with the ability to invent foundations.757 Just as with Beckett and Chekhov, Stoppard is interested in the duality that Shakespeare produces, both in his plays and as a man. Stoppard argues that ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had a public mandarin language and a private language’.758 Likewise, The Real Thing is an exploration of the contrast between the public manifestation of the private motivation. For Stoppard, the duality is present in Shakespeare himself. ‘In (Shakespeare)’, he tells us, ‘we find two separate forms of genius which are rare indeed when encountered separately but almost unprecedented when found together in the same writer’.759 – his

were theatrical events. The first concerns the exit of Ariel in a production of The Tempest, apparently running across a lake (by virtue of a plank just below the surface). Stoppard achieves a similarly memorable effect at the end of the first scene of The Real Thing. It is described by Toby Zinman as, ‘(The scene) ends as the snow in the souvenir paperweight engulfs the stage, creating a magical and Shakespearian image of the theatre as globe’. – T. Zinman, ‘Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 130. 757 Stoppard, ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’, International Shakespeare ­Association Occasional Paper no. 2 (University Press, Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1982), page 10. 758 Stoppard, ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’, International Shakespeare ­Association Occasional Paper no. 2 (University Press, Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1982), page 11. Charles Marowitz also notices this distinction, arguing that, ‘Stoppard vividly suggests the two languages which are native to us all. One, our own carping, unbridled tongue with which we question our existence and bitch at our circumstance; the other, the formal and politic language with which we conduct our business in society’. – C. Marowitz, Confessions of a Counterfeit Critic: A London Theatre Notebook, 1958–1971, pages 125–126. (Quoted in T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom Stoppard, page 21). 759 Stoppard, ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’, International Shakespeare ­Association Occasional Paper no. 2 (University Press, Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1982), page 11.

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observation and understanding of human nature coupled with the verbal cadences he employs to express what he sees. In his book The Genius of Shakespeare Jonathan Bate uses a methodology founded on duality to explain the difficulty of understanding contradictory interpretations of Measure for Measure. He argues that, ‘the way round the ­problem was to admit the simultaneous validity of contradictory readings’,760 deriving the methodology from an application of Einstein’s quantum mechanical theory that led to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s principle of complementarity.761 These concepts of duality are precisely those which S­ toppard explores in Hapgood. Such ambiguity resonates throughout ­Shakespeare, culminating, perhaps, in Iago’s confession of, ‘I am not what I am’,762 which is surely as Stoppardian as Housman’s or Jerry Krohl’s or Hapgood’s duality. Bate goes on to note how the concept of literary ambiguity leads to Wittgenstein’s views on the ambiguity of language which Bate argues is reflected in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan rhetorical training at grammar school. Is it a coincidence that Stoppard wrote a play – Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s M ­ acbeth – based upon Wittgenstein’s linguistic wordplay? Bate concludes that such ambiguity finally develops into a theatrical characteristic that, ‘being and acting are indivisible. … For the later Wittgenstein, the truth of a proposition is indivisible from the language in which it is performed. For Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players”.763’764 Again, Stoppard gets to the same point in his exploration of the interaction of acting and reality in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The duality of contradiction also produces compression. Stoppard notes, ‘I have really been looking for a line or two of Shakespeare’s which might encapsulate the philosopher-poet. Consider the line “There’s a divinity which shapes our ends rough hew them how we will.” The contradiction between predeterminism and free will must be a problem almost as old as thought itself’.765 Compression is part of Stoppard’s offering. His compression is that of unrelated ideas and the application of Occam’s razor. It is also, ‘the simultaneous

760 J. Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare, page 302. 761 See J. Bate’s discussion of Empsonian ambiguity in The Genius of Shakespeare, Chapter 10, ‘The Laws of the Shakespearian Universe’. 762 Othello, Act i, scene i, line 66. 763 As You Like It, Act ii, scene vii, lines 139–140. 764 J. Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare, page 332. 765 Stoppard, ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’, International Shakespeare ­Association Occasional Paper no. 2 (University Press, Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1982), page 12.

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compression of language with expansion of meaning’, which, for Stoppard, is what, ‘makes Shakespeare breathtaking and defines poetry’.766 The craft Stoppard identifies is inherent in Shakespeare. Both realise the significance of an electrifying opening scene. Stoppard observes of Hamlet, ‘there is a real theatrical excitement about the way that play just kicks off, it goes off like a motorbike’.767 Both know the value of an abrupt scene ending for maintaining interest and tension. Each is quite happy to play to the gallery in order to keep his audience’s interest and both know how to make an Elizabethan audience laugh.768 The two become most closely intertwined in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when, according to Stoppard, he, ‘just wrote along, a bit of Shakespeare, off they went, a bit of me, a bit more of that, off with me, on with some Shakespeare’.769 From Riley’s throwaway reference to Florence of ‘We’re a small band of brothers’770 through to Tatiana in Voyage demonstrating her prowess in English – ‘“The quality of mercy is not strained, it dropping like the gentle dew from heaven!”’771 – Shakespeare is never far away.772 As Stoppard says, ‘we always get back to Shakespeare’.773 766 Stoppard, ‘Pragmatic Theater’, page 7. 767 Stoppard, ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’, International Shakespeare ­Association Occasional Paper no. 2 (University Press, Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1982), page 9. 768 Ian Mackean argues that Shakespearian and Stoppardian comedy are used to different effect with adverse consequences for Stoppard – eg: ‘…whereas…a Shakespeare tragedy may have brief comic interludes, in Stoppard’s plays the humour and seriousness co-exist as intertwined strands. Shakespeare’s comic interludes serve to heighten the tragic climaxes and the tragic setting heightens the impact of the comedy. But in Stoppard’s work the comic and the serious are so close that they tend to compromise one another’. See I. Mackean, Sir Tom Stoppard. In Search of Reality. Mackean cites Stoppard who asks, ‘Is my seriousness compromised by my frivolity?…Or my frivolity redeemed by my seriousness?’. 769 Stoppard, ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’, International Shakespeare ­Association Occasional Paper no. 2 (University Press, Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1982), page 11. 770 Enter a Free Man, page 29: Henry V, Act iv, scene iii, line 60. 771 Voyage, page 4: The Merchant of Venice, Act iv, scene i, lines 183 to 184. 772 Jill Levenson also notes the repeated influence of Shakespeare on Stoppard but argues for the novelty that Stoppard applies – ‘Stoppard’s Shakespeare belongs to the second half of the twentieth century, a product of its artistic styles and political views. What makes this Shakespeare different from the rest is the persistence with which the dramatist reproduces him, the originality of each new conception, and the continuity of influence over more than three decades’. See J. Levenson, ‘Stoppard’s Shakespeare: textual re-visions’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, page 156. 773 Stoppard, ‘The Event and the Text’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 210.

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Parsimony I make the jokes.774

martin, Funny Man

∵ The patterns of pandemonium in Stoppard’s theatrical plenitude manifest themselves clearly. Whilst the dramatic mayhem and visual fireworks are designed to keep the audience in their seats they, for Stoppard, have another ­purpose: to underline or emphasise the themes of his plays or underscore their arguments. Hence, the poetry of The Invention of Love and the music of D ­ arkside and the Dejeuner sur l’herbe of The Coast of Utopia reinforce the debate. The arresting opening scenes may well have audiences amazed and baffled in equal measure but the attentive will realise that in them the seeds of both the plot and its resolution have already been carefully sown. The comedy, be it verbal or of situation, invariably contains some element of the argument, as in Housman’s ‘inversion’, Natalie Ogarev’s ‘historical’ tendencies or On the Razzle’s farce of illusion. The most significant patterns, however, are derived from Stoppard’s influences – the Beckettian contradiction, the Chekhovian character duality and Shakespeare’s sense of the event. One particular pattern, or device, is, nevertheless, pure Stoppard: the time shift. 774 Funny Man, ii – 3, ii – 4.

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Stoppard’s Time Shifts Tock, tick goes the universe and then recovers itself.1 bernard, Arcadia

∵ A pattern that Stoppard has made all his own is the time shift. Time is a vector through space and in the real world it is unidirectional and few, if any, playwrights have taken such liberty with the concept as Stoppard. It generates a freedom which produces a number of theatrical capabilities. In addition to offering rather obvious increased possibilities for the narrative of a play altering time allows Stoppard to change perspective in plays, such as Indian Ink and Rock ‘N’ Roll (in the process reflecting the relativist leitmotif so prevalent in much of his work). In Stoppard’s hands time can deployed in a structural way as part of the vehicle of Arcadia or The Coast of Utopia, permitting him to pick up the theme of a play, or to allow him to reprise arguments as part of his on-stage debates in Travesties and The Invention of Love. But, Stoppard wastes nothing and time shifts provide freedom around the edges of his plays: freedom for humour2 and mystery and, so he argues, the chance to make an emotional point in Artist Descending a Staircase. An early experiment with the time shift on the stage occurs in Enter a Free Man with a quick shift forwards and backwards in time from the home, which Riley has just left, to the pub, where Riley suggests he has just left his wife, and back to the living room of Riley’s home earlier in the day where the audience sees the events that caused Riley to leave. In this brief operation of the time shift Stoppard can build both the narrative and the audience’s curiosity, a technique he also uses in The Real Inspector Hound as he both reprises the plot and resolves the mystery. From that point of departure the time shift became a recurrent feature in much of Stoppard’s work.

1 Arcadia, page 66. 2 For example, Anthony Jenkins comments on Enter a Free Man that, ‘The reversed time-loop adds comic point to Riley’s delusions’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, pages 4–5.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_008

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Emotional Recall

Stoppard employs time shift in Artist Descending a Staircase and with it offers up several insights into his reasons for using it, particularly emphasising how it enables him to address the emotional side of the characters. The play is a series of sequentially regressing flashbacks from the present time (1972, when the play was first performed) until 1914, the furthest point, is reached whereafter the flashbacks run sequentially forwards – a structural palindrome.3 As the stage directions instruct, ‘the play is set temporally in six parts, in the sequence ABCDEFEDCBA’.4 The structure of the play is thus: Scene sequence Time period Date

Dramatis personae

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

B, M B, D D, M S, M, B, D S, M, B, D B, D,M S, M, B, D S D, M B, D B, M

A B C D E F E D C B A

Here and now A couple of hours ago Last week 1922 1920 1914 1920 1922 Last week A couple of hours ago Here and now

Dramatis personae: B=Beauchamp M=Martello D=Donner S=Sophie

Stoppard explains that there are two reasons for the use of the time shift device: 3 Gordon House, director of the production of Artist Descending a Staircase which was first broadcast on 10 January 2016 on bbc Radio 3, explained that it is ‘a play constructed in an elegant palindrome’. 4 Artist, page 111. Michael Billington comments, ‘I can…think of no radio play in history constructed quite like this one’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 93.

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What it allows me to do is reveal certain plot points in ways and in a time frame that forces a sense of reverberation. I also know that despite a career’s worth of criticism to the contrary, I do try to deal with emotions. The sequential highjinks allow me to get at these emotions better.5 Stoppard begins in scene 1, the here and now, by tantalising us, suggesting there was something between Donner and Sophie: ‘Poor Donner’, Martello says to Beauchamp, ‘he never had much luck with Sophie’.6 In fact, Donner has been brooding about her. Donner’s sensitivity is revealed in scene 3 (last week) when he accuses Martello of sneering at Sophie’s memory with the edible figure Martello has made of her. Donner admits that, despite the 50 years that have now passed since what the audience learns is her death, he is still trying, ‘to shut out the memory but it needs only…a ribbon…a flower…a phrase of music…a river flowing beneath ancient bridges…the scent of summertime…’,7 to set it off. One has to go back to 1922, scene 4, to find out that Donner loves Sophie. He cannot bear to live close to her if she is living with someone else (Beauchamp). ‘When he made you happy I couldn’t bear it, and now that he hurts you I…just can’t bear it’,8 Donner quietly confesses. Sophie responds, saying to Donner, ‘I can’t love you back…I have lost the capability of falling in love’. The geometry of the split time periods allows Stoppard to have another go at the pain of Sophie’s rejection when the play returns to 1922 in scene 8. Just before Sophie falls to her death she reveals, in a piercingly painful speech which shows touchingly great insight on Stoppard’s part of what life must be like for the blind, how she cannot live with Donner: We cannot live here like brother and sister. I know you won’t make demands of me, so how can I make demands of you?…And yet I will not want to be alone, I cannot live alone … I need to know that it’s morning when I wake or I will fear the worst and never believe in the dawn 5 Stoppard, in an interview with D. Maychick, ‘Stoppard Ascending’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 233. It is interesting to contrast Stoppard’s reasons for his use of time shift with Steven Price’s observation about Stoppard’s adaptation of Parade’s End: ­‘Although its time frames are not always straightforward, in general the adaptation rearranges the material along simpler and broadly chronological lines’. – S. Price, ‘The Illusion of Proprietorship’: Tom Stoppard’s Parade’s End’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 124. 6 Artist, page 117. 7 Artist, page 130. 8 Artist, page 133.

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b­ reaking – who will do that for me?…And who will light the fire; and choose my clothes so the colours don’t clash; and find my other shoe; and do my dress up the back? You haven’t thought about it. And if you have then you must think that I will be your lover. But I will not. I cannot. And I cannot live with you knowing that you want me – Do you see that?9 Fifty years later Martello then asks the painfully ironic question of Donner, ‘Did you ever wonder whether it was you she loved?’, to which Donner replies, ‘No, of course not. It was Beauchamp’.10 As Martello alone realises, that is not necessarily the case. The time structure allows Stoppard to emphasise the emotional aspects of the play by revisiting them in the second time the play enters a particular time period and by allowing their consequences to linger for fifty years. What particularly distinguishes the structure is its geometry and it produces a much more intriguing story. ‘I look at the construction of this play as a puzzle. That’s why the time sequence seems so geometrical’,11 Stoppard explains. Had he run the plot forwards from 1914 he would have got a play which introduces three men as naïve artists on a tour through the French countryside on the eve of the First World War. They would have met after the war a young girl, nearly blind, who took all their affections and moved in with one of them. Blind, she commits suicide and fifty years later the three of them, mature artists by now, have not got over it. One of them dies and the other two accuse each other over the death. In the course of it all the nature of art, particularly modern art, gets debated. But, that’s not how Stoppard tells it. Following Beauchamp’s precept – ‘Art consists of constant surprise. Art should never conform’.12 – Stoppard contrives the time geometry to produce what appears to be a murder mystery which reveals the pieces in a manner which draws the audience in, thereby allowing Stoppard’s characters to fulminate about the nature of modern art along the way. There are two mysteries to be solved in the play. The first, Donner’s death, the audience is confronted with immediately. It hears a recording of the incident. But, it is not given an explanation. Instead, Martello and Beauchamp each accuse each other; ‘Yes, but you killed him’,13 says Martello; 9 10 11 12 13

Artist, page 151. Artist, page 153. Stoppard, in an interview with D. Maychick, ‘Stoppard Ascending’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 232. Artist, page 143. Artist, page 116.

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‘Murderer!’,14 Beauchamp flings at Martello. The seed of the mystery is sown and continues to germinate throughout the play. They disagreed about art. To Donner, Beauchamp’s recordings were ‘rubbish, general rubbish’15 as the audience learns from the flashback of two hours ago. Last week, in another flashback, Donner accuses Martello of, ‘contemptible artistic presumptions’.16 He was ‘rather unfeeling about my work in progress’,17 Beauchamp reveals in scene 3, last week. Martello explains at the same time that, ‘(Donner) was rude about mine the other day’.18 They bickered as housemates: Donner stole Beauchamp’s honey while last week Donner discovered Beauchamp had been using his flannel. Donner confesses to Beauchamp that he once damaged one of Martello’s figures slightly. But, does this behaviour justify murder? The first three scenes, all set in the present or very recent past, establish the mystery surrounding Donner’s death. But, the scenes set between 1914 and 1922 establish the underlying story and enable Stoppard both to establish the second mystery, the nature of Sophie’s love, and get at the emotions surrounding it. To distinguish the distance in time the three men are all known by their youthful nicknames: Mouse for Donner; Biscuit for Beauchamp; and, Banjo for Martello. One learns three key points in 1922: Sophie loves Beauchamp, although there is a suggestion that he ‘he only hurts’19 her by that stage and may be involved with a Bohemian poet; Donner loves Sophie; and, there was an exhibition, entitled Frontiers In Art, involving all three men. Scene 4 sets up the tragedy of Sophie’s fall/suicide in scene 8, also in 1922. The house to which Sophie is going is ‘most unsuitable’ for a blind girl: it has, ‘steep unprotected stairs – you could fall Sophie’,20 Donner warns. In 1920, scene 5, Stoppard explains how Sophie – Miss Farthingale as she is introduced by Martello – meets the three boys at a tea party and how Sophie fell in love with Beauchamp. The attraction is quite immediate as in 1920, scene 7, Mr Beauchamp is already inviting her to dinner and holding hands as he escorts her downstairs. Sophie is blind but the story line is allowed to thicken as Martello realises that Sophie wishes ‘to know which of us was the one who posed against the painting’21 which had so impressed her at the boys’ exhibition. This point is crucial to the play because it establishes 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Artist, page 115. Artist, page 119. Artist, page 129. Artist, page 119. Artist, page 119. Artist, page 133. Artist, page 134. Artist, pages 141–142.

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the love story and, unwittingly for Sophie, the undercurrent of metaphor of illusion and reality which enlightens the debate about art. Stoppard also takes advantage of the time shift to plant a small clue as to how to solve the puzzle of Donner’s death in a way that he could never have done otherwise. Fifty years before Donner’s demise, and well before the audience could be expected to work it out, Sophie explains how to solve the mystery when she is recounting her story of how she came across the boys’ exhibition. ‘Oh dear, I’m telling everything back to front’,22 she says. The only scene set in 1914 establishes the three men, in their youth, whose story runs through the play. The opening words of the scene announce that art is going to be an issue for the three who are described as ‘best friends’.23 It allows Stoppard to begin the story in the middle of the play, just as Beauchamp says: When we are old and doddery and famous and life is given over to retrospection and retrospectives, this is as far back as I want memory to go.24 Stoppard – never one to miss a dramatic opportunity – takes full licence that the time structure allows and introduces what may be described as both a clue and a memento mori – ‘I’ve never been so hot…and the flies…’25 – which returns to haunt the three of them in scenes 1 and 11, the present. They are presented as naïve, for despite having seen a ‘fourth load of troop lorries’26 a group of men digging a trench is explained away as a pipe laying exercise. They are idealistic, too. Beauchamp is asking, ‘how can the artist justify himself?’,27 while Martello is incubating an idea of ‘a portrait…an idealization of female beauty, based on the Song of Solomon’.28 The second time the narrative is in the period of last week is the point at which Stoppard can reveal Sophie’s possible confusion and run the metaphor of illusion and reality to its conclusion. Scene 10, thereafter, sets up Donner’s death as Beauchamp, driven mad by a fly, goes out to purchase some fly-killer, leaving the instruction to Donner to turn his tape recorder on when he is out. In scene 11, back in the present, Martello and Beauchamp, unbeknown to them, demonstrate to the audience how Donner really did meet his end. 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Artist, page 138. Artist, page 143. Artist, page 143. Artist, page 143. Artist, page 146. Artist, page 144. Artist, page 144.

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Perspective Shuffling time allows Stoppard to change perspective,29 as he recognizes: ‘The thing about the shuttling between time periods, I think that makes vital – you know, full of life – situations which, you know, perhaps would be not that interesting if they were not in counterpoint to another perspective’.30 Stoppard uses it to debate the ethics of Empire from both an Indian and a British point of view in Indian Ink and from a pre- and post-colonial standpoint. Stoppard says that the converging of time and place in Indian Ink is, ‘very like Arcadia in certain ways. But in Arcadia the two periods don’t dovetail until the last part of the play. We’re dovetailing from two minutes into the evening’.31 According to the staging instructions ‘the play is set in two time periods, 1930 (in India) and mid 1980s (in England and India)’32 and many of the scenes, illustrated in Appendix 2, are very short with voiceover interjections from Pike. In the Native State is different, lacking the scenes set in 1980s India. Unlike Arcadia, but like The Invention of Love, the scenes not only alternate time periods but also locations. This approach makes for a very complicated staging in which not only do the scenes intermingle, as Stoppard suggests, but they flow into each other as seamlessly as they do in The Invention of Love. The close intermingling of the scenes is further illustrated by the staging instructions which stipulate that ‘It is not intended that the stage be demarcated between India and England, or past and present. Floor space, and even furniture, may be common’.33 The changes in location can be very slick. As Coomaraswami greets Flora with a handshake when she gets off the train in Jummapur “the handshake which begins on the station platform ends on the verandah of the ‘Dak Bungalow’.”34 Equally slick are the changes in time period. At one stage Flora in India in the 1930s is writing the same letter that her sister in England in the 1980s is reading: Pike:     …(He passes a letter to (Mrs Swan) for assistance.) Mrs Swan: (Deciphering where he indicates) ‘…a kitchen bit with a refrigerator…’ 29

30 31 32 33 34

H. Sudkamp draws attention to the implications of perspective for relativism and truth: ‘(Indian Ink) presents historical truth as relative and dependent on the cultural and personal standpoint’. – H. Sudkamp, Tom Stoppard’s Biographical Drama, page 331. Stoppard, in conversation with E. Farnsworth, 10 March 1999. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, “I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India” in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 128. Indian Ink. Indian Ink, frontispiece. Indian Ink, page 1.

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Flora:     (Reappearing) ‘…a kitchen bit with a refrigerator!      …      It’s called a duck bungalow…’ Mrs Swan: ‘Dak bungalow’. Flora:  ‘…although there is not a duck to be seen’.35 As the chart depicting scenes and locations illustrates there are some occasions when a character from one time period is present in a scene from another. Pike transcends time because he interjects with footnotes. The time shift in Indian Ink is, however, not enough on its own to achieve the effects Stoppard requires. Indian Ink complicates the time shift by having two locations in the mid 1980s – London and India – and only one in the 1930s, India. Having the extra location of modern-day India ‘justifies the play’, according to Stoppard, ‘a play which would otherwise float between India then and an old lady in a garden in a London suburb now’.36 He says it generates a dynamic impact theatrically as, ‘it gives the play a big kick when it needs it. Fifty minutes in, suddenly there are a lot of neon signs and traffic noise, and a character (Pike) who is in one part of the play turns up in another part of the play’.37 The benefit is certainly one of contrast but it also forms a key part of Stoppard’s analysis of the question of who should govern India. It enables him to answer the question that Flora says is on all the British lips: ‘The Brits here shake their heads and ask where will it all end when we’ve gone’.38 Stoppard can paint the post-Independence picture in contrast to the Raj of the 1930s with Dilip’s description of a typically modern Indian scene in the 1980s at some traffic lights: You have to understand that begging is a profession. Like dentistry. Like shining shoes. Every so often you need to get a tooth filled, or your shoes shined, or to give alms. So when a beggar presents himself to you, you have to ask yourself – do I need a beggar today? If you do, give him alms.39

35 36 37 38 39

Indian Ink, pages 2–3. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, “I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India” in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 128. Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, “I retain a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India” in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 128. In the Native State, page 250. Indian Ink, page 58.

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The time shift in Indian Ink also has a theatrical attraction for Stoppard. It permits him to pursue a mystery which the switch in time, first of all, deepens and, then, resolves. The ongoing puzzle about whether there was a nude painting of Flora is raised by the characters in the 1980s, is enhanced by the events of the 1930s and explained, again, in the 1980s. But, the resolution and, hence, the suspense is heightened by the switch back to the 1930s in the middle of Anish’s two-part revelation. By comparison, in The Real Inspector Hound the repetition of the narrative with different characters is not so crucial to the suspense – it does not have to be as the play is a whodunit anyway – but it allows Stoppard to perpetuate and re-emphasise the mystery until the final revelation. Like The Coast of Utopia, Rock ‘N’ Roll is a history play and while Stoppard elects not to switch the time back and forth he does run it forward over more than twenty years and employ the same technique of perspective he uses in Indian Ink to look at freedom from both the Czech and English positions. The play continually moves forward in time from the Prague Spring of 1968 through to the Velvet Revolution of 1989–1990, contrasting the two events in the process. In defiance of the passage of the years Esme reflects that, ‘it was like suddenly time didn’t leave things behind but kept them together’,40 in reference to the continuing struggle for freedom of expression in Czechoslovakia. The time element of the play is dramatically subservient to the continual switch in locations. The locations allow Stoppard to make an ironic point that is a significant part of his purpose for writing the play. The Czech dissidents are trying to throw off a regime which deprives them of freedom of speech in favour of a system like the English one, based on the rule of law and freedom. Meanwhile a Cambridge university professor, enjoying such freedoms and justice, is besotted with the Communist idea on which Russian backed totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia is founded. Just as the final scene of Arcadia takes place in two time periods which become blurred, so the final scene of Rock ‘N’ Roll takes place in both locations. In Prague the location is the Lennon Wall with ‘The Beatles’ ‘Rock and Roll Music’41 playing. At the same time in Cambridge Deirdre is translating Plutarch’s description of the announcement of the death of Pan. The parallel between the death of one great muse and another is striking, as is the news that ‘The Rolling Stones are in Prague…at Strahov…Strahov is where the Communists had their big shows’.42

40 41 42

Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 70. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 117. Rock ‘N’ Roll, page 99.

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Integrating the Idea

For Stoppard the time shift is an opportunity to integrate the ideas of a play into its vehicle and part of Arcadia’s intellectual and theatrical elegance is his use of it to do so in such a way that the vehicle and the idea are one. It is impossible to escape the concept of time in Arcadia. Stoppard’s stage directions both reflect a need to explain the point and highlight its importance: Something needs to be said about this. The action of the play shuttles back and forth between the early nineteenth century and the present day, always in the same room, without the additions and subtractions which would normally be expected.43 Stoppard had undertaken a minor dress rehearsal of this structural approach to time shifts in his earlier radio play Where Are They Now? The introductory stage directions explain: The play is set entirely in two inter-cut locations…Part of the idea is to move between the two without using any of the familiar grammar of fading down and fading up; the action is continuous.44 Stoppard uses the time shift to accentuate both the differences and similarities between the men as they were as schoolboys and as they are once grown up.45 The treatment of time in Arcadia reflects the general discussion about old and new science. Even in Newton’s day there were competing views of time: Newton’s absolutist view; and, the relativist view of Leibnitz. Newtonian thinking is part of the science which the play debates and contrasts with the new science of Chaos Theory. The play’s structure, through the bifurcation process of the scenes, acts as a metaphor for the iteration process contained within Chaos theory. Two characters, two centuries apart, have realised what time is: since, as Septimus appreciates, you cannot stir things apart – because, ‘time must needs run backward, and since it will not we must stir our way onward mixing as we go’46 – so Valentine also realises, ‘everything is mixing the same way, all the 43 44 45 46

Arcadia, page 19. Where Are They Now? page 89. ‘Stoppard is more interested in contrast than causality’. – R. Hayman, Tom Stoppard, page 89. Arcadia, page 6.

