Tom Stoppard by Thomas Whitaker

Abstract

Reviews79 work to confuse and puzzle audiences who do not have time to reflect or for the different impressions that read and orally transmitted material leave. Nonetheless, Licastro brings to the reader a wide knowledge of contemporary Italian drama, especially of Pirandello to whose work Betti's plays are invariably compared and on whom Licastro has already written (Luigi Pirandello, dalle novelle alle commedie, 1974) . For readers who do not have access to Italian or contemporary Italian drama, Ugo Betti: An Introduction is indispensable. It is the first book-length study of the playwright, and it should kindle some interest in his troubling , erudite, and presently undervalued work. JEROME MAZZARO State University of New York at Buffalo Thomas Whitaker. Tom Stoppard. New York: Grove Press, 1983. Pp. xiii + 177. $17.50 (hardcover); $9.95 (paper). To write on Tom Stoppard is constantly to renegotiate and re-evaluate one's position as spectator, reader, and critic. Stoppard's parodistic slides and verbal feints, his highly wrought spectacle mixing low comic confusion with high comic self-awareness, invoke a wide spectrum of responses. In Tom Stoppard, Thomas Whitaker is concerned to analyze those responses. For Whitaker, Stoppard's playfulness is purposive; it engages us in "collaborative worlds of play," by which we "modify our merely spectatorial distance" on the action and participate in "stylized explorations of our own intellectual and emotional life" (pp. 6-7). Stoppard 's ideal audience, then, laughs and learns, pleasurably dislocated by the playwright's art-life mirror play, only to be relocated in Stoppard's "moral matrix" (p. 5) which enjoins us to reconsider our relation to the characters and actions we encounter on Stoppard's stage and in our own lives. Whitaker's thesis is ambitious and imaginative, and as a result his readings of Stoppard's major and minor works are creative, often exciting. Eventually, however, his thesis traps him, limiting his own play with the texts he so enjoys. Whitaker moves chronologically through the Stoppard canon and develops issues that clarify his argument. The opening chapters offer readings of generally unknown but important early works, such as the radio play Albert's Bridges and the novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, through the early signature works, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, and smaller but challenging pieces such as After Magritte and Dogg's Our Pet. Throughout, Whitaker's careful analyses extend and explore the notion of collaborative play. "Playing Our Absence ," focusing on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is perhaps the most successful of the first four chapters. The title refers to both the dialectical play of characters whose presence on stage is determined by a script that writes them into absence, and to "our" experience of the illogical logic of their situation. The purely theatrical presence of the Player and of the Hamlet sections challenges the ontological status of Ros and Guil, "who cannot become their own author," even as we become "implicit actor[s]" in their dilemma (p. 58). 80Comparative Drama The author is persuasive here, drawing on (though never explicitly) deconstructionist ideas, particularly Derrida's critique of presence in both written texts and in individual utterance. Deconstructors argue that words have no originary meaning but rather contain the traces of meanings attached to them through other discursive uses. Since meaning is endlessly dispersed, we are never fully present in what we say, or, to put it another way, the fact of our speaking does not—as Ros and Guil painfully discover—guarantee our presence. Furthermore, the denial of origin in verbal and spoken texts means that all texts are "always already written ," Derrida's way of describing the pre-text of all texts and Whitaker's way of describing the overdetermined text in which Ros and Guil find themselves performing. Fully collaborating in Stoppard's play with his characters, we recognize the undecidability of our own scripts, the inevitable lack of a controlling authorial center. Yet, Whitaker argues, there is exhilaration in this recognition: "In so playing our feared absence, we richly enact our presence" (p. 67). In the fine analysis of Jumpers in "Ethics and the Moon," Whitaker's vocabulary shifts slightly. Rather than collaborative play...