Hamlet: Film, Television, and Audio Performance ed. by Bernice Kliman (review)

194 Comparative Drama tizing authority, Sammells' Chapter Two presents convincing evidence in the journalism for Stoppard's early commitment to "marry critical questioning with a well-versed conservatism" (i.e., an awareness of the traditional canon and its conventions). However, Chapter Three is less successful, attempting to show the influence of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds on Stoppard's only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, and citing as primary evidence the coincidence of multiple styles and hyperconscious narrative in the two novels. Some of the commentary on the novel and on the plays in Chapter Four, "A Theatre of Formalism," nicely reinforces the earlier observation of Stoppard's Beckettian strategy of self-cancellation. The Chapter Four discussion of Travesties as selfinspecting and self-contradicting shows the first part of Mr. Sammells' thesis in its best light. Travesties earns its liberty from the dogmas it presents by both establishing and departing from them in a spirit of critical fun. The play's form vindicates art as criticism. The fifth chapter, ''The Dissenters," leads off Part Two. Its extended discussion of Slawomir Mrozek's Tango, which Stoppard adapted from an original Polish translation in 1966, is another example of Mr. Sammells ' determination to present overlooked influences on Stoppard's work, even when the evidence for them might be shaky or their significance marginal. Finally, after much plot summary, the contribution of Tango is explained in one sentence: the spiralling farce humor of After Magritte as well as its opening and closing tableaux owe an obvious debt to the structure of Tango. An extensive discussion of George Moore's philosophical beliefs in this chapter is more to the point: "The spiritual loners of Stoppard's earlier work associate freedom with refusal, not criticism. George, however, does not refuse the rules of the philosophical languagegame , but attempts to stay within them. This is real dissent, the attempt to engage with opponents ..." (p. 99). The ensuing lengthy discussion of George's philosophical principles bogs down under its own weight, but Mr. Sammells' summary statement ties this play nicely to those discussed as "formalist theatre" in Part One: Stoppard uses philosophy to make a point about "thepossihility, and the difficulty, of earning freedom through the performance of criticism" (p. 110). When in Chapter Six. ("The Dissidents") Mr. Sammells turns his attention to Stoppard's Eastern European plays, he must find new ground upon which to evaluate them while linking them to the earlier work, and he does so quite well. The dissidents, like George Moore, struggle for language, but unlike George they are able to find the words with which to express their criticism. The most interesting discovery here has to do with Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, where dissent is described as a collective activity rather than the lonely work of an eccentric professor. Mr. Sammells has little to say about the new and problematic nature of the comedy in these plays, but he points to the danger of sentimentality in the "humdrum rhyming mnemonics" of Alexander in Every Good Boy. The best of the analyses in this chapter draws parallels between Wittgenstein's assertion of the impossibility of private language and the use of "language as dissent" in Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoofs Macbeth, whereby the spectators collaborate with the actors' dissent by learning "Dogg" along with them. Reviews 195 Only in the last twenty pages of his book does Mr. Sammells take Stoppard to task for relinquishing the "aesthetics of engagement" for the "politics of disengagement." Evidence for "disengagement," that is, the failure to address his own writing procedures critically, is found in Stoppard's own claim that one of his recent plays speaks for "the truth": "Stoppard declares himself concerned with the correct solution, rather than the setting of the question. He now positively encourages the application of 'true or false' criteria to his work" (p. 131). In fact, Stoppard did claim that young journalist Milne of Night and Day speaks "the truth" when he says that ''with a free press everything is correctible." But does this make Stoppard a thesis dramatist? Every major character in the play, after all, speaks a "truth." It is not, as Mr...