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time,…till there’s no time left. That’s what time means’.47 Time is, therefore, defined as the mixing process of chaos. But, as the bifurcation of the scenes shows, the product over a long period of time is not chaos but pockets of order within it, in much the same way as the repetition of the same game theory situation, referred to in The Hard Problem, leads to an equilibrium.48 The objects on the table demonstrate it to be so as they have accumulated over nearly two centuries of time while, at the same time, the mixing of the time periods in the last scene does not produce confusion (in fact, it resolves the puzzles of the play). Time allows for the process of the production of chaos in which there exists underlying order; the initial premise of Chaos Theory. The time shift between scenes in Arcadia performs a different function from that used in other Stoppard plays. In Arcadia the scene shifts, in which the nineteenth century scenes are denoted by A and the present day ones by B, follow the following pattern: Scene

Time Period

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

A B A B B A Mixed A and B

Scene 7 is quite complicated as characters from both time periods at times are on stage together. As Fleming notes, the original London staging emphasised the intermingling: In Nunn’s staging, Thomasina and Septimus’ waltz takes them on a few different paths through the room, at one point even dancing between Bernard and Chloe who are in the midst of their hasty and unplanned farewell.49 47 48 49

Arcadia, page 126. See AM. Leroi, letter to Stoppard. J. Fleming, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, page 70. Derek Alwes ascribes huge metaphorical significance to the dance: ‘we are looking at the human condition. The Dance. It embraces beginnings and ends, creation and loss, life and death, simultaneously’. – D. Alwes, ‘Oh

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The final scene comprises six time periods: two present day, two nineteenth century and two in which characters from both periods intermingle:50 The time shifts mimic the process of iteration whereby an algorithm, in Chaos Theory, bifurcates between two centres of stability. Valentine explains: ‘It’s about the behaviour of numbers’.51 The A and B time structure of the play mimics the output of ‘an iterated algorithm’.52 Scenes 1 to 6 reflect the behaviour of the algorithm ‘on the critical boundary between steadiness and oscillation’53 – the point in a non-linear system, such as the behaviour pattern of the grouse population which Valentine is studying, at which you make the output of the series for one year the input for the next year and which produces outputs which fluctuate between two different states of near stability. Scene 7 reflects a later stage in the Chaos Theory process when ‘the bifurcations…come faster and faster’.54 At that point ‘periodicity gives way to chaos, fluctuations that never settle down at all’.55 But, just as in Chaos Theory itself in which ‘the simplest systems are…seen to create extraordinarily different problems of predictability’ but at the same time ‘order arises spontaneously in those systems – chaos and order together’,56 so scene 7 produces order out of chaos. The present day and nineteenth century time periods remain ordered. The items collected on the desk throughout the play, whilst chaotic in their nature, tell when explained (using the Occam’s razor process) a rational story. The questions in the story line of the play all get answered in scene 7 – was there a duel?, did Byron kill Chater?, who was the hermit? and, what happened to Thomasina? Stoppard extends the metaphor of time in Arcadia to address a different point in relation to time shift. Hannah realises that Thomasina’s ‘only problem’ was ‘enough time’,57 as was proved by the hermit’s cottage, ‘stacked solid with

50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Phooey to Death!: Boethian Consolation in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Papers in Language And Literature’, 36, 4 (2000), pages 401–403, quoted in H. Bloom (ed), Tom Stoppard, page 102. See J. Fleming: ‘Within (scene seven) there are six sub-scenes: two only of the past, two only of the present and two where different periods share the stage’. – Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, page 52. Arcadia, page 60. Arcadia, page 57. J. Gleick, Chaos, page 70. J. Gleick, Chaos, page 73. J. Gleick, Chaos, page 73. J. Gleick, Chaos, pages 7–8. Arcadia, page 68.

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paper’,58 in Septimus’ vain attempt to prove Thomasina’s algebraic theory. Time shift allows science to be worked out: ‘mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again’,59 Septimus asserts. In Arcadia this is exactly what the time shift allows to happen as Valentine uses Thomasina’s algebra, this time with the aid of a computer. Stoppard has the last intellectual word over time in Arcadia. Bernard, in reference to events in the early nineteenth century, ironically says that, ‘Everything moved more slowly then. Time was different’.60 – ironic because Newton believed that time was absolute. The very last laugh on the subject is, naturally enough, how Hannah proposes to expose Bernard’s erroneous interpretation of events at Sidley Park and an episode in Byron’s life – by means of ‘a letter to The Times’.61 No detail of metaphor, dialogue or thought is ever wasted by Stoppard. In The Coast of Utopia trilogy Stoppard employs the time shift device as a means of illustrating a point, once again interweaving the vehicle of the play with one of the driving ideas of the play.62 One of the main themes in the plays is the nature of history and the view, emanating principally from Hegel and Marx, that history is deterministic and follows a purposeful path towards a preordained destination. There is a pervading sense amongst some of the Russian intelligentsia of events forming the part of a journey towards an expected culmination, as exemplified by Michael Bakunin’s belief that, ‘We were on a journey to this moment. Revolution is the Absolute we pursued at Premukhino, the Universal which contains all the opposites and resolves them. It’s where we were always going’.63 Herzen, by contrast, argues that history is chaotic and haphazard and follows no pattern but rather is influenced by the actions of individuals. It is what he refers to as, ‘the zig and the zag’,64 of history. The chronology of the scenes in each of the three plays, illustrated in Appendix 3, reflects this historical dichotomy.

58 59 60 61 62

63 64

Arcadia, page 36. Arcadia, page 51. Arcadia, page 78. Arcadia, page 120. William Demastes comments, ‘History for Stoppard is a series of repeated resemblances but never precise duplications, lacking the linear inevitability we like to believe in. To highlight the pattern of recurrence and similarity that Stoppard sees, he rearranges chronology throughout the trilogy’. – W. Demastes, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard, page 116. Shipwreck, page 43. Salvage, page 37.

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The first two plays involve a chronology which reverses at some points, thereby emphasising that events do not move in an orderly, inexorably onward fashion. In Voyage the first nine scenes all proceed chronologically, commencing in summer 1833 and continuing to autumn 1841.65 This was the point in the original Royal National Theatre production in London in 2002 when Act 1 ceased and there was an interval. Upon recommencement the action reverts to March 1834 and the scenes run forward chronologically again until autumn 1844. In the first act all the scenes take place at ‘Premukhino, the Bakunin estate, a hundred and fifty miles north-west of Moscow’.66 The remaining scenes all take place in Moscow and St. Petersburg, with the exception of the very last in which the location reverts to Premukhino. The scene at Premukhino in autumn 1841 also includes a brief flashback in which Tatiana recalls an incident with her, by then dead, sister, Liubov until ‘the past fades’67 and the scene resumes. In the second play, Shipwreck, there are two reversals of time in the order of the scenes. The play begins and ends in summer 1846 at ‘The garden of Sokolovo’68 whilst the activity in between occurs from 1846 to 1852. There is an additional reversal of time when a scene set in Paris in 1847 is first played and then reprised six scenes later after the intervening scenes have all occurred in 1848. It is as if history is following Natalie Herzen’s observation that ‘while real time goes galloping down the road in all directions, there are certain moments… situations…which keep having their turn again’.69 In the first part of the original September 1847 scene, according to Stoppard’s stage directions, ‘there are separate conversations going on’70 between the participants. Part way through the scene the directions change so that ‘the dialogues…are written to be ‘wasted’. They are spoken on top of each other, to make a continuum of word noise’.71 Just to underline the confusion some characters speak in English, some in German and some in French. When this scene is reprised the stage directions instruct that it is one of the competing conversations which is in this instance given 65

66 67 68 69 70 71

H. Sudkamp, however, identifies 15 instances of reversal of causality in Voyage: ‘The reversal of the Aristotleian cause-and-effect chain in Voyage negates, on the one hand, the dramatic unities of time, place and plot, and on the other the archetypical biographical plot of conventional biography, which views life as a chronological cause-and-effect succession’. – H. Sudkamp, Tom Stoppard’s Biographical Drama, page 249. Voyage, page 3. Voyage, page 51. Shipwreck, page 3. Shipwreck, page 4. Shipwreck, page 27 Shipwreck, page 37.

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prominence over the others: ‘The rest of the scene now repeats itself with the difference that instead of the general babel which ensued, the conversation between Belinsky and Turgenev is now “protected”, with the other conversations virtually mimed’.72 Principally, what drops out second time around is Bakunin and Sazonov’s discussion about why the Poles should revolt and how ‘everybody hates the Russians’,73 while what gets expanded is Belinsky’s condemnation of utopias and his announcement that, ‘In literature (Russia is) a great nation before we’re ready;’74 two of the great themes of the trilogy. Significantly, in terms of the argument about the determinism of history, Turgenev ends Belinsky’s speech by complaining, ‘You’re going round again’.75 One small scene, in which Michael Bakunin is in prison in Saxony and is being rehearsed by his lawyer in the argument for his defence against charges of fomenting revolution, sees history repeat itself. His lawyer, Otto, repeats his line of questioning at the end of the scene and to begin with Bakunin repeats his rehearsed answers. But, Bakunin makes a small addition in which he suggests that plotting a revolution in Dresden is ‘a necessary first step to put Europe in flames and thus set off a revolution in Russia’.76 The addition strengthens Bakunin’s credentials as a hot-head revolutionary whilst the repetition of the rehearsal serves as a small reminder that events do not always move forward in a deterministic way. There is one further scene in Shipwreck which has structural implications for the nature of how events occur in history. There is a scene in Paris in June 1849 in which Stoppard presents a tableau mimicking Manet’s painting, Dejeuner sur l’herbe. The stage directions state that, ‘The tableau is an overlapping of two locations, Natalie and George being in one, while Herzen, Emma and Turgenev are together elsewhere’.77 Rather, as in the final scene in Arcadia, Stoppard mixes two sets of action, although this time what separates the two distinct sets of action is location (the events are simultaneous) rather than a difference in time period. Apart from emphasising that Natalie Herzen and George Herwegh are having an affair, of which their two spouses – Alexander Herzen and Emma Herwegh – are at that point ignorant, the scene is a complete melange. As it commences it looks as if Turgenev is sketching Natalie in the other location when he is, in fact, sketching Emma in his own. The two 72 73 74 75 76 77

Shipwreck, page 57. Shipwreck, page 38. Shipwreck, page 57. Shipwreck, page 58. Shipwreck, page 73. Shipwreck, page 74.

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locations are separate at the start of the scene but by the end of the scene the characters have all met up together in the same place. Most complicated of all, although there are two separate conversations going on at the two separate locations at the start of the scene they are transposed into each other such that it seems at times as if all the characters are sharing the same conversation. This is not a deterministic turn of events but a haphazard one. The scene order in Salvage is conventionally chronological and leads towards the conclusion both of the plays and Herzen’s life. It commences in February 1853 and finishes in August 1868. But, even within that forwards chronology there are two scenes – the first and the last – in which Herzen has a dream. The first includes an array of revolutionaries – described as ‘émigrés, political refugees, from Germany, France, Poland, Italy and Hungary’78 – while the second comprises only Marx and Turgenev for his companions. The trilogy is a family saga which involves a multiplicity of scenes – 24 in Voyage, 21 in Shipwreck and 26 in Salvage – across a range of locations, both in Russia and across several European countries. Stoppard has given the trilogy a stochastic structure in which, as Appendix 3 illustrates, one scene is as long as 19 pages but the majority are considerably shorter, including three interscenes (of which two have no dialogue – the first is an image of Pushkin and a shot, representing the duel that killed him: the second is just an image of a windswept Turgenev and a ‘soundscape’) and one scene which involves just a single revolver shot, symbolising the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander. The scenes, short and long, suggest a varied speed of events – some fast some slow – which also hint at a denial of the concept of a deterministic history of continual progress. In The Invention of Love Stoppard employs the time shift that he employed in the last scene of Arcadia, when he mingled characters and events from two distinct periods; modern times and the early nineteenth century. But, in The Invention of Love he does so with a difference, thereby emphasising the duality that the classicist-poet character of Housman embodies, again allowing the vehicle to reflect the idea. In Arcadia the characters and events merely intermingled. Now he has the characters interact, chiefly the older and younger Housman. He gives effect to the shift by seamlessly sailing from the waters of the Styx in Elysium, in which aeh, the elder Housman, reminisces to the waters of the Isis in Oxford, where the younger Housman studies. The device of reminiscing with himself is introduced in a way that the audience should expect of Stoppard – by a joke: aeh comments to his younger self, Housman, ‘I’m 78

Salvage, page 4.

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not as young as I was. Whereas you, of course, are’.79 The primary effect of an older and younger Housman interacting is to reinforce the duality of personality which Stoppard wished to explore: the poet versus the classical scholar.

Reprising the Debate

The time shift allows Stoppard to repeat or reinforce the arguments. aeh tells his younger self that the only reason to read the ancient philosophers is to settle disputes about their texts. Housman is later able to repeat the advice to Pollard: ‘The only reason to consider what Plato meant’, he tells him, ‘is if it’s relevant to settling the text’.80 Stoppard also uses the shift to get Housman to repeat Jowett’s argument, about the perils inherent in the transcription of classical texts, to aeh, using Propertius as an example: ‘– if you can believe the manuscripts – which you can’t because they all come from the same one, and that was about as far removed from Propertius as we are from Alfred burning the cakes! He just scraped through to the invention of printing – a miracle!’.81 The time shift device also permits Stoppard to conduct a debate between the older and the younger Housman about some of the play’s central themes: the nature of love and the purpose of classical study. By way of example, for aeh classics is about textual criticism. He attacks the relativism of one classical scholar, Baehrens, who, ‘to defend the credit of a scribe he’ll impute any idiocy to a poet’.82 Instead, he makes his point about what he sees as the absolutism of scholarship by attacking another scholar, Palmer, whose ‘idea of editing a text is to change a letter or two and see what happens. If what happens can by the warmest goodwill be mistaken for sense and grammar he calls it an emendation’.83 Housman, by contrast, emphasises the poetry – how he catches his breath at its capacity to convey emotion, as with Catullus, and the lyrical impact of ‘Diffugere nives’. As ever, Stoppard cannot resist the lure of a joke and the ‘back to the future’ format provides plenty of scope, the best of which is aeh’s advice to Housman that, ‘Really there’s no need for you to read anything published in German in the last fifty years. Or the next fifty’.84 Likewise, Stoppard’s pun on

79 80 81 82 83 84

The Invention of Love, page 30. The Invention of Love, page 47. The Invention of Love, page 32. The Invention of Love, page 33. The Invention of Love, page 34. The Invention of Love, page 34.

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the classicists’ use of tenses: ‘The future perfect I have always regarded as an oxymoron’.85 The same use of time shift to aid and abet the argument appears in Travesties. It is a play in the form of a reminiscence by an old man, Carr, looking back at an episode in his life – the events surrounding his participation in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest and the ensuing court case with Joyce. But, Stoppard doesn’t just use the device as a simple retrospective or merely to demonstrate the fallibility of Carr’s memory (which gives him considerable licence). As the stage directions early on in the play explain: …the scene (and most of the play) is under the erratic control of Old Carr’s memory, which is not notably reliable, and also of his various prejudices and delusions. One result is that the story (like a toy train perhaps) occasionally jumps the rails and has to be returned at the point where it goes wild. This scene has several of these ‘time slips’, indicated by the repetitions of the exchange between BENNETT and CARR about the ‘newspapers and telegrams’. Later in the play there are similar cycles as Carr’s memory drops a scene and then picks it up again with a repeated line (e.g. CARR and CECILY in the Library).86 As Stoppard says, the time slips are well advertised in the dialogue. In the library scene between Cecily and Carr the audience on three occasions hears Cecily utter the words, ‘I don’t think you ought to talk to me like that during library hours’.87 There are multiple benefits of (and various theories about88) the time slip. Following the first time slip in the library it allows Stoppard to have Carr conduct his critique of Marxism. Following the second slip it allows Stoppard to set up the farce in which Cecily and Carr embrace behind Lenin and Nadya. In the first act there are multiple time slips in the scene with Tzara and Carr. In those instances one of the main effects of the device is to allow Stoppard to produce his short bursts of argumentative ping-pong, debating the purpose of art each time with slightly different aspects of the discussion. In the first instance they discuss whether art is just a matter of meaning or whether it implies some intrinsic skill. The second time around they debate the role of art in society. In practical terms, it gives Stoppard another opportunity to make the arguments without overpowering the audience with solid debate. 85 86 87 88

The Invention of Love, page 39. Travesties, page 11. Travesties, pages 47, 50 and 52. See J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 106.

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Narrative Recall

The shift in time also allows Stoppard to introduce narrative that enables the audience to catch up with the story. For example, Tzara explains, ‘The war caught Joyce and his wife in Trieste in Austro-Hungary. They got into Switzerland and settled in Zurich’.89 One sees the same application in The Invention of Love. It enables Stoppard to introduce Oscar Wilde, as the winner of last year’s Newdigate prize for poetry. Again, it permits Stoppard to provide some background about the Balliol scandal: ‘Pater used to have tea with (Wilde), in his rooms…the year before Wilde (the prize) was won by a Balliol man who sent poems to Pater in the manner of the early Greek lyrics treating of matters that get you sacked at Oxford, and was duly sacked by Dr Jowett…’.90 Stoppard can explain the narrative in Housman’s own life as the older Housman can inform the younger (and the audience) that he left Oxford and ‘became a clerk and lived in lodgings in Bayswater’.91 Pike’s verbal footnotes in Indian Ink/In the Native State perform much the same function, informing the audience of historical details such as the relevance of jc. Squire, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Dr Alfred Guppy and, perhaps more importantly, Emily Eden’s Up The Country. Rather ironically, Stoppard can use the narrative recall engendered by the time shift in Arcadia to produce the flawed hypothesis that Bernard postulates over the non-existent duel between Byron and Chater. Stoppard is, however, able to exploit it both ways because he uses the same opportunity afforded by the time shift to allow Valentine to explain the mathematical implications of Thomasina’s work to Hannah (and, thereby, the audience) and, most significantly for the narrative, the significance of the hermit’s voluminous algebra. Parsimony Oh, plenitude, plenitude! ‘Dead on time’,92 Charon utters, twice, in The Invention of Love. In that play, in Indian Ink, in On ‘Dover Beach’ and in Arcadia there are moments when Stoppard has characters from two different time periods on stage/radio contemporaneously. The Invention of Love elides between the Styx and the Isis. In two plays Stoppard has the same character interrogate himself. Confusion hath, indeed, made his masterpiece! 89 90 91 92

Travesties, page 24. The Invention of Love, page 35. The Invention of Love, page 45. The Invention of Love, page 29.

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Oh, pattern, pattern! Just like Carr’s memory lapses93 such temporal confusion has a purpose. Most importantly, it enables Stoppard to interweave the vehicle with the idea – in The Coast of Utopia he uses the time slips to undermine the Marxist idea that history is deterministic and in Arcadia they symbolize the bifurcation of Chaos Theory. It assists Stoppard in permitting him to revisit his arguments, as in Tzara and Carr’s discussion of art or aeh and Housman’s debate about the nature of classical scholarship. Stoppard also believes that it enables him to get at the emotions of his characters, which he most painfully does in Artist Descending a Staircase. Significantly, it provides Stoppard with a narrative luxury as it allows him to develop the plot in a more mysterious way. The time shift in Indian Ink both enhances the mystery of the nude painting and, eventually, allows it to be explained while in The Real Inspector Hound the re-run of the play-within-a-play results in the resolution of the whodunit. Oh, parsimony, parsimony! The fundamental benefit of the time shift, however, to a playwright who, by his own admission is a dualist, and for whom relativism is a key element in his dramatic world, is that it is a counterpoint to another perspective. It affords him, for example, the opportunity to address the ethics of empire from a pre- and post-colonial perspective in Indian Ink and, in Rock ‘N’ Roll, the effects of Communism from both sides of the Berlin Wall. 93

In Act 1 of Travesties part of the memory lapse routine occurs when Carr three times asks Tzara, ‘What brings you here?’, to which Tzara replies, ‘O, pleasure, pleasure!’. Travesties, pages 15, 19 and 24.

chapter 8

Coda …when I’ve got everything I can put it all down…so you can see where things cross and where they join up, so you can relate all the things to each other…so it might be possible to discover the grand design, find out if there is one, or if it’s all random – if there’s anything to it.1 moon, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon

∵ Every time I see Jumpers I can never entirely convince myself that the Coda is really necessary.2 Stoppard has by that stage made all the arguments and said all he really needs to say. So, by now, have I. To be sure, there is no grand design. But, it’s not all random, either. For Stoppard, ‘A play…is an attempt to convey an event’.3 Therefore, the overriding impression one gets as a member of a Stoppardian audience is one of plenitude. As Stoppard once said, ‘My intent was simply to entertain’.4 And, he certainly does so with farces like Dirty Linen, the murder/mystery of 1 Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, page 139. 2 Anthony Jenkins contends that the Coda, ‘is perfectly attuned to the play’s idiom…(and it)… directly articulates the philosophic and moral points at issue in George’s rambling paper and Dotty’s hysterical or angry outbursts’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, pages 95 and 197. John Fleming argues that, ‘The moral issues of the play are recapitulated in the coda’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 97. Paul Delaney adds, ‘The Coda serves as a reprise, a recapitulation, of the themes of the play proper’. – P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, page 54. Stoppard wrote two versions of the Coda – see J. Fleming, op cit., pages 97–99 for an assessment of the differences and for criticism of an interpretation of Archie’s last speech as uplifting rather than cynical. Jernigan contends that the Coda contains an, ‘important clue to the play’s meaning’, (DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 54) as its dream nature reveals how George sees his rehearsal of arguments previously in the play in the context of a performance. Katherine Kelly argues that the Coda is, ‘a formally distinct section of the play that summarizes with new emphasis elements of the first two acts … the dream sequence surrealistically distorts the characters and idioms we have already seen and heard’. – K. Kelly, Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play, pages 102–104, quoted in H. Bloom (ed), Tom Stoppard, page 65. 3 Stoppard, ‘The text’s the thing’. 4 Stoppard, in an interview with Murray Briggs, 29 September 1994. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_009

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The Real Inspector Hound and an inexhaustible array of comedy devices: puns, malapropisms, running gags, parody, satire, double entendres and cross purposes. All of which is wrapped in bursts of music hall, poetry and music – classical and modern – and, notwithstanding his own very distinctive style, is influenced by a wide range of theatrical and literary sources from Shakespeare to Beckett, via Joyce, Wilde, Shaw, Chekhov and sprinklings of many others. Never lost in all of the theatrical mayhem, however, are the ideas which are debated with a high degree of verbal dexterity. Stoppard refers to both Arcadia and Hapgood, for example, as, ‘a seasoning of chaos and a pinch of thermodynamics following a dash of quantum mechanics’.5 From the confusion of the theatrical high jinks and the crossfire of the intellectual mayhem there emerges a series of patterns at the heart of which is the principle of parsimony, or Occam’s razor; a mediaeval philosophy which argues that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. This approach is most easily defined by the hypothesis that the best explanation for any complicated situation or problem is usually the simplest. One of his plays, After Magritte, is a demonstration of Occam’s razor in action while others contain vignettes of construction or language that rely on the same principle of parsimony. The process of reduction is usually methodological, in the form of a concise speech, such as aeh’s storm in a teacup, or a sharp encounter, such as Ruth’s reported conversation with her son, Alastair. Sometimes, as in the symbolic scene of Alexander and Sacha cleaving the orchestra in two, the reduction is not verbal but an image. In one instance, Jumpers, Stoppard even achieves a process of metaphysical parsimony. But, the principle of parsimony does more than reduce the complicated issues of fate, the role of individuals in society and freedom of speech to their essence. It explains the way Stoppard thinks. His plays typically involve the union of a complex idea, such as the nature of consciousness in The Hard Problem, with an unlikely narrative device, hedge fund trading. There is only one way the fusion can work and that is arrived at by the application of Occam’s razor. As Stoppard explains with reference to Hapgood, ‘If you think about the coincidence of certain ideas about spycraft and certain ideas about physics, you know, it is a wonderful device that makes the whole play work at all’.6 Nevertheless, if the principle of parsimony is the pivotal pattern in Stoppard’s canon there are others which can be applied thematically to the Stoppardian plenitude: patterns of method – such as the stage debate and the matching of the vehicle to the idea; patterns of themes, ethics and duality; and, patterns of devices – the various aspects of Stoppard’s theatricality and the time-shift. 5 Stoppard, ‘The Matter of Metaphor’, page 2. 6 Stoppard, ‘A Play In Three Acts’, The Pennsylvania Gazette, April 1996, page 28.

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What distinguishes the drama in Stoppard’s plays is that it comes not from character but from debate, largely adhering to the Shavian concept of the drama of conflict. It is no surprise, therefore, that Stoppard attaches a premium to an actor’s diction. In response to the question, ‘What was the first thing I expected from an actor in my plays’, Stoppard replied, ‘Clarity of utterance…it really is the first thing I ask for’.7 Eventually, parsimony is applied to condense the arguments down to the core issue. The ideas are batted around in the form of intellectual ping-pong or skirmishes or run internally (as between the two Arnolds in On ‘Dover Beach’) while several traverse more than one play: the role of art in Artist Descending a Staircase and Travesties; the nature of morality in Jumpers, Darkside and The Hard Problem; freedom of speech in Night and Day, Cahoot’s Macbeth, The Invention of Love, Rock ‘N’ Roll and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour; and, the role of the individual in society in Professional Foul and the The Coast of Utopia trilogy. ‘The subject matter of the play exists before the story and it is always something abstract’,8 explains Stoppard. Each idea needs a narrative vehicle, as Hapgood demonstrates. ‘The story has much more to do with espionage than physics’,9 Stoppard asserts. What carries the idea may be a picture, as in Artist Descending a Staircase, or a man, as in The Invention of Love. Repeatedly – in The Real Thing, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, The Real Inspector Hound, Dalliance, Rough Crossing and Shakespeare in Love, for instance – it is a play-within-a-play, that most theatrical of devices. The narrative underlying The Hard Problem actually contains worked examples of Stoppard’s moral dilemmas – Hilary’s altruistic decisions to take the blame for Bo’s error and to give up her daughter for adoption. If parsimony is applied to Stoppard’s vast consideration of ethical issues they reduce to a fundamental contrast between that of absolutism and relativity. Arising from the absolutist position is the innate sense of right and wrong that George Moore cannot see in his microscope and the single, eternal idea that is the basis upon which the artist sets out his moral matrix. Stoppard’s moral debate runs from Another Moon Called Earth in 1967, via Jumpers and Darkside, right through to his latest play of 2015, The Hard Problem. The duality at the core of Stoppard’s ethics produces his most consistent metaphor: the nature of illusion and reality. It is at its most apparent in Hapgood, a play about spying, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound 7 Stoppard, ‘Pragmatic Theater’, page 1, New York review of Books. See also Stoppard in an interview with J. Fleming, ‘A Talk With Tom Stoppard’ in Theatre Insight (Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Texas at Austin), Issue 10, volume 5, number one (December 1993): on advice to actors he suggested, ‘What you do is you just speak clearly. Clarity of diction’. 8 Stoppard, ‘A Play In Three Acts’, The Pennsylvania Gazette, April 1996, page 30. 9 Stoppard, ‘The Matter of Metaphor’, page 2.

