Abstract
‘I used to feel out on a limb,’ admits Stoppard, ‘because when I started to write you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that … The Importance of Being Earnest is important, but it says nothing about anything.’1 As we shall see later, in Travesties Stoppard the playwright pinpoints what Wilde was up to with rather more accuracy than this overstatement allows; nevertheless, the remark deserves our attention. Stoppard’s championing of a drama which says nothing about anything is not simply a new aestheticism, ‘a delectation,’ in Eichenbaum’s words, ‘with certain elements of form consciously divorced from “content” ‘.2 It is, rather, an elevation of form to the status of content. His plays evoke the two orders (preservation of the traditional canon and deviation from that canon) and in so doing they perform a critical function — speaking of those procedures which have brought them into being, and with which they so clamorously argue.
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Notes and References
Quoted by Tynan, Show People, p. 47.
B. Eichenbaum, ‘The Theory of the Formal Method’ in Matejka and Pomorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics (1971) p. 12.
See B. Crossley, ‘An Investigation of Stoppard’s “Hound” and “Foot” ’, Modern Drama 20 (1977) passim.
R. Bryden, The Observer, 23 June 1968, 26.
See M. Billington, Guardian, 14 September 1985, 10.
The Real Inspector Hound (2nd edn, 1970) p. 9.
See R. Bryden, The Observer, 23 June 1968, 26.
Wardle, ‘A Grin Without a Cat’, 19.
Stoppard coins this phrase in a review of Agatha Christie’s Rule of Three. See Scene 16 (12 January 1963) 39.
S. Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1965) p. 23.
W. Harris, ‘Stoppard’s After Magritte’, Explicator 34 (January 1976) passim.
Scene 18, (9 February 1963) 46.
After Magritte (1971) p. 34.
C. James, ‘Count Zero Splits the Infinite’, Encounter 45 (1975) p. 70.
K. Hurren, Spectator, 12 February 1972, 245;
J. Barber, Daily Telegraph, 3 February 1972, 11.
G. Melly, The Observer, 2 July 1967, 19.
In The Dog It Was That Died and Other Plays (1983) p. 92.
‘Paradise and Purgatory’, The Observer Magazine (29 November 1981) 42.
Interview with A. Gollob and A. Roper, Gambit 10 (1981) 6.
Jumpers (1972) p. 81.
2nd interview with Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 143.
Interview with F. Hill, The Times Educational Supplement, 9 February 1973, 23.
F. Marcus, Sunday Telegraph, 6 February 1972, 18;
J. Barber, Daily Telegraph, 3 February 1972, 11.
J. Barber, Daily Telegraph, 11 June 1974, 14;
G. Weales, Commonweal, 13 February 1976, 114;
J. Elsom, Listener, 20 June 1974, 801;
Tynan, Show People, pp. 113, 119;
F. Marcus, Daily Telegraph, 16 June 1974, 801;
M. Coveney, Financial Times, 11 June 1974, 3.
G. B. Shaw, ‘Preface to Three Plays by Brieux’, in B. Dukore (ed.), Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski (New York: 1974) p. 636.
D. Rod, ‘Carr’s View on Art and Politics in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties’, Modern Drama 26 (1983) 541.
Michael Billington, for instance, in reviewing the original London production, suggests that Joyce ‘emerges as a truly great man, shaping the way future generations view reality.’ (Guardian, 11 June 1974, 12.) For a full discussion of the various lobbies for a spokesman in the play, see C. Werner, ‘Stoppard’s Critical Travesty, or Who Vindicates Whom, and Why …’, Arizona Quarterly 35 (1979) 228–236.
Werner, ‘Stoppard’s Critical Travesty’, 230–1.
Travesties (1975) p. 85.
Tynan, Show People, p. 109.
Bristol Evening World, 23 April 1960, 3.
Oscar Wilde, Plays, Poems and Prose Writings (1975) p. 350. All subsequent references to The Importance of Being Earnest and Wilde’s critical writings will be to this edition.
In the uncut original Wilde allows Algy the most explicit and stylish declaration of this confusion of document and person. Miss Prism expresses the sincere hope that ‘you will now turn over a new leaf in life.’ ‘I have already begun an entire volume, Miss Prism,’ comes the reply. See the Four Act version of the play in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (new edn, 1966) p. 357.
For the most succinct discussion of how Stoppard, or Old Carr, cheats history by telescoping four years into one in order to create the events and meetings in Travesties, see R. Ellmann, ‘The Zealots of Zurich’, The Times Literary Supplement, 12 July 1974, 744.
See G. Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. H. and S. Mitchell (Harmondsworth, 1969) especially pp. 36–39.
P. Wood, interview with R. Hayman, The Times, 8 June 1974, 9.
Quoted by Hayman, Tom Stoppard, p. 4. Stoppard is here describing John Hurt’s performance in the original production.
J. Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth, 1969) p. 11.
R. Kipling, ‘The Elephant’s Child’, Just So Stories (1962) p. 46.
H. Zeifman, ‘Tomfoolery: Stoppard’s Theatrical Puns’, Yearbook of English Studies 9 (1979) especially 216–18.
Tynan, Show People, pp. 112–13.
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© 1988 Neil Sammells
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Sammells, N. (1988). A Theatre of Formalism. In: Tom Stoppard: The Artist as Critic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18970-0_4
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