“Stark Raving Sane”

Below is the text of my final, culminating paper. I may return to this to revise it somewhat, but this is its original form. Enjoy. 

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Plays Within the Plays of Tom Stoppard 

From his masterpiece Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to his lesser-known short plays like Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, Tom Stoppard frequently constructs his plays around a vitally important play-within-a-play. However, unlike the work of may other playwrights such as Shakespeare himself, in whose works art merely mirrors life, in Stoppard’s theatre, art and life become inextricably tangled. Many of Stoppard’s plays deal with the delicate division between stage and auditorium, and the question of just how permeable this barrier is. Examining the function of the play-within-a-play in five Stoppard plays, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Travesties, The Real Inspector Hound, The Real Thing, and Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, forces the audience to question not only their expectations of theatre but also their understanding of their own world, reflected in a microcosm where all the world really is a stage. 

Stoppard’s plays-within-plays are extraordinary because they weaken the usually-clear divisions between stage and audience by forcing the audience – both the onstage audience watching the play-within-a-play, and the audience in the theater house watching Stoppard’s play – to take part in the action. In her article “Plays without Plot: The Theatre of Tom Stoppard,” Gabriele Scott Robinson describes Stoppard’s protagonists using a phrase gleaned from Stoppard’s novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon: “the spectator as hero” (Robinson, 42). Robinson uses the term in a more figurative sense to describe a hero who is used to being passive, removed from the action, merely an observer, and who is unexpectedly forced to get involved. She applies it to Henry Carr, narrator and protagonist of Travesties, through whose eyes we see all the action of the play, most of which he invented; he did very little of what he claims to have done, instead merely watching events unfold around him and then decades later recreating himself as the primary active agent. However, on a more literal level, Stoppardian protagonists frequently are spectators at a play who, through some convoluted twist of plot and physics, find themselves impossibly caught in the fiction and forced to take on a leading role.

The clearest and most complete example of this is in his early one act play, The Real Inspector Hound, which begins with two theatre critics, Birdboot and Moon, watching a shoddy whodunit, only to unexpectedly stumble onstage and find that their every word and move fits the script perfectly. Circumstances align so perfectly that it becomes impossible to explain the similarities. Strangely, the actors performing the play-within-a-play have no reaction when Moon and Birdboot change places with Simon and Hound – they just carry on with the script, which makes far more sense after the critics step in than it did before. Certain characteristics of the play-within-a-play, such as the mysterious phone calls, even require the presence of Birdboot and Moon specifically. In fact, the events of the play-within-a-play only make sense if it is Birdboot and Moon, rather than Simon and Hound, who act them out. The play-within-a-play is written to anticipate these audience members’ participation. This intertwining of a play and its audience in a theatrical symbiotic relationship appears again and again in Stoppard’s writing. The internal (play-within-a-play) and external (Stoppard’s) play are intimately connected; the play only functions when it includes the play-within-a-play, and the play-within-a-play necessitates the context of the external play.

While watching the Muldoon Manor mystery, Moon comments pretentiously, “we note the classic impact of the catalystic figure – the outsider” (Plays, 15). Moon (and many of his counterparts in other Stoppard plays) is an outsider himself, though he is blissfully unaware of the irony in his statement. In theatre, outsider and spectator are closely connected concepts – spectators are usually by definition outsiders, existing outside and distinct from the world of the play. The outsider/spectator is crucial to theatre because without their presence, nothing matters. As the Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead complains, without a spectator, theatre is pointless; the eternal presence of an audience is “the single assumption which makes our existence viable – that somebody is watching” (R&G are Dead, 49). The spectator is absolutely necessary for theatre to succeed.

