PHILIP ROBERTS

Tom Stoppard : serious artist or siren?

Tom Stoppard’s writing career is a remarkable one. Since 1%3, when his play A Walk on the Water was transmitted on television a few days after the assassination of President Kennedy ‘as a substitute for a play deemed inappro- priate in the circumstances’,’ he has had performed some eleven stage plays (including two adaptations), seven television plays, six radio plays and one music piece (‘Every good boy deserves favour’). There have also been some short stories and a single novel. He is said by his agent to have ‘grossed well over f 300,000’ from Rosencrantx and Guildenstern are Deod alone.’ He is the most consistently eulogised dramatist of our time. Only Beckett and Pinter, significantly, are able to match his glowing reviews, which is possibly why, in the midst of wittily decrying critics in general, he has a good word for reviewers: ‘I hope it is obvious that generally I am not referring to theatre- reviewers, who are performing a useful public service.” He has been praised, albeit with a few reservations by Bigsby, deified pedanticaUy by Hayman, championed aggressively by James and mythologised unctuously by Tynan.‘ His critical cup runneth over, and although what is said about his plays is not his fault, what he says about his plays should make one wonder why the accolades are so fulsome, and why his particular brand of theatre should have drawn quite so much attention over the last fifteen years.

Stoppard is never less than articulate about his position. In 1968, he stated that he had ‘very few social preoccupations . . . Some writers write because they burn with a cause which they further by writing about it. I burn with no causes. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing.’’ The statement is one of many in which the terms of the antithesis set up are disguised as mutually exclusive. The inference is that those whose medium is the theatre who are judged to have something to say are lesser writers who merely employ the theatre. Any other medium would do as well. Again, those with social preoccupations are defined as writers who ‘burn with a cause’. In order to take the position that a love of writing is the only reason for so doing, it becomes necessary to denigrate those who apparently work Merently. Elsewhere, Stoppard confesses himself

deeply embarrassed by the statements and postures of ‘committed’ theatre. There is no such thing as ‘pure’ art - art is acommentaryonsomethqelseiulife - it might be adultery in the suburbs or the Viemamese war. I think that art ought to involve itself in contemporary social and political history as much as anything else, but I find it

Tom Stoppard: serious artist or siren? 85

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.6

What is being said here amounts to a refusal to believe in the efficacy, in any sense, of theatre to affect anythmg, including an audience. It is perfectly reasonable to feel embarrassed about ‘committed’ theatre but to equate it with ‘pure’ art and then to feel embarrassed when ‘large claims are made’ for it is to attribute non-Stoppardian theatre with an arrogance which might make even the hardest of hard-line ‘political’ groups wince. In another context, Stoppard goes so far as to pronounce the theatre ‘valuable, and I just hope very much that it’ll remain like that as an institution. I think it’s vital that the theatre is run by people who like showbiz’.’ He does not, however, define in what sense the theatre is valuable. There is a consistent jokiness to Stoppard’s sayings about the theatre and himself. In a second interview with Hayman, he confessed that ‘I never quite know whether I want to be a serious artist or a siren’.‘ It is the case that watching the plays at least reflects a comparable unease, especially if one’s doubts are reinforced by (they may be deliberately provocative) such airy notions as ‘I’m not actually hooked on brm. I’m not even hooked on content if one means message. I’m hooked on style’ and ‘For me the particular use of a particular word inthe 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 . . . ’ .’ What is peculiar about this is the supposition that writing is about one thing 01 the other.

What Stoppard has resisted steadily both in his plays and in his opinions expressed in interviews is any idea of the theatre as an agent of change, as a form of art which is in any sense expressive of and contributory to the nature of the society of which it is a part. In order to do this, he uses a definition of the term ‘political’ which excludes what he does, and thereby begs the question as to the status of his own work. Stoppard comfortably acquiesces in the sttatus quo: ‘I lose less sleep if a policeman in Britain beats somebody up than if it happens in a totalitarian country, because I know it’s an exceptional case. It’s a sheer perversion of speech to describe the society I live in as one that inflicts violence on the underprivileged.”O It might be thought that the perversion of speech resides more in Stoppard’s deliberate restriaion of the word ‘violence’ to physical beating so as to enable him to assert smugly that the under- privileged in Britain are not done any violence. Consequently, he becomes exasperated at those who dissent and whose writing reflects such dissent. In an interview in 1974, Stoppard attempted to stretch the term ‘political’ into meaninglessness :

86 Critical Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 3

there are political pkys which are about specific situations, and there are political plays which are about a general political situation, and there are plays which are politkd ucts in themselves, insofar as it can be said that attacking or insulting or shocking an audience is a political act . . . The Term ‘political play’ is a loose one if one is thinking of Roots as well as b a r - I mean Bond’s - as well as L y By. So much so that I don’t think it is meaningful or useful to make that distinction between them and Jumpers - still less so in the case of Travesties . . .Jumpers obviously isn’t a political act, nor is it a play about politics, nor is it a play about ideology . . . On the other hand the play reflects my belief that all political acts have a moral basis to them and are meaningless without them.u

