“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.

I have updated the “Quotations” page so that it now includes quotations from Arcadia, Artist Descending a Staircase, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, The Real Inspector Hound, The Real Thing, and Travesties. A post on Arcadia will be forthcoming.

The Real Thing is the closest thing to realism yet to be seen in Stoppard’s writing. It includes little of the absurdity which characterizes earlier plays such as Hound, Dogg/Cahoot, or Magritte, proceeds linearly rather than playing tricks with time, and makes no side trips into memory or senility as with Artist or Travesties. It is set in the present day and concerns ordinary people and the dramas of their daily lives. The title explains it all: this is ‘the real thing.’ However, although this play is in many ways more straightforward than other Stoppard plays, at least superficially, it still exhibits many familiar characteristics of Stoppard’s previous writing; most importantly, doubling and meta-theatricality.

Stoppard deliberately crafts his scenes to mimic each other, with the general circumstances and physical set-up remaining the same while the characters change places. The initial scene between Max and Charlotte is recreated later with Max and Annie and also with Annie and Henry. Annie and Bill’s train scene is re-performed later in the play, and is in itself a recreation of Annie and Brodie’s original interaction. Relationships are doubled as the characters cheat, separate, and come together again.

Writing a play about theatrical professionals gives Stoppard the perfect opportunity to play with one of his favorite devices, meta-theatricality. In the first scene, we immediately fall into Stoppard’s trap – we have no way of knowing that Charlotte and Max are enacting a play-within-a-play. We are meant to take them for ‘the real thing,’ and we do, at least until the dialogue in the 2^nd scene gradually reveals the trick. He uses the same trick in Annie’s acting scenes – on the train, and her rehearsals with Billy. It is difficult to know when the actors are playing characters who are acting, and when those characters stop acting. Most of the play-within-a-play devices are self-contained scenes with a clear ending, while the ‘reality’ scenes, once recognized as such, also remain entirely in ‘reality’ and free of acting; however, at some points – such as Scene 8 between Annie and Billy – acting and reality merge, and the distinction is ambiguous enough that the director could chose where to draw the line.

The Real Thing is also the first instance in Stoppard’s writing to treat more than a momentary romance. Although a love affair is key to the plot of Artist, there the potential dies before the relationship can take off, and we see only the tragic remnants of a frustrated passion. In this play, though love affairs turn sour, the lovers carry on; the story does not end with the demise of one relationship, as with Artist. Annie and Max break up, Annie and Henry struggle, Annie and Bill get together, Annie and Henry repair their relationship, Charlotte and Max both move on – the connections are alive and continue to change, rather than remaining frozen. This is part of what convinces the audience that this is indeed ‘the real thing,’ a slice of real life – it is not constrained by the stage, we see that the story and the characters go on after the curtain comes down.

I found Henry to be an amazing character. He knows Annie is serially unfaithful, but his willingness to accept that as the terms on which they are together shows how much he really loves her. I thought his discussion of jealousy and the futility of it is what Stoppard intends to be the indicator of real love, and hearing Henry voice those views only makes his struggle to control those feelings more poignant; his struggle makes clear that his love for Annie is ‘the real thing.’

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.

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.