“Stark Raving Sane”

As chance would have it, William and Mary’s Theatre department chose this semester to perform Stoppard’s translation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.  I hadn’t planned things this way, but the timing couldn’t be better! Though the play is obviously not original material for Stoppard, after watching the play, it is easy to see why he might be drawn to translate this work.

 Like many of Stoppard’s own plays, Chekhov’s play is about creative people, actors and writers and artists, their twisted relationships, their struggle to find truth, and to justify their work to the world. Constantin’s struggle to define the art of the future must certainly appeal to a playwright who has written so many plays (Artist Descending a Staircase, Travesties) depicting similar-minded characters attempting to break through conventions and find the real meaning of art. Constantin makes the same argument as Annie in The Real Thing- that the professional artists such as Trigorin or Henry have made themselves into an elite and have blocked anyone who might disagree with them – they hold creation as something for the chosen few, and no one else can be an initiate. They place constraints on art and attempt to fit every artist into their narrow categories. In some ways, Chekhov’s play even prefigures Stoppards’ own – as when Chekhov’s characters discuss Constantin’s play which is ‘all lines, no action’ – an accusation frequently leveled against Stoppard. Chekhov employs a number of Stoppard’s favorite devices, such as the play-within-a-play. Stoppard’s frequent portrayals of the search for identity appear here in characters such as Constantin and Nina.

Chekhov considered The Seagull to be a comedy, despite what the audience might think – rather similar to Stoppard’s take on a number of his own plays, which he maintains were written to be comedies and should be taken as such, despite what might seem a tragic ending.

With any work-in-translation there is always the question of how much content comes from the original author and how much from the translation. I would be curious to see if other translations contain as many parallels to Stoppard’s plays as Stoppard’s translation does, or whether Stoppard tweaked the language to play up his favorite ideas. Regardless, it’s fascinating to see what parallels emerge between the two playwrights writing almost a century apart.

Stoppard’s The Invention of Love is the last of the three plays (the other two being The Real Thing and Arcadia) which are usually mentioned when discussing love and romance in Stoppard’s writing. Much like his subject, scholar poet A. E. Housman, Stoppard was frequently considered early in his career to be ‘heartless’ in that his early plays seemed to lack genuine human emotion. In the first two ’love’ plays, romance, love, and sex were openly treated and acknowledged as driving significant parts of the plot. In Invention, however, love is treated with a degree of removal, as something either confined to paper and the written word rather than an active emotion, or in the case of the protagonist’s romantic aspirations, something to be suppressed, denied, and silenced.

For the scholarly characters, love is a constant topic of discussion, but they confine their discussion to the classical works they study; though they laud and praise the beauty and evocativeness of the classical poets’ treatments of love, they do not carry this discussion into their own lives. They are preoccupied with the attempt to capture genuine emotion through the written word – the exact struggle Stoppard, too, is dealing with – but they ignore the genuine emotion in their own lives.

The elderly AEH tells his younger self that the pursuit of truth is in a sense the ultimate happiness, the ultimate good – yet AEH spends the majority of his life suppressing and hiding the truth of his love for Mo Jackson and denying to the world at large the nature of his feelings. While it is understandable that he should hide his love given the views of the time period, it is gut-wrenching to imagine how it must have felt for AEH, so devoted to removing all doubts and discovering every tiny truth in his scholarly work, to have to deny a major component of his identity.

The dialogue between the deceased AEH and his younger self, Housman, is fascinating for a number of reasons. This is a new twist on Stoppard’s characteristic doubling device; he presents the same character at different ages in several other plays, such as Travesties and Arcadia, but here the two selves actually interact and influence each other. AEH’s cynical jabs and pointed remarks actually shape Housman into the person who will eventually become AEH – in a sense, he is creating himself, introducing a kind of time paradox into their dialogues. That assumes, of course, that their dialogues actually take place and that their interactions are not merely a figment of AEH’s imagination or some kind of supernatural under-worldly spectre – which could be the case, given that AEH encounters his younger self while the dead man is traversing the river Styx. The boatman Charon’s remark that the trio of Oxford undergrads have brought their own boat with them seems to suggest that all the characters traveling the same river, the Styx, and therefore are inhabiting some kind of Limbo – whether truly in the afterlife, or all inside the feverish mind of the dying AEH.

