Abstract
Jumpers explodes on the stage with a burst of flashing lights, puzzling pyramids of gymnasts, an unsynchronised medley of moon songs, and the striptease of a secretary who is, literally, a quite daring young woman on a flying trapeze. Suddenly a gunshot tears one of the jumpers out of the gymnasts’ pyramid; the party is over; and we are plunged into a play which is, among other things, a murder mystery. Tom Stoppard’s 1972 play has proven so popular that in 1976 it began a remarkable second run at the National Theatre — a ‘revival’ of a work not five years old. Drawing on the magnificent theatrical facilities available at the National, the production employed a revolving stage, projected televised images on a gargantuan screen, and belted out a concluding musical number which might bring down the house in Las Vegas. Making a most welcome reappearance on the West End stage in 1985, the play counterpointed the ravishing strains of Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo’ with the soundtrack of ‘Star Wars’, added a jet-propelled space suit for the eye-popping re-entry of Captain Scott to the Coda, and a grapevine for the swinging entry — clad in tuxedo top and loincloth — of Lord Greystoke, a.k.a. Tarzan.1
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Notes
G.B. Crump, ‘The Universe as Murder Mystery: Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers’, Contemporary Literature, 20 (Summer 1979) 356; Eric Salmon, ‘Faith in Tom Stoppard’, Queen’s Quarterly, 86 (Summer 1979) 215; Salmon, p. 215; Crump, p. 354.
Kenneth Tynan, ‘Withdrawing with Style from the Chaos’, New Yorker, 53 (19 December 1977), p. 44; repr. in Kenneth Tynan, Show People: Profiles in Entertainment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 53.
Tom Stoppard, ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’, Theatre Quarterly, 4, no. 14 (May–July 1974), p. 7; hereafter cited in my text as ‘Ambushes’.
Mel Gussow, ‘Stoppard’s Intellectual Cartwheels Now With Music’, New York Times, 29 July 1979, sec. 2, p. 22.
Tim Brassell, Tom Stoppard: An Assessment (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), p. 132.
Tom Stoppard in ‘A Conversation’ with Peter Wood in the programme for the National Theatre’s 1976 production of Jumpers, n. pag; ‘First Interview with Tom Stoppard: 12 June 1974’, in Ronald Hayman, Tom Stoppard, 4th ed. (London: Heinemann, 1982), p. 5; Tom Stoppard, ‘The Language of Theatre’, a lecture delivered at the University of California at Santa Barbara, 14 January 1977; Stoppard, ‘A Conversation’, n. pag.
Mel Gussow, ‘Jumpers Author is Verbal Gymnast’, New York Times, 23 April 1974, p. 36.
Tom Stoppard, Jumpers, 2nd ed. (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 12. Quotations hereafter noted parenthetically in my text are from this revised 1986 edition. Material contained only in the first two printings of the first edition of Jumpers (London: Faber and Faber, 1972) will be identified as ‘1972 text’. The third and subsequent printings of the first edition — identified by the author’s ‘Postscript (February 1973)’, p. 11 — incorporated revisions made in the course of the original National Theatre production at the Old Vic. Material contained in this state of the text will be identified as ‘1973 text’.
Tom Stoppard, ‘But for the Middle Classes’, review of Enemies of Society, by Paul Johnson, Times Literary Supplement, 3 June 1977, p. 677.
Lucina P. Gabbard identifies Stoppard’s advice with Archie’s and asserts that the play ridicules morality (‘Stoppard’s Jumpers: A Mystery Play’, Modern Drama 20 [March 1977] 95, 88). Mary R. Davidson concurs that Archie ‘is not an unsympathetic character’ (‘Historical Homonyms: A New Way of Naming in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers’, Modern Drama, 22 [September 1979] 310).
Michael Billington, Stoppard the Playwright (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 90.
Tom Stoppard to Oleg Kerensky, The New British Drama: Fourteen Playwrights since Osborne and Pinter (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977), p. 170.
Quoted by Mel Gussow, ‘Stoppard Refutes Himself, Endlessly’, New York Times, 26 April 1972, p. 54.
John A. Bailey, ‘Jumpers by Tom Stoppard: The Ironist as Theistic Apologist’, Michigan Academician, 11 (Winter 1979) 248; repr. in Harold Bloom (ed.), Tom Stoppard, Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), p. 41.
Richard Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery and the Clockwork (Oxford: Amber Lane Press; New York: Methuen; 1984).
Gabrielle Robinson, ‘Nothing Left but Parody: Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Tom Stoppard’, Theatre Journal, 32 (March 1980) 90–1. Michael Hinden commits much the same error in ‘Jumpers: Stoppard and the Theater of Exhaustion’, Twentieth Century Literature, 27 (Spring 1981) 1–15. Citing the murders in the play, Hinden asserts: ‘Evidence is lacking in such a world to support either of George’s intuitions, that of a “God of Goodness to account for moral values” or that of a “God of Creation to account for existence”. The old philosophy George clings to is a ladder that cannot support much weight’ (pp. 10–11). Hinden implies, rather naïvely, that if a God of goodness exists humankind would be incapable of murder. But George never predicates divine perfection on the existence of human perfection.
Gabrielle Robinson, ‘Plays Without Plot: The Theatre of Tom Stoppard’, Educational Theatre Journal, 29 (March 1977) 47.
For the 1985 Aldwych production, Stoppard deleted the line because he thought ‘the line was unnecessary and made an obvious point of something that the audience would already have grasped’. The deletion came much to the chagrin of at least one American academic according to an account Stoppard provided to Clare Colvin (‘The Real Tom Stoppard’, Drama, 43, no. 161 [1986], p. 10).
Clive James, ‘Count Zero Splits the Infinite’, Encounter, 45 (November 1975), pp. 71, 70.
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© 1990 Paul Delaney
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Delaney, P. (1990). The Flesh and the Word in Jumpers. In: Tom Stoppard. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20603-2_3
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