THE THEATRE OF TOM STOPPARD
Anthony Jenkins
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987
189 pp., $29.95
Suppose that everything happens by chance. Life is absurd, a tale told by an idiot. Maturity consists of gazing into the abyss without trembling or, if one is a Nietzschean Ubermensch, without so much as a twinge of regret. Art reflects a godforsaken world. At worst, it wallows in despair and self-pity and concerns itself with ugliness and savagery. At best, it struggles to affirm life, search for meanings, if not for Meaning, and project a desperate hope. Often enough it will breathe inspiration from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, that modern classic in which two tragicomic tramps, Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi) take upon themselves our burdens and fears without succumbing to terminal despondency. "We are not saints," Didi reminds Gogo, "but we have kept our appointment [with Godot.]" One day, perhaps, he will arrive and reveal to them some pattern or order, some design hidden beneath the chaos. Until then, they do not move.
Gogo and Didi's alter egos appear as Shakespeare's Rosencrantz (Ros) and Guildenstern (Guil) in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the brilliant play that brought Tom Stoppard overnight fame twenty years ago. In Shakespeare's hands, the two courtiers are bungling fools whom Hamlet delights in baiting and eventually marks out for death. Borrowing from Beckett, Stoppard lends them an unexpected dignity and importance. Through their confrontation with the void, he offers theatergoers a serious meditation on death and the apparent absurdity of human existence. When, on the ship that is carrying them to England, they learn of their impending fate, the more thoughtful Guil cries out in anguish: "To be told so little - to such an end - and still, finally, to be denied an explanation."
And yet, as Anthony Jenkins points out in this superb study of Stoppard's theater, Ros and Guil's predicament is not identical to that of Beckett's everymen. "In the Stoppard play, life only seems absurd because of the limitations of one's particular angle." We in the audience share Godot's viewpoint: because we know the plot of Hamlet, we know why the two men die. Jenkins' recognition of this distinction is important, for Stoppard believes that there is a design and purpose to life if we could but see events whole. It is our finite perspectives, rather like those of the Indostani blind men who give wildly variant descriptions of the elephant, that persuade us that life is absurd.
In the memorable opening scene of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard dramatizes the point: Ros and Guil are tossing a coin that shows "heads" again and again. Ros, who is winning, does not seem disturbed by this even as he calls out the incredible tally: "Seventy-six-love." But Guil worries about the failure of the law of probability to assert itself. The result of each single toss, he knows, is a matter of chance; thus, Ros' repeated success may be "a spectacular vindication of the principle that each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise each individual time it does." Yet he understands the implication: that each event in the world would then be completely random and essentially unrelated to every other. If that were the case, life would indeed be meaningless - one damn thing after
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