“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.

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.’