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Stop the World-I Want to Get Off: the Vice as Everyman Ina Rae Hark When the Leslie Bricusse-Anthony Newley musical Stop the World— 1 Want to Get Off opened on Broadway in October 1962, the generally tepid New York reviewers condescendingly labeled its style a derivative of Marcel Marceau’s Seven Ages of Man pantomime and its protagonist, Littlechap, “a British Everyman.”! Although they were correct concerning the play’s indebtedness to these concepts,2 by failing to consider the dra­ matic traditions associated with the medieval morality play, ultimate source of the Mankind figure and the Seven Ages trope, they overlooked the subtle ways in which Bricusse and Newley had shaped the conventions of a theological drama to portray Everyman in a modern, God-deserted setting. In subtitling their play “a New-Style Musical,” the authors perhaps invited such criticism. Viewed in relation either to the prevailing “integrated” musical style of the time, with its links, bursts of song notwithstanding, to the tradition of nineteenthcentury realism, or in relation to the extravaganzas of the twen­ ties and thirties with their sumptuously costumed chorines and lavish production numbers, Stop the World is indeed “New Style.” Its individual elements, however, are all tried and true. As Henry Hewes, author of the one genuinely favorable early review, admits: “For if one takes the magical mixture apart, the elements that have gone into this imported concoction can seem deceptively ordinary and borrowed.”3 Since this dependence on earlier materials apparently contradicts authorial proclamation, the critics no doubt felt justified in denigrating, without thorough examination, what had been done with those sources. Furthermore, at the time the morality play itself was in critical disrepute, seen as a primitive dramatic form long out99 100 Comparative Drama grown. It is generally in the last decade or so that scholars have reaffirmed the vitality of medieval stage traditions and their persistent influence. Despite the vast philosophical differ­ ences between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, this influ­ ence has been repeatedly noted in the modem theatre. Drawing parallels with plays by T. S. Eliot and Brecht, Robert Potter calls the moralities “the archetype of the theater of ideas in our western tradition of drama.”4 Martin Stevens, also citing Brecht as well the Expressionists and the Theatre of the Absurd, ob­ serves: “I do not mean to suggest that the typical medieval play shares the philosophical view of absurdist drama, but I do main­ tain that it resembles that drama in style and technique.”5 Edgar Schell and J. D. Shuchter comment: “In a curious way we have been taught to appreciate a play like The Castle of Perseverance by such unlikely playwrights—unlikely for that purpose—as Genet, and Brecht, and Clifford Odets, playwrights whose thea­ tres alternate between state and secular pulpit.”6 To this list of dramatists one might certainly add Samuel Beckett, especially the Beckett of Endgame, with its ironic use of Scripture and its possible interpretation as a psychomachia taking place within the mind of a dying man. Given these distinguished examples of the longevity of the medieval dramatic tradition, it perhaps seems unnecessary to trace morality play elements in a mere musical comedy. But many of the factors which separate Stop the World from the works of a Brecht or Beckett make its relationship with the morality play all the more significant. First, it was written, just as the moralities were, for the popular theatre, rather than as experimental, intellectual drama. It consequently does not lean as far toward nihilism as do many other modem plays. (Harold Clurman’s observation that the show presents “the theatre of the absurd in British middle-class terms” has considerable validity.7) Therefore, the metamorphosis of the medieval themes becomes far less radical, as Stop the World simply replaces a Christian salvation through repentance and grace with a humanistic sal­ vation through love. And finally, few plays of the contemporary theatre bear as many striking simliarities of structure, action, setting, and technique to a play like The Castle of Perseverance or Mankind.8 Like the “full-cycle” moralities, Stop the World traces the life of a representative human figure from birth through death. Ina...

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