This phenomenon appears elsewhere with characters like Easy and the Inspector in Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth. Unlike Birdboot or Moon, the Inspector is eager to be involved, even where he is unwanted. He is an unwelcome spectator who won’t stop butting in, attempting to stifle the performance of Macbeth only to wind up unintentionally encouraging it; but completely unintended by him, his intrusions, sirens, and knockings align with sound cues in the script. Easy, a delivery man with a chronic case of Dogg, unwittingly wanders into the performance and becomes the third murderer and Banquo’s Ghost.  Easy’s confused entrances and exits are treated as a distraction and a nuisance by the actors performing Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but they correspond perfectly to the action of the play, which raises the question of how the action could proceed properly without the presence of the intruder; the answer is that it couldn’t. This particular staging requires the interference of an outsider. As in the Muldoon Manor mystery of Hound, the staging of the play-within-a-play seems predetermined to include the spectator-turned-actor.

The problem in both cases is, of course, how a work of fiction can anticipate ‘real’ circumstances. This question becomes even more elaborate in R&G are Dead. Around the midpoint of the play, the eponymous heroes are spectators at a rehearsal where they watch their own imminent deaths acted by the tragedians; their later actions reenact the play-within-a-play perfectly. Although they do not take part in the play-within-a-play in the same way that Moon, Birdboot, or Easy do, the problem of a play anticipating the circumstances surrounding its performance is still present, and in fact becomes even more acute here. This play-within-a-play not only mirrors ‘life,’ it actually predicts the future. The same happens to the protagonists of The Real Thing. Unbeknownst to the audience, the first scene of Stoppard’s play is actually a play-within-a-play written by the protagonist, Henry, and acted by his then-wife Charlotte. That initial scene from Henry’s “House of Cards” is recreated multiple times throughout The Real Thing with different pairings of characters. Henry’s marriage to Annie reaches a crisis point in which the conflict takes place in exactly the manner of the scene Henry wrote years before; as in R&G are Dead, the play-within-a-play predicts the future. Here, since the author of the play-within-a-play is himself the protagonist, it is somewhat easier to explain the similarities – perhaps some kind of unconscious recognition of something the characters’ personalities render inevitable – but that does not fully reassure; questions still remain. Henry has seen and written his own future. Do the plays-within-plays predict the future?; or cause it, the protagonists making the choices they do because of the play they’ve seen and/or participated in? The perfect alignment of art and life raises the question of whether characters have control over their actions, or if they are fulfilling an already-scripted role. This dilemma introduces the larger issue of free will underlying in much of Stoppard’s writing.

On the most literal level, the reason art and life within the world of a play correspond so completely is because the playwright wrote it that way. The characters’ spontaneity is always part of someone else’s – the author’s – order. Stoppard’s heroes, in order to make sense of the world around them, have to accept that their world really is a stage.  Things happen as they do because “it is written…We follow directions – there is no choice involved” (R&G are Dead, 63). Although Stoppard’s characters may believe themselves to have free will, they are constrained in their actions, limited to obeying a script; just as the characters of the plays-within-plays should be. By becoming involved with the play-within-a-play, the spectator surrenders himself to the vagaries and dictates of that script, at the mercy of the author even though he might not know it.

Scripts have a predetermined end, something Stoppard’s characters begin to realize as they become aware of their metatheatricality. Moon keeps struggling to anticipate how the script will turn out, but fails, to his own misfortune, though he dies admiring the neatness of the plot. Similarly, Guildenstern begins to clue into the presence of something beyond his control which determines his actions: he complains, “We act on scraps of information…sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct” (R&G are Dead, 80) – what to the character is instinct, in fact is stage directions provided to the actor. In his final moments Guildenstern, thinking he knows where he went wrong, comforts himself with the thought that “we’ll know better next time” (98). His claim that there will be a next time shows he is on some level aware that their story will be replayed over and over again each time Stoppard’s play is staged, but he hopes in vain; events will always play out as they are scripted, and whether or not R&G “know better,” they will still not be able to do anything to change the outcome. Much as they may hate to admit it, they are controlled by a ‘destiny’ as written by the playwright. Even something which seems to be a spectacular demonstration of chance at work - such as the flipped coins always landing heads up – is really controlled by the playwright. As Charlotte explains, theatre means a character will always “[Have] all the words to come back with just as you need them. That’s the difference between plays and real life” (The Real Thing, 21). This is true in any play or piece of creation, but the difference is that in Stoppard’s plays, the characters are starting to catch on and question their lot. Certain characters – such as Simon, Hound, and Magnus/Puckeridge – are more aware of the similarities between play and play-within-a-play and of the fundamentally theatrical nature of their existence; they have figured out the system and are able to manipulate it, and they thrive more often than the less perceptive characters who have only a cloudy understanding of their theatrical nature.