Several of the characters preach a kind of ‘carpe diem’ philosophy about seizing what time is given and making the most of it, but it is questionable how many of these characters truly live that philosophy out. Oscar Wilde is one – “better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light,” as he tells AEH, and Wilde is one of the few characters who (claims, at least) to repent nothing and has the fewest regrets.

 As in many other Stoppard plays, there is an underlying discussion of the function of art – in this case, writing. Characters in many of the previous plays have struggled with the question of how to justify art to the starving impoverished mainstream population, how to give value to something essentially useless. AEH claims that the very value of scholarship is in its uselessness:

“Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it’s for the fainthearted, 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”

AEH and the other Oxford scholars, however, separate their creations, works of scholarly writing, from art, and even set the two up in conflict with each other. They claim there can be no overlap between the two, and the endeavor to keep these two realms separate is what divides AEH into the two different people – “A poet and a scholar…it sounded like two different people” – for whom Charon is waiting at the opening of the play.

When I initially picked the works I would study this semester, my intention was to focus primarily on works which dealt with the theatre itself – metatheatrical works – but without planning it that way, my study expanded to include not just performance, but all the fine arts – and three of the first plays I studied dealt with visual Art.

Stoppard throws out so many convoluted rapid-fire witticisms about art that it becomes very complicated to try and sort through to find the central message (assuming there is one). As I read Magritte, Artist, and Travesties, I was stricken by the many parallels, particularly between the latter two.

Entire passages of Artist are regurgitated in Travesties almost verbatim. Donner states there are two ways of becoming an artist, to either do what is considered art or to make art mean what you do. This latter is the same philosophy the dadaist Tristan Tzara follows in Travesties. Donner, however, seems  alarmed and even a little appalled by the freedom this grants, whereas Tzara embraces it. Donner’s reluctance allies him with Carr, who echoes word for word Donner’s definition of the artist: “An artist is someone who is gifted in some way which enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted.” Donner and Carr see art as meeting set standards and having particular characteristics, and when it ceases to do so, it becomes unintelligible nonsense for them – exactly what Tzara is aiming for.

Tzara passionately attacks Carr, saying,

“Your art has failed. You’ve turned literature into a religion and it’s as dead as all 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!” (my bolding).

Donner describes his failure to “make a distinction between the art that celebrated reason and history and logic and all assumptions, and our own dislocated anti-art of lost faith.” This anti-art seems to be the same kind of art Tzara pursues, and despite Tzara’s assertion that the religion of art is crumbling, Donner concludes,  

“there is something divine about modern art nonetheless, for it is only sustained by faith. That is why artists have become as complacent as priests. They do not have to demonstrate their truths. Like priests they demand our faith that something is more than it appears to be…”

In light of Donner’s remark, Tzara’s claim denunciation of Carr seems hypocritcal – Tzara’s art must be ’a religion’ as well, and it suggests that he has failed to overthrow the established rules. He has not achieved his claimed purpose of reconciling the shame and necessity of art. Donner has not either, but they continue to do so. His struggle to find a meaning for art that can be appreciated by starving masses connects with Cecily’s ideas of art in Travesties, when she says that

“The sole duty and justification for art is social criticism…we live in an age when the social order is seen to be the work of material forces and we have been given an entirely new kind of responsibility, the responsibility of changing society…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 hatful of words flung in the public’s face, is a luxury which only artists can afford.”

Although Tzara, Donner, and Carr are following opposing routes, they are reaching for the same goal – to justify their creations. This is what all the artists in these plays are struggling to do.