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and The Real Thing; all plays about acting. In truth, Stoppard sees duality everywhere, particularly in the nature of individuals, beginning as early as Enter a Free Man, a play he wrote in the 1960s, and culminating in his exploration of mind-body dualism in The Hard Problem. Duality gives Stoppard a salient feature of many of his plays, and possibly his most effective device: the time shift. In Arcadia the play bifurcates between the early nineteenth century and the modern day in the Croom family house, replicating the oscillations of chaos, part of the play’s subject matter. Less obviously, Stoppard employs time shift in Voyage and Shipwreck to underline the theme of historical determinism which recurs throughout The Coast of Utopia. Indian Ink and its radio counterpart, In the Native State, oscillate both period and location while The Invention of Love and On ‘Dover Beach’ see their respective poets, Housman and Arnold, interrogate themselves. The time shift, employed through Carr’s defective memory in Travesties or the structure of Artist Descending a Staircase, allows Stoppard to reinforce his arguments and add perspective, a key ingredient of relativism. Despite the obvious potpourri of entertainment there are even patterns within the theatricality. A Stoppard play invariably begins with an arresting scene – a couple seemingly uncovering an infidelity or an impenetrable exchange of briefcases or Joyce dictating Ulysses while Tzara is cutting up words, drawing them from a hat and making up sentences at random. But, pay close attention to that libretto – for, more often than not, it contains clues to the play’s explanation. The music, while varied in nature, is usually employed to emphasise the argument, as in The Real Thing, or reflect the theme, as in The Hard Problem. The comedy itself often reflects the subject matter, too – the farcical nature of both On the Razzle and Rough Crossing reflecting the topic of duality. Even a consideration of Stoppard’s literary influences reveals recurring patterns, such as the Beckettian contradiction or the Chekhovian duality of character. If the principle of parsimony were to be applied to this book, then it would be best expressed by Moon’s comment above, ironically not from one of Stoppard’s plays but from his single published novel. Like Stoppard’s humorous snake which eats its own tail the principle of parsimony reduces Stoppard’s works to an overall explanation of his craft – that of Occam’s razor itself.

…

You can’t go against the pattern.10 prisoner, The Gamblers

10

The Gamblers, page 22.

appendix 1

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead every exit being an entrance somewhere else.1 PLAYER, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

∵ Actions reported in italics refer to actions in which the participants were not on stage or where their actions were reported. 1

1 RosGuil, page 19. Tim Brassell argues that of nine significant encounters between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet Stoppard incorporates six in full, omits two and cuts one (Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii). Brassell argues in Tom Stoppard: An Assessment that: 1) ‘Primarily…Stoppard is interested in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as victims – victims of Hamlet the prince…and, in a wider sense, of Hamlet the play’. (page 47); 2) ‘Stoppard is simply omitting those sections which do not suit his purposes…This view is strongly reinforced by the evidence of the two scenes wholly omitted’. (page 44); and, 3) ‘It is…somewhat misconceived to judge the success of Stoppard’s play by the precision of its relationship with Hamlet – just as it would be to judge the success of his own later play Travesties by the completeness of its intermittent parody of The Importance of Being Earnest’. (pages 46–47) – T. Brassell, Tom Stoppard: An Assessment. This reflects the implications of Stoppard’s comment to Giles Gordon: ‘I see them much more clearly as a couple of bewildered innocents rather than a couple of henchmen, which is the usual way they are depicted in productions of Hamlet’. – ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 18. This interpretation is supported by Felicia Hardison Londre who comments, ‘What Stoppard did for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was to eliminate Hamlet’s suspicion that they are acting in league with Claudius’. – FH. Londre, Tom Stoppard, page 41. However, see John Fleming’s comments about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s culpability when on board the ship – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 62. John Wightman also argues that, ‘Mr Stoppard has to curtail (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s) biggest Shakespearian scene, because in it they appear as rather silly time-servers’.– J. Wightman, ‘Mini-­Hamlets in Limbo’, Encounter, 29 July 1967 in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 72. Robert Brustein tries to have it both ways, arguing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are ‘baffled characters’ and at the same time ‘cold, calculating opportunists who betray a friendship for the sake of preferment’. Brustein’s latter verdict explains, he argues, why Stoppard omits the recorder scene (where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are exposed as Claudius’ spies). See R. Brustein, The Third Theatre, pages 149–153. Stoppard explains why he omits the recorder scene as, ‘we are not sitting in © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_010

2 3 4 5

2 3 4 5

Act i Denmark is preparing for war against Fortinbras who bears a grudge against Hamlet’s dead father for killing his own father. Hamlet’s father has been murdered by Claudius who has hurridly married his mother, Gertrude. Hamlet, on leave from university in Wittenberg is troubled and has ‘that within which passeth show’.2 In his first soliloquy (‘O, that this too solid flesh would melt’3) Hamlet describes his world as an ‘unweeded garden that grows to seed’4 and laments his mother’s actions in marrying Claudius. Ophelia explains to her father, Polonius, that Hamlet ‘hath…of late made many tenders of his affection to me’.5 Commanded by his father’s ghost, who explains that Claudius murdered him, to revenge his death Hamlet cannot make up his mind to do so. Act ii, scene i Polonius sends Reynaldo to spy on Laertes

Hamlet Storyline

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

a classroom, we are sitting in a theatre, and we have been sitting here for rather a long time’. – see Stoppard, ‘Playwrights and Professors’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 October 1972, page 1219. Hamlet, Act i, scene ii, line 85. Hamlet, Act i, scene ii, line 129. Hamlet, Act i, scene ii, lines 135–136. Hamlet, Act i, scene iii, lines 99–100.

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

586 appendix 1

6 7 8 9 10

6 7 8 9 10

RosGuil, pages 9–10. RosGuil, page 26. Hamlet, Act ii, scene i, lines 76–99. RosGuil, page 26. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 3–4.

Pages 9–12 Ros and Guil meet the players Ros and Guil ‘were sent for…a royal summons’.6 The Tragedians arrive Page 26 Hamlet harasses Ophelia Stage direction: ‘Ophelia has been sewing… Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced…his stockings fouled, ungartered and downgyved to his ankle…takes her by the wrist and holds her hard…falls to such perusal of her face…That done he lets her go, and with his head over his shoulder turned, he goes out backwards…’.7 Pages 26–28 Claudius and Gertrude meet Ros and Guil Claudius: ‘The need we have to use you did provoke our hasty sending’.9

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Act ii, scene i, lines 74–99 Ophelia describes to Polonius how Hamlet encountered her: ‘as I was sewing in my closet, Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced…his stockings fouled, ungartered, downgyved to his ankle…took me by the wrist, and held me hard…He falls to such perusal of my face…That done, he lets me go; and with his head over his shoulder turned, he seemed to find his way without his eyes…’. 8

Hamlet Storyline

Act ii, scene ii, lines 1–39 Claudius and Gertrude meet Ros and Guil Claudius: ‘The need we have to use you did ­provoke Our hasty sending’.10

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

587

11 12 13 14 15 16

11 12 13 14 15 16

RosGuil, page 27. RosGuil, pages 27–28. RosGuil, page 28. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 14–18. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 29–32. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 35–36.

Claudius: ‘…vouchsafe your rest here in our court some little time, so that by your companies to draw (Hamlet) on to pleasures, and to gather so much from occasion as you may glean, whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus, that opened, lies within our remedy’.11 Guil: ‘We both obey and here give up ourselves in the full bent to lay our service freely at your feet, to be commanded’.12 Gertrude: ‘I beseech you instantly to visit my too much changed son’.13

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hamlet Storyline

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (cont.)

Guil: ‘We both obey and here give up ourselves, in the full bent, to lay our service freely at your feet, to be commanded’.15 Gertrude: ‘I beseech you instantly to visit my too-much-changed-son’.16

Claudius: ‘…vouchsafe your rest here in our court some little time; so by your companies to draw (Hamlet) on to pleasures, and to gather so much from occasion as you may glean, whether aught, to us unknown, afflicts him thus, that opened, lies within our remedy’.14

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

588 appendix 1

17 In Hamlet, Ros and Guil are offstage. 18 RosGuil, page 29. 19 Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 49. 20 Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 132. 21 RosGuil, page 36. 22 Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 171.

17 18 19 20 21 22

Act ii, scene ii, lines 40–58 Polonius thinks he has found ‘the very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy’19 – his ‘hot love’20 for Ophelia – and proposes to Claudius to bait a trap, using his daughter, to confirm his theory.

Pages 28–29 Polonius suggests a cause of Hamlet’s madness (Ros and Guil towards a downstage wing)17 Polonius: ‘I have found the very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy’.18 Page 36 Hamlet enters and exits briefly ‘Enter Hamlet behind, crossing the stage, reading a book…Hamlet goes’.21 Page 44 Hamlet feigns madness to Polonius (Ros and Guil occupy the two downstage corners looking upstage) Polonius: ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.…My lord, I will take my leave of you. Polonius: ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.…My honourable lord, I will most humbly take my leave of you.

Act ii, scene ii, lines 173–219 Hamlet feigns madness to Polonius.

Act ii, scene i, line 171 ‘Enter Hamlet reading a book’.22

Hamlet Storyline

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

589

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

RosGuil, page 44. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 205–217. RosGuil, page 44. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 224. RosGuil, page 48. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 242. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 265.

Hamlet: ‘You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal…’.24

Hamlet: ‘You cannot take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal…’.23 Pages 44–45 Ros and Guil meet Hamlet and the players arrive Hamlet greets Ros and Guil as, ‘My excellent good friends!’.25 Page 48 Ros reports that Hamlet is depressed and thinks, ‘Denmark’s a prison’.27

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Hamlet Storyline

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (cont.)

He tells them that ‘Denmark’s a prison’28 and asks, ‘What make you at Elsinore?’29

Hamlet greets Ros and Guil as ‘My excellent good friends’.26

Act ii, scene ii, lines 220–521 Ros and Guil meet Hamlet and the players arrive

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

590 appendix 1

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

RosGuil, page 48. RosGuil, page 48. RosGuil, page 46. RosGuil, page 46. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 269. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 275–276. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 286. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 307–308. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 353–356.

Hamlet: ‘The appurtenance of welcome is fashion and ceremony…You are welcome’.33 Pages 46–47 Polonius arrives

Page 46 Guil tells Hamlet, ‘There are the players’.32

Page 48 Ros: ‘Were you sent for?’,30 (Hamlet) says. Page 48 Ros: ‘My lord, we were sent for’.31

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hamlet Storyline

Polonius arrives.

Ros tells Hamlet that the players are ‘coming to offer you service’.37 Hamlet: ‘The appurtenance of welcome is fashion and ceremony…You are welcome’.38

‘Were you not sent for?’,34 Hamlet asks. Ros and Guil lie, saying their purpose is to visit Hamlet, but Hamlet realises that ‘the good king and queen have sent for you’,35 which Ros and Guil admit (‘My lord, we were sent for’36) and Hamlet foresees why.

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

591

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

RosGuil, page 53. RosGuil, page 53. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 510–511. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 514–515. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, line 523. Hamlet, Act ii, scene ii, lines 579–580. Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, line 2.

Pages 64–65 Claudius interviews Ros and Guil in the presence of Gertrude, Polonius and Ophelia

Pages 52–53 Hamlet asks the players, ‘Can you play the Murder of Gonzago?’39 tomorrow and to study a speech which he ‘would set down and insert in’t’.40

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Act ii, scene ii, lines 521–580 Hamlet’s second soliloquy (‘what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’43) in which he determines that, ‘the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’.44

Hamlet Storyline

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (cont.)

Claudius asks Ros and Guil why, ‘(Hamlet) puts on this confusion’45 but Ros and Guil admit they cannot ascertain the cause.

Act iii, scene i, lines 1–28 Claudius interviews Ros and Guil in the presence of Gertrude, Polonius and Ophelia

Hamlet asks the players, ‘Can you play the Murder of Gonzago?’41 tomorrow and to study a speech which he ‘would set down and insert in’t’.42

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

592 appendix 1

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

53

52

51

50

49

48

47

46

RosGuil, page 64. Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, line 10. RosGuil, page 66. RosGuil, page 67. RosGuil, page 70. Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, line 56. Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, lines 90–91. Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, lines 145–148.

Page 64 Gertrude asks, ‘Did he receive you well?’.46 They inform Claudius that Hamlet seemed happy at the arrival of the players Claudius and Polonius watch Hamlet’s encounter with Ophelia Page 66 ‘Hamlet enters upstage, and pauses, weighing up the pros and cons of making his quietus’.48 Page 67 Hamlet meets Ophelia and greets her with the words, ‘Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered’.49 Page 70 Hamlet berates Ophelia, saying, ‘I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad!…To a nunnery go’.50

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Act iii, scene i, lines 145–148 Hamlet berates Ophelia, saying, ‘I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad…To a nunnery go’.53

Act iii, scene i, lines 90–160 Hamlet meets Ophelia and greets her with the words, ‘Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered’.52

Act iii, scene i, lines 56–89 Hamlet’s third soliloquy (‘To be, or not to be’51).

Hamlet Storyline

Gertrude asks, ‘Did he receive you well?’.47 They inform Claudius that Hamlet seemed happy at the arrival of the players.

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

593

Act iii, scene i, lines 161–188 Claudius, watching with Polonius, realises that ‘Love! His affections do not that way tend’,56 and decides that Hamlet ‘shall with speed to England, for the demand of our neglected tribute’.57 Polonius proposes to repeat his spying trick on Hamlet, this time using Gertrude as bait. Act iii, scene ii, lines 1–41 Hamlet advises the player on how to ‘speak the speech’58 he has written

Page 70 Claudius, watching with Polonius, realises that ‘Love! His affections do not that way tend’,54 and decides that Hamlet ‘shall with speed to England…’.55

54 55 56 57 58 59

54 55 56 57 58 59

RosGuil, page 70. RosGuil, page 70. Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, line 161. Hamlet, Act iii, scene i, lines 168–169 Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, line 1. Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, line 46.

Pages 68–77 The dress rehearsal

Hamlet Storyline

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (cont.)

Act iii, scene ii, lines 41–47 Hamlet asks Polonius and Ros and Guil to bring the players in Hamlet asks Ros and Guil to ‘help to hasten them’.59 Act iii, scene ii, lines 87–254 The play Ros and Guil are in the audience during the play. At the start Ros confirms that the players are ready.

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

594 appendix 1

60 61 62 63

60 61 62 63w

Hamlet Storyline

The play within the play in which Hamlet’s inserted passage about the poison of a king and the subsequent union of the queen and the murderer is enacted. The Mousetrap is sprung and Claudius rises to cries of ‘Lights, lights, lights’61 and Polonius instructing ‘Give o’er the play’.62 Hamlet now knows that Claudius killed his father, but so, too, does Claudius now realise that Hamlet knows he is a murderer. Act iii, scene ii, lines 278–361 Ros and Guil convey Gertrude’s request to see Hamlet63

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

RosGuil, page 77. Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, line 254. Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, line 252. Michael Billington comments: ‘As many critics have pointed out, Stoppard…carefully omits the post-play scene in Act 3 Scene 2 when Guildenstern is sent to summon Hamlet to Gertrude’s closet. He omits it because it would overturn his vision of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as mystified, puzzled figures at the mercy of events. What is striking about Shakespeare’s scene is how purposeful Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are and how it is Hamlet who is distraught and manic’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 34.

Page 77 The dress rehearsal concludes with ‘Shouts… ‘The King rises!’…‘Give o’er the play!’…and cries for ‘Lights, lights, lights!”60

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

595

64 65 66 67 68 69

64 65 66 67 68 69

Hamlet Storyline

Guil tells Hamlet that Claudius is ‘marvellous distempered’64 and that Gertrude has sent them. Ros says that Hamlet’s behaviour has ‘struck (his mother) into amazement and admiration’65 (= worry and bewilderment) and that she ‘desires to speak with (him) in her closet’.66 Ros asks Hamlet ‘what is your cause of distemper’67 to which Hamlet replies ‘I lack advancement’.68 As the players enter Hamlet asks Guil to play on one of their pipes, accusing Guil of trying to play on him.69 Polonius enters and Hamlet affects madness.

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, line 283. Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, lines 305–306. Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, line 309. Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, line 314. Hamlet, Act iii, scene ii, line 317. This scene is not repeated in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead but on page 104 Guildenstern hears a sailor playing on a pipe which is recounted in the same style as Hamlet’s instructions.

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (cont.)

596 appendix 1

Hamlet Storyline

71 72 73 74 75

70

70 71 72 73 74 75

Act iii, scene iii, lines 1–27 Claudius announces the trip to England Claudius tells Ros and Guil ‘Therefore prepare you; I your commission will forthwith dispatch, and (Hamlet) to England shall along with you’.71

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

RosGuil, page 73. In Hamlet Claudius makes the decision to send Hamlet in Act iii, scene i, lines 168–169 and he tells Ros and Guil of his intention before Hamlet’s scene with Gertrude in her closet and not after, as RosGuil’s mime dress rehearsal on page 73 implies. Hamlet, Act iii, scene iii, lines 2–4. RosGuil, page 73. Hamlet, Act iii, scene iii, lines 74–75. Hamlet, Act iii, scene iv, lines 67–68. Hamlet, Act iii, scene iv, line 112.

Page 73 Claudius announces the trip to England The Player reports that ‘The King –…tormented by guilt –…decides to despatch his nephew to England – and entrusts the undertaking to two smiling accomplices – friends – courtiers – to two spies’.70 Act iii, scene iii, lines 36–98 The story of how Hamlet kills Polonius Hamlet passes up the chance to kill Claudius whilst he is praying, using the excuse that, ‘and so he goes to heaven; and so I am revenged’.73 Act iii, scene iv, lines 9–201 Page 73 In the mime dress rehearsal ‘an impassioned Hamlet berates his mother over her behaviour – ‘could you on this fair mountain leave to feed and batten on scene with the Queen…and a very stylized this moor?’74 – and kills the eavesdropping Polonius. reconstruction of a Polonius figure being Hamlet’s father’s ghost appears to ‘whet (Hamlet’s) stabbed behind the arras’.72 almost blunted purpose’.75

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

597

76 77 78 79 80

76 77 78 79 80

Hamlet, Act iii, scene iv, lines 203–205. RosGuil, page 78. RosGuil, page 78. Hamlet, Act iv, scene i, line 34. Hamlet, Act iv, scene i, lines 36–37.

Page 78 Claudius, in the presence of Gertrude, tells Ros and Guil to find Hamlet Claudius tells Ros and Guil that Hamlet ‘in madness hath Polonius slain’77 and tells them to, ‘Go seek him out…and bring the body into the chapel’.78

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hamlet Storyline

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (cont.)

Act iii, scene iv, lines 201–210 Hamlet confides in Gertrude Hamlet tells his mother that he must go to England with ‘my two school-fellows – whom I will trust as adders fanged’76 but that he will turn what they plot against him on themselves. Act iv, scene i, lines 1–4 Claudius asks Gertrude where Hamlet is Ros and Guil are asked to leave. Act iv, scene i, lines 32–45 Claudius, in the presence of Gertrude, tells Ros and Guil to find Hamlet Claudius tells Ros and Guil that Hamlet ‘in madness hath Polonius slain’79 and tells them to, ‘Go seek him out…and bring the body into the chapel’.80

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

598 appendix 1

86

81 82 83 84 85

81 82 83 84 85 86

Hamlet Storyline

Act iv, scene ii, line 1 Hamlet hides Polonius’ body Hamlet, referring to Polonius’ body: ‘Safely stowed’.82 Act iv, scene ii, lines 3–27 Ros and Guil find Hamlet and ask for Polonius’ body Ros asks, ‘What have you done…with the dead body?’.84 Hamlet calls Ros a ‘sponge’. Act iv, scene iii, lines 11–56 Claudius sends Hamlet and Ros and Guil to England Ros tells Claudius that he cannot find the body but that Hamlet is under guard. Guil brings Hamlet in. Claudius tells Hamlet to prepare to go to England. Claudius tells Ros and Guil to follow Hamlet and that ‘everything is sealed and done’.86

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

RosGuil, page 81. Hamlet, Act iv, scene ii, line 1. RosGuil, page 82. Hamlet, Act iv, scene ii, line 4. RosGuil, page 84. In Hamlet Claudius and Hamlet both stay on stage and Claudius asks Hamlet where he has put Polonius’ body and, then, tells him to prepare to go to England. Hamlet, Act iv, scene iii, line 55.

Page 81 Hamlet hides Polonius’ body ‘Hamlet enters…dragging Polonius’ body.… Hamlet leaves, dragging the body’.81 Pages 82–83 Ros and Guil find Hamlet and ask for Polonius’ body Ros asks, ‘What have you done…with the dead body?’.83 Hamlet calls Ros a ‘sponge’. Pages 83–84 Claudius enquires as to Polonius’ body and demands it Ros tells Claudius that he cannot find the body but that Hamlet is under guard. Guil brings Hamlet in. Stage direction: ‘Hamlet, escorted, is marched in just as Claudius leaves’.85

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

599

87 88 89 90 91

87 88 89 90 91

RosGuil, page 74. Hamlet, Act iv, scene iii, line 64. RosGuil, page 87. Hamlet, Act iv, scene iv, line 32. Hamlet, Act iv, scene iv, lines 65–66.

Page 74 Claudius gives Ros and Guil a letter for England The Player reports that Claudius gives (Ros and Guil) ‘a letter to present to the English court’.87 Pages 85–86 Hamlet, Ros and Guil encounter Fortinbras’ Soldier The soldier tells Hamlet that Fortinbras marches on Poland. Page 87 Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy ‘Guil: What’s he doing? Ros: Talking. Guil: To himself? Ros: Yes’.89

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Act iv, scene iv, lines 32–66 Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy (‘How all occasions do inform against me’90) in which he finally resolves to act – ‘from this time forth my thoughts be bloody or nothing worth’.91

Act iv, scene iii, lines 56–67 Alone, Claudius admits that his letters to England demand ‘the present death of Hamlet’.88

Hamlet Storyline

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (cont.)

Act iv, scene iv, lines 8–31 Hamlet, Ros and Guil encounter Fortinbras’ Captain The Captain tells Hamlet that Fortinbras marches on Poland.

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

600 appendix 1

92 93 94 95

92 93 94 95

RosGuil, page 74. RosGuil, page 103. Hamlet, Act v, scene ii, line 56. Hamlet, Act v, scene ii, line 57.

‘Hamlet approaches the sleeping Ros and Guil. He extracts the letter…Hamlet emerges again with a letter, and replaces it…’.93

Page 74 Ros and Guil and Hamlet depart for England The Player reports: ‘And so they depart – on board ship –’92 Page 103 Hamlet switches Claudius’ letter

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Act iv, scene v, lines 1–107 Ophelia goes mad. Act iv, scene v, lines 107–213 Laertes returns and sees his sister’s madness and is informed by Claudius of the manner of his father’s death.

Hamlet Storyline

Act v, scene ii, lines 12–57 Hamlet tells Horatio how he switched Claudius’ letter and sent Ros and Guil to their deaths Hamlet reports how he stole Claudius’ letter to England and found it commanded his death. Hamlet rewrote it asking that its bearers (Ros and Guil) be put to death. Horatio concludes, ‘So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to’t’94 to which Hamlet replies, ‘they did make love to this employment’.95

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

601

96 97 98 99

96 97w 98 99

RosGuil, page 109. RosGuil, page 110. Hamlet, Act iv, scene vi, lines 23–24. RosGuil, page 74.

‘The pirates attack’96 ‘Guil: …Where is (Hamlet)? Player: Gone’.97 Page 74 Ros and Guil arrive in England The Player reports: ‘– and they arrive…and disembark – and present themselves before the English King –’99

Pages 109–110 The attack by pirates

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Act iv, scene vii The sailors deliver letters from Hamlet to Claudius, thereby alerting the king of his survival. Laertes agrees to Claudius’ proposal that he fights a fencing match with Hamlet using an unblunted sword to kill him. For good measure Laertes suggests poisoning the sword’s tip and Claudius also agrees to procure a poisoned drink for Hamlet. Gertrude brings news of Ophelia’s death.

Hamlet Storyline

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (cont.)

Act iv, scene vi, lines 5–30 Sailors arrive with a letter from Hamlet to Horatio Hamlet reports to Horatio that he was captured by pirates and is returning. But, ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold their course for England’.98

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

602 appendix 1

100 RosGuil, page 76. 101 RosGuil, page 117. 102 Hamlet, Act v, scene ii, line 353.

100101102w

Page 76 The death of Ros and Guil in England The mime show rehearsal shows that ‘The Spies die at some length, rather well’.100 Page 117 The Ambassador from England arrives The Ambassador reports that, ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’.101

Characters from Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Act v, scene ii, lines 343–385 Fortinbras enters and claims the throne of Denmark with Hamlet’s blessing.

Act v, scenes i–ii Hamlet returns and witnesses Ophelia’s funeral. Hamlet and Laertes fight a duel in which both are killed, as are Claudius and Gertrude as onlookers.