For the heroes, of course, their involvement with the play-within-a-play often becomes a question of survival, of life or death. The Player says, “We pledged our identities” (R&G are Dead, 49); in becoming an actor, the spectator gives up his own identity and takes on that of the character, often only to discover, like Moon, to his misfortune that he cannot separate himself again from the character he has assumed. In entangling himself with the play-within-a-play, Moon condemns himself to the fate of the character he takes on. Some characters, such as Hound and Simon, manage to break out of their scripted existence, but their escape from the play-within-a-play throws the other play characters, like Moon, into turmoil. The Player’s comments also provide insight into their escape: actors pledge their identities “secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching” (49). The spectator is necessary for the continued existence of the characters and play; having given up their own identities, the actors have no identity other than their character, which ceases to exist without an audience for which to perform. Deprived of the spectator (Moon) by his transition from spectator to actor, Hound and Simon sidle over the barrier between play and play-within-a-play in the other direction, changing from actor to spectator and thereby maintaining a kind of equilibrium.

Although getting involved with a play, moving from spectator to actor, proves disastrous for some characters, for others it becomes a means of salvation. Dogg/Cahoot’s Inspector rails against theatre because it grants protection in some sense; while being an active character is full of pitfalls, it can sometimes be safer than being a spectator. The Inspector complains, “what we don’t like is a lot of people being cheeky and saying they are only Julius Caesar or Coriolanus or Macbeth” (Plays, 192-193), because the layer of artifice and the degree of removal from ‘real’ life enables people to deny their actions by claiming they are the work of the character, not the actor. They too can, as the Player puts it, pledge their identities: give up their own identity in exchange for the deniability and protection offered by an assumed character.

Stoppard’s plays are preoccupied with and fascinated by the issue of what happens when a spectator, like Moon, ceases to be on the outside and becomes and actor and catalyst; and also by the result when something from a play overstretches the boundaries of the play and begins acting on the external world. Examples abound of characters impossibly interacting with something more internal than they (e.g. within a play-within-a-play) or more external (e.g. Stoppard’s audience). In Act I of R&G are Dead, Stoppard’s stage directions have Rosencrantz address the footlights – and the audience – saying, “I feel like a spectator – an appalling business” (32). His remark equates the protagonists with the spectators in the audience. The Inspector in Cahoot asks another character, “Don’t you find it rather inconvenient, having a lot of preening exhibitionists projecting their voices around the place?—and that’s just the audience” (Plays, 185), again equating actors and audience, treating the spectators as actors. In that quotation he refers to the occupants of the Hostess’ living room, but he later draws in Stoppard’s audience when, as instructed by the stage directions, he singles out various members of the audience in the theatre and attacks them as collaborators in the performance of Macbeth. Addressing the audience makes them part of the world of the play, no longer outsiders and mere spectators. He also breaks the fourth wall later when he remarks “between you and me and these three walls” (Plays, 194); theatre being the only situation where rooms would have three rather than four walls, his comment shows his awareness of the absent fourth wall of theatrical convention and therefore some awareness that he is a part of a theatrical production – besides Macbeth. In each of these situations, the role of character and audience, spectator and participant, are becoming blurred.   