Several ideas which appeared in Artist Descending a Staircase are elaborated upon in Travesties. A number of characters who are mentioned in the earlier play here appear onstage and state for themselves the opinions which other characters only touched on in Artist. Several passages seem to come almost verbatim from the earlier play’s discussion on the meaning and role of art in the world. Interestingly, Carr continually refers to the memoirs he is mentally composing as ‘a sketch,’ adding him to the ranks of artists wandering in and out of his memories. The nonsensical limerick scene also includes characters that are mere ‘sketches’ of people rather than lifelike portrayals of historical figures. The structure of this play borrows much from the literary works which lie at the center of it – Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness writing appearing in Carr’s monologues, the progression of memories mimicking The Importance of Being Earnest, and the nonsense scenes of limericks and song lyrics in some ways drawing on the choppy, nonsensical writings of the Dadaists.

Travesties breaks a number of molds set by previous Stoppard plays. This is the first Stoppard play which I have read to feature real historical figures, famous and not; so while Stoppard has previously stretched the boundaries of reality and disbelief, this is the first time he begins to reshape recorded fact – if, as the play questions, ‘fact’ can be accepted as such.

Another interesting element of Travesties is the use of monologues as an opening device for both of the acts and as an aid in several other transitions. Although earlier plays such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead do feature occasional monologues, they have nothing to compare with Old Carr’s pages-long soliloquy. In fact, the entire play – with the exception of the very last scene between Old Carr and Old Cecily – can be looked upon as a sort of extended soliloquy. Though Stoppard used a similar flashback device in Artist Descending a Staircase, there it was never made clear whether the flashback was to be seen as any one character’s memory, or merely an inversion of before-and-after on the playwright’s part. In Travesties, the narrator shows from the start that the entire action of the play takes place within his self-admittedly senile memory and is no more substantial than the grandiose daydreams of a little old man. There is no way for the audience to tell which, if any, of the scenes he presents are accurate, and in fact in the ending exchange Old Cecily implies that none of Carr’s reminiscing is correct. The question Carr then raises is whether it matters if what he remembers matches reality. Young Carr and Tzara previously discussed the changeable nature of words, and Tzara insisted that it is not necessary to change the world to fit the word, it is far easier to simply change the word to fit what you want it to – for example, redefining ‘art’ as whatever you do, or ‘flying’ to be some action other than aerial movement. Something similar seems to be at play here; if Carr says the real history of the events is what he told us, does that make it true? When meanings are changeable and arbitrary, can it be proved that historical events did not play out as he said they did?

In many ways it was disorienting to transition from a play like After Magritte, which depends so heavily on the sense of sight, into a radio play like Stoppard’s 1972 Artist Descending a Staircase, in which the audience is utterly ‘blind’ and depends entirely upon the sense of hearing to understand the action of the play. However, like Magritte, which examines the reliability of senses, Artist also questions whether the senses can be relied upon; and where the plot of Magritte revolves around a relatively trivial incident, in Artist, the misinterpretation of sensory signals becomes far more consequential, altering the entire course of people’s lives. Sophie’s inability to distinguish between Beauchamp’s and Donner’s paintings entangles all three in an unhappy triangle that continues until Donner’s death. Beauchamp and Martello rely on their sense of hearing to explain to them the circumstances surrounding Donner’s death, but their senses may have been fooled. The audience, too, is entirely dependent on what they hear – blinded, like Sophie. At the beginning of the play, they, like Martello and Beauchamp, believe they are correctly interpreting sensory signals, but by the end, though the artists are still convinced Donner was murdered, the audience has been forced to admit doubt. They have been deprived of all senses save hearing, and even that one, they eventually learn, can’t be trusted.