Hamlet Storyline

Act v, scene ii, lines 343–353 The Ambassador from England arrives The Ambassador reports that ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’.102

Ros and Guil as characters in Hamlet

Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

603

Appendix 2

Indian Ink – Timeline

Act 1

Page

Location

1 1 2 4 5 5 8 8 9 10 13 15 16 18 24 26 31 33 40 41–46

India 1930s India 1930s England India 1930s London India 1930s England India 1930s England India 1930s (Anish England 1980s present from p 12) England India 1930s England India 1930s England India 1930s (Pike enters India 1980s p 30) India 1980s India 1930s England India 1930s

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_011

605

Appendix 2



Act 2

Page

Location

47 48 51 51 52 57 60 63 66 69 75 76 79 80 82

India 1930s India 1980s India 1930s (Pike present dressed as in India 1980s) India 1980s India 1930s India 1980s India 1930s India 1980s England India 1930s India 1980s India 1930s England India 1930s India 1930s

Appendix 3

The Coast of Utopia – Timeline

Voyage

Period

Year

Location

Page

Summer Spring Autumn Spring August Autumn January Spring Autumn (incl. flashback) March March March Summer Spring November December January February March April June July Spring Autumn

1833 1835 1835 1836 1836 1836 1837 1838 1841 1834 1835 1835 1835 1836 1836 1836 1837 1837 1838 1838 1840 1840 1843 1844

Premukhino Premukhino Premukhino Premukhino Premukhino Premukhino Premukhino Premukhino Premukhino Moscow zoo Mrs Beyer’s residence Mrs Beyer’s residence Telescope office Telescope office Inter-scene – at the piano Belinsky’s room Inter-scene – Pushkin duel Belinsky’s room Belinsky’s room Belinsky’s room On a river boat St. Petersburg street Party Premukhino

3 10 15 25 28 31 42 45 49 53 64 75 78 83 88 90 95 95 98 99 102 103 106 111

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_012

607

Appendix 3

Shipwreck Period

Year

Location

Page

Summer July July September March 15 May June 21 June 27 June September January April May June September November December January November August Summer

1846 1847 1847 1847 1848 1848 1848 1848 1848 1847 1849 1849 1849 1849 1850 1850 1850 1851 1851 1852 1846

Sokolovo Salzbrunn Paris, Place de la Concorde Paris Paris Paris, Place de la Concorde Paris, near Arc de Triomphe Paris Paris, street Paris Paris1 Paris2 Saxony, prison Paris – two locations simultaneously Nice Nice Nice Nice Nice Cross-Channel steamer Sokolovo

3 22 25 26 40 44 49 52 54 56 59 66 71 73 81 86 86 88 93 99 104

1 2

1 Not specified, but assumed to be Paris. 2 Not specified, but assumed to be Paris.

608

Appendix 3

Salvage

Period

Year

Location

Page

February February May September November January 31 December March April June June January May June July August August March December June August September October April May August

1853 1853 1853 1853 1853 1854 1854 1855 1856 1856 1856 1857 1859 1859 1859 1860 1860 1861 1861 1862 1862 1864 1864 1866 1866 1868

London + dream London London London London London London London London London London London London London London Inter-scene – Blackgang Chine, Isle of Wight Ventnor, Isle of Wight London London London London London London A revolver shot Geneva Chateau near Geneva + dream

3 19 19 21 23 25 30 39 40 51 52 55 57 70 72 82 82 88 89 92 104 105 106 108 108 110

Bibliography

Plays by Stoppard

A Separate Peace. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 3, Faber and Faber Limited 1998. After Magritte. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 1, Faber and Faber Limited 1996. Albert’s Bridge. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 2, Faber and Faber Limited 1996. Another Moon Called Earth. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 3, Faber and Faber Limited 1998. Arcadia. Faber and Faber Limited 2000. Artist Descending a Staircase. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 2, Faber and Faber Limited 1996. Darkside. Faber and Faber Limited 2013. Dirty Linen. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 1, Faber and Faber Limited 1996. Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 1, Faber and Faber Limited 1996. Enter a Free Man. Samuel French 1996. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Profes­sional Foul, Faber and Faber Limited 1978. Hapgood. Samuel French 1988. Hapgood. Faber and Faber Limited 2015. If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 2, Faber and Faber Limited 1996. In the Native State. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 2, Faber and Faber Limited 1996. Indian Ink. Faber and Faber Limited, 1995. Jumpers. Faber and Faber Limited, 1979. ‘M’ is for Moon Among Other Things. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 2, Faber and Faber Limited 1996. Neutral Ground. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 3, Faber and Faber Limited 1998. New-Found-Land. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 1, Faber and Faber Limited 1996. Night and Day. Samuel French 1979. On ‘Dover Beach’. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 2, Faber and Faber Limited 2012. Professional Foul. in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Professional Foul, Faber and Faber Limited 1978. Rock ‘N’ Roll. Faber and Faber Limited 2006. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Faber and Faber Limited 2000. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Samuel French 1976. Salvage. Faber and Faber Limited 2002. Shipwreck. Faber and Faber Limited 2002. Squaring the Circle. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 3, Faber and Faber Limited 1998. Teeth. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 3, Faber and Faber Limited 1998. The Boundary. Samuel French Ltd 1991 (by Tom Stoppard and Clive Exton). The Dissolution of Dominic Boot. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 2, Faber and Faber Limited 1996.

610

Bibliography

The Dog It Was That Died. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 2, Faber and Faber Limited 1996. The Fifteen Minute Hamlet. Samuel French 1976. The Hard Problem. Faber and Faber Limited 2015. The Invention of Love. Faber and Faber Limited 1997. The Real Inspector Hound. Faber and Faber Limited 1987. The Real Thing. Samuel French 1986. Travesties 1993 version. Faber and Faber Limited. Travesties 1975 version. Faber and Faber Limited 1986. Voyage. Faber and Faber Limited 2002. Where Are They Now?. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 2, Faber and Faber Limited 1996.



Adaptations and Translations By Stoppard

Dalliance. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 4, Faber and Faber Limited 1999. Heroes. Faber and Faber Limited 2005. Ivanov. Faber and Faber Limited 2008. Largo Desolato. Faber and Faber Limited 1987. On the Razzle. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 4, Faber and Faber Limited 1999. Pirandello’s Henry iv. Faber and Faber Limited 2004. Rough Crossing. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 4, Faber and Faber Limited 1999. Tango. Jonathan Cape 1968. The Cherry Orchard. Faber and Faber Limited 2009. The Seagull. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 4, Faber and Faber Limited 1999. Undiscovered Country. in Tom Stoppard: Plays 4, Faber and Faber Limited 1999.



Film Screenplays by Stoppard

Anna Karenina. Empire of the Sun. Enigma. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Faber and Faber Limited 1991. Shakespeare in Love. Faber and Faber Limited 2008 (by Marc Norman and Tom Stop­pard).



Television Adaptations by Stoppard

Parade’s End.

Bibliography



611

Libretti by Stoppard

The Love for Three Oranges. Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Limited 1983. The Merry Widow. linking narrative for the Glyndebourne Opera’s production of a concert version.



Book by Stoppard

Lord Malquist and Mr Moon. Faber and Faber Limited 1980.



Short Stories by Stoppard

Life, Times: Fragments. Reunion. The Story.



Autograph Manuscript

Arcadia add Ms.89037/1/4 UNBOUND 5028A, April 2, April 7 1992. The British Library.



Material from the Tom Stoppard Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin (all works by Stoppard unless otherwise stated)

‘A Play In Three Acts’. The Pennsylvania Gazette, April 1996 – Container 122.12. Doctor Masopust, I Presume. Episode 1 by Gordon M. Williams and Tom Stoppard – Container 80.11. Funny Man – Container 67.4. Galileo. A copy of what is described as a ‘This script of ‘Galileo’ has been prepared for performance in the London Planetarium’.1 – Container 43.3. Hapgood Crib – Container 13.6. Higg and Cogg – Container 13.11. How Sir Dudley Lost The Empire – Container 67.6. I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby – Container 14.10. 1 Other versions, described as ‘A screenplay’, are also amongst the papers.

612

Bibliography

Interview by Murray Briggs. 29 September 1994 – Container 122.11. ‘Playing With Science’. article – Container 66.3. ‘Pragmatic Theatre’. article for the New York Review of Books – Container 121.23. Pursuit of Happiness – Container 12.10. ‘Reflections on Ernest Hemingway’. article – Container 121.25. Shakespeare in Love screenplay. second draft by Marc Norman – Container 50.7. The Gamblers – Container 10.13. ‘The Matter of Metaphor’. draft for the programme notes of the Lincoln Center production of Hapgood – Container 60.7. Three Men In A Boat. Filming Script – Container 119.7. ‘To Film Or Not to Film’. draft of an article for Premiere Magazine – Container 122.1. ‘Unidentified article re. Stoppard’s family’ – Container 122.5. ‘Unidentified lecture re. Rough Crossing and translation’ – Container 122.3.



Material from the Gordon Dickerson Collection of Modern British Playwrights at the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin (all works by Stoppard unless otherwise stated)

‘Critic and his credo’. Western Daily Press, 5 January 1961 – Container 18.5. ‘Freedom but thousands are still captive’. article in the Daily Mail, 12 February 1986 – Container 18.6. The Explorers. a television play – Container 8.7. The House of Bernarda Alba. adaptation by Stoppard – Container 9.2. ‘The text’s the thing’. article in Weekend Telegraph, 23 April 1988 – Container 18.6.



Prompt ‘Bible’ Scripts and Production Notes

The Coast of Utopia. the Royal National Theatre, London 2002 – RNT/SM/1/481c; RNT/ SM/1/482b; RNT/SM/1/483. Travesties. Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Aldwych Theatre, London 1974 in the Collections of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.



Articles by Stoppard

‘But For The Middle Classes’. Review of Enemies of Society by Paul Johnson, Times Literary Supplement 3 June 1977, page 677. ‘Chekhov – An Impartial Witness’. in the programme notes to the London production of Ivanov, August 2008.

Bibliography

613

‘First Person’. in the programme notes of the Royal National Theatre production of The Hard Problem 2015. ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’, International Shakespeare Association Occasional Paper no. 2 (University Press, Oxford: International Shakespeare Association, 1982). ‘Lenin, Joyce, Tzara and Henry Carr’. in the programme notes of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Travesties at the Aldwych Theatre, London 1974. ‘Leveson’s legal backstop is aimed at rogue press – not a free press’. The Independent, 17 March 2013. ‘Playwrights and Professors’. Times Literary Supplement, 13 October 1972. ‘Something to Declare’ (25 February 1968). in Hunter, J, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work. ‘The Event And The Text’. in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation.



Correspondence to/from Stoppard

Dawkins. R letter to Stoppard – 2006. Published in the programme of the Royal National Theatre production of The Hard Problem 2015. Leroi, AM letter to Stoppard. Published (in abridged form) in the programme of the Royal National Theatre production of The Hard Problem 2015. Stoppard letter to Carson, R, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 5 May 1983. Stoppard letter to Gordon Davidson 17 April 1986. in the archive at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin (quoted in Fleming, J – Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 169). Stoppard letter to Jon Bradshaw 8 December 1976. in the archive at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin (quoted in Fleming, J – Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, page 267). Stoppard letter to Richard Dawkins.1 – 2006. Published in the programme of the Royal National Theatre production of The Hard Problem 2015. Stoppard letter to Richard Dawkins.2 – 2006. Published in the programme of the Royal National Theatre production of The Hard Problem 2015.



Interviews with Stoppard

Allen, P. ‘Third Ear’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Berkvist, R. ‘This Time, Tom Stoppard Plays It (Almost) Straight’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Biggins, J. ‘Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in Conversation’, 17 December 2011.

614

Bibliography

Billington, M. ‘Stoppard’s Secret Agent’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Bolton, R. Feedback, BBC Radio 4, 5 January 2016. Bradshaw, J. New York magazine, 10 January 1977. Bradshaw, J. ‘Tom Stoppard, Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Bragg, M. ‘The South Bank Show’ in P. Delaney (ed) Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Bragg, M. ‘The South Bank Show’, 16 March 2008. Buck, JJ. ‘Tom Stoppard: Kind Heart and Prickly Mind’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Croggon, A. interview at The Wheeler Centre. Dodd, J. ‘Success Is the Only Unusual Thing about Mr. Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Eichelbaum, S. ‘Call Me the Thinking Man’s Farceur’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Eichelbaum, S. ‘So Often Produced, He Ranks with Shaw’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Farndale, N. The Telegraph, 19 January 2010. Farnsworth, E. March 10 1999. Fleming, J. ‘A Talk With Tom Stoppard’ in Theatre Insight (Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Texas at Austin), Issue 10, volume 5, number one (December 1993). Firth, B. ‘Interview with Brian Firth’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday. Glendenning, V. Intelligent Life magazine, September/October 2012. Gollob, D and Roper, D. ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Gordon, G. ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Goreau, A. ‘Is The Real Inspector Hound a Shaggy Dog Story?’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Grant, S. Time Out. Guppy, S. ‘Tom Stoppard, The Art of Theater VII’, in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Gussow, M. Conversations with Stoppard, Nick Hern Books 1995. Gussow, M. ‘Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.’ in Gussow, M, Conversations with Stoppard. Gussow, M. ‘I retain (sic) a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India’ in Gussow, M, Conversations with Stoppard. Gussow, M. ‘Seriousness compromised by my frivolity or…frivolity redeemed by my seriousness’ in Gussow, M, Conversations with Stoppard. Gussow, M. ‘Stoppard Refutes Himself, Endlessly’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation.

Bibliography

615

Gussow, M. ‘The dissident is a discordant note in a highly orchestrated society’ in Gussow, M, Conversations with Stoppard. Gussow, M. ‘The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through’ in Gussow, M, Conversations with Stoppard. Gussow, M. ‘What is your greatest superstition?’ ‘It’s bad luck to talk about it’ in ­Gussow, M, Conversations with Stoppard. Gussow, M. ‘Writing Dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself’ in Gussow, M, Conversations with Stoppard. Hardin, NS. ‘An Interview with Tom Stoppard’, Contemporary Literature, xxii (1981) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Hawkes, N. ‘Plotting The Course of a Playwright’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Hayman, R. BBC Radio 3, quoted in Hayman, R, Tom Stoppard. Hayman, R. ‘Double Acts: Tom Stoppard and Peter Wood’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Hayman, R. ‘First Interview’, 12 June 1974 in Hayman, R – Tom Stoppard, 4th Edition, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd 1982. Hayman, R. in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Hayman, R. ‘Second Interview’ 20 August 1974 in Hayman, R – Tom Stoppard, 4th Edition, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd 1982. Henninger, D. ‘Tom Stoppard and the Politics of Morality’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Hebert, H. ‘A Playwright in Undiscovered Country’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Hill, T. ‘The poet punts down the Styx’, Daily Telegraph, 4 October 1997. Hudson, R, Itzin, C and Trussler, S. ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’, Theatre Quarterly, IV, 14 (May/July 1974) in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Hunter, J. ‘May 2003’ in Hunter, J, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work. Hytner, N. The Royal National Theatre, 6 February 2015. Jaggi, M. ‘You can’t help being what you write’, The Guardian, 6 September 2008. Jury, L. ‘Sir Tom Stoppard: Newspapers kidnapping sacred idea of press freedom’ in The London Evening Standard , 18 March 2014. Kelly, K and Demastes, W. ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994. Kerensky, O. ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Lawson, M. ‘Front Row’, BBC Radio 4, 19 August 2013. Leveaux, D and Davies, L. ‘The Real Thing’ in programme notes to the 1999 Donmar Warehouse production.

616

Bibliography

Lewis, P. ‘Quantum Stoppard’, Observer Magazine, 6 March 1988. Louis, P. ‘See The Father. See The Baby.’, New York Times, 24 March 1968, D3. Macaulay, A. ‘The Man Who Was Two Men’, Financial Times, 31 October 1998. Martin, J. ‘Tom Stoppard and David Parfitt on Parade’s End’, MIPBlog, 5 October 2011. Maves, CE. ‘A Playwright on the Side of Rationality’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Maychick, D. ‘Stoppard Ascending’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Mayne, R. ‘Arts Commentary’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. McCulloch, J. ‘Dialogue with Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Con­versation. McEnroe, C. ‘Tom Stoppard in Conversation with Colin McEnroe’, 8 September 2014. Mortimer, W. programme of 2015 production of Hapgood, Hampstead Theatre. Mustich, J. Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009. Nathan, D. ‘In a Country Garden (If It Is a Garden)’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. O’Connor, G. ‘Two Men on an Ocean Wave’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. O’Connor, T. ‘Welcome to the World of Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Reynolds, G. ‘Tom’s Sound Affects’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Rose, C. interview with Stoppard, 2007. Schiff, S. ‘Full Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Sierz, A. ‘Sir Tom in the doghouse’, The Daily Telegraph, 10 October 2005. Smith, ACH. Flourish, Issue One 1974 in the Collections of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Smith, S. ‘Script Jockey: The Flickering Images of Theatre’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Stoppard. interview in the Lincoln Center Theater’s Platform Series 14 February 2007. Taylor, JR. ‘Our Changing Theatre, No. 3: Changes in Writing’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Tusa, J. BBC Radio 2002 in Hunter, J, About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work. Twisk, R. ‘Stoppard Basks in a Late Indian Summer’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Upton, A. Artworks 24 February 2008. Watts, J. The Guardian 21 March 1973 in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Watts, J. ‘Tom Stoppard’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Welsh, AM. ‘Stoppard in Love’, Copley News Service, 14 February 2000: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 09 Mar. 2015.

Bibliography

617

Wetzsteon, R. ‘Tom Stoppard Eats Steak Tartare With Chocolate Sauce’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation.



Articles about Stoppard or his Works

Alwes, D. ‘“Oh Phooey to Death!”: Boethian Consolation in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia’, Papers in Language And Literature, 36, 4 (2000). Ayer, AJ. ‘Love Among the Logical Positivists’, Sunday Times, 9 April 1972. Bailey, J. ‘Jumpers by Tom Stoppard: The Ironist as Theistic Apologist’, Michigan Academician, 11 (Winter 1979). Berlin, N. ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Theatre of Criticism’, Modern Drama, XVI (Dec. 1973) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Billington, M. ‘Prima Le Parole?’, Glyndebourne Festival Opera programme 1993. Billington, M. ‘Tom Stoppard: playwright of ideas delivers a new Problem’, The Guardian, 17 January 2015. Branagh, K. interview with Grandage, M in the programme notes of the London production of Ivanov, 2008. Brater, E. ‘Tom Stoppard’s Brit/lit/crit’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Bull, J. ‘Tom Stoppard and politics’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Cavendish, D. Interview with Josie Lawrence, Daily Telegraph, 26 March 2008. Cavendish, D. The Telegraph, 28 January 2015. Corballis, R. ‘Tom Stoppard’s Children’ in J. Harty III (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook. Coveney, M. ‘Stoppard’s parting gift to Nicholas Hytner is unashamedly clever’ in What’s On Stage, 29 January 2015. Coveney, M. The Observer, 18 April 1993. Crump, GB. ‘The Universe as Murder Mystery: Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers’ in J. Harty III (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook. Davis, T and Womack, K. ‘Reading (and Writing) the Ethics of Authorship: Shakespeare in Love as Postmodern Metanarrative’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday. Dean, M. ‘Stoppard’s Shakespeare: Collaboration and Revision’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday. Demastes, William W (1994). ‘Re-Inspecting the Crack in the Chimney: Chaos Theory from Ibsen to Stoppard’ in New Theatre Quarterly, 10, number 39, pp 242– 254. doi:10.1017/S0266464X00000543.

618

Bibliography

Duncan, J. ‘Godot Comes’, Ariel, xii, 4 (1981) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Durham, W. ‘The Structure And Function of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties’ in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook. Edwards, P. ‘Science in Hapgood and Arcadia’ in K. Kelly (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Egan, R. ‘A Thin Beam of Light; The Purpose of Playing in R. & G. are Dead’, [Education] Theatre Journal, 31 (1979) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Glover, M. ‘Theatre: Housman: a very private lad’, The Independent 27 September 1997. Gold, M. ‘Who are the Dadas in Travesties?’, Modern Drama, XXI (1978) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Gruber, W. ‘Wheels Within Wheels’, Comparative Drama, XV (1981–1982) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Gruber, W. ‘Wheels within wheels, etcetera: Artistic Design in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ in J. Harty III (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook. Harty, J. ‘Stoppard’s Lord Malquist and Mr Moon: The Beginning’ in J. Harty III (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook. Hayman, R. ‘Profile 9: Tom Stoppard’ in New Review, 1, December 1974. Hendrickson, T. ‘Insecurity, Frustration and Disgust in Tom Stoppard’s Fiction’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday. Huston, JD. ‘“Misreading” Hamlet: Problems of Perspective in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ in J. Harty III (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook. James, C. ‘Tom Stoppard: Count Zero Splits the Infinitive’ in Encounter, November 1975. Kelly, K. ‘Tom Stoppard’s Dramatic Debates: The Case of Night and Day’. Kent, A. ‘You Get What You Interrogate For’ in the programme to the 2015 production of Hapgood at the Hampstead Theatre. Knapp, J. ‘Stoppard’s Arcadia: “This is not Science; this is story-telling”’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday. Levenson, J. ‘Stoppard’s Shakespeare: textual re-visions’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Levenson, J. ‘Views from a Revolving Door: Tom Stoppard to Date’, Queen’s Quarterly, 78 (1971) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Macaulay, A. ‘Tom Stoppard, A.E. Housman, and the Classics’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday. Mackean, I. ‘Sir Tom Stoppard. In Search of Reality’.

Bibliography

619

Malvern, J. ‘Stoppard: They don’t get my jokes any more’ in The Times, 9 February 2015. Marowitz, C. ‘Tom Stoppard – The Theatre’s Intellectual P.T. Barnum’, New York Times, 19 October 1975, II. Mason, J. ‘Footprints to the Moon: Detectives as Suspects in Hound and Magritte’ in J. Harty III (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook. Morwood, J. ‘Jumpers revisited’, Agenda, 18–19 (Winter/Spring, 1981) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Muza, A. ‘The Sound of Distant Thunder: The Chekhovian Subtext in The Coast of Utopia’. Nadel, I. ‘Chekhov’s Stoppard’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday. Nathan, J. ‘Tom Stoppard: The modern Shakespeare returns to the National for a longawaited comeback’, The Independent, 15 January 2015. Niederhoff, B. ‘Fortuitous Wit: Dialogue and Epistemology in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia’, Connotations 11.1 (2001/2002): 42–59. Price, S. ‘“The Illusion of Proprietorship”; Tom Stoppard’s Parade’s End’, in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday. Probst, M. ‘The Inauthentic Translations in The Invention of Love’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday. Rabinowitz, P J. ‘Narrative difficulties in Tom Stoppard’s Lord Malquist and Mr Moon’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Rehman, S. ‘Wittgenstein’s Language-games, Stoppard’s Building-blocks and contextbased learning in a corpus’. Reynolds, N. Daily Telegraph 3 August 2002. Robinson, GS. ‘Nothing Left But Parody: Friedrich Durrenmatt and Tom Stoppard’ in J. Harty III (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook. Robinson, GS. ‘Plays Without Plot: The Theatre of Tom Stoppard’, Educational Theatre Journal 29, 1977. Rod, D. ‘Carr’s View of Art and Politics in Travesties’, Modern Drama, XXVI (1983) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Rodway, A. ‘Stripping Off’ London Magazine, 16 (1976) in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Ryan, C. ‘Translating The Invention of Love: The Journey From Page to Stage for Tom Stoppard’s latest Play’ in Journal of Modern Literature 24, 2 (Winter 2000 – 2001). Sammells, N. ‘The early stage plays’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Schlueter, JM. ‘Moon and Birdboot’ in Bloom, 6.

620

Bibliography

Schultz, S and Astley, R. ‘Travesties: Plot and the Moral Tilt’ in J. Harty III (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook. Smothers, A. ‘Lost and Found: The Search for ‘Truth’ in Arcadia’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday. Spencer, C. ‘Stoppard, master of the play on words’, Daily Telegraph, 8 September 1993. Stalcup, S. ‘Who Rules the Empire?’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday. Tynan, K. ‘Withdrawing with Style from Chaos’ in The New Yorker, 19 December 1977. Vanden Heuvel, M. ‘“Is postmodernism?”: Stoppard among/against the postmoderns’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Wolf, M. interview with John Wilson on Front Row, BBC Radio 4 29 January 2015. Wightman, J. ‘Mini-Hamlets in Limbo’, Encounter, 29 July 1967 in T. Bareham (ed), Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties. Zeifman, H. ‘Comedy of Ambush: Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing’ in J. Harty III (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook. Zeifman, H. ‘The comedy of Eros: Stoppard in love’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Zinman, T. ‘Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard.



Reviews Of Productions Of Stoppard’s Plays

Billington, M. review of Ivanov, The Guardian, 18 September 2008. Coveney, M. ‘Head-scratching in Stoppard’s Arcadia’ in The Observer, 18 April 1993. Coveney, M. review of Travesties, Financial Times, 11 June 1974. de Jong, N. review of Ivanov, The Evening Standard, 18 September 2008. Hobson, H. review of Travesties, The Sunday Times, 16 June 1974. Isherwood, C. review of the Lincoln Center Theater’s production of The Invention of Love 2001, Variety 382, 7 (2–8 April 2001). Kauffman, S. review of the first New York production of Jumpers in 1974, in Kauffman, S, Persons of the Drama, Harper & Row 1976. Nightingale, B. review of Night and Day, New Statesman, 17 November 1978. Nightingale, B. review of Travesties, New Statesman, 14 June 1974. Shulman, M. Evening Standard, 11 June 1974. Spencer, C. ‘Hail to the mad “king”’, Daily Telegraph, 5 May 2004. Spencer, C. review of Ivanov, The Telegraph 19 September 2008. Taylor, P. review of Ivanov, The Independent, 18 September 2008. Teachout, T. review of The Cherry Orchard, Wall Street Journal, 16 January 2009. Trueman, M. Variety, 29 January 2015.

Bibliography

621

Wardle, I. review of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Times, 12 April 1967. Wardle, I. review of Travesties, The Times, 11 June 1974.



Works about Stoppard or his Works

Baker, W and Smothers, A (ed). ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2013. Baker, W and Wachs, GN. Tom Stoppard A Bibliographical History, The British Library 2010. Bareham, T (ed). Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, MacMillan Press 1990. Bigsby, CWE. Tom Stoppard, published for The British Council by Longman Group Limited 1976. Billington, M. Stoppard: the playwright, Methuen 1987. Bloom, H (ed). Tom Stoppard, Chelsea House 2003. Brassell, T. Tom Stoppard: An Assessment, MacMillan 1985. Cahn, V. Beyond Absurdity: The Plays of Tom Stoppard, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 1979. Corballis, R. Stoppard: The Mystery And The Clockwork, Amber Lane Press Limited 1984. Dean, JF. Tom Stoppard Comedy As A Moral Matrix, University of Missouri Press 1981. Delaney, P (ed). Tom Stoppard in Conversation, The University of Michigan Press 2001. Delaney, P. Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays, Macmillan 1990. Demastes, W. The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard, Cambridge University Press 2013. Fleming, J. Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Continuum Modern Theatre Guides 2008. Fleming, J. Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos, University of Texas Press 2001. Gabbard, LP. The Stoppard Plays, Whitston Pub Co 1982. Harty, J iii (ed). Tom Stoppard A Casebook, Garland Publishing Inc 1988. Hayman, R. Tom Stoppard, 4th Edition, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd 1982. Hodgson, T. The Plays of Tom Stoppard, Icon Books Ltd 2001. House, G. preamble to the BBC Radio 3 production of Artist Descending a Staircase, first broadcast on 10 January 2016. Hunter, J. About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, Faber and Faber Limited 2005. Hunter, J. Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, Faber and Faber 2000. Jenkins, A. The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, Cambridge University Press 1989. Jernigan, DK. Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, McFarland & Company, Inc. 2012. Kelly, K. Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play, University of Michigan Press 1991.