In other words, there are just plays and no label works for all of them. Or, perhaps, could it be that all plays are political? The stance is that of the liberal humanist with a corresponding belief that mankind will sort itself out eventually, without anyone prodding it in any particular direction. Stoppard recently put this very plainly: ‘I believe in the perfectibility of society, and the concomitant of that belief is a recognition of its imperfections. That’s why I am not a revolutionary person. I don’t believe that the painful progress towards the perfect society happens in revolutionary spasms. I think it is a gradualist thing of growing enlightenment. I believe in the contagious values.’”

It is curious that someone whose approach is gradualist should continue to demonstrate the chaos in the world via, initially, a series of characters out of Prufrock, Beckett (the novels), Flann O’Brien, Ulysses and Sternep and that, as far as he is concerned, the great liberator theatrically was Waiting for Godot. His initial heroes, as Bigsby has well annotated, are all trapped within a hostile mechanistic world which is at odds with individual aspiration. The telephonist who is the speaking clock in If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank (radio 1966; stage 1969) cannot prevail. Albert in Albert’s Bridge (radio 1967; stage 1969) finds order in the structure of the bridge which is not available on the ground. George in Enter a Free f i n (television 1963 as A Walk on the Water; stage 1968) defends his eccentricity as a means of surviving in the face of an illogical world. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966) shows two figures entirely outdistanced by the few facts of their situation and forced into the Beckettian situation of playing theatre games. If the world is the true Beckettian one as delineated by Stoppard, then there seems little sense even in a gradulist optimism. There is to date nothing written about the play that made Stoppard famous which shows how it is essentially different from its equally famous parent. All that appears to have happened is that Vladimir and Esvagon have been moved up-market. The two plays which followed were The Red Inspector Hound and Afier Magn’tte (1%8 and 1970), both of which Stoppard accurately describes as ‘an attempt to bring off a sort of comic coup in pure mechanistic terms. They were conceived as short plays’.” In both, what appears to be

Tom Stoppard: serious artist or siren? 87

central is the opportunity for wit, parody and metaphysical dalliance to do with the nature of perception. The plays reel away from seriousness as from a contagious disease.

Only in the two most recently available full-length plays does Stoppard confess himself entangled with more disturbing matters, and again the questions are severely diffused by the shifting insistence upon farce which both feather- beds and suffocates them. Out of the fashionable Bedrettian context of the early sixties emerged Stoppard’s preoccupation with ‘the points of view play’ so that he could assert in 1974 that ‘there is very often no single, clear statement in my plays. What there is, is a series of conflicting statements made by conflicting characters, and they tend to play a sort of infinite leap-frog. You know, 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.’” The structure and way of proceeding given here are accurate descriptions of both Jumpers (1972) and Travesties (1974). George, a professor of Moral Philosphy, attempts to establish the validity of God and morality via a lecture which he is composing throughout Jumpers. He does so in the face of a world and society which is busily engaged in doing precisely the opposite. As before in Stoppard’s plays, there is the little man or the eccentric contra mundum. He is the lonely figure holding out against overwhelming pressure, whether from his retired show-business wife, his all-purpose Vice-chancellor, or the irrestible march to power of the radical liberal party (a deliberate contradiction in terms?). The play is pessimistic despite its acutely clever portrayal of certain aspec~s of the academic life, for George never engages with the real world, and can struggle with metaphysics only on the luxurious level of a private study. While he wanders in abstractions, the world gets on with its business. George is Stoppard’s hero, someone who despite the odds, the self-contradictions, even the topical fallacies, and especially despite the realities of the situation, insists upon the existence and survival of values other than the ones which rule. The fact that George is shown to be hopelessly adrift is what makes him so’attractive to Stoppard, for in his confusions he is said to represent essential man. Conceptually, George’s rational means advance him no further than Watt confronted with the problem of Mr Knott’s leftovers who, having found ‘the solution that stxmed to have prevailed’, furnishes the household with hordes of famished dogs, each in their turn to eat M Knott’s food and numbers of families to supply the dogs and ‘For reasons that remain obscure Watt was, for a time, greatly interested, and even fascinated, by this matter of the dog . . . and he attached to this matter an importance, and even a significance, that seems hardly warranted, For otherwise would he have gone into the matter at such length. ”‘

