THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Mrs Prentice finds her husband holding a woman’s dress in What the Butler Saw, she first asks whether he had taken
up transvestism and then adds: ‘I’d no idea our marriage teetered on the edge of fashion.’ Orton is at his most
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consistently risqué in the topsy-turvey world of Loot, a play in which the Oedipal jostles with the necrophilic and in
which the old buttresses of social order — love, medicine, religion, and law — are systematically sapped. Here, as in
all Orton’s work, moral floors dissolve leaving a space which is both amoral and, by extension, apolitical. If some of
his critics po-facedly condemn him for never exploring the consequences of the social questions he raises, it should be
allowed that the very velocity of his verbal comedy never really allows him to stay for answers.
Where Orton’s comedy is explosive, untidy, and unresolved, that of Tom Stoppard (born in Czechoslovakia in
1937) is implosive, symmetrical, and logical. Where Orton disorders the traditional elements of farce, Stoppard takes
a fresh delight in the kind of theatrical clockwork that was perfected by Feydeau. Unlike Orton or Feydeau, however,
Stoppard seems to take a deep intellectual pleasure in parallels, coincidences, and convergences that extends beyond a
purely theatrical relish. In an age which has exhibited a fascination with the often extraordinary patternings of
mathematical and metaphysical theory, he has emerged as an almost exemplary artist, one with an appeal to the
pragmatic and the speculative alike. At their most brilliant, his plays are carefully plotted, logical mystery tours which
systematically find their ends in their beginnings. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which opened at the
National Theatre in April 1967 (the year following its first, amateur, presentation at the Edinburgh Festival), begins,
according to its stage direction, with ‘two ELIZABETHANS passing the time in a place without any visible character’.
This is Hamlet playfully reread according to Einsteinian laws, Eliotic negatives, and Beckettian principles.
Everything is rendered relative. The perspective is changed, time is fragmented, the Prince is marginalized, and two
coin-spinning attendant lords are obliged to take on the weight of a tragedy which they neither understand nor
dignify. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead de-heroizes, but, despite its frantically comic surfaces, it never
expels the impending sense of death implied in its title. Shakespeare’s toadying gentlemen are transformed into two
prosy commoners endowed with twentieth-century sensibilities, men trapped by their costumes, their language, and
their characterless setting. Their tragedy, if tragedy it is, lies in their awareness of convergence, concurrence, and
consequence: ‘Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are ... condemned. Each
move is dictated by the previous one — that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it’ll just be a shambles
...’. However arbitrary life might appear to be, logic is relentless and the pre-existent and inescapable pattern of
Hamlet determines that Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s strutting and fretting must end, like real life, with death.
Much of Stoppard’s subsequent drama introduces characters who are as much out of their intellectual and social
depths as are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In the short radio play, If You’re Glad I’ll be Frank (1966), a bemused
husband desperately tries to reclaim his wife who has become
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subsumed into a speaking clock. In The Real lnspector Hound (1968), a superbly poised parody of an English
detective story, two theatre critics find themselves absorbed into a play and a murder which they assumed they had
come to observe. In Jumpers (produced by the National Theatre in 1972) a moral philosopher preparing a lecture on
the existence of God, and on the related problem of the objectivity of good and evil, is confronted by the murder of an
acrobat at a party in his own home. As its title so succinctly and riddlingly suggests, Jumpers is about intellectual
gymnastics, the making of mental and moral jumps and the construction of an unsteady philosophical architecture; it
is also a tour de force of plotting. Henry Carr, the somewhat dim-witted central figure of what is perhaps Stoppard’s
most sustainedly witty and inventive play, Travesties (1974), is equally overwhelmed by the events in which he
becomes involved. The play begins with a historical footnote (the real Carr, British Consul in Zurich, had taken James
Joyce to court, claiming reimbursement for the cost of a pair of trousers worn in an amateur production of The
Importance of Being Earnest performed in Zurich in March 1918), and a historical coincidence (Joyce, Lenin, and the
Dadaist poet, Tristan Tzara, all used Zurich as a refuge from the First World War), but it develops into a complex,
totally speculative, extrapolation of political and literary history. Stoppard shapes his own play around echoes,
parodies, and inversions of Wilde’s comedy and, to a lesser extent, of Joyce’s Ulysses. None of his later plays has
quite the same confident verve. His excursions into explicitly political drama — with the unwieldy script for actors
and symphony orchestra, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), and the clever television play, Professional Foul
(1978) — demonstrate an (at the time) unfashionable concern with persecution of intellectuals by the thuggishly
illiberal Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Hapgood (1988), with its carefully deployed twins, its double-takes,
and its spies who explain the particle theory of light, does, however, suggest something of a return to his old whimsy,
albeit a singularly menacing whimsy.
Whimsy, intellectual gymnastics, and symmetry are not qualities that most audiences would readily associate with