622

Bibliography

Kelly, K (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, Cambridge University Press 2002. Londre, FH. Tom Stoppard, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. 1981. Nadel, I. Double Act A Life of Tom Stoppard, Methuen 2002. Rusinko, S. Tom Stoppard, Twayne Publishers 1986. Sales, R. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Penguin 1988. Sudkamp, H. Tom Stoppard’s Biographical Drama, WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier 2008. Whitaker, T. Tom Stoppard, MacMillan 1983.



Programmes of Stoppard Productions

Arcadia. Royal National Theatre 1993. Dalliance. Royal National Theatre 1986. Hapgood. Hampstead Theatre 2015. Jumpers. Royal National Theatre 1972. Jumpers. Royal National Theatre 1976. On the Razzle. Royal National Theatre 1981. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Royal National Theatre 1967. The Coast of Utopia. Royal National Theatre 2002. The Hard Problem. Royal National Theatre 2015. The Invention of Love. Royal National Theatre 1997. The Real Thing. Donmar Warehouse 1999 (quoted in Hunter, J – About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work). Travesties. Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Aldwych Theatre, London 1974.



Other Works

Acton, E. Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary, Cambridge University Press 1979. Aczel, A. Fermat’s Last Theorem, Four Walls Eight Windows 1996. Aksakov, K. Memo to the Tsar (March 1855). Albee, E. The Zoo Story. Arnold, M. Dover Beach. Arnold, M. Letter to his mother 5 June 1869. Auden, WH. A Certain World A Commonplace Book, Faber and Faber 1971. Bakunin, M. The Reaction In Germany, 1842.

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623

Barrett, S. ‘Golden Hair’. Bartlett, N and Walker, J. The Girl I Left Behind Me, Oberon Books Ltd 2011. Bate, J. The Genius of Shakespeare, Picador 2008. Beckett, S. The Unnamable. Beckett, S. Waiting for Godot, Samuel French 2004. Belinsky, V. Open letter to Gogol , 15 July 1847. Berlin, I. Russian Thinkers, The Hogarth Press 1978. Binmore, K. ‘Fairness as a Natural Phenomenon’. Blavatsky, HP. The Key to Theosophy 1889. Brustein, R. The Third Theatre, Knopf 1969. Calaprice, A (ed). Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein’s Letters to and from Children, Prometheus Books 2002. Carr, EH. The Romantic Exiles, Serif 1998. Chaadaev, P. Philosophical Letters Addressed to a Lady (1829). Chalmers, D. ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3) 1995. Charter 77. Chekhov, A. Diary. Chekhov, A. Letter to AS Suvorin, 30 May 1888. Chekhov, A. Letter to D Grigorovich, 12 January 1888. Chekhov, A. The Three Sisters, translated by J. West, Project Gutenberg. Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Dawkins, R. The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press 1999. Demastes, William W. Comedy Matters: From Shakespeare to Stoppard, palgrave macmillan 2008. Demastes, William W. Theatre Of Chaos: Beyond Absurdism Into Orderly Disorder, Cambridge University Press 1998. Dennett, D. Consciousness Explained, Penguin Books, 1993. Donne, J. Elegy XIX. To His Mistress Going To Bed. Duck, I and Sudarshan, E.C.G. 100 Years of Planck’s Quantum, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd 2000. Dworkin, R. Religion Without God in The New York Review, April 4 2013 Issue. Esslin, M. The Theatre of the Absurd, Methuen Drama Third Edition. Feynman, R. The Character of Physical Law, Penguin Books 1992. Feynman, RF, Leighton, RB, Sands, M. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, California Institute of Technology 1963. Funke, L. Playwrights Talk about Writing: 12 Interviews, Chicago Dramatic Publishing 1975. Galileo, G. Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Systems, translated by Stillman Drake, University of California Press 1953.

624

Bibliography

Gaskin, R. Horace and Housman, Palgrave Macmillan 2013. Gleick, James. Chaos, Vintage 1998. Goldsmith, O. ‘An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog’. Graves, Richard Percival. A.E. Housman The Scholar Poet. Hadas, M. A History of Greek Literature. Harper’s Magazine. August 1958. Hawking, S. A Brief History of Time, Transworld Publishers Ltd 1998. Herzen, A. From the Other Shore, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1956. Herzen, A. My Past and Thoughts (Translated by Garnett, C and Abridged), Chatto & Windus 1974. Herzen, A. Sobranie Sochinenii, Moscow Akademiia nauk 1954–1966. Hobbes, T. Leviathan. Housman, AE. A Shropshire Lad. Horace. Odes in translation by AE. Housman (More Poems). Johnson, S. Lives of the English Poets, ed. G.B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905). Joyce, J. Lean Out Of The Window in Chamber Music. Joyce, J. Ulysses The 1922 text, Oxford World’s Classics 1998. Kant, I. Antimony of Pure Reason. Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason. Keats, J. Ode on a Grecian Urn. Keele, R. Ockham Explained From Razor To Rebellion, Open Court Publishing Company 2010. Kelly, A. ‘A Glowing Footprint: Herzen, Proudhon, and The Role of The Intellectual Revolutionary’, Modern Intellectual History 2 (2005), pp 179–204. doi: 10.1017/ S1479244305000399. Kelly, A. The Discovery of Chance: the life and thought of Alexander Herzen, Harvard University Press 2016 Kelly, A. Views from the Other Shore, Yale University Press 1999. Kerensky, O. The New British Drama: Fourteen Playwrights since Osborne and Pinter, Hamish Hamilton 1977. Kipling, R. ‘Gunga Din’. Lawrence, TE. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lazarus, E. ‘The New Colossus’. Leane, E. Reading Popular Physics Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies, Ashgate Publishing Limited 2007. Lenin, VI. Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers 1973. Lipcik, R. ‘The Rolling Stones’ Czech Invasion’, Rolling Stone, 4 October 1990. Lyotard, J-F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Bennington, G and Massumi, B, Manchester University Press 1984.

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MacDonald, I. Revolution in the Head, Vintage Books 2008 (first published in 1994 by Fourth Estate). Majeed, J. ‘“The Bad Habit”: Hobson-Jobson, British Indian glossaries and imitations of mortality’ in Henry Sweet Society Bulletin, November 2006. Marowitz, C. Confessions of a Counterfeit Critic: A London Theatre Notebook, 1958 – 1971, Eyre Methuen 1973. Marx, K. Critique of the Gotha Programme 1875. McHale, B. Postmodernist Fiction, Methuen 1987. Nabokov, V. ‘Pale Fire’ (poem). Nagel, T. ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’ in The Philosophical Review 83 no. 4 (October 1974). National Theatre Magazine. Issue 01, April 2015, page 19. New York Times. 10 November 1991; 9 April 2006. Newton, Isaac. The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, translated by ­Andrew Motte 1729, Dawsons of Pall Mall 1968. Orwell, G. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin Books 2008. Osborne, J. The Entertainer. Plato. Phaedrus. Plato. Symposium. Plutarch. Moralia, De Defectu Oraculorum. ‘Poem of the week: Dover Beach’. in The Guardian, 20 October 2008. Polkingthorne, JC. The Quantum World, Longman 1984. Pushkin, A. Eugene Onegin 1998. Rappaport, H. Some Thoughts On The Russian Personality, 24 May 2002. Sand, G. Correspondence. Scott, Robert Falcon. Journals, Oxford University Press 2008. Shakespeare, W. Hamlet, New Swan Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. Henry IV, Part 2, The Cambridge text. Shakespeare, W. Henry V, The Cambridge text. Shakespeare, W. Julius Caesar, The Cambridge text. Shakespeare, W. King Lear, New Swan Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. Macbeth, The Cambridge text. Shakespeare, W. Richard III, The Cambridge text. Shakespeare, W. Romeo and Juliet, The Cambridge text. Shakespeare, W. Sonnet 18, the Cambridge text. Shakespeare, W. The Merchant of Venice, the Cambridge text. Shakespeare, W. Twelfth Night, the Cambridge text. Shapiro, J. 1606 William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, Faber and Faber 2015. Shaw, GB. ‘Preface (1898)’, Plays Pleasant: Arms and the Man; Candida; the Man of Destiny; You Never Can Tell, Penguin Classics 2003.

626

Bibliography

Shean, A and Gallagher, E. Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean. Shelley, PB. Ozymandias. Sokolyansky, M. Shakespearian Themes and Motifs in Anton Chekhov’s Work. Spade, PV. The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, Cambridge University Press 1999. Strindberg, J. Miss Julie and Other Plays, Oxford’s World’s Classics 1998. Swinburne, Richard. Simplicity As Evidence of Truth, The Aquinas Lecture 1997, Marquette University Press 1997. The Guardian. ‘How astronauts went to the Moon and ended up discovering planet Earth’, 20 December 2008. The Telegraph. 20 August 2007. The Times. 9 February 2015; 13 June 2015. Theocritus. Idylls. Theognis of Megara. Theognidea. Tolstoy, L. Anna Karenina, Penguin Classics 2006. Turgenev, I. Fathers and Sons. Turgenev, I. Letter to Vassily Botkin, 29 June 1855. Virgil. Aeneid. Virgil. Eclogues. Watson, JD. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. Whitman, W. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Whittaker, T. ‘Mirrors of Our Playing: Paradigms and Presences’ in Modern Drama, University of Michigan Press 1999. Wieda, N. ‘The Ominousness of Chekhovian Idyll: The Role of Intertextuality in Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia’. Wilde, O. The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing. Wilde, O. The Importance of Being Earnest, Amazon.co.uk, Ltd. William of Ockham. I Libros Sententiarum. William of Ockham. Quodlibeta septem. Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations. Wordsworth, W. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. Yiqun Zhou. Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece. Yarmolinsky, A. Road to Revolution, Princeton University Press 1986. Yule, H and Burnell, AC. Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary Of Colloquial Anglo Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. Zimmer, B. The Story Behind ‘Hobson-Jobson’, June 4 2009.

Bibliography Unless otherwise stated all references to: ——— Jumpers are to the 1979 edition; ——— Hapgood are to the 1988 version; ——— Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are to the 2000 edition; ——— The Real Thing are to the 1986 acting edition; and ——— Travesties are to the 1993 version.

627

Works by Tom Stoppard ‘A Play In Three Acts’ 56n, 463n, 581n, 582n A Separate Peace 499, 528n A Walk on the Water 516 After Magritte xxxi, 5, 8–11, 18, 39, 55–56, 437, 470, 491, 504, 504n, 535n, 581 Albert’s Bridge 155, 551 Anna Karenina 257 Another Moon Called Earth 37n, 121, 156, 239, 239n, 320, 323, 441, 443, 455, 582 Arcadia xxii, xxiv–xvii, 15, 17, 23, 37, 38–41, 55, 74–79, 88, 88n, 118n, 126, 136–152, 179, 185, 212, 222, 231, 234, 238, 248, 260, 309, 313, 315, 322, 337, 347, 350–352, 369, 377n, 398n, 399, 407, 412, 418, 424, 436n, 441, 451, 470, 473, 488–489, 505, 514, 521, 523, 531, 552, 566, 568–572, 575, 578–579, 581, 583 Article on James Thurber 5 Artist Descending a Staircase xxiii, xxvi, 11–14, 26, 62, 63, 64, 64n, 66, 118, 120–121, 153n, 157–159, 236n, 238, 326, 329, 352, 363, 370–372, 423, 533, 551, 560–565, 579, 582 ‘But For The Middle Classes’ 251n, 261n, 324n Cahoot’s Macbeth 91, 121, 160, 175–177, 277, 290–293, 341–343, 390n, 392–393, 423, 433, 440, 445, 458, 551, 582 ‘Chekhov – An Impartial Witness’ 540n ‘Critic and his credo’ 145n Dalliance xxiii, 42n, 55, 377, 439, 485–486, 497, 510, 512, 515, 582 Darkside xxvi–xxvii, xxix, 49, 55, 73, 122–123, 189, 237–238, 241–244, 344, 346, 360, 438, 445, 467, 479–481, 490, 509, 559, 582 Dirty Linen xxvii, 284, 428, 435, 439, 441, 443, 448, 456, 462, 490, 490n, 498, 514, 521, 534, 580 Doctor Masopust, I Presume 437 Dogg’s Hamlet 26, 55, 176, 271, 292, 303–304, 339–340, 484

Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth xxiv, xxvi, 55, 176, 354n, 393, 423, 557, 582 Empire of the Sun 7, 414, 440n Enigma 77 Enter a Free Man 254, 399, 454, 516n, 524, 560, 560n, 583 Every Good Boy Deserves Favour xxv–xxvi, xxix, 50–52, 55, 56, 59n, 90, 121, 136, 182–184, 235–237, 286–289, 294, 298, 327n, 381–384, 437, 447, 473, 479, 490, 496n, 582 ‘First Person’ 244n ‘Freedom but thousands are still captive’ 277n Funny Man 458, 559 Galileo 144, 258–259, 260, 471 Hapgood xxiii–xxvi, xxvii–xxix, 15, 40, 52, 55, 56, 127, 129, 135–137, 143, 145, 222n, 238, 258, 259n, 260, 309, 343, 347, 349, 351, 362, 365–369, 398n, 400–407, 400n, 423–424, 426, 428, 471, 478, 488, 492–495, 502–503, 515, 548, 557, 581–582 Hapgood Crib 129 Heroes 512–513 Higg and Cogg 377n How Sir Dudley Lost The Empire 84, 84n I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby 547 If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank 155n, 399n, 441, 454, 489n, 517n In the Native State xxv–xxvi, xxx–xxxi, 84, 86, 354n, 413, 417, 441, 501, 566, 578, 583 Indian Ink xxiii, xxv–xxvi, xxx–xxxi, 23, 47–49, 51, 56, 62, 84–93, 211, 295, 327, 341, 412–420, 424, 441, 487, 497, 499, 522–523, 560, 566–567, 578–579, 583, 604–605 ‘Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare?’ 547n, 554n, 555n, 556n, 557n, 558n

Works by Tom Stoppard Ivanov xxiv, 407, 497, 537, 539–540, 543, 545, 553 Jumpers xxiii–xxix, xxxi, 6, 19–22, 36, 37, 46, 55, 56, 61n, 62, 67n, 70–73, 74, 79, 85, 121–122, 124–125, 134, 145, 152–157, 153n, 187, 224, 236, 238, 241, 248–249, 251–253, 255–256, 260–261, 263, 278, 286, 298, 325, 337, 345, 347, 349, 351–353, 360, 363, 384n, 410, 424, 425n, 428, 436, 452, 454–455, 470–471, 472, 478, 480, 485, 490, 490n, 492, 497, 497n, 514–515, 520, 527, 536, 544, 549, 551, 580–582 Largo Desolato 42n, 374, 377n, 386n ‘Lenin, Joyce, Tzara and Henry Carr’ 17n ‘Leveson’s legal backstop is aimed at rogue press – not a free press’ 284n Life, Times: Fragments 279n, 456n, 517n Lord Malquist and Mr Moon 64n, 124, 129, 270, 470n, 492, 492n, 499, 518, 536n ‘M’ is for Moon Among Other Things 377n, 548 Neutral Ground xxv, 365, 423, 439, 470n, 519, 519n New-Found-Land xxv, 441, 445, 465–467, 535 Night and Day xxiii–xxiv, xxvi, 24–25, 55, 61n, 62, 62n, 79–84, 83n, 93, 121, 130n, 134–135, 178, 222–223, 237, 276, 278–286, 279n, 298, 304n, 334n, 379, 385, 400, 480, 490, 497, 515, 544n, 551, 582 On ‘Dover Beach’ xxv–xxvi, 267n, 475–477, 578, 582–583 On the Razzle xxiii, xxvii, 55, 268, 421–424, 435, 449, 472, 511–512, 531, 559, 583 Parade’s End 44, 269, 432n, 549n Pirandello’s Henry iv 262, 268–272, 321n ‘Playing With Science’ 125n, 339n ‘Playwrights and Professors’ xi–xii, 130n, 429n, 555n, 586n ‘Pragmatic Theater’ 130n, 535n, 582n Professional Foul xxv–xxvi, xxvii, 23–24, 44n, 55, 117–118, 123, 136, 185–189, 234, 235, 237, 251–253, 276, 278, 298–305, 340, 345, 363, 385, 441, 447, 459, 487, 582 ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ 135

629 ‘Reflections on Ernest Hemingway’ xin, 4n Reunion 435n, 519n Rock ‘N’ Roll xxiii, xxv–xxvi, xxxi–xxxii, 34, 49–50, 55, 56, 83, 107, 121, 186, 224, 253–255, 277, 292–298, 412, 479–480, 482–484, 515, 527n, 544, 547, 549, 560, 568, 579, 582 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead xxiii–xxiv, xxviii, 23, 37, 53–55, 60n, 134, 136, 160, 171–174, 230, 234, 262–268, 286, 310–321, 386–393, 390n, 423, 429, 429n, 438–439, 444, 453–454, 456, 478, 490, 492, 517–518, 518n, 520, 524, 527, 528n, 530–531, 536, 542, 548–549, 555, 557–558, 582, 585–598 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – film 54, 265, 387, 389–390, 389n, 428, 457, 487 Rough Crossing xxiii, xxvii, 268, 423, 439, 449, 454–455, 489, 510, 512, 514, 515, 554, 582–583 Salvage xxv–xxvi, xxxi, 19, 94, 96–107, 110, 111–117, 127, 215–220, 267n, 339, 442, 445, 469, 471, 545–546, 575 Shakespeare in Love 55, 181, 372–373, 374n, 423, 440, 468, 582 Shipwreck 63n, 94–96, 98–104, 106–114, 116–117, 121, 214–217, 220, 471, 487, 497, 505, 539, 573–574, 583 Something to Declare 329n Squaring the Circle 33, 100n, 324n, 346, 384, 423, 434 Tango 63n, 103n, 271n, 301, 447n, 479n, 497n Teeth xxv, 452, 519 The Boundary xxxi, 13–14, 442, 461n, 491n, 553n The Cherry Orchard xxiv, 105, 317n, 407, 424, 472, 539, 544–546, 553 The Coast of Utopia xii, xiv, xxi, xxiii, xxv–xxvi, xxxi 23, 28–36, 55, 56, 60, 62, 93–117, 125, 130–131, 136, 183, 212–222, 237, 253, 256, 262, 272–277, 288, 293, 305, 320–323, 330–331, 333, 407, 411–412, 457, 471, 507, 508n, 544, 546, 559–560, 568, 572, 579, 582–583, 608–610

630 The Dissolution of Dominic Boot 135, 377n, 513–514 The Dog It Was That Died xxv, xxvii, 52–53, 84, 363–364, 374, 423, 437, 446, 455, 514, 521 ‘The Event And The Text’ 130n, 325n, 496n, 498n The Explorers 83n The Fifteen Minute Hamlet xxxi, 26 The Gamblers xxix, 32, 516 The Hard Problem xxiii, xxvi, xxxi–xxxii, 46, 55, 61, 77, 121, 123, 125, 132, 134, 136, 146, 189–193, 234, 238, 240, 243–249, 251–252, 254, 256–258, 260, 274, 298, 303, 353, 360–361, 363, 377n, 408–409, 424, 438, 471, 481, 489, 504, 544, 553n, 570, 581–582, 583 The House of Bernarda Alba 146n, 151n, 441 The Invention of Love xxiii–xxvii, xxxi, 19, 23, 26, 28, 62, 70, 81, 118, 131n, 136, 193–212, 267, 280, 282, 285, 315n, 334, 354, 379, 397, 412, 438, 443, 474–475, 486–487, 493, 521, 559–560, 566, 575, 578, 582–583 The Love for Three Oranges 437 ‘The Matter of Metaphor’ 232n, 548n, 581n, 582n The Merry Widow 7 The Real Inspector Hound xxiv, xxvii, xxix, 55, 160, 177, 234, 393–395, 393n, 420, 423–424, 436, 439, 441, 445–449, 454, 460, 460n, 464, 469, 491, 498, 520, 524, 560, 568, 579, 581–582 The Real Thing xxiii, xxv–xxvi, xxviii, xxxi, 16, 23, 41–46, 49, 55, 121, 134–136, 177–182, 196, 234, 304n, 329, 336, 373– 379, 373n, 374n, 377n, 378n, 423–424,

Works by Tom Stoppard 426, 434n, 436, 459, 472, 477n 481, 492n, 521, 535, 556n, 582–583 The Seagull xxiv, 129, 173n, 254, 329, 407, 538–539, 541–543, 553 The Story 279n, 519n ‘The text’s the thing’ 133n Three Men In A Boat 521 ‘To Film Or Not to Film’ 133n Travesties xxiii–xxvi, xxx–xxxi, 7, 15, 16, 23, 26–28, 55, 56, 59n, 60n, 62–70, 63n, 64n, 67n, 69n, 85, 121, 127, 134, 136, 145, 160–172, 210, 222, 224, 234, 267n, 277–278, 281, 304n, 326–327, 327n, 329, 329n, 331, 333, 333n, 337, 338n, 352, 379, 397n, 398n, 424, 428, 437, 440, 455, 470, 472–473, 478, 490n, 492, 495, 497, 515–516, 520, 531, 533, 539, 549, 552, 560, 577, 582–583, 585n Undiscovered Country xxiv, 37, 42n, 268, 395–396, 423, 444, 511–512, 554 ‘Unidentified article re. Stoppard’s family’ 434n ‘Unidentified lecture re. Rough Crossing and translation’ xiiin Voyage xxiv–xxv, 94–97, 99–100, 102–105, 109–112, 115–116, 213–216, 219–222, 237, 250, 272–276, 321, 328, 410–412, 459, 471, 490, 504, 537–539, 558, 573, 583 Where Are They Now? 384n, 569

Characters in Stoppard’s Works Acherson (Neutral Ground) 439 Adam (Rough Crossing) 449, 454–455 Adele (Undiscovered Country) 396 aeh (The Invention of Love) 19, 28, 58, 62, 118, 196–198, 202–204, 206–211, 354, 356–359, 379, 398–399, 438–439, 444, 468, 475, 575–576, 579, 581 Aksakov (Shipwreck) 30–31, 101 Ala (Tango) 497n Alastair (Night and Day) 24–25 Albert (Another Moon Called Earth) 320– 321, 443 Albert (Albert’s Bridge) 155, 551 Albert Muldoon (The Real Inspector Hound) 394 Alexander (dissident) (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour) xxix, 51, 90, 183–184, 236–237, 286–289, 300, 382–383, 437, 473, 479, 496n, 581 Alexander (mental patient) (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour) 51, 183, 287, 381–383, 479, 496n Alice (Rock ‘N’ Roll) 483 Amal (The Hard Problem) xxxii, 122, 124, 191, 244, 248–249, 254 Ambassador (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) 320 Anderson (Professional Foul) xxv, xxix, 23– 24, 44n, 71, 117–118, 186–188, 235–237, 245, 247, 251, 253, 267, 278, 299–305, 319, 340, 345, 360, 385, 459, 499 Annie (The Real Thing) 41–45, 178, 180–181, 337, 339, 374–377, 481 Anya (The Cherry Orchard) 472, 546 Apothecary (Shakespeare in Love) 372 Archbishop Glemp (Squaring the Circle) 347 Archie (Jumpers) 21, 36–37, 71, 73, 153–154, 243, 362, 468, 471, 473, 516, 527n, 551 Arkadina (The Seagull) 542 Arlon (The Dog It Was That Died) 374 Arthur (I Can’t Give You Anything But My Love, Baby) 547 Arthur (New-Found-Land) 445, 466 Arthur (Tango) 301 Augustus (Arcadia) 141

Baggott (Darkside) 73, 189, 346, 438, 480 Baker (Dogg’s Hamlet) 485 Bakunin, Alexander (Voyage) 96, 98–99, 213–214, 219–221, 274, 457, 459, 490, 506 Bakunin, Alexandra (Voyage) 110, 321 Bakunin, Liubov (Voyage) 110–112, 115, 213–215, 346, 411, 538–539, 573 Bakunin, Michael (Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage) 29, 30, 35, 62, 96–100, 103–104, 109, 111, 125, 136, 213–215, 218, 220–221, 234, 237, 272–274, 287, 306–308, 321–322, 328, 343–345, 411–412, 457, 459, 508, 546, 549, 572, 574 Bakunin, Tatiana (Voyage) 97, 110–111, 213, 221, 272, 539, 558, 573 Bakunin, Varenka (Voyage) 110–111, 116, 213–214, 221 Bakunin, Varvara (Voyage) 213, 215 Banquo (Cahoot’s Macbeth) 175, 290–291 Banquo’s Ghost (Cahoot’s Macbeth) 176 Baron Renne (Voyage) 111, 213, 219 Baron Zeta (The Merry Widow) 7 Beauchamp (Artist Descending a Staircase)  12–13, 64n, 120, 158, 236n, 370–371, 562–565 Belcredi (Pirandello’s Henry iv) 269 Belinsky (Voyage, Shipwreck) xxv, 94–5, 95n, 97–98, 100, 102, 110–111, 213–214, 216, 221, 238, 250, 253, 274–275, 288, 321, 328, 330n, 332, 345, 360, 411, 538, 545, 549, 574 Bennett (Travesties) 162, 164, 167, 381, 455, 515, 577 Bernard (Arcadia) 40, 139–141, 147, 149–151, 234, 351, 400, 488n, 523, 560, 570, 572 Bernard (New-Found-Land) 445, 466, 535 Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba)  151n Beyer, Natalie (Voyage) 109, 112, 115, 213, 215, 411–412 Beyer, Mrs (Voyage) 214–215 Billy (The Real Thing) 41, 45, 180, 339, 374, 377 Birdboot (The Real Inspector Hound) 177, 394–395, 439, 447, 454, 459–461, 496, 498–499