In theatre, the audience’s interpretation of what they are seeing and hearing always shapes the meaning of the play, but Stoppard plays with the audience and makes them think they’re hearing or seeing something other than what’s really happening. A spectator is dependant on their senses, and Stoppard uses this to his advantage by tricking the audience. They become engaged in the action of the play, but in a way controlled by the playwright. One example is the opening scene of The Real Thing, which Toby Zinman describes as a “trompe l’audience” (Zinman, 121), a play on the term trompe l’oeil, referring to the artistic practice of creating illusions and visually deceptive artwork. Zinman also uses this term to describe the prologue of Travesties; the audience watches the various characters at work in the Zurich library only to later realize that what they saw was in Carr’s imagination. Cahoot’s Macbeth also contains a false start, beginning with Macbeth and only gradually introducing enough outside action to reveal the Shakespeare to be a play-within-a-play. The spectators are unable to recognize the nested play as such – in what other ways could Stoppard be hoodwinking them? How can they know they themselves are not part of a greater ‘play’? Stoppard forces them to take nothing for granted, to forget all the expectations and conventions. In order to avoid falling into the trap, they must learn to overcome their expectations for how theatre ‘should’ work, to ignore convention and accept that anything can happen on stage.

Stoppard continually places the audience in the characters’ shoes, forcing them to experience the events of the play in the same manner as the characters and depriving them of a removed perspective with which to analyze the events of the play. When the characters are tricked, so are the audience members, as with another illusion which appears in Dogg/Cahoot, one which is not visual but rather aural. When listening to the literal building blocks of the language Dogg, the words ‘slab,’ ‘plank,’ ‘brick,’ ‘cube,’ and ‘block,’ the audience thinks what they hear means one thing, when in fact it means something else; they are taken in by an auditory illusion. The audience is in the same position as the characters, who have no idea what the double meanings are, or even, at first, that there are two meanings.

A more obvious way in which Stoppard plays with double meanings is through extensive punning. Puns function because one object or word has multiple meanings, and the parties exposed to it take different interpretations. Stoppard uses not only verbal puns in his dialog, but also visual puns which depend upon multiple interpretations of the action presented to the audience. An example might be the interaction between Birdboot and Felicity, in which their dialogue can either be interpreted as the script of the Muldoon Manor mystery or as an attempt at backstage flirtation.

Zeifman states in his article “Tomfoolery: Stoppard’s Theatrical Puns,” “The use of puns…merely parallels, on a verbal level, what is already implicit on a visual level: our ‘perceptions’ may deceive us” (Zeifman, 208). Theatre itself is essentially an extended pun which depends on two levels of perception when watching a play. One event is perceived in two different ways: on one level, that those two men wearing old-fashioned clothes are pretending to be Elizabethan courtiers, but on a second level, temporarily suspending disbelief and accepting that those two men wearing old-fashioned clothes are Elizabethan courtiers. Theatrical convention dictates that the audience accepts something fictional, essentially an extended lie, as ‘truth’. What they see is not truth at all, but within the confines of the play it is accepted as such. Stoppard gleefully plays with this convention when he titles a fictional creation The Real Thing; nothing about the play is real in actuality, but the audience accepts it as such regardless. In watching any play, the audience temporarily ignores the distinction between being and not being, what is and what is not, and takes anything placed before them as ‘really’ happening. Even though they know what they are watching is a group of people pretending, they will accept anything they see – such as death – as true within the world of the play. As the Player in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead staunchly maintains, “audiences know what to expect, and that is all they are prepared to believe in” (R&G are Dead, 66).

Theatre contains a well-established set of conventions which audiences obey without second thought. The universally accepted convention that what is seen on stage is what is really happening enables Stoppard to fool the audience into believing what he wants them to believe. For example, in a moment of near-hysteria late in R&G are Dead, Guildenstern stabs the Player and then both he and Rosencrantz as well as the audience watch in horror as the Player wordlessly crumbles to the ground. The audience knows that the actor-playing-the-Player is not dead but merely pretending, but theatrical convention prompts them to assume that his character, the Player, is now dead, and to respond accordingly, just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern within the play are responding. The catch is, of course, that the Player is faking; it is not the actor-playing-the-Player who pretends to die, but the character himself. Like Guildenstern, the audience is taken in because when there are multiple levels of artifice present, we have no means of distinguishing what is happening on which level. The spectator’s perception of events is controlled by the playwright; we see what he wants us to see.

