Spiel und Politik: Aspekte der Komik bei Tom Stoppard by Beate Neumeier (review)

594 Book Reviews greater degree of emotional reality" (p. 146). Thanks to Jeremy Irons, Heruy's breakdown is "the most moving moment in all Stoppard" and the stylist's cricket bat speech "contains more passion and feeling than anything in Stoppard 10 date" (pp. 155, 151). Curiously, Billington finds the play "grounded in truth" yet he finds "insupportable " Henry's contempt for all "public postures" and he judges the Brodie/Henry antithesis as "false" (pp. 156, 155). Billington's howler is tojudge it "his best·structured play" (p. 145), not knowing he is referring to scenes in the 1982 text that were never performed. The 1983 performance text would have enhanced Billington's case, especially the new Scene 7. There were other slips elsewhere: five lines of "Burnt Norton" were attributed to "Ash Wednesday" (p. 24); Moon not Birdfoot first picks up the phone (p. 63); and there were a dozen printing errors. Though Billington gives an index (unlike Jenkins who is otherwise meticulous in his references) he quotes without the necessary page references and critical sources. Nevertheless, overall it is Billington with his more elegant style, vigorous argument, and wide-ranging comparisons, who better educates his reader in the art of drama criticism. JOHN MORRIS, COLLEGE OF ST. MARK AND ST. JOHN , Pl.YMQUTH BEATE NEUMEIER. Spiellmd Politik: Aspekte der Komik be; Tom SlOppard. Munich, Wilhelm Fink t986. Pp. 278. Unfortunately, the title of Beate Neumeier's book promises more than the work itself delivers. I am sure that many readers and critics would appreciate having at hand a volume tbat sought to raise questions about the relationship between play and politics (or, perhaps, between the polyphonic sea of language and the historical undercurrents) in Stoppard's dramatic oeuvre. Neumeier manages to avoid broaching these complex, but important questions by using the tenns "play" (Spiel) and "politics" (Politik) simply as rubrics within which to classify Stoppard's early and late work. Neumeier's version of Stoppard is one in which the early plays - up to and including Travesties - embody a comic reworking ofother, earlier, dramatic and literary models. What Neumeier refers to as Stoppard's "postmodem" revision of these models is discussed briefly in relation to each of his plays.The core oCher argument is built around the disjunction that emerges between such binaries as language and meaning, reflection and action, the particular and the general. The works from Dirty LineIlINew-FoundLand to The Real Thing, and especially those Neumeier refers to as the "dissident plays" are used to show Stoppard's later interest in the way language is, or can be employed as an instrument either for the oppression or defense of the individual. Ofcourse, this sort of thing has been said before - indeed, Neumeier often makes her case by citing those who have said it, and her bibliography is extensive - nonetheless, and despite the rigidity of her tecbnique, her systematic explication of the textual models, and her delineation of the manner in which Stoppard deconstructs them as well as other social, Book Reviews 595 literary, and philosophical artifacts provides the reader with a fairly thorough checklist of the material that Stoppard has seen fit to call into question. On the other hand, her book is also a clear demonstration of the problems that arise when a critic tries to impose a rather traditional, diachronic explication on work that, as Neumeier and most others have recognized, sets out to deny the very possibility of organi,zing a single, objective order of meaning. She opens her book with an elaborate exposition of various definitions for comedy. satire, and parody, coupled with a discussion of the ways in which these "genres" (tropes?) have been put to use in modem, "absurdist," and postmodem drama. But Neumeier's desire to differentiate between and objectify these categories, and her wish to claim that Stoppard is not a playwright of the modem or the absurd, but of the postmodem, blinds her to the fact that the linguistic and epistemological destabilization she discovers in Stoppard has a much longer genealogy than she assumes. In her effort to demonstrate what is new about his work, Neumeier fails to note the not so new, that which is...