632 Blair (Hapgood) 129, 226–228, 233, 347, 349, 365, 367–369, 401–403, 405–407, 503 Blair (The Dog It Was That Died) 363–364, 374, 446, 455, 521–522 Blanc (Salvage) 34, 96, 99–100, 105 Bo (The Hard Problem) 46, 123–124, 190, 244–245, 360, 481, 582 Boatman (Shakespeare in Love) 468–469 Bone (Another Moon Called Earth) xxvii, 37n, 320, 323, 440, 443, 455 Bones (Jumpers) 6, 9, 302, 454, 470 Borkin (Ivanov) 497 Boy (Darkside) 344, 445, 480 Brenda (The Boundary) 13–14, 442, 461n Brice (Arcadia) 147, 451 Brodie (The Real Thing) 41, 44–5, 182, 336–337, 360, 373n, 374, 376–378 Brown (Enter A Free Man) 454 Bunthorne (The Invention of Love) 486 Bunyans (The Boundary) 13, 442, 553n Byron (Arcadia – by reference) 139–140, 146, 150, 400, 504, 571–572, 578 Cahoot (Cahoot’s Macbeth) 291–292, 342 Carmen (Enter A Free Man) 431 Carr (Travesties) xxv, xxxi, 7, 15, 26–27, 59n, 64–70, 69n, 125, 127, 145, 162–167, 170, 193, 304n, 324, 324n, 333, 337, 379–381, 379n, 437, 440, 455, 474, 492n, 496, 498, 515, 531, 533–534, 577, 579, 583 Carson, Geoffrey (Night and Day) 80, 379 Cathy (The Hard Problem) 47, 192–193, 244–245, 261, 408–409, 504 Cecily (Travesties) 59n, 68n, 69, 134, 162, 165–167, 171, 333, 380, 478, 496, 498, 577 Chaadaev (Voyage) 95, 95n, 97, 115, 287, 332 Chairman (Professional Foul) 187, 301 Chamberlain (The Invention of Love) 199, 202, 210–211, 438–439, 444 Chap 1 (Largo Desolato) 374 Chap 2 (Largo Desolato) 374 Charlie (Dogg’s Hamlet) 485 Charlotta (The Cherry Orchard) 472, 539, 542 Charlotte (The Real Thing) 41–42, 44, 46, 178–181, 374–377, 472, 535, 549 Charon (The Invention of Love) 209, 397–398, 468, 492, 578 Chater (Arcadia) 40, 139–142, 149–150, 399, 424, 451, 504, 531, 571, 578

Characters in Stoppard’s Works Chernyshevsky (Salvage) 34, 101, 103–104, 107, 213, 218 Chetwyn (Professional Foul) 301, 304 Chief (The Dog It Was That Died) 52–53 Child’s Voice (Cahoot’s Macbeth) 177 Chloe (Arcadia) 75, 146–147, 152, 488n, 570 Christine (Dalliance) 42n, 377, 439, 485, 510 Christopher (On the Razzle) 422–423, 449–451 Clarissa (The Love for Three Oranges) 437 Claudius (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) 53, 173, 266, 387 Clegthorpe (Jumpers) 551 Coachman (On the Razzle) 423, 531 Cocklebury-Smythe (Dirty Linen) 439, 443, 448, 462–463, 491 Colonel (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour)  51, 383, 479 Comisky (Neutral Ground) 365 Constable (On the Razzle) 422–423 Coomaraswami (Indian Ink/In the Native State) 90, 419, 566 Count Sollogub (Voyage – by reference) 213 Crewe, Flora (Indian Ink/In The Native State) xxix, 47–49, 58, 85–90, 92–93, 193–194, 341, 354n, 400, 412–419, 441, 497, 499–502, 522–523, 566–567 Cricketer (The Boundary) 14 Crouch (Another Moon Called Earth) 441, 455 Crouch (Jumpers) 73, 155, 157, 452, 455 Cynthia (The Real Inspector Hound) 421, 454, 460–461, 465, 499 Das, Anish (Indian Ink/In the Native State)  48–49, 85–86, 88, 90–91, 413–414, 416, 420, 500–501, 523, 568 Das, Nirad (Indian Ink/In the Native State)  48–49, 85, 88–90, 92–93, 125, 327, 341, 413–415, 417–419, 497, 499–500, 502, 522 Debbie (The Real Thing) 42, 179–181 Deirdre, (Rock ‘n’ Roll) 484, 568 Di Nolli (Pirandello’s Henry iv) 270 Dilip (Indian Ink) 85, 90–92, 417, 500–501 Dobson (Where Are They Now?) 62 Doctor (Doctor Masopust, I Presume) 437 Doctor (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour) 50, 184, 289, 381–383 Doctor (Pirandello’s Henry iv) 270 Doctor (Salvage) 100

633

Characters in Stoppard’s Works Dominic (The Dissolution of Dominic Boot)  135 Donner (Artist Descending a Staircase)  12–13, 60, 64n, 158–159, 238, 352–353, 370–372, 562–565 Dorn (The Seagull) 129, 329 Dotty (Jumpers) 21, 36–37, 61n, 71, 121, 154– 157, 155n, 239, 249, 259, 303, 362, 428, 436, 452, 470–471, 480, 485, 497, 551 Dr Moth (Shakespeare in Love) 440 Dr Seddon (The Dog It Was That Died) 365, 374 Durance (Indian Ink/In the Native State) 87, 89–90, 92, 416, 501–502, 524 Dvornichek (Rough Crossing) 449, 454–455, 544 Dyakov (Voyage) 111, 213–214, 221 Easy (Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoots Macbeth) 292, 341–342, 485 Eddie (Tango) 479n Eleanor (Rock ‘n’ Roll) 254–255, 549 Emily (Darkside) 123, 237–238, 241–243, 344, 438, 445, 480 Empy (The Dog It Was That Died) 446 English King (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) 387–388 Eric (Indian Ink) 86 Erna Wahl (Undiscovered Country) 395, 444 Esme (Rock ‘n’ Roll) 50, 482–484 Ethics Man (Darkside) 346, 360, 468 Eugene (Tango) 479n Fata Morgana (The Love for Three Oranges) 437 Felicity (The Real Inspector Hound) 394– 395, 421, 460, 465 Ferdinand (Rock ‘n’ Roll) 50, 186, 296–298 Firs (The Cherry Orchard) 546 First Electrician (Squaring the Circle) 434 First Sidney (Largo Desolato) 374 Florence (Enter A Free Man) 558 Francis (In the Native State) 86 Frank (If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank) 454 Fraser (Albert’s Bridge) 336 Fraulein Blumenblatt (On the Razzle)  422–423 French (Dirty Linen) 284–285

Friar (Shakespeare in Love) 372 Frida (Pirandello’s Henry iv) 270 Friedrich (Undiscovered Country) 309, 395–396, 554 Fritz (Dalliance) 377, 439, 485, 497 Gaev (The Cherry Orchard) 539 Gal (Rough Crossing) 449, 454, 554 Galileo (Galileo) 78, 258, 260–261 Genia (Undiscovered Country) 395–396 George (Teeth) 452–453, 519 George Moore (Jumpers) 6, 19–22, 36–37, 62, 71–73, 72n, 118, 121, 123–125, 127, 153, 157, 187, 236–239, 241–242, 245, 248, 251–253, 255–257, 260–261, 263, 267, 278, 286, 301–304, 309, 319, 325, 328, 340, 342n, 345, 351, 354, 360, 400, 410, 428, 437, 452, 454–455, 468, 470, 472, 532n, 533, 549, 582 George Riley (Enter A Free Man) 254, 399, 424, 454, 558, 560 Gertrud (On the Razzle) 451 Gertrude (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) 173, 387 Gierek (Squaring the Circle) 434 Ginger Cat (Voyage, Salvage – by reference)  xxv, 31, 131n, 237, 322–323, 360 Gladys (If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank) 155n, 399n, 454, 489n, 517n Granovsky (Shipwreck) 101, 216, 256–257, 539 Guildenstern (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) 53–55, 124, 172–174, 237–238, 263–268, 273, 286, 311–319, 353, 361, 386–392, 438–439, 444, 453, 456–457, 472, 487, 528–529, 532, 542, 547, 556 Gus (Arcadia) 141, 472 Guthrie (Night and Day) 24, 61n, 80–82, 224, 280 Gwendolyn (Travesties) 162, 164–167, 171, 380, 474, 479, 516, 552 Hamlet (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) 53, 266, 319, 386–388, 469, 472 Hannah (Arcadia) xiii, 38, 40, 75, 77–78, 128, 141, 147–150, 400, 472–3, 571–572, 578 Hapgood, Celia (Hapgood) 232, 366, 368, 401–402, 407, 424, 488

634 Hapgood, Elizabeth (Hapgood) xxiii, xxvi, xxviii–xxix, 225–228, 232–233, 350–351, 366–369, 401–403, 406–407, 415, 424, 495 Harris (After Magritte) 10–11 Harris (The Invention of Love) 204, 212, 286 Harry (Teeth) 452–453 Haydon (The Explorers) 83n Henri (Heroes) 513 Henry (The Real Thing) xxxi, 42–46, 178– 182, 304n, 324, 336–339, 360, 373–377, 373n, 378n, 459, 472, 472n, 477n, 549 Henry iv (Pirandello’s Henry iv) 262, 269–272, 321n360 Herr Weiring (Dalliance) 42n Herwegh, Emma (Shipwreck) 94, 112–113, 220, 505, 574 Herwegh, George (Shipwreck) 107, 113, 117, 216, 220, 345, 408, 505, 507, 539, 574 Herzen, Alexander (Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage) xii, xxv, xxix, xxxi, 19, 28, 31, 33–36, 62, 95–96, 98–99, 100, 103–110, 113–117, 125, 127, 136, 212–221, 234, 245, 256–257, 275–276, 288, 293, 298, 306–308, 321–323, 339, 345–346, 360, 407–408, 411–412, 424, 435, 444, 457n, 469, 505, 507–508, 531, 539, 545–546, 572, 574–575 Herzen, Kolya (Shipwreck) 217 Herzen, Natalie (Shipwreck) 106, 109–110, 112–114, 116, 121, 216–217, 220, 321, 345, 407–408, 412, 424, 497, 505, 539, 573–574 Herzen, Olga (Salvage) 115, 412, 442 Herzen, Sasha (Shipwreck, Salvage) 507–508 Higgs (The Real Inspector Hound) 394, 499 Hilary (The Hard Problem) xiv, xxxi, 46–47, 77, 121–123, 189–192, 236, 244–249, 252–253, 256–258, 261, 360, 408–410, 438, 481, 504, 544, 553n, 582 Himself (On ‘Dover Beach’) 475–477 Hogbin (The Dog It Was That Died) 52, 521–522 Hollar (Professional Foul) 117–118, 186–188, 299–301, 304–305 Hostess (Cahoot’s Macbeth) 342, 459, 469 Housman (The Invention of Love) xxiv, xxv, xxvii, xxix–xxx, 55, 62, 70, 82, 118–119, 127, 136, 193, 196, 198–212, 234, 280, 356–359, 379, 398–399, 412, 415,

Characters in Stoppard’s Works 424, 438, 475, 486, 499, 531, 557, 559, 575–576, 578–579 Hupfer (On the Razzle) 450 Inspector (Cahoot’s Macbeth) 175–176, 290–292, 341–342, 390n, 392, 433, 458–459, 469 Inspector Foot (After Magritte) 1, 10–11 Inspector Hound (The Real Inspector Hound) 395, 421 Ivanov (Ivanov) 68, 497, 541–544, 554 Ivor (Rough Crossing) 449 Jackson, Moses (The Invention of Love)  199–203, 205–209, 359 Jamie Graham (Empire of the Sun) 7 Jan (Rock ‘n’ Roll) 35, 50, 107, 293–298, 480, 482–483 Jane (Lord Malquist and Mr Moon) 492 Jaruselski (Squaring the Circle) 347, 384 Jasper (Lord Malquist and Mr Moon) 492 Jericho, T (Enigma) 77 Jerome (The Invention of Love) 201 Jirous (Rock ‘n’ Roll – by reference) 484, 186, 296–297 Joe (Hapgood) 227–228, 407, 504 John Brown (A Separate Peace) 499, 528n Johnson (The Boundary) 13–14, 442, 553n Jowett (The Invention of Love) 118–120, 200, 354–355, 357–358, 576 Joyce (Travesties) xxv, 27, 60, 63n, 64, 69n, 125, 145, 162, 164, 167–168, 171, 210, 327, 327n, 329n, 333, 333n, 338n, 380, 398n, 440, 472, 474, 479, 492, 496, 516, 531, 578, 583 Julia (The Hard Problem) 244, 504 Juliet (Shakespeare in Love) 372–373 Kania (Squaring the Circle) 347 Kate (The Invention of Love) 499 Katya (Voyage) 221, 411, 538 Kerner (Hapgood) 129, 225–230, 233, 258, 259n, 260, 347–351, 362–363, 365–369, 401, 403–407, 494–495, 503 Ketscher (Voyage, Shipwreck) 96, 107, 215–216 Khrol, Jerry (The Hard Problem) 47, 134, 189–190, 192–193, 244, 248–249, 408, 424, 481, 504, 557

Characters in Stoppard’s Works Konstantin (The Seagull) 173n, 542 Kuron (Squaring the Circle) 33 Labouchere (The Invention of Love)  282–283, 286 Lady Croom (Arcadia) 40, 138, 147, 149, 152, 441, 451 Lady Macbeth (Cahoot’s Macbeth) 175, 433 Landovsky (Cahoot’s Macbeth) Leander (The Love for Three Oranges) 437 Lenin (Travesties) xxv, 26, 63n, 68–70, 68n, 69n, 158, 163, 169, 171, 222, 222n, 278, 281–282, 327n, 334, 380, 478, 496, 531, 533 Lenka (Rock ‘n’ Roll) 253–256 Lennox (Cahoot’s Macbeth) 342 Leo (The Hard Problem) 47, 122, 191, 244, 408, 504 Leopold (Largo Desolato) 42n, 374, 377n, 386n Lightning (Arcadia) 470 Linda (Enter A Free Man) 399, 399n Liubov (The Cherry Orchard) 542, 546 Liza (Salvage) 115 Long John Slaughter (Lord Malquist and Mr Moon) 492 Lopakhin (The Cherry Orchard) 407, 539–540, 546, 553 Lord Malquist (Lord Malquist and Mr Moon) 64n, 492, 536n Lucy (Largo Desolato) 42n, 374 Lvov (Ivanov) 544 Macbeth (Cahoot’s Macbeth) 176–177, 290, 342, 392, 394 MacMaster (Parade’s End) 549n Madame Knorr (On the Razzle) 422–423, 449–450 Maddie Gotobed (Dirty Linen)  284–285, 428, 439, 448, 453, 456, 462–463, 498, 534 Mageeba (Night and Day) 24, 79, 81–83, 278, 281–284, 286, 334n, 551 Maggs (Hapgood) 228 Magnus (The Real Inspector Hound) 19, 393–394, 421, 445, 447, 464–465 Malcolm (Cahoot’s Macbeth) 392 Malwida (Salvage) 442 Marguerite (Largo Desolato) 374

635 Marie (On the Razzle) 422, 450 Martello (Artist Descending a Staircase) 12– 13, 120–121, 153n, 157–159, 353, 370–371, 562–565 Martin (Funny Man) 458, 559 Master Of The Revels (Shakespeare in Love) 372 Matilda (Pirandello’s Henry iv) 269–270 Matron (The Dog It Was That Died) 374 Matt (On ‘Dover Beach’) 475–477 Mauer (Undiscovered Country) 395–396 Marx (Shipwreck, Salvage) 106, 322, 345, 546, 575 Max (Rock ‘n’ Roll) 34–35, 50, 83, 253–256, 276, 293–295, 482, 547, 549 Max (The Real Thing) 41, 44–46, 178, 180–181, 374–378, 472, 481, 535 McFee (Jumpers) 46–47, 71–73, 118, 121–123, 125, 153–155, 157, 242, 248, 303, 349, 351, 360, 428, 437, 452, 468, 533, 536 McKendrick (Professional Foul) 44n, 118, 186–188, 300–302, 305, 351, 385 McTeazle (Dirty Linen) 443, 448, 453, 456, 491 Medvedenko (The Seagull) 254 Melchior (On the Razzle) 422, 450 Merryweather (Hapgood) 228, 403, 406, 494 Milne (Night and Day) 24, 62n, 79–80, 82–83, 237, 279–280, 282–285, 304n, 307, 379 Mizi (Dalliance) 439 Moon (Lord Malquist and Mr Moon) 124–125, 129, 270, 492, 499, 580, 583 Moon (The Real Inspector Hound) xxvii, 177, 394, 446–447, 460–461, 499 Mother (After Magritte) 10–11 Mr X (Doctor Masopust, I Presume) 437 Mrs Drudge (The Real Inspector Hound) 420, 454, 464–465, 469 Mrs Ebury (Dirty Linen) 448 Mrs Fischer (On the Razzle) 421–422, 450 Mrs Natter (Undiscovered Country) 395 Mrs Ryan (The Dog It Was That Died) 446 Mrs Swan (Indian Ink/In the Native State)  48, 85–86, 88–89, 91–92, 125, 400, 413, 415–416, 420, 500–501, 523, 566–567 Mrs von Aigner (Undiscovered Country) 396 Mrs Wahl (Undiscovered Country) 396

636 Music Hall Buffs (The Love for Three Oranges) 446 Nadya (Travesties) 163, 169, 222, 334, 380, 437, 478, 496 Narrator (Galileo) 78 Narrator (Squaring the Circle) 385 Natalie/(Natasha) Tuchkov (Shipwreck) (see also Natalie Ogarev) Natasha (Rough Crossing) 449, 454, 489 Natter (Undiscovered Country) 42n Nazrul (Indian Ink/In the Native State) 413, 419 Nell (Indian Ink/In the Native State) 416 Nigel (Rock ‘N’ Roll) 297, 482 Nina (The Seagull) 407, 543 Ninetta (The Love for Three Oranges) 437 Njegus (The Merry Widow) 7 Noakes (Arcadia) 88, 138, 147, 451–452, 488 Ogarev, Maria (Shipwreck) 109–110, 112, 116, 121, 217, 221, 497 Ogarev, Natalie (Salvage) (see also Natalie Tuchkov) 110, 114, 116, 216–220, 308, 412, 424, 442, 545, 559 Ogarev, Nicholas (Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage) xxv, 28, 34, 96, 103–104, 107, 109, 111–112, 114, 116, 213, 215, 217–221, 412 Otto (Shipwreck) 574 Otto (Undiscovered Country) 395–396 Pamela (The Dog It Was That Died) 446 Party Official (Squaring the Circle) 384 Pat (Jumpers) 157, 470, 549 Pater (The Invention of Love) 200, 334, 355, 359 Pattison (The Invention of Love) 118, 120 Penelope (Another Moon Called Earth) 37n, 121, 156, 239 Philo (Neutral Ground) 365, 519n Pike (Indian Ink/In the Native State) 85, 90–91, 413, 415, 500, 523–524, 566–567, 578 Piper (Rock ‘N’ Roll) 483 Plautus (Arcadia) 151, 470, 551 Player (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) 54, 172–173, 230, 263, 273, 281, 312, 314, 316–317, 319–320, 386–392, 453, 472 Polevoy (Voyage) 103, 215

Characters in Stoppard’s Works Pollard (The Invention of Love) 197, 201, 205, 210, 356, 576 Postgate (The Invention of Love) 204 Prince (The Love for Three Oranges) 437 Prisoner (The Gamblers) xxix, 32n, 262, 397, 583 Puckeridge (The Real Inspector Hound) 394 Purvis (The Dog It Was That Died) 52–53, 364–365 Queen Elizabeth (Shakespeare in Love)  372–373 Rajah (Indian Ink/In the Native State) 87, 89, 414, 501–502 Rakowski (Squaring the Circle) 347 Ranevskaya (The Cherry Orchard) 539 Resident (Indian Ink/In the Native State) 89, 502 Ridley (Hapgood) 129, 226–232, 350, 366–369, 402, 405–407, 424, 488, 493–495, 502 Robinson Ellis (The Invention of Love) 204 Romeo (Shakespeare in Love) 372–373 Rosencrantz (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) 53, 55, 172–174, 237–238, 263–268, 273, 286, 311–313, 315, 317–319, 360, 386–392, 438–439, 444, 453–454, 456–458, 469, 472, 488, 528–529, 532, 542, 556 Roy (Professional Foul) 188 Ruskin (The Invention of Love) 200, 334, 354–355 Russian One (Hapgood) 493–495 Russian Two (Hapgood) 494–495 Ruth (Night and Day) xxiii, 24–25, 58, 80, 82, 178, 224, 278, 284–285, 379, 400, 480, 497, 551, 581 Sacha (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour)  xxix, 50–51, 183–184, 236, 286, 289, 300, 382–383, 473, 581 Sacha/(Hollar’s son) (Professional Foul) 23, 237, 301, 305 Sam Gosse (Shakespeare in Love) 372 Sarpi (Galileo) 258–259 Sasha (Ivanov) 543 Sazonov (Voyage, Shipwreck) 104, 183, 215–216 Second Electrician (Squaring the Circle) 434 Second Sidney (Largo Desolato) 374

637

Characters in Stoppard’s Works Secretary (Jumpers) 455, 498 Septimus (Arcadia) xxv, 39–40, 74–76, 78, 118, 139–142, 146, 15–152, 212, 312, 400, 424, 441–442, 451, 488, 551–552, 570, 572 Simon Gascoyne (The Real Inspector Hound) 394, 420–421, 445, 447, 465 Slack (The Dog It Was That Died) 363–364 Sleptsov (Salvage) 35 Smeraldina (The Love for Three Oranges) 437 Sonders (On the Razzle) 422–423, 450–451 Sophie (Artist Descending a Staircase) 353, 363, 370–372, 562–565 Soprano (Dalliance) 486, 510 Sorin (The Seagull) 542 Spies (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) 387 Spike (The Hard Problem) 46, 121–124, 132, 190, 243–247, 257–258, 261, 408–410, 438 Stanislavsky (Neutral Ground) 439 Stankevich (Voyage) 30, 103, 213–215, 221, 272, 274–275, 306, 321, 343, 345, 360, 410–411, 538 Stead (The Invention of Love) 81, 282–283, 285 Stomil (Tango) 63n, 103n, 271n, 447n Stone (Professional Foul) 304, 339–340, 385, 447 Sutherland, Mary (Salvage) 117 Teacher (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour)  381–382 Tenor (Dalliance) 486, 510 Thelma (After Magritte) 10–11 Theodore (Dalliance) 439, 515 Thomasina (Arcadia) xxv, 39, 74–78, 138–139, 141, 144, 146–148, 152, 234, 441–442, 488, 552, 570–572, 578 Thumper (Jumpers) 157, 452, 470 Tietjens, Christopher (Parade’s End) 44 Tietjens, Sylvia (Parade’s End) 44 Tragedians (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) 313, 387, 389 Travers (How Sir Dudley Lost The Empire) 84n Trofimov (The Cherry Orchard) 105, 272, 545–546 Turai (Rough Crossing) 439, 449, 454, 554

Turgenev (Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage) xxv, 34, 95, 97, 99–100, 102, 117, 213–214, 219, 221, 275, 346, 444, 457n, 574–575 Tzara (Travesties) xxv, 27, 61, 63n, 64–70, 68n, 69n, 125, 158, 162–168, 171, 308, 329n, 333, 352, 380–381, 437, 474, 479, 492, 495, 533, 552, 578–579, 583 Urban (Galileo) 260n Ursula (The Hard Problem) xiv, 123, 191 Valentine (Arcadia) 37–39, 74–78, 142, 144, 146–149, 234, 313, 315, 351, 400, 489, 569, 571–572 Varya (The Cherry Orchard) 272, 472, 539–540, 553 Viola de Lesseps (Shakespeare in Love) 372, 468 Vivian (The Dissolution Of Dominic Boot) 135–136 Voices (Darkside) 468 von Aigner (Undiscovered Country) 395 Wagner (Night and Day) 24–25, 79–82, 278, 281, 304n, 379, 385 Walensa (Squaring the Circle) 347 Wannop, Valentine (Parade’s End) 44 Wates (Hapgood) 225–230, 233, 367, 403, 494–495, 503 Weinberl (On the Razzle) 421–423, 451 Wilde (The Invention of Love) 81, 200–203, 206–207, 20–211, 280, 334, 359, 438, 486–487, 578 Will (Shakespeare in Love) 372, 440, 468–469 Wise One (Darkside) 480 Witch Finder (Darkside) 122, 445 Withenshaw (Dirty Linen) 462, 534 Witness (Squaring the Circle) 305 Worcell (Salvage) 469 Yasha (The Cherry Orchard) 539, 545 Yepikhodov (The Cherry Orchard) 317n, 541 Yermolai (The Cherry Orchard) 543 Zangler (On the Razzle) 421–422, 446, 450–451

General Index ‘1812 Overture’ 479 1848 Paris uprising 31, 96, 98, 98n, 104, 106, 107, 115, 216, 306, 487, 506–508 1857 Mutiny/Rising 88 ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ xxv, 181 Absolute 30, 73, 99–100, 109, 221, 252, 267, 272, 274, 303, 319, 345, 411, 572 absolutism 71, 72, 156, 236, 238–249, 262, 263, 265, 276, 310, 336–360, 362, 362n, 582 acting 269, 385–397, 423, 582–583 Acton, E Alexander Herzen and The Role Of The Intellectual Revolutionary 33 Aczel, A Fermat’s Last Theorem 77n Aeneas 195n, 206, 209 Aeschylus 206 Aksakov, K Memo to the Tsar (March 1855) 34 Alexander ii, Tsar, 218, 308, 508, 545, 549 Algernon (The Importance Of Being Earnest) 162–167, 169, 380 algorithm 37, 77, 142–143, 149, 377n, 571 Allen, P Third Ear 47n, 84n, 85n, 93n, 128n, 414n, 522n Altruism 73, 121–125, 190, 247–248, 360, 582 Alwes, D “Oh Phooey to Death!’: Boethian Consolation in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia’ 570n anagnorisis 519 Ancus 195, 206 Annabella (Tis Pity She’s A Whore) 41–42, 180, 377 anti-razor 2, 52 Apollo 200 Archimedes 458 Aristophanes 198, 206 Aristotle 1 On The Heavens 1n Arnold, M xxv, xxix, 55, 475–476, 475n Dover Beach 475 Letter to his mother 5 June 1869 475, 475n

art 26, 68, 120–121, 145, 157–158, 193, 210, 295, 324–336, 353, 372, 563, 582 Auden, WH 43, 66, 326, 326n, 327n A Certain World A Commonplace Book 44n Avignon 1 Ayer, AJ Love Among the Logical Positivists 71n Bach, JS Air On A G String 181 Preludes xxiii, 192, 489 bad 19, 21, 71, 117, 187, 237, 239–241, 253, 263, 299, 301, 303, 325, 335, 340, 345, 360, 428, 533, 550 Bailey, J ‘Jumpers by Tom Stoppard: The Ironist as Theistic Apologist’ 236n Baker, W and Wachs, GN Tom Stoppard A Bibliographical History xxiin Bakunin, M 30, 104 The Reaction In Germany, 1842 30n, 103n Banquo (Macbeth) 175, 290, 292 Banquo’s Ghost (Macbeth) 176, 392 Barrett, S xxxi, 15, 482–484 ‘Golden Hair’ 483, 527n Madcap Laughs 482 Opel 482 ‘Terrapin’ 482 Bartlett, N and Walker, J The Girl I left Behind Me 479n Bate, J The Genius of Shakespeare 557 Bazarov (Fathers and Sons) 100 Beckett, S xxiv, xxix, 50, 145, 466, 517, 517n, 518, 518n, 519n, 525–526, 527–536, 527n, 555–556, 559, 581, 583 The Unnamable 530 Waiting For Godot 267n, 315, 318n, 516, 517, 519n, 525, 527, 530–531, 535 Bedser, A xxv, 21–22 Beethoven, L Appassionata Sonata xxvi, 68, 478 Fifth Symphony 458n, 488