This problem becomes especially crucial in situations such as Hound, where Stoppard’s audience must distinguish between the characters of the play-within-a-play  (Hound); the actors behind those characters but within the world of Stoppard’s play (the Actor Playing Hound); and the real actors in the world of the audience who play all of those characters (the actor-playing-theActorPlayingHound). Motivations and therefore meaning change depending on which entity we are actually watching. Has Moon’s place been stolen by The Actor Playing Hound, or has the fictional Hound somehow stepped out of the play and forced Moon to change places with him? Is Stoppard’s audience watching a play about critics watching a play, or are they watching two separate stories in which the characters are plucked out of their plot and rearranged in another ‘reality’? Puckeridge gets away with murder because no one, inside Hound or watching it, can be sure that they have witnessed Puckeridge kill his colleagues, and not merely seen the real Inspector Hound executing his duties. The nature of the play-within-a-play and the inability to distinguish how many levels of acting are presented makes it impossible to determine the chain of events beyond any doubt.

The ultimate spectators, the audience of Stoppard’s plays, are left disconcerted and vaguely uncomfortable, with the nagging thought that if the impossible can happen to Birdboot and Moon, Easy and the Inspector, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or Carr, who’s to say it couldn’t happen to them, too? If there is no concrete division between onstage and off, what’s to stop any spectator from wandering too close to the action and being sucked in? Stoppard cultivates the audience’s uneasiness, forcing them to forget their assumptions about theatre and take nothing for granted, for fear they too might be as misguided and ignorant of the real nature of their existence as are the fictional characters of the plays and plays-within-plays.

Stoppard uses different aspects of plays-within-plays to shape the audience’s theatre experience into something interactive and fluid, rather than static and purely a spectacle. He plays with the possibilities opened by the presences of multiple levels of artifice, and the traits of his plays – the spectator as hero and the blurring of spectator and actor, entwining the action of play and play-within-play, arranging the audience’s and character’s viewpoints to correspond, toying with theatrical convention in order to engage the audience on his own terms, and introducing theatrically-self-aware characters able to contemplate questions of free will versus destiny as determined by the playwright – all connect back to the age-old metaphor of the world as a stage. His audience, by watching the varied fates of the characters struggling to come to terms with the world of the play, leaves the theatre more aware of the questions they themselves must find answers for to understand their own existence.

Ultimately, though, it’s important to give the final word to the master genius himself, Tom Stoppard, who in fact doesn’t recommend over-scrutinizing his writing. Stoppard insists, “Plays are written to entertain, they’re theatrical. I don’t want to be disobliging or churlish to people who are invariably nice and are paying me a real compliment in asking academic questions about my plays. But I do insist on making the point that they aren’t written to be studied and discussed” (“Tom Stoppard, Nonstop”).  His audience should perhaps be guided by the philosophy epitomized in one of Annie’s flippant remarks, one regarding a play-within-a-play but which can easily be extended to the plays at large: “Keep your knickers on, it’s only a bloody play” (The Real Thing, 107).

  

Works Cited

Bradshaw, Jon. “Tom Stoppard, Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright.” Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Ed. Paul Delaney. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Robinson, Gabriele Scott. “Plays Without Plot: The Theatre of Tom Stoppard.” Educational Theatre Journal Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar., 1977): 37-48. JSTOR 11 Aug 2008 <www.jstor.org>.

Stoppard, Tom. Plays One. London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996.

—. Real Thing, the. London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1982.

—. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. London, New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1967.

—. Travesties. London: Faber, 1975.

Zinman, Toby. “Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing.” The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Ed. Katherine Kelley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Zeifman, Hersh. “Tomfoolery: Stoppard’s Theatrical Puns.” The Yearbook of English Studies Vol. 9, Theatrical Literature Special Number, (1979): 204-220. JSTOR 11 Aug. 2008 < www.jstor.org>.