Tom Stoppard's Dissident Comedies

Tom Stoppard's Dissident Comedies ANDREW K. KENNEDY To thy own selfbe true One and one is always two. I How many readers and theatre-goers would find the hallmarks of Tom Stoppard's verbal wit in those Peer Gyntian lines from Every Good Boy Deserves Favour? The lines are spoken rapidly by Alexander, the political prisoner detained in a "hospital," to his absent son; every word is meant, without ambiguity or irony either in the phrasing or in the situation; and the verse is a mnemonic, in case the prisoner is not allowed writing material "on medical grounds." This is only a local example of the remarkable change in Stoppard's comedy from a relativistic and parodic universe of wit to a new kind of comedy that combines moral and political commitment with a newly stable satire of real/absurd worlds, recognizably located in Russia and Czechoslovakia . It is an interesting transformation of comic vision, strategy and language. Stoppard's comedy has, until this new direction, been most notable for the creation of a "pan-parodic" theatre. We were right to stress2 the vertiginous interplay of two kinds of theatre (Renaissance and Modernist) in the tragical-comical-farcical-melodramatic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and the cross-weaving of style parodies from Dada and Joyce, caught in the threads of Wilde's famous farce, in turn misperformed by the British Consul's decaying memory, in Travesties. In that kind of comedy - with its rapidly shifting perspectives, surrealistic quasi-encounters, and self-breeding verbal games - a "centre of gravity" was not to be looked for too gravely. That comedy did release vision, but no stable point of view. When a committed spokesman does appear amid the whirling worlds and words - George meditating on the meaning of God and morality in Jumpers, and Lenin's speeches on art and revolution in Travesties - critics complain that the comedy 470 ANDREW K. KENNEDY is all but undone: "his footing slips in his play-long parody of philosophy ... polysyllables are dull weapons with which to cut at logical positivism" (Ruby Cohn)', and the "authentic speeches" of Lenin dislocate the "baroque farce" in the play (Bigsby).4 Cecily's lecture on the origins of the Russian Revolution at theopening ofact two of Travesties was judged to be so anti-comic by a French director that he procured, if that is the word, an actress who was willing to deliver the tedium-risking speech in the nude, slowly getting dressed as she went on speaking the unwitty lines (Stoppard's anecdote)? In sum, the universal parody, the instability of focus, and the sometimes indulgent but nearly always theatrically well-timed verbal wit have created acomedy-farce in which the importance of being serious was a risky ingredient. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Professional Foul6 are relatively modest in scope; they also differ in genre and style, preserving only a family resemblance with the universal parody of the earlier plays. It may well be that we have been given a wholly new kind ofpolitical comedy, still to be defined. Placing these two short Stoppard comedies on the generic map may be provisional; but before we tum to the plays themselves, it is worth recalling that there has been a certain poverty of political comedy in contemporary (English) drama. Some of the most interesting plays by roughly "New Left" dramatists (plays like Howard Brenton:s Weapons of Happiness and David Hare's Fanshen) border on the ponderously solemn. A generation of dramatists has found it difficult to combine didactic purpose - including a feeling for ideological subtleties and contradictions - with anything resembling fullblooded comic vision. Traces of the robust Shavian and Brechtian political comedy - with its fusion of theatricality and ideology, comedy and ideas, the direct use of platform, stage, arena and circus, from Major Barbara to Arturo Ui - are now rare, or rarefied. When a bolder kind of political comedy is attempted, it often leads to a catasttophe of pity and terror, deliberately and didactically contrived, as in Trevor Griffiths's fine Comedians and Edward Bond's recent Restoration (in which the triumphant pastiche comedy suggested by the title is pushed towards a melodramatic execution through aristocratic...