639

General Index Belinsky, V 30, 100n, 274, 328, 330–331 Open letter to Gogol, 15 July 1847 331 Berkvist, R 279, 434 ‘This Time, Tom Stoppard Plays It (Almost) Straight’ 58n, 60n, 223n, 279n, 298n, 434n Berlin, I 274, 328, 407 Introduction to From The Other Shore 507n Russian Thinkers 94n, 100n, 215n, 274n, 307n, 328n, 407n, 506n, 507n Berlin, N ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Theatre of Criticism’ 390n Bertoni, C The Oxford Student 148n bifurcation 74, 79, 143, 185, 407, 570–571, 579, 583 Biggins, J 327, 330 Ideas At The House: Tom Stoppard in C ­ onversation 135, 284n, 293n, 327, 328n, 330, 340n, 425n, 431n, 435n, 440n, 525n Bigsby, CWE Tom Stoppard 8n, 59n, 69n, 173n, 315n, 379n, 463n Billington, M 7, 276, 325, 336, 399, 517, 520, 536n ‘Prima Le Parole?’ 7n, 477n review of Ivanov 543 Stoppard: the playwright 6n, 8n, 22n, 52n, 58n, 61n, 62n, 64n, 68n, 83n, 150n, 156n, 177n, 250n, 310n, 324n, 327n, 338n, 378n, 382n, 393n, 427n, 447n, 454n, 461n, 499n, 510n, 516n, 517n, 518n, 519n, 520n, 521n, 561n, 595n ‘Stoppard’s Secret Agent’ 276n, 325n, 399n, 426n ‘Tom Stoppard: playwright of ideas delivers a new Problem’ 536n Binmore, K 247 ‘Fairness as a Natural Phenomenon’  246n, 247n Blanc 96–97 Blavatsky, HP 90 The Key to Theosophy 1889 91n Bloom (Ulysses) 167–168 Bloom, H (ed) Tom Stoppard 398n, 525n Bohr, N 350, 369

Bolton, R Feedback, bbc Radio 4, 5 January 2016 xiin, 363n, 427n Bosie 200–201, 203, 206, 209–210 Bradman, D xxv, 21 Bradshaw, J 431, 433, 534 New York magazine 431n ‘Tom Stoppard, Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright’ xin, 58n, 431n, 433n, 437n, 534n Bragg, M 152, 443 The South Bank Show 1978 70n, 126n, 152n, 185n, 222n, 223n, 279n, 427n, 443n The South Bank Show 2008 293n, 296n Branagh, K interview with Grandage, M 542 Brassell, T 518 Tom Stoppard: An Assessment 63n, 163n, 167n, 172n, 222n, 585n Brater, E ‘Tom Stoppard’s Brit/lit/crit’ 135n Briggs, M Interview with Stoppard 580n Brooks, M 489 Brown, C 138, 148 Browning, R 86, 475 Brustein, R The Third Theatre 518n, 528n, 587n Buck, jj 378 ‘Tom Stoppard: Kind Heart and Prickly Mind’ 129n, 378n Bukharin 382 Bukovsky, V 287–288 Bull, J ‘Tom Stoppard and politics’ 8n, 428n Butterfly Effect 78, 139–140, 147, 234 Byatt, AS Possession 137 Byron xxiv, 40 ‘Darkness’ 75, 473 ‘She Walks In Beauty’ 152 Cabet 96 Cahn, V Beyond Absurdity: The Plays of Tom Stoppard 527n Calaprice, A (ed) Dear Professor Einstein 259n Carlyle 170 Carr, EH 212, 215, 217, 408

640 The Romantic Exiles 111, 111n, 112, 112n, 113, 113n, 114n, 115n, 212n, 213n, 215n, 216n, 217n, 218n, 407n, 408n Carr, H 161 catastrophe theory 186–187 Catullus 201, 206, 474 The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis 357 Verona Codex 119 Cavendish, D Interview with Josie Lawrence 231n The Telegraph 122n Cecily (The Importance Of Being E­ arnest) 162, 165–167, 380 Cerberus 209 Chaadaev, P Philosophical Letters Addressed to a Lady (1829) 29, 95, 95n Chalmers, D xxi, xxvi, 191–192, 248, 261, 410, 408–409, 489 Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness  122n, 191n, 408n, 409n, 410n Chaos Theory xii, xxii–xxiv, xxvii–xxxi, 17, 23, 37–39, 40n, 74, 76–79, 125, 127, 136–139, 142–147, 149, 185, 234, 248, 260, 309–311, 315, 347, 350, 352, 377n, 549, 552, 569–571, 579, 581 Charter 77 15, 185–186, 482 Chasuble (The Importance of Being Earnest) 167 Chaucer, G 92, 170 Canterbury Tales 181 ‘The Miller’s Tale’ 181 Chaurapanchasika 92 cheap gag 435, 443–445 Chekhov, A xxiv, xxix, 68, 95, 171, 407, 424, 511, 521n, 526, 528, 532n, 537–547, 553, 556, 559, 581, 583 Diary 95 Letter to AS Suvorin, 30 May 1888 544n Letter to D Grigorovich, 12 January 1888 544n The Three Sisters 538n Chernyshevsky 34, 213 What Is To Be Done? 213n child/children 23, 235, 237, 275–276, 275n, 277n, 304, 305, 324, 360 Child’s Voice (Macbeth) 177 Chinese box 177n Christie, A xxiv, 394–395, 464–465, 520 The Mousetrap 395, 395n

General Index Churchill, W 89 Classical scholarship 193, 204–205, 212, 579 classicism 137 Claudius (Hamlet) 173, 386–387, 395, 454, 549–550 Collected Letters (Flora Crewe) 415 collision – see union of ideas Colloquium Philosophicum Prague 1977 117, 185–186, 301, 339 Committee for Free Expression 291 Committee of Public Harmony 34 Committee to Defend the Unjustly Persecuted 291 Conan Doyle, A 465 consciousness 55, 145–146, 189, 191, 256, 274, 408–409, 424, 489, 581 Corballis, R 43n Stoppard The Mystery And The Clockwork  16n, 67n, 159n, 177n, 222n, 399n, 436n, 465n, 517n, 520n, 527n, 532n ‘Tom Stoppard’s Children’ 276n counterpoint xviiin, 192, 489n Coveney, M 161n, 424–425, 521 ‘Head-scratching in Stoppard’s Arcadia 521n review of Travesties 27n review of Arcadia, The Observer, 18 April 1993 6–7, 425n ‘Stoppard’s parting gift to Nicholas Hytner is unashamedly clever’ 192n, 489n Coward, N 521, 521n Crick, F 4, 246 cricket bat speech 338, 428n, 444, 472 Criminal Law Amendment Act 81, 285 Croggon, A interview at The Wheeler Centre  305n, 525n cross-purpose 424, 436, 451–453, 581 Crump, GB ‘The Universe as Murder Mystery: Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers’ 157n Dada/Dadaism 15, 27, 161, 437, 472, 495, 552 D’Agoult, M 112 Dahl, R xxv, 453, 519 Daily Citizen 79, 84 Daily Mirror 81 Dali, S The Persistence of Time 158 Dante 200

General Index Darwin, C 246, 248, 520 Davidson, G 42–43 Davis, T and Womack, K ‘Reading (and Writing) the Ethics of Authorship: Shakespeare in Love as ­Postmodern Metanarrative’ 425n Davison, J xi Dawkins R 248–249 letter to Stoppard – 2006 248n The Selfish Gene 122n, 247n, 249n de Jong, N review of Ivanov 545 Dean, JF Tom Stoppard Comedy As A Moral Matrix 324n, 428n, 526n Dean, M ‘Stoppard’s Shakespeare: Collaboration and Revision’ 554n death 37, 53–55, 76n, 157, 173, 209, 212, 281, 310, 315, 317–320, 373, 389, 391–392, 441, 484, 530, 568, 578 Decembrists 96, 215, 218, 306, 332 Delane, J 81 Delaney, P Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of the Major Plays 5n, 27n, 60n, 68n, 251n,   277n, 280n, 299n, 315n, 325n, 334n,   361n, 373n, 400n, 403n, 424n, 427n,   495n, 532n, 580n Demastes, W 310, 492 The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard 99n, 327n, 374n, 427n, 440n, 481n, 492n, 505n, 514n, 520n, 535n, 572n Comedy Matters: From Shakespeare to Stoppard 144–145, 144–145n, 386n ‘Re-Inspecting the Crack in the Chimney: Chaos Theory from Ibsen to Stoppard’ 137n, 143, 143n, 146n, 147n, 260n, 310n Theatre Of Chaos: Beyond Absurdism Into Orderly Disorder 4n, 144–145, 144–145n, 492n Dennett, D Consciousness Explained 145n Descartes, R (including Cartesian) 254, 261, 274, 408, 410, 520 Desert Island Discs 181 destiny xxviii, 32, 53–55, 116, 173, 281, 316–317, 439, 473, 506–507

641 determinism xxiii, xxviii, 55, 75–76, 79, 137, 147, 151, 237, 276, 308–324, 352, 360, 373, 386, 391, 405, 443, 488, 529, 550, 557, 574, 579, 583 Diana 198 Dickens, C 86, 519n Dido 209 Dodd, J ‘Success Is the Only Unusual Thing about Mr. Stoppard’ 128n Dogg language 176, 292, 340, 342–343, 393, 485 Donne, J Elegy xix. To His Mistress Going To Bed 441n, 465 double entendre 411, 415, 421, 424, 435, 437, 440, 451, 581 double helix 294 Douglas, A – see Bosie dualism/duality xiiin, xxiii, xxv, xxviii, xxx, 8n, 20, 23, 28, 32n, 39, 41, 46–48, 51, 55, 60, 85n, 118, 125, 145n, 146, 194n, 175n, 196, 198, 203, 209, 211, 227–231, 234–235, 237, 248, 252, 254, 256, 262, 266, 274, 284, 309, 336, 349–351, 360–426, 398n, 400n, 432n, 433n, 424n, 475, 477, 485, 487n, 493, 504, 526, 530, 543, 548, 556–557, 559, 575–576, 579, 581–583 Dubcek 290, 295 Duchamp, M xxvii Nu descendant un escalier 158, 505 Duck, I and Sudarshan, E.C.G 100 Years of Planck’s Quantum 2n Duncan (Macbeth) 292 Duncan, J Godot Comes 530n Durham, W ‘The Structure And Function of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties’ 398n Dworkin, R Religion Without God 20n, 251, 252n, 259–260, 260n Eden, E xxvi, 48, 416 Up The Country 93, 522, 578 Edwards, P ‘Science in Hapgood and Arcadia’ 39–40, 152n Eichelbaum, S ‘Call Me the Thinking Man’s Farceur” 154n, 517n

642 ‘So Often Produced, He Ranks with Shaw’ 60n Einstein, A xxvi, 38, 145, 258–261, 259n, 312, 348, 350, 369, 404, 520, 557 Eliot, TS 518n, 519n ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’ 517, 517n, 518 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 40 entropy 39, 76, 76n, 152 Esslin, M The Theatre of the Absurd 527n Estragon (Waiting for Godot) 529 ‘Ethical Fictions as Ethical Foundations’ 185 ethics xxiii, xxvi, 117, 124, 187–189, 235–360, 581 of empire xxviii, xxx, 47, 579 Euclid 16, 128, 184 Euler, L 230–231 Exton, C 13, 442 Fainberg, V 183, 276, 287 farce 422, 432, 435, 445–451, 559, 580, 583 Farndale, N The Telegraph xivn, 4n Farnsworth, E Interview with Stoppard 430, 430n, 566n fate 37, 173, 238, 308–324, 360, 391 Feigenbaum, M 38 Fermat, P de 77n Feynman, R xxii, 2, 2n, 260, 348–349, 351, 363, 365, 548 The Character of Physical Law 40, 349n, 363n Feynman, RF, Leighton, RB, Sands, M The Feynman Lectures on Physics 41n, 363n Fichte, JB 29, 221, 272–274, 344, 411 Firth, B ‘Interview with Brian Firth’ 4n Fleming, J xxi, 376, 378, 383, 488, 490, 517, 520, 570 ‘A Talk With Tom Stoppard’ xxiin, 85n, 232n, 309n, 582n Stoppard’s Theatre Finding Order amid Chaos xxxin, 4n, 22n, 43n, 52n, 53n, 58n, 62n, 78n, 82n, 134n, 157n, 161n, 170n, 177n, 186n, 203n, 223n, 224n, 231n, 236n, 240n, 261n, 309n, 383n, 311n, 315n, 362n, 366n, 373n, 376n, 378n, 383n, 398n, 400n, 425n, 427n, 442n, 451n, 458n, 460n, 471n, 473n, 479n, 488n,

General Index 490n, 492n, 496n, 497n, 514n, 516n, 517, 518n, 520n, 524n, 526n, 527n, 528n, 530n, 536n, 577n, 580n, 587n ‘Tom Stoppard: A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man’ 5n, 460n Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia 137n, 142n, 143, 143n, 441n, 488n, 570n, 571n Ford, John xxv, 179 Tis Pity She’s A Whore 41–42, 178, 180, 182, 376–377 Forster, EM xxv, 521 A Passage To India 414, 522 Fourier 96 fractals 141 Free Russian and Polish press 33, 107, 217 free speech xxii, xxvi, 50–51, 70n, 102, 121, 187, 224, 237, 277–298, 381, 482, 484, 506, 515, 551, 568, 581–582 freedom xxiii, xxvi, 25, 29, 32n, 33–34, 50, 65, 79, 94, 97, 98n, 102–103, 105, 116, 125, 176n, 183, 185, 193, 237, 258, 278–279, 293, 295, 298–309, 312, 315–317, 346, 360, 381, 396, 506, 545–546, 568 freedom of the press 24–25, 60, 79–84, 135, 223–224, 334n, 381 Frontiers In Art 564 Funke, L Playwrights Talk about Writing: 12 Interviews 326n fusion – see union of ideas Fyodor (Anna Karenina) 257 Gabbard, LP The Stoppard Plays 72n, 315n Galileo, G 458 Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Systems 3 Gallus 211 ‘Galway Bay’ 479 Game Theory 46, 190–191, 243, 246–248, 303, 377n Gandhi, M 413 Gaskin, R Horace and Housman 207, 207n geometry 16, 78, 128, 184, 228–231, 562 Gertrude (Hamlet) 173, 386, 395, 551 Gilbert and Sullivan 479 Patience 486 Giotto 200 Giovanni (Tis Pity She’s A Whore) 41, 180, 377

General Index Gleick, J Chaos 38, 74, 78n, 79n, 136, 139n, 141n, 142n, 143n, 571n Glendenning, V Intelligent Life magazine 440n Glenarvon 139 Globe 80–81 Glover, M ‘Theatre: Housman: a very private lad’ 203n, 209n God xxii, 1, 19, 71, 74, 111, 127, 128, 138, 152–153, 155, 190, 207, 236, 239, 242, 249–261, 272–273, 280, 302, 312, 352, 360, 416, 437–438, 455, 523 God of Creation 19–21, 71, 98–99, 153, 236, 242, 252, 258, 400 God source of moral values 19–21, 71, 73, 153, 155, 242, 250–251, 252n, 261, 301–302, 360, 481 Gogol 100, 214 Gold, M ‘Who are the Dadas in Travesties?’  521n, 526n Golden Age 28, 97, 203, 359 Goldsmith, O xxv An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog 437 Gollob, D and Roper, D 519 ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ xiiin, 22n, 24n, 45n, 59n, 61n, 130n, 188n, 237n, 241n, 276n, 299n, 305n, 443n, 519n good/goodness 19, 21, 66, 71–73, 97, 107, 111–112, 117, 123–124, 190, 236–242, 244–245, 248, 250, 257, 263, 299, 301, 303–304, 306, 325–326, 335, 340, 345–346, 351, 353–354, 356, 358, 360–361, 428, 533, 550 Gordon, G 514, 524 ‘Tom Stoppard’ 133n, 311n, 514n, 525n, 533n, 536n, 550n, 587n Goreau, A 58 ‘Is The Real Inspector Hound a Shaggy Dog Story?’ 59n, 85n, 92n, 133n, 460n, 464n, 522n Gorki 70n Gothic novel xxiv, 138–139 Graham, K The Wind In The Willows 482 Grant, S Time Out 433n

643 Graph Theory 231 Graves, Richard Percival A.E. Housman The Scholar Poet 196n, 209n Gruber, W ‘Wheels within wheels, etcetera: Artistic Design in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ 54n, 160n Guardian 81, 156n, 475n Guildenstern (Hamlet) 173–174, 454 Guppy, S ‘Tom Stoppard, The Art of Theater vii’ 4n, 16n, 127n, 128n, 131n, 132n, 251n, 261n, 401n, 503n, 522n Gussow, M 5, 43, 137, 231, 233, 280, 326, 425, 501, 534–535 “Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight” 43n, 57n, 327n, 373n, 376n, 378n, 435n, 520n, 521n, 534n “I retain (sic) a nostalgia for the heat and the smells and the sounds of India”  47n, 130n, 295n, 416n, 417n, 434n, 502n, 522n, 523n, 524n, 566n, 567n “Seriousness compromised by my frivolity or … frivolity redeemed by my seriousness”  xxivn, 24n, 63n, 241n, 250n, 325n, 326n, 433n ‘Stoppard Refutes Himself, Endlessly’ 504n “The dissident is a discordant note in a highly orchestrated society” xin, 58n, 60n, 61n, 183, 183n “The sci and the phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through”  84n, 128n, 129n, 137n, 231n, 233n, 280n, 285n, 309n, 384n, 401n, 403n, 425n, 426n, 516n, 555n “What is your greatest superstition?’ ‘It’s bad luck to talk about it” 16n “Writing Dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself” 5n, 6n, 57n, 60n, 133n, 250n, 337n, 504n, 525n, 535n Gwendolen (The Importance of Being Earnest) 162, 164–166 Hadas, M, A History of Greek Literature 212n Hamlet (Hamlet) 173–174, 310–311, 316, 318, 321, 340, 392, 395, 454, 541–542, 547, 549–551

644 hard problem 409, 489 Hardin, NS ‘An Interview with Tom Stoppard’ 426n Harty, J ‘Stoppard’s Lord Malquist And Mr Moon: The Beginning’ 526n Havel, V 50, 186, 296, 298, 374 Hawkes, N ‘Plotting The Course of a Playwright’ 148 Hawking, S 352 A Brief History of Time 352n Hayman, R 224n, 437, 517, 524, 533, 554, 517n ‘Double Acts: Tom Stoppard and Peter Wood’ 554n First Interview 63n, 129n, 468n ‘Profile 9: Tom Stoppard’ 304n Second Interview xxxn, 128n, 426n Tom Stoppard 155n, 163n, 167n, 427n, 437n, 447n, 490n, 504n, 510n, 512n, 518n, 524n, 528n, 530n, 531n, 532n, 533n, 536n, 554n, 569n Hedder Gabler 434 Hegel, GWF xxvi, 29, 30, 100, 107, 237, 253, 274, 321, 345, 572 Heisenberg,W xxvi, 136, 145, 349, 360, 363, 405 Uncertainty Principle 41, 225, 309, 343, 350n, 362, 557 Helsinki Accords 185 Hemingway, E xi, 4, 518–519 Hendrickson, T Insecurity, Frustration and Disgust 124n Hendrix 295 Henninger, D ‘Tom Stoppard and the Politics of Morality’ 23n, 235n, 275n, 286n Hebert, H ‘A Playwright in Undiscovered Country’ 61n, 223n, 224n, 280n Hercules 195 Herzen, A 30–33, 97n, 98n, 114n 507 From The Other Shore xxv, 32n, 34, 36n, 105n, 106n, 505–507, 508n My Past and Thoughts xxv, 29n, 30n, 31–32, 104n, 213n, 215n, 407n Sobranie Sochinenii 29n, 30n, 32n, 98n, 116n, 216n, 306n The Polar Star 34n Who Is To Blame? 116

General Index Hill, T ‘The poet punts down the Styx’ 193n, 194n, 398n Hippolytus 198 history 31, 36, 93n, 107–108, 137, 320–323, 321n, 345, 506, 572–573, 579, 583 Hobbes, T 237, 245–246 Leviathan 245n Hobson, H review of Travesties 161n Hobson-Jobson xxv, 341, 419 Hodges, J 488 Hodgson, T The Plays of Tom Stoppard xxiin, 178n, 269n, 395n, 399n, 424n, 437n, 470n, 519n, 520n, 527n, 534n, 543n Horace 196, 205–206, 209, 212, 359 Diffugere nives; Odes – see ‘Ode iv, 7’ ‘Ode iv, 7’ 194, 195n, 196, 197, 212 ‘Odes iv, 1’ 197 ‘Odes Book Three’ 197 House of Cards 41, 46, 178–179, 181–182, 373–376 House, G preamble to the bbc Radio 3 production of Artist Descending a Staircase  505n, 561n Housman, AE xxiv–xxv, 82n, 193–195, 197–198, 202–204, 206–207, 212, 398n, 474 A Shropshire Lad 209, 212 ‘Because I like you better’ 210, 210n Last Poems 202 More Poems 195 ‘Oh Who Is That Young Sinner’ 474 ‘The vane on Hughley steeple’ 209 Hudson, R, Itzin, S and Trussler, S ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ xxvin, 59n, 63n, 67n, 124n, 128n, 130n, 160n, 171n, 172n, 325n, 333n, 335n, 336n, 430n, 433n, 434n, 516n, 524n Hunter, J 496 About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work  xiiin, 15n, 17n, 58n, 102n, 131n, 134n, 222n, 223n, 326n, 329n, 370n, 375n, 424n, 425n, 431n, 434n, 435n, 436n, 457n, 490n, 491n, 514n, 519n, 528n, 532n, 535n, 544n

General Index Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides xiin, xxviiin, 88n, 311n, 426n, 433n, 436n, 458n, 472n, 492n, 495n, 496n, 519n, 528n, 532n Husak 186, 295–296, 299, 480 Huston, JD ‘“Misreading” Hamlet: Problems of Perspective in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ 55n Hyacinth 200 Hytner, N 192n, 489n Interview with Stoppard xiin, 46n, 132n, 189n, 237n, 245n, 252n, 434n, 544n I Love The Ladies 479 Iago (Othello) 557 Ibsen, H The Wild Duck 524 illusion and reality xxiii, xxviii, 52n, 55, 160, 173, 178, 343, 360–397, 393n, 411, 423, 439, 487, 491–492, 510, 550, 559, 582 Indianization 91 Index on Censorship 287 information 191, 280 inner life 344 intellectual joke 435, 438–440 iteration 77, 142 Is God? xxiii, 19, 533 Isherwood, C review of the Lincoln Center Theater’s production of The Invention of Love 2001 428n Isis 202, 209, 575, 578 Ithaca Cathechism xxv, 167 Jack (The Importance of Being Earnest)  162–168, 380 Jackson, M 194, 197–198, 202–203 Jaggi, M ‘You can’t help being what you write’ 288n, 509n James, C ‘Tom Stoppard: Count Zero Splits the Infinitive’ 309n, 339n Jenkins, A 376, 448 The Theatre of Tom Stoppard 6n, 8n, 27n, 62n, 178n, 223n, 239n, 320n,

645 327n, 338n, 350n, 366n, 374n, 377n, 432n, 448n, 464n, 470n, 479n, 517n, 519n, 520n, 521n, 530n, 560n, 580n Jernigan, DK Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern  9n, 25n, 40n, 63n, 130n, 137n, 172n, 177n, 192n, 250n, 309n, 312n, 331n, 373n, 398n, 424n, 426n, 428n, 457n, 464n, 504n, 515n, 518n, 554n, 580n Jirous, I 186, 296, 484 John xxii 1 Johnson, S Life of Cowley 17 Jones, P 357 Programme notes to The Invention of Love  357n Joyce, J xxiv, xxxii, 15, 161, 164n, 168, 170–171, 377, 516, 525n, 527n, 581 Chamber Music 483 Finnegans Wake 377 Lean Out Of The Window 483n Letters 1 377n Mr Dooley 171 Ulysses 28, 69n, 167–170, 170n, 327, 440, 473, 473n, 496, 515–516, 527n, 583 Jummapur 87–88, 90 Jury, L ‘Sir Tom Stoppard: Newspapers kidnapping sacred idea of press freedom’ 284n Justice For Brodie Committee 44 Juvenal 203 Kafka 525 Kaliningrad, – see Konigsberg Kant, I xxvi, 110, 273, 275, 306, 343–346, 360, 410–411 Antimony of Pure Reason 343n Critique of Pure Reason 345 Karamzin, NM 507 Kauffman, S review of the first New York production of Jumpers in 1974 153n Keats, J Ode on a Grecian Urn 77n Keele, R Ockham Explained From Razor To Rebellion  2n, 19

646 Kelly, A 331 ‘A Complex Vision’ 94n, 98n ‘“A Glowing Footprint”: Herzon, Proudhon, And The Role Of The Intellectual Revolutionary’ 30n, 31n, 32n, 34n, 98n, 101, 101n, 505n Introduction to Russian Thinkers 98, 331n The Discovery of Chance 101n, 114n programme notes to The Coast of Utopia 2002 30, 103n, 217n, 272–273, 273n Views From The Other Shore 97n, 105n, 106n, 112n, 116n, 506n Kelly, K Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play 425n, 464n, 516n, 526n, 544n, 580n ‘Tom Stoppard’s Dramatic Debates: The Case of Night and Day’ 79n, 130n Kelly, K and Demastes, W ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom Stoppard’ xiin, xxixn, 15n, 17n, 18n, 131n, 143n, 427n, 484n Kendal, F 413, 423, 532n Kent, A ‘You Get What You Interrogate For’ 362n Kerensky, O 242 The New British Drama: Fourteen Playwrights since Osborne and Pinter  131n, 161n, 242n, 250n, 251n, 258n, 327n, 329n, 434n, 435n, 464n, 515n ‘Tom Stoppard’ 60n Kipling, R Gunga Din 87 ‘Mandalay’ 487 Knapp, J ‘“Stoppard’s Arcadia: This is not Science; this is story-telling”’ 76n, 212n, 399n knowledge 148, 151–152, 179, 355–356 Kohout, P 277, 290 Konisgsberg, seven bridges problem xxv, 228–231, 493 Krishna 48–49 ‘La Cumparsita’ 479n Labouchere Amendment 81, 206 Lady Augusta Bracknell (The Importance of Being Earnest) 162, 164–165, 168–169