88 Critical Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 3

It is true that Stoppard remarks that he believes ‘all political acts must be judged in moral terms, in terms of their consequences. Otherwise, they are simply attempts to put the boot on some other foot’!’ What is equally true is that any sense that George provides moral judgements has to be mediated both through the bones of a murder enquiry and through the technique of argument and counter argument which is Stoppard’s main structural device. He heads unerringly for the joke, the parodic moment, the visually witty contrast to a degree which makes one doubt whether anythmg of what George struggles with, albeit in a vacuum, is able to locate itself solidly in such a texture. The confusions engendered lead to bizarre criticism. Thus Lucina P. Gabbard argues that Stoppard ‘daringly weaves a serious philosophical dialectic in and out of this Absurdist drama’, as if the debate in George’s lecture is a complex one. She concludes that ‘Absurdism, usually so depressing to audiences, emerges in a new configuration with entertainment’, which suggests she has only read and not seen k k e t t , Ionesco et ~ 1 . ~ The same writer is sufficiently entranced to instance the use of a screen and a slide projector as examples of ‘Brechtian technique’.

Stoppard himself has pointed out the similarity between Jumpers and Travesties. They are ‘very similar plays. No-one’s said that . . . You start with a prologue which is slightly strange. Then you have an interminable monologue which is rather funny. Then you have scenes. Then you end up with another monologue. And you have unexpected bits of music and dance, and at the same time people are playing ping-pong with various intellectual arguements.’” His sense of the two plays is that ‘A lot of thiigs in Jumpers and Travesties seem to me to be the terminus of the particular kind of writing which I can do’. Once again, what Stoppard may have to say is, perhaps defensively, insulated via the recollections of Henry Carr and by the other clever weaving of Carr’s memories with The Importance of Being Earnest. Carr ’s origins, once again, are Beckettian : ‘My memoirs, is it, then? Life and times, friend of the famous . . . Joyce . . . a liar and a hypocrite, a tight-fisted, sponging, fornicating drunk not worth the paper, that’s that bit done . . . (He makes an efort) . . . (He giues up again).’ *’ What he does is to summon up the occasion when Joyce, Tzara and Lenin were all in Zurich in 1918. They are all three engaged in revolution in one form or another. Other than that and the historical fact that Carr was involved with Joyce in a production of Wilde, there seems no good reason why connections should be apparent between them. Except that Stoppard appears to want to endorse the farce and the frivolity at the expense of Lenin, because of the implications of the ideology represented by Lenin. The play is broken backed and oscillates between farce figures jumping through comic hoops and Lenin’s ostensibly dour reality. Characters pirouette around a situation which they do not advance, and of which they are not the product. They observe the

Tom Stoppard: serious artist or siren? 89

Brian Southwood as Lenin and Cmlyn Pickles as M n Lenin, and (right) Alan Moore as James Joyce, in the 1978 production of Travesties at the Library Theatre, Manchester.

Kate Kendal as Cecily and Alan Meadows as Henry Cam in the 1978 produaion of Truvesties at the Library Theatre, Manchester.

90 Critical Qwtterly, vol. 20, no. 3

situation as wittily as possible. Most of the speeches are not dialogue but elegant reflections upon a general theme. Each of the central characters makes pro- nouncements upon himself and the others, scores points, and is in turn rebufled by another character. When at a loss, they move into pages of limericks or adaptations of music-hall songs. They as characters hardly exist. What is paramount is the shape of the remark, the delicacy of the wit. The play concentrates upon its own hermetic premise. Tmra and Joyce are created as mad and eccentric, exaggerated so as to provide a focal point for the sparks which can be struck. Carr is equally concerned only with his own cleverness and disdain. And then there’s Lenin.

Stoppard has said that Travesties ‘puts the question in a more extreme form. It asks whether an artist has to justify himself in political terms at ull’, ‘whether the words “revolutionary” and “artist” are capable of being synonymous or whether they are mutually exclusive, or something in between’. His three main figures represent aspects of this curious question, on the one hand Joyce, on the other Lenin and in between Tzara. The question is never seriously debated, however. It is stated dogmatically in three forms, and the fact that Joyce and Tzara are joined with Carr means that they all perform a manic dance, mouthing belief but not substantiating it. Joyce in fact is absent from the play for long stretches at a time. Where the scheme falters is with the introduction of Lenin himself and Stoppard, as ever, is sensitive to the problem. He had ended Act One with an exposition of Dada and

I wanted to begin the second with a corresponding exposition of how Lenin got to Zurich, not in geographical but political terms. I chose to do that from square one by starting with Dar Kupitul . . . I overplayed that hand very badly, and at the first preview I realised that the speech had to be about Lenin only. The second act is Lenin’s act really, and I just blue-pal led everything up to the mention of Lenin. So now it was one page instead of five.u

