Balancing the Equation

Balancing the Equation PHYLLIS RUSKIN AND JOHN H. LUTTERBIE Tom Stoppard left work on his new play for two weeks in October 1981 to be playwright in residence at San Diego State University, the focal point of this experience being a production ofDogg's Hamlet (retitled Mackoon' s HamletI ) and Cahoot's Macbeth. Supervising rehearsals, conducting a seminar in new plays, and holding numerous interviews provided a hectic schedule for Stoppard and a good opportunity for the students to learn how one playwright works and thinks. The following synopsis ofhis visit is based on a theme which continually surfaced in his work on the production, his discussions with young playwrights, interviews and lectures: balancing the equation. Stoppard readily points out that any comments he makes are self-referential and should not be construed as a universal theory of play-writing. He also reserves the right to alter his perspective as he develops, a freedom one is quick to admit. Nevertheless, during the course of his visit certain ideas came together which might be viewed as a philosophy of writing for the theatre. According to Stoppard, the primary function ofhis work - a function which he feels is universal - is holding the audience's interest. But he believes that this attraction is something over which he has minimal control: I didn't invent theatrical viability. In other words, I'm not in a position ofsomebody who makes a moment valid. It happens the other way around.... I don't care if they [the actors] stand looking at the wall for ten minutes, ifthe audience thinks that's interesting. I don't, as it were, have any control over what is interesting. I can only try and guess what is and what isn't. ... I'm kind of stuck with what an audience finds viable and what it doesn't, and I fit in with it.2 If he cannot keep an audience attentive and involved, he knows that any ideas he might try to convey will be lost. Such a loss would be disastrous for a playwright who is attempting to marry comedy with a play of ideas, because 544 PHYLLIS RUSKIN AND JOHN H. LUTTERBIE theatricality and abstract concepts make up two ofthe variables which Stoppard balances in his equation. Stoppard acknowledges that the ideas one may find in his plays result from two kinds of play-writing: plays which are the products of ideas, and ideas which are the products of plays. Whereas Jumpers, Travesties, and Night and Day illustrate the first kind, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead exemplifies the second. Stoppard's intent with Rosencrantz was to write a "straightforward play about two Elizabethan courtiers trapped in Elsinore, existing between the scenes of Hamlet"; the playwright's willingness to admit ideas as the basis of his other plays allows one to take him at his word. Consequently, he did not intend the resulting volume of interpretations, although he acknowledges their presence. His inevitable metaphor for explaining this phenomenon is that of the customs officer/critic who refuses to believe that the playwright has nothing to declare: He starts ransacking the baggage. In five minutes he has come up with more exotic contraband than you've ever seen on the local border. All kinds of gold watches and drugs and that kind of stufffalling out ofthe baggage. He lays it all out and says: "Well, what do you have to say about this?" And all you do is say that you admit it's there but you don't remember packing it. While Stoppard denies that he intended such interpretations, he feels that plays of this type are often the more interesting: they support his faith in "subjective response." He demonstrates this idea with his interpretation of one of his favorite plays, Max Frisch's The Firebugs: Stoppard originally viewed this work as a metaphor of the Nazis' climb to power before the war; he then discovered that Frisch meant it as a play about how the Communists came to power after the war. Such differences led Stoppard to devise the epigram: "No interpretation will be denied, and none acknowledged." Most ofStoppard's later plays, however, spring from ideas which...