Like Magritte and Hound, Artist is a sort of whodunit, but ultimately the audience discovers there may not have been a crime at all. The structure of Artist as a series of nested flashbacks also raises interesting questions. Are these flashbacks reliable? Whose memory is it that we’re ‘flashing back’ to, an impartial observer, or one of the artists? The opening set of uncertain, chaotic circumstances, the gradual backtracking and explication, and the return to a previously confusing, but now perfectly understandable scene parallels the progression of Magritte. Artist’s structure actually creates a kind of stair-step, the form of the play mimicking the content – and the audience must be wary, lest they fall into sensory traps, like the artists.

Artist is the earliest Stoppard play to elicit a real sense of compassion and pity, to present real, tragic humans, rather than farcical characters like those of Magritte or even in some ways, The Real Inspector Hound, in which the characters are mainly thinkers and rationalizers, but not feelers. In the earlier plays, the characters are more emotionally detached from each other and from the audience, but Artist introduces real, painful emotion rather than simple motivations. Donner’s doomed love of Sophie is one of the first truly poignant moments of emotion in Stoppard’s writing. In this, Stoppard employs one of the most frequently recurring characteristics of his plays, confused identities. He creates doubt as to which artist Sophie truly fell for – Donner or Beauchamp. The uncertainty leaves the audience grieving for Donner and his lost chance, assuming that it was really him that Sophie loved and that had she chosen the right man, they could’ve been happy together – but again, without being able to absolutely rely on our senses, and like Sophie, lacking sight, there is no way to know that it really wasn’t Beauchamp, and that they would have been miserable anyways, regardless of Donner’s presence. Donner’s and Sophie’s similar fates, both dying from a fatal fall, unite them in the audience’s mind and encourage the thought that they were supposed to be together, but there is no way to know that that would have been the case.

While many of Tom Stoppard’s plays are very hearing-focused, relying mainly on verbal gymnastics to move the story along, After Magritte depends on vision and the stage picture. The entire play revolves around the sense of sight and the question of how reliable that sense is.

Predictably, Stoppard’s play draws heavily on the paintings of the artist Rene Magritte. Throughout the play, Stoppard translates Magritte’s images from a two-dimensional medium into a three-dimension stage picture. Many iconic characteristics of Magritte’s work – tubas, apples, men in bowler hats, unusual juxtapositions of people and objects – appear on Stoppard’s stage throughout the play. The seemingly-absurd stage images which open and close the action of the play are also reminiscent of Magritte’s surrealist artwork.  However, once the stage picture is brought to life through the actors’ lines and blocking, the absurd reassembles itself into the ordinary. Perfectly logical explanations emerge for the odd images. Stoppard presents a reversal of the natural order; rather than order dissolving into chaos, chaos instead becomes order. By the end, even the ridiculous closing pose does not seem at all odd to the audience, since they have seen the progression of events which led to the absurdity.

The characters within the play are as dependent on sight as the audience is, but unfortunately for them, their senses deceive them. The central conflict of the play is the argument amongst the characters is the bizarre figure they witnessed in Ponsonby Place. Each character has a different interpretation of what they saw. Each is correct about some elements, but none correctly perceived all, and one of them – Inspector Foot – don’t even realize they’re all talking about the same man: Foot himself. Foot’s inability to transform the verbal descriptions given by the others into an accurate mental picture which he could then identify as himself causes most of the confusion in the play. He also misinterprets the scene Holmes witnesses.

The audience has to work alongside Foot to reconcile the bizarre visual image presented by the stage picture with the explanatory remarks made by the characters throughout the play. Unfortunately for the characters within the play, they never fully reach an explanation, because they cannot completely integrate the seen and the spoken. Only Foot has all the information necessary to explain what they’ve all experienced, but he lacks the necessary ability to convert image into words and vice versa. Unlike a Magritte painting, which often does not have a logical explanation, Stoppard’s play does; but Foot is incapable of reconciling what he’s seen and heard, and subsequently subjects everyone else to massive inconvenience and confusion before finally foisting all the blame onto the bungling Holmes.

“The Menaced Assassin,” Rene Magritte