General Index Lady Macbeth (Macbeth) 175 Laertes (Hamlet) 173, 287, 311, 321, 549, 551 Lamb, C xxiv, 139 Land and Liberty 218 Landovsky, P 290–291 Lane (The Importance of Being Earnest) 162, 164 Lawrence, TE The Seven Pillars of Wisdom 200 Lawson, M 509 ‘Front Row’ 410n, 480n, 481n, 509n Lazarus, E ‘The New Colossus’ 467 le Carré, J xiiv, 232, 521–522 Leane, E Reading Popular Physics Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies 350n Leibnitz, GW 351–352, 569 Lenin, N Memories of Lenin 169 Lenin, vi 70n, 160, 168, 213, 218, 236, 293, 334n, 496 Lenin Collected Works 169, 293n Proletary No. 35 335n What Is To Be Done? 213n Leroi, AM 246 letter to Stoppard 190, 361, 361n, 570n Leroux 96 Lesbia 201, 474 Leveaux, D and Davies, L, – The Real Thing Levenson, J ‘Stoppard’s Shakespeare: textual revisions’ 517n, 551n, 552n, 558n ‘Views from a Revolving Door: Tom Stoppard to Date’ 527n Levin (Anna Karenina) 257, 260n Lewis, P ‘Quantum Stoppard’ 362n Ligurinus 197 Limerick 170, 473–474 Lipcik, R ‘The Rolling Stones’ Czech Invasion’ 50n Liszt 112 Little Barmouth 44 Living Room Theatre 175, 290, 445, 458 Londre, FH Tom Stoppard 276n, 466n, 514n, 587n Loppert, M 437n ‘Lord’s Prayer’ 456 Lorenz, EN 79

General Index Louis of Bavaria 1 Louis Philippe 32 Louis, P ‘See The Father. See The Baby’ 311n love 109–117, 178–182, 193–204, 209–210, 216, 373 Lucan 203 Lutyens, E 93 Lyotard, J-F The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge 250n Macaulay, A 399 ‘The Man Who Was Two Men’ 399n ‘Tom Stoppard, A.E. Housman, and the Classics’ 60n, 148n, 194n, 204n, 209n, 315n, 424n, 436n Macaulay, TB 86 Macbeth (Macbeth) 176–177, 290, 292, 343, 394, 551 MacDonald, I Revolution In The Head 293n Macduff (Macbeth) 551, 553 Mackean, I ‘Sir Tom Stoppard. In Search of Reality’  399n, 558n MacNeice, L xxv Bagpipe Music 90 magic 329n, 424, 428 Magritte, R xxvii Majeed, J ‘“The Bad Habit”: Hobson-Jobson, British Indian glossaries and imitations of mortality’ 341n, 420n Malapropism 13–14, 401, 422, 435, 442–443, 581 Malcolm (Macbeth) 392 Malvern, J ‘Stoppard: They don’t get my jokes any more’ xxivn, 132n Manet, E Dejeuner sur l’herbe xxvii, xxix, 9n, 497, 505, 539, 559, 574 Manilius 203 Marcellus (Hamlet ) 173 Marowitz, C 170 Confessions of a Counterfeit Critic: A London Theatre Notebook 556n ‘Tom Stoppard – The Theatre’s Intellectual P.T. Barnum’ 160n

647 Marx, K xxvi, 31, 69, 104, 215, 237, 306–307, 322, 360, 496, 507–8, 546, 572, 577, 579 Critique of the Gotha Programme 1875 293 Communist Manifesto 34, 100 Mason, J ‘Footprints to the Moon: Detectives as Suspects in Hound and Magritte’ 8n Maves, CE ‘A Playwright on the Side of Rationality’  60n, 536n Maychick, D ‘Stoppard Ascending’ 158n, 562n, 563n Mayne, R ‘Arts Commentary’ 11n, 61n, 329n, 370n, 430n, 432n, 541n McCulloch, J 259 ‘Dialogue with Tom Stoppard’ 153–154, 259n McEnroe, C 432 Tom Stoppard in Conversation with Colin McEnroe 432n McHale, B Postmodernist Fiction 177n, 318n Mendel, G 246 Method School 439 Michaelangelo David 355 microscope 73, 238, 255–256, 360, 410, 550, 582 Miller, A 541 mind-body dualism 408, 410, 583 mirror 262, 269–270, 390, 393, 491 Miss Prism (The Importance of Being Earnest) 167 Modigliani 415, 418 Molnar, F xxiv, 171, 519n At The Castle 510 moral matrix 325, 326n, 328, 335, 360, 582 morality 193, 198, 238–249, 273, 299–300, 325, 336, 339, 354, 400, 438, 582 Mortimer, W interview with Stoppard 3, 232n, 503n Morwood, J ‘Jumpers revisited’ 550n motivation 44, 46, 47, 122–123, 178, 189–190, 252, 256, 409, 426, 544, 556 Mount Pisgah 208 Moses 208 Mozart 21, 240–241 Mrozek, S xxiv, 479n

648 Munro 357 music hall xxvi, 443, 479, 581 Mustich, J Barnes & Noble Review xxviiin, 61n, 132n, 279n, 425n, 432n, 509n, 510n, 511n, 512n, 541n, 545n Muza, A ‘The Sound of Distant Thunder: The Chekhovian Subtext in The Coast of Utopia’ 537–538 ‘My Way’ 485 ‘mystery in the clockwork’ 236, 255, 349, 532n Nabokov, V 435n Pale Fire xiiin Nadel, I 44, 132–133, 133n, 378 ‘Chekhov’s Stoppard’ 471n, 539n, 540n, 543n Double Act A Life Of Tom Stoppard 49n, 67n, 137n, 171n, 373n, 378n, 424n, 460n, 508n, nadryv 94 Nagel, T ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’ 256n, 410n Nash Equilibrium 246, 377n Nathan, D ‘In a Country Garden (If It Is a Garden)’  128n, 135n, 354n Nathan, J ‘Tom Stoppard: The modern Shakespeare returns to the National for a long-awaited comeback’ 548n National Theatre Magazine 471n Nestroy 511 New Geometry of Irregular Forms 78 New York Times 225n Newsweek 81 Newton, I 2, 76, 152, 258, 260, 347–348, 350–352, 360, 404n, 405, 458, 549, 569, 572 The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy 3n Newtonian physics/science/theory xxxi, 17, 38–39, 74–75, 79, 125, 127, 137–138, 144, 146–147, 151, 313, 352, 361, 472n Nicholas I, Tsar 29, 96, 100, 102, 218, 220, 288, 305, 411, 508, 549 Niederhoff, B

General Index ‘Fortuitous Wit: Dialogue and Epistemology in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia’ 140n, 148n Nietzsche 242 Nightingale, B review of Night and Day 59n, 62n, 63n review of Travesties 63n, 431n Norman, M 440 Nunn, T 16, 131, 131n, 141, 488n, 570 O’Brien, Flann 523 O’Connor, G ‘Two Men on an Ocean Wave’ 509n O’Connor, T 59, 232, 493 ‘Welcome to the World of Tom Stoppard’  58n, 59n, 135n, 232n, 233n, 493n O’Nolan, Brian – see O’Brien, Flann Oates, Captain xxv, 155 Occam’s razor/(parsimony) xii, xxiii–xxiv, xxx–xxxii, 1–56, 58, 124, 126, 127, 145n, 149, 234–235, 237, 276, 284, 301, 343, 361, 395, 410n, 470, 491, 534–535, 557, 571, 581–583 Ophelia (Hamlet) 173, 310, 386, 551, 554 orchestra 34, 50–51, 182–184, 287, 381, 383, 437, 479, 581 Ortega Y Gasset 44 Orwell, G Nineteen Eighty-Four xii, 51, 383, 384n outlier 47, 245 Ovid 139, 203, 206 ‘Oxen of the Sun’ 169–170, 516 Pan 482–484, 568 parody 436, 463–468, 463n, 581 parsimony – see Occam’s razor payoff matrix 246 peripeteia 519 Persephone 195 perspective 155, 271, 337, 342n, 363, 423, 560, 566–568, 579, 583 Phaedrus 206n, 358 Philip of Macedon 359 Piccadilly Recreation 40, 150 Pink Floyd xxii, 243, 480 ‘Breathe’ 480 ‘Echoes’ 487 ‘Eclipse’ 243 Meddle 487 ‘Money’ 481

649

General Index Piper at the Gates of Dawn 482 ‘Seamus’ 487 ‘Speak To Me’ 490 ‘Time’ 480 The Dark Side of the Moon 479–480 ‘Us and Them’ 481 Pirandello, L xxiv, 393n, 461, 518, 518n, 519n, 525, 527n Pirithous 195, 198, 209 Plastic People of the Universe 50, 186, 224, 295–298, 482, 484 Plato 20, 119, 202, 206, 248, 330, 358, 576 Phaedrus 206n Republic 329 Symposium 198, 207n, 541n Plautus Menaechmi 552 play-within-a-play xxix, 55, 136, 159–182, 234, 318, 375n, 393–397, 424, 504, 521, 579, 582 Plutarch 198, 568 Moralia, De Defectu Oraculorum 484n The Obsolescence of Oracles 484 poetry xxiv–xxv, 193, 203–209, 212, 253, 417, 473–477, 559, 581 Polkingthorne, jc The Quantum World 404n Polonius (Hamlet) 173, 287, 310, 386, 549–550 Poussin, N xxvii The Shepherds of Arcadia 441, 505 Pozzo (Waiting For Godot) 315, 529–530 ppu – see Plastic People of the Universe Prague Spring 293, 480, 568 Pregel river 230 Premukhino 99, 99n, 131n, 213–214, 219–221, 274, 537–538, 545, 572–573 Previn, A 182–183, 479, 490 Price, S ‘“The Illusion of Proprietorship”; Tom Stoppard’s Parade’s End”’ 440n, 562n Prisoner’s Dilemma 132, 189–190, 246–247 Probst, M ‘The Inauthentic Translations in The Invention of Love’ 194n Procul Harum 181 Prokofiev 479 Promised Land 208 Propertius 206 Proudhon 96, 98, 98n

pun 435–438, 436n, 576, 581 Pushkin, A 110n, 111–113, 115–116, 321, 575 Eugene Onegin 110 quantum jump 143, 258, 231, 350 quantum mechanical theory/quantum ­mechanics xii, xxiii, xxvi, xxviii, 2, 41, 56, 76, 127, 145, 225, 228–229, 231, 238, 260, 309–312, 343, 347–348, 350, 360, 361n, 362, 362n, 363, 369, 400–401, 404, 406–407, 424, 435, 557, 581 Rabinowitz, P J 518 ‘Narrative difficulties in Tom Stoppard’s Lord Malquist and Mr Moon’ 518n Radha 49, 416 Raj, 87, 91, 93 randomness 311 Raphael xxvii Madonna and Child 244 Rappaport, H 511 Some Thoughts On The Russian Personality 94n rasa 47, 49, 55, 295, 416–419, 424 razmakh 94 reason 260 Rehman, S ‘Wittgenstein’s Language-games, Stoppard’s Building-blocks and context-based learning in a corpus’  26, 340n, 485 relativism/relativity xxviii, xxviii, 21–22, 28, 41, 46–47, 55, 71–72, 74, 76, 93, 121, 122n, 125, 154–157, 189, 235, 237–239, 250, 258, 262–265, 267–268, 271, 277–278, 280n, 281, 283, 302–303, 310, 336–360, 363, 384n, 388–389, 397, 404, 409, 423, 428, 437, 458n, 527n, 536, 544, 550, 560, 566, 569, 576, 579, 582–583 Renaissance 355 Reynolds, G ‘Tom’s Sound Affects’ 84n Reynolds, N, – Daily Telegraph Richards, K 50 Robinson, GS ‘Nothing Left But Parody: Friedrich Durrenmatt and Tom Stoppard’ 464n ‘Plays Without Plot: The Theatre of Tom Stoppard’ 61n, 428n

650 Rod, D ‘Carr’s View of Art and Politics in Travesties’ 69n Rodway, A ‘Stripping Off’ 148n Rolling Stones xxvi, 49–50, 224, 225n, 297–298, 482, 484, 568 ‘It’s All Over Now’ 224, 297, 482 No Security 49, 298 Romantic/Romanticism xxii, xxxi, 8n, 15, 17, 32n, 74, 88, 99–100, 109, 111–112, 114, 116, 127, 128n, 137–139, 148, 214, 221, 234, 262, 273–274, 344–345, 398, 411, 475, 505, 549 Rosa, S 505 Rose, C interview with Stoppard, 2007 135n Rose of Sharon 123, 248 Rosencrantz (Hamlet) 173, 454 Rousseau, J-J xxvi, 96, 111, 113, 237, 245, 298, 306, 306n, 360, 506 Ruge Deutsche Jarbucher 104 running gag/joke 428, 435, 454–458, 581 Rusinko, S 518 Tom Stoppard 279n, 435n, 456n, 472n, 526n Russell, B 20 Ryan, C ‘Translating The Invention of Love: The Journey From Page to Stage for Tom Stoppard’s latest Play’ 133, 133n Saint Sebastian 455 Saint-Simon 96 ‘Satisfied Egg’ – see ‘My Way’ Sales, R Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 528n Sammells, N ‘The early stage plays’ 428n, 528n Sand, G 110–112, 114–115 Correspondence 115n Sappho xxv, xxxi, 206, 253–255 satire 436, 458–463, 463n, 491, 581 scanner (see also microscope) 256, 410 Schelling, FW xxvi, 29, 99, 221, 237, 272–273, 345, 411

General Index System of Transcendental Idealism 221 Schiff, S 534 ‘Full Stoppard’ 38n, 59n, 126n, 400n, 478n, 534n Schlueter, JM ‘Moon and Birdboot’ 395n Schiller 112 Schnitzler, A 171, 486, 510–511, 512n, 519n Das Weite Land 395 Liebelei 486, 510 Schultz, S and Astley, R ‘Travesties: Plot and the Moral Tilt’ 59n Scott, CP 81 Scott, Robert Falcon Journals 196, 196n second law of thermodynamics 74–76, 79, 147–148, 151, 352, 581 Select Committee on Promiscuity In High Places 81, 284, 441, 448, 456, 462 Self 272–273 Shade, JF xiiin Shah Jahan 93 Shakespeare, W xxiv, xxviii–xxix, 3, 92, 172, 291, 343, 386–387, 439, 461, 517n, 518, 526, 541–542, 547–559, 581 All’s Well That Ends Well 552 Antony and Cleopatra 552 As You Like It 552 Hamlet xxxi, 26, 37, 53–54, 160,171–174,  262,  310,  311,  316,  318,  321,  340–341, 386–387, 390, 410, 429, 442, 454, 456, 458, 490, 518, 520, 527n, 541, 548–553, 558, 585–598 Henry iv, Part 1 553 Henry iv, Part 2 551, 551n Henry v 553–554 Julius Caesar 552 King Lear 3, 542, 551, 554 Macbeth 160, 175n, 176, 276, 290–292, 341, 392–393, 440, 548 Measure for Measure 557 Much Ado About Nothing 553 Othello 553 Richard iii 551 Romeo and Juliet 372, 554 ‘Sonnet 18’ 551–552 ‘Sonnet 32’ 553 The Comedy of Errors 552

General Index The Merchant of Venice 554 The Merry Wives of Windsor 553 The Tempest 556n Twelfth Night 181, 508n Shapiro, J 1606 William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear 175n Shaw, GB xxiv, 519n, 520, 520n, 521n, 525n, 581–582 Preface (1898), Plays Pleasant 57 Shean, A and Gallagher, E Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean 171, 478 Shelley, PB 93 Ozymandias 93n Sher, A 548 Sherlock Holmes xxiv, 464 Shine on Harvest Moon 155, 480n Shringara 49, 418–419 Shulman, M review of Travesties 425n Sibleyras, G xxiv, 513 Sidley Park 39, 78, 137, 139–140, 142, 146, 149–151, 222, 400, 441, 504, 549, 572 Sierz, A ‘Sir Tom in the doghouse’ 513n Smith, ACH 426 Flourish 67n, 130n, 131n, 150n, 327n, 426n, 533n Smith, S ‘Script Jockey: The Flickering Images of Theatre’ 509n, 520n Smith,Winston (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 51, 384 Smothers, A ‘Lost and Found: The Search for “Truth” in Arcadia’ 472n Socrates 206n, 540 Sokolovo, 539, 573 Sokolyansky, M Shakespearian Themes and Motifs in Anton Chekhov’s Work 541n Solidarity 347 Sophocles 151, 206, 325, 477, 520 Philoctetes xxv, 519 The Loves of Achilles 203 Spade, PV The Cambridge Companion to Ockham  1n, 2n

651 Spencer, C 425 ‘Hail to the mad ‘king” 268n review of Ivanov 541 review of Hapgood 425n ‘Stoppard, master of the play on words’ 137n The Telegraph 425n spying 127, 225–233, 361n, 385–386, 401, 405, 423, 454, 503, 522, 582 Squire, JC 415, 524, 578 ss Italian Castle 510 Stalcup, S ‘Who Rules the Empire?’ 440n Steinbeck, J The Grapes Of Wrath 248 Stephen (Ulysses) 167 Stoppard, T A Passage to India 522 absolutism 185, 241, 261, 279, 284n, 299n, 336, 362 adaptation 509–513, 545 After Magritte 56, 504n Arcadia 15, 148, 566 art/artist 26, 63n, 67, 145, 158, 160, 288, 324–327, 327n, 328, 329n, 330, 333, 333n, 335–336 Artist Descending a Staircase 11, 158, 562–563 Auden 43, 66, 326 Beckett 516–517, 525, 530, 532, 534–536, 535n Chaos Theory 17, 136–137, 143, 309, 581 characters 15, 58, 58n, 61, 194 Chekhov 511, 537, 540–541, 544–545 child/children 23, 235, 237, 275n, 276, 277n comedy 135, 431–434, 436, 443, 463, 534, 541n Coward 521n Darkside 480–481, 480n determinism 309, 323 dissident/dissent 183, 296 duality 248, 284, 361, 398–401, 403, 426, 548 Duchamp 158 Eliot 517 Emily Eden 522 empire 84 farce 161, 298n, 426, 432

652 free expression 279, 292, 330 free press 280, 284–285 freedom 279, 288, 293n, 330 God 250n, 251, 259, 261 good/goodness 240, 241n, 244–245, 250, 250n, 299 Hamlet 6n, 171, 311, 520, 550, 558, 587 Hapgood 4, 129, 133, 231–233, 493, 522, 548 Hemingway xi, 4n Herzen 31, 102, 293n, 323 Housman 193–194, 398 ideas 58, 152, 161, 194, 426, 432 Indian Ink 47, 85, 92–93, 501, 522–524, 566–567 information xii, 61n, 280 journalism 222–223, 280, 284–285, 327 Joyce 60, 60n, 61, 327, 527n Jumpers 61, 224, 241, 241n, 250n, 251, 298n, 429, 493n, 517n, 536 letter to Carson, R, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 5 May 1983 477n letter to Gordon Davidson 17 April 1986 43n letter to Richard Dawkins.1 – 2006 248, 248n letter to Richard Dawkins.2 – 2006 240n, 299, 299n, 361n moral matrix 325–326 morality 154, 185, 241–242, 244–245, 248, 250n, 258, 261, 286, 298–299, 305, 325–326 Neutral Ground 519 Night and Day xiiin, 61, 222–224, 223n Occam’s razor 4, 18, 22, 24, 237 opening scene 493, 493n, 496–497 perspective 93, 363 Professional Foul 23, 45n, 188, 298n, 305, 519 programme notes to The Hard Problem 2015 251, 254n quantum mechanics 309, 362, 400–401, 581 radio 427n rasa 295, 416–417 reality 363 Rock ‘N’ Roll 483 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 6n, 134, 171–172, 311, 488, 517,

General Index 520, 524, 532, 555–556, 585n Shakespeare 547, 554–558 Shaw 432, 520n spying 522 stage debate xxviii, 57, 60, 60n, 63, 70, 84–85, 124n, 532 The Coast of Utopia 30–31, 305, 330, 432, 544 The Hard Problem 244, 252, 544 The Importance of Being Earnest 520 The Invention of Love 193–194, 398 The Merry Widow 7 The Real Inspector Hound 133, 520 The Real Thing 43, 329, 373, 375, 521n theatre/theatricality xin, 130, 133–134, 327, 427, 430, 432n, 434, 535–536, 554–555, 558, 580 time xxix, 563, 566 Travesties 7, 15, 16n, 17n, 26, 60, 61n, 63, 161, 163, 168, 170, 224, 327, 493n, 496–497, 520, 527n, 533 truth 261 union of ideas/yoking 17, 437, 484 utopia 102 value 46 whodunit 503n Whitman xxviii, 467 Wilde 193, 354n writing xi, xin, xii, xiv, xxii, xxiv, xxviii–xxix, 15–16, 18, 38n, 57–61, 120n, 126–134, 129n, 152, 171, 185, 224, 232, 329, 354, 370, 376, 378, 425n, 425, 427, 429–432, 429–432, 435n, 509–511, 513–514, 523, 525, 533, 535, 554n, 558, 562, 580, 582 Stoppard, T and Parfitt, D, on Parade’s End 432n storm in a teacup 23, 28, 127, 581 Strindberg, J xxv Miss Julie 178, 180, 182, 376 Styx xxix, 209, 468, 575, 578 Sudkamp, H Tom Stoppard’s Biographical Drama 6n, 193n, 194n, 212n, 268n, 542n, 566n, 573n Sunday Times 81 Swinburne, Richard Simplicity As Evidence of Truth 3n Syrinx 482

653

General Index Taylor, JR ‘Our Changing Theatre, No. 3: Changes in Writing’ 19n, 120n, 127n, 434n, 536n, 554n Taylor, P review of Ivanov 540–541 Tchaikovsky 479 Teachout, T review of The Cherry Orchard 544n Telegraph 104 Tennyson, A 86, 475 Thamous 484 ‘The Aesthete’ 487 The Bell 217–218 The Castle Of Otranto 138 The Chameleon 201 The Confidential Secretary 7 The Couch of Eros 40, 140, 150 ‘The Cripple’ 159 ‘The False Hussar’ 485–486 The Globe 80–81 ‘The Maid of Turkey’ 150 ‘The Miller’s Tale’ 181 The Mousetrap (Hamlet) 395 The Murder of Gonzago 318 The Mysteries of Udolpho 138 The Odyssey 167, 170 The Peaks Traveller and Gazetteer 151 ‘The Physiology of High Stakes’ 408 ‘The Stripper’ 498 The Telescope 214, 549 The Times xiiin, 81, 102, 513 Theban 300 212 Theban youths 198, 359 Theocritus xxv, 207 Idylls 207n Theognis of Megara 212 Theognidea 212n Theosophical Society 90–91, 502 Theseus 195, 198, 209 thought experiment 189 Thurber, J 5 Tibullus 358 time shift xxiii, xxviii–xxx, 3, 185, 371, 378, 505, 559–579, 581, 583 Tolstoy, L 213, 335, 531 Anna Karenina xxv What Is To Be Done? 213n

transcendental idealism 411 triangle 184, 287 triangulation 228 Toms, C 366 Trojan War 27, 338n Trueman, M Variety 61n truth 53, 239, 261–276, 391, 439, 502 Tullus 206 turbulence 146 Turgenev, I 331 Letter to Vassily Botkin, 29 June 1855 331n Sportsmen’s Sketches 331 Fathers and Sons 100 Turner, JMW 85 Tusa, J interview with Stoppard 102n, 134, 326n, 436n, 544 twins/twinning 122, 162n, 218, 226–228, 230– 233, 366, 68–369, 397n, 399, 401–402, 404n, 405, 407, 424, 426, 494, 503, 552 Twisk, R ‘Stoppard Basks in a Late Indian Summer’ 16n, 126n, 132n, 413n Tynan, K ‘Withdrawing with Style from Chaos’ 4n, 168, 168n, 240n, 333n, 435n Tzara, T 28, 160–161, 472 Uncertainty Principle – see Heisenberg union of ideas 8n, 17, 56, 127, 183, 234, 515, 581 Universal Idea 99 Upton, A 329, 331n Artworks 329n, 425n utopia 102 Vanden Heuvel, M ‘“Is postmodernism?”: Stoppard among/ against the postmoderns’ 424n Velvet Revolution 35, 224, 298, 568 Venus de Milo 157, 238 Virbius 198 Virgil 139, 203 ‘Aeneid Book iv’ 208n, 209, 209n Eclogues 418n Vishnu 417 Vishvanata 419 Vivaldi, A 488

654 Vladimir (Waiting for Godot) 529 Voltaire 236 waltz 470, 488 Wardle, I review of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 6n review of Travesties 437n, 515n Watson, JD 4, 246 The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of dna 18 Watts, J 324 The Guardian xi, 324 ‘Tom Stoppard’ 63n, 66n, 326n Weiner, B A Puzzling, “Traditional” Stoppard’ 161n Welsh, AM ‘Stoppard in Love’ 537n Wetzsteon, R ‘Tom Stoppard Eats Steak Tartare With Chocolate Sauce’ 26n, 63n, 161n Whitaker, T ‘Mirrors of Our Playing: Paradigms and Presences’ 527n Tom Stoppard 280n, 435n, 520n, 521n, 526n Whitman, W xxviii ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ 467 Wieda, N ‘The Ominousness of Chekhovian Idyll: The Role of Intertextuality in Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia’ 538–539 Wightman, J ‘Mini-Hamlets in Limbo’ 587n Wilde, O xxii, xxiv, xxxii, 168, 193, 276, 354n, 428, 436n, 515, 519n, 525n, 581 The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing 379n

General Index The Importance of Being Earnest  160–167, 172, 222, 379n, 380, 470, 515, 518, 520, 539, 577, 587n William of Ockham xxiii, 1 I Libros Sententiarum; Quodlibeta septem 2n Wittgenstein, L xxvi, 26, 175–176, 271, 290, 292, 303–304, 339n, 340–341, 342n, 343, 360, 392–393, 485, 517n, 520, 557 Philosophical Investigations 339 Wolf, M interview with John Wilson on Front Row 408n, 436n Wood, P xxviiin, 126n, 222n, 429, 430n, 510, 511n Wordsworth, W I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud 122 Yarmolinsky, A 508 Road to Revolution 508n Yiqun Zhou Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece 212n yoking – see union of ideas Yule, H and Burnell, AC Hobson-Jobson 420n Zeifman, H ‘Comedy of Ambush: Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing’ 430n ‘The comedy of Eros: Stoppard in love’ 315n, 398n, 436n Zimmer, B The Story Behind “Hobson-Jobson” 419n, 420n Zinman, T ‘Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing’ 79n, 162n, 397n, 412n, 492n, 514n, 521n, 556n