The unease shows in the text at the beginning of Act Two where it is stated that ‘The performance of the whole of this lecture is not a requirement, but is an option. After “To resume’’ it could pick up at any point, e.g. “Lenin was convinced . . .” or “Karl Marx had taken it as an axiom”, but no later than that’ (p. 66). The opening series of Act Two may thus begin with the statement that the beginning of the war caught Lenin and his wife in Galicia and that they came eventually to Zurich: ‘Here could be seen James Joyce . . . and here, too the Dadaists were performing nightly . . .’ (pp. 69-70). Now there is nothing objectionable in worrying away at those speeches of Lenin which are self-contradictory and in turn pondering the situation of the artist. Yet when the form and procedure of the play is such as in Travesties, it is the case that Lenin’s massive historical presence in the play creates a boomerang

Tom Stoppard: serious artist or siren? 91

effect with regard to Joyce and to Tzara. If the only seriousness in the play is of the self-regarding kind, then Lenin’s pronouncements must inevitably carry weight, since the others are busily absorbed in playing Wildean antics. Consequently, the targets are easy to aim at. W y ’ s passionate defence of Lenin is ridiculed suavely by Carr who insists on viewing her as a sexual object. The sequence closes with Cecily in Carr’s mind’s eye dancing on a table to the tune of ‘The stripper’ and Carr’s roaring ‘Get ’em oj?’. It is true that this is Carr and not Stoppard. It is also true that her passion is ridiculed and that she is made to love Carr because she wants to reform him. The centre of the play is not a debate about the artist and revolution. It is contained more obviously in Carr’s remark to Tzara: ‘You’re an artist. And multi-coloured micturition is no trick to those boys, they’ll have yau pissing blood’ (p. 83). Lenin, in spite of the author in the end stands as a critical comment on the rest of the characters.

At the moment, Stoppard’s work is beloved by those for whom theatre is an end and not a means, diversionary and not central, a ramification and not a modifier of the status quo, a mother of worried minds and not an irritant. He is the wittiest of our West End playwrights and his plays assure the reactionary that theatre was and is what they always trusted it was, anodyne and anaesthetising. It is difficult to know whether Stoppard at present takes himself too seriously or not seriously enough. The novelist Derek Marlowe suggests that ‘He’s startled by the smallest minutiae of life. But the grand events, the highs and lows of human behaviour, he sees with a sort of aloof, omniscient amusement. The world doesn’t impinge on his work, and you’d think after reading his plays that no emotional experience had ever impinged on his world’ to which Stoppard characteristically and ambiguously replied, ‘That criticism is always being presented to me as if it were a membrane that I must somehow break through in order to grow up . . .’?’ It remains to be seen whether the serious writer or the siren triumphs.

Notes 1

2 3

‘Theatre Checklist No. 2’, compiled by Randolph Ryan. Tbeutrejats 2, May-July, 1974, p. 3. Kenneth Tynan, ‘The man in the moon’, Syndpy Times, 15 January 1978. ‘Playwrights and pmfessors’, TLS, 13 October 1972, p. 1219. Among the few perjorative reviews of the plays are Robert Brustein in Plays and Players, January 1968 (on the New York produaion of Rosencruntz . . .), J. R. Taylor, Plays and Pkzyers, June 1967 (on the National Theatre’s production of the same play), and Peter Roberts, Pkays and Players, April 1974 (on Jumpers). C. W. E. Bigsby, Tom Stoppard, W&m and their Work (Longman for the British Council, 1976); R. Hayman, Tom Stoppmd (Heinemnnn, 1977); C. James, ‘Count zero splits the infinite’, Encounter 45 (1975), pp. 68-76; K. Tynan, ‘The man in the moon’, .%n&y Times, 15 January 1978.

4

92 Critical Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 3

5 6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24

‘SomethinR to declare’, S u d y Times, 25 February 1968. Quoted Bigsby, op. cit., p. 241 Ronald Hayman, ‘First interview with Tom Stoppard 12 June 1974’, in Hayman, op. cit., p. 8. Ibid., p. 139. Interview with Giles Gordon in J. F. McCrindle (4.). Behind the Scenes: Theatre and Film Intewiewsjbn the Transatlantic Review (Pitman, 1971). p. 86, and ‘he th ing to declare’, op. cit., respectively. Tynan, op. cit. Theatre Quurterly 14, May-July 1974, p. 12. Interview with Marina Warner, Vogrre, January 1978, p. 39. Interview with Gila Gordon, op. cit., p. 85. Theatre Quarterly, op. cit., p. 8. Ibid., p. 6. Samuel Beckett, Watt (Calder, l%3), pp. 95,114. Theatre Qwrterb, op. cit., p. 12. ‘Stoppard’s Jumpers: a mystery play’, Modern Drama, xx No. 1 , March 1977, pp.

Hayman, op. cit., p. 12. Ibid., p. 135. Trarvesties (Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 22-4. Quoted Bigsgy, op. cit., p. 24. Hayman, op. cit., p. 9. Tynan, op. cit.

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