Tom Stoppard’s bons mots

With Rock ‘n’ Roll a hit at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London’s West End, and the three-play trilogy The Coast of Utopia arriving in New York as a highlight of the new season, here are some quotes from Tom Stoppard’s plays illustrating his wit and verbal verve, as well as his depth of thought.

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead the First Player, meeting the pair, responds to Rosencrantz’s question, “What is your line?”

“Tragedy, sir.  Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, denouements both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels including the suggestive.  We transport you into a world of intrigue and illusion. . . clowns, if you like, murderers –we can do you ghosts and battles on the skirmish level, heroes, villains, tormented lovers – set pieces in the poetic vein; we can do you rapiers or rape or both, by all means, faithless wives and ravished virgins – flagrante delicto at a price, but that comes under realism for which there are special terms.”

Another play that imaginatively blends scenes from Shakespeare into its own action is Cahoot’s Macbeth, “dedicated,” says Stoppard, “to the Czechoslovakian playwright Pavel Kohout,” who wrote him in 1978 that famous Czech actors, forbidden by Communist authorities to act on the stage, were performing in living rooms: “Macbeth is now performed in Prague flats.”   As Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, played by actors having to work as a floor cleaner and a waitress, leave the playing area after the murder of Duncan, a Government Inspector bursts onto the scene and addresses the hostess in whose home the performance is taking place:

“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.  I mean, who wants to be packed out night out after night by a crowd of fashionable bronchitics saying ‘I don’t think it’s as good as his last one,’ and expecting to use your lavatory at will?  Not to mention putting yourself at the mercy of any Tom, Dick or Bertolt who can’t universalize our predicament without playing ducks and drakes with your furniture arrangements….Yes, if you had any pride in your home you wouldn’t take standing-room only in your sitting-room lying down.” 

Jumpers takes on academics, portrayed here as acrobats who combine philosophy with physical gymnastics that symbolize their verbal arguments.  Professor George Moore (not the George Moore) is married to his former student Dotty, an ex-entertainer, who reminisces about their early relationship and about the book he has been hoping to write and publish:

Dotty:

“And so our tutorials descended from the metaphysical to the merely physical…not so much down to earth as down to the carpet, do you remember?…That was the year of ‘The Concept of Knowledge,’ your masterpiece, and the last decent title left after Ryle bagged ’The Concept of Mind’ and Archie bagged ‘The Problem of Mind’ and Ayer bagged ’The Problem of Knowledge’ --- and ‘The Concept of Knowledge’ might have made you if you had written it, but we were still on the carpet when an American with an Italian name working in Melbourne bagged it for a rather bad book which sold four copies in London, three to unknown purchasers and the fourth to yourself.  He’d stolen a march while you were still comparing knowledge in the sense of having-experience-of, with knowledge in the sense of being-acquainted-with, and knowledge in the sense of inferring facts with knowledge in the sense of comprehending truths…”

George:  “I don’t believe you know anything about it.  You are the wife of an academic: that means you are twice removed from the center of events.” 

Travesties is a Stoppard classic that uses Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” as its frame and delightfully works in some of its dialogue.  Based on Richard Ellmann’s note in his biography James Joyce that during World War I in Zurich Joyce mounted a production of the Wilde comedy in which a minor official in the British Consulate, Henry Carr, played Algernon, Stoppard also introduces into the Wildean goings-on Lenin and Dadaist Tristan Tzara, who were living in Zurich at the same time. Carr, reminiscing, often incorrectly, is the narrator. Hilariously, in the local library, both Lenin and Joyce are working on their manuscripts, Lenin on Imperialism and Joyce, using the Irish Times of June 1904, on Ulysses.  Their chapters, like the baby and the novel in Wilde, are mixed up, resulting in the following critique:

Carr: (expecting Lenin but receiving “Mr. Bloom’s adventures correspond [ing] to the Homeric episode of the Oxen of the Sun”)    “Is it a chapter, inordinate in length and erratic in style, remotely connected with midwifery?”

Joyce:  “It is a chapter which by a miracle of compression, uses the gamut of English literature from Chaucer to Carlyle to describe events taking place in a lying-in hospital in Dublin.”

Stoppard presents a defense of the artist in a number of the plays, with an especially eloquent one here (ending with a paraphrase of Wilde).  Joyce is speaking to Tzara:

“An artist is the magician put among men to gratify – capriciously – their urge for immortality….What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist’s touch?  Dust.  A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets.  A minor redistribution of broken pots.  But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships – and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most complete of all heroes—husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer….It is a theme so overwhelming that I am almost afraid to treat it.  And yet I with my Dublin Odyssey will double that immortality…..and if you hope to shame it into the grave with your fashionable magic, I would strongly advise you to try and acquire some genius and if possible some subtlety before the season is quite over.  Top o’ the morning, Mr. Tzara!”   

The Coast of Utopia is a historical trilogy about a group of nineteenth-century  Russian intellectuals, romantics and revolutionaries who argue the future of their country while unable to manage their private lives.  At their center is socialist Alexander Herzen, who here, in “Salvage,” the final play, counters Karl Marx’s argument that blood today will lead to utopia tomorrow: 

“There is no libretto.  History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance.  We shout into the mist for this one or that one to be opened for us, but through every gate there are a thousand more.  We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us.  But that is our dignity as human beings, and we rob ourselves if we pardon us by the absolution of historical necessity.”

Rock ‘n’ Roll, along with attacking Communism and socialism, has a few words to say about tabloid newspapers when one is brought in, carrying a vicious story about the late Syd Barrett, whose song begins the play:

“To anyone who knows, it’s an overheated nonsense, apparently written for people with arrested development, and mindlessly cruel, but totally safe, a sort of triumph, really, an unrebuttable lie.  But the oddest thing about it is that the cruelty and the dishonesty are completely unmotivated, it’s just a … a kind of style.”