Crime and Panachement

By Timothy Foote

THE THEATER

JUMPERS by TOM STOPPARD

Seven years ago, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, British Playwright Tom Stoppard turned Hamlet inside out and seemed to prove that even for bit players, great tragedy has no silver lining. When critics inquired about the play's message, Stoppard averred that this is no age for message in the theater. "One writes about human beings under stress," he said, "whether it is about losing one's trousers or being nailed to a cross." To risk a play whose primary level was philosophical, he added, "would be fatal." In Jumpers, that is just the gamble he has taken--in London with triumphant results. Now the play has opened in Washington, D.C., for a limited run at the John F. Kennedy Center.

Moral Absolutes. Jumpers begins at a surreal party. A girl swings back and forth over the stage as she performs a denture-defying striptease. Some lemon-clad gymnasts, called Jumpers, do flips and build pyramids. A shot flings one Jumper out of his pyramid. It seems to be a gag until he bleeds. Next day the cadaver turns up in the bedroom of ex-Singer Dotty Moore, at whose party he was mysteriously murdered. A good deal of esprit de corpse ensues until the poor chap is lugged away by his fellow Jumpers in a huge plastic bag. The deceased in fact is a professor of logic named McFee. Like McFee, all the Jumpers are professors of philosophy at the college where Dotty's husband teaches. They have been organized as gymnasts by the vice chancellor of the college, an unscrupulous bounder, lecher and pragmatist called Sir Archibald Jumper. "McFee's dead," Jumper announces. "Shot himself ... in a plastic bag." The question is why. "It's hard to say," replies Jumper. "He was always tidy."

These goings-on may be taken as the kind of crazy crime and panachement that Stoppard displayed so well in The Real Inspector Hound. But the playwright also offers a long, rambling monologue by Dotty's rumpled husband, George Moore. Moore is a professor of moral philosophy. In his office opposite Dotty's bedroom, he is busy dictating a discourse in defense of moral absolutes --in fact, of the whole idea of goodness and even the possibility of God's existence. "Is God?" he begins. But soon he is revising: "Are God?" Before long, Moore has fumblingly re-created the whole history of man's proofs of God's existence, the decline of faith and philosophy's search for knowledge, from the ancient wrestlers with the nature of truth and virtue down to the pusillanimous modern school, which limits itself to discussing the slipperiness of words.

Beyond his own intuition, George never makes much of an intellectual case for God's presence. But he is brilliant at ragging hairsplitters and linguists. He chomps on a bacon sandwich as he explores the ambiguities of the word "good" when applied to it. He derides the linguists' refusal to accept simple common sense as proof of reality by comparing their thinking to Zeno's paradox (an arrow shot toward a target first has to cover half the distance and then half the remainder, etc.). "It never gets there!" shouts George, brandishing a toy bow and arrow. "And Saint Sebastian died of fright." His finger slips. The arrow wobbles into a closet. It is only near the final curtain that the heartbroken professor learns that the arrow has killed his pet hare Thumper.

By itself, George's discourse is exquisite parody. By themselves, the goings-on in Dotty's room are surrealist --eventually futurist--farce, which reflect the cumulative personal and political effects on the modern world of not believing in absolute values. Together, they make up an extraordinary statement: if God does not exist, it will shortly be necessary to re-invent him.

Both message and manner require fast pace and total aplomb on the part of the players. But in the Washington production, Jill Clayburgh reads her lines as if they were instructions for assembling a Japanese motorcycle. And Brian Bedford (School for Wives) is faintly querulous when he should be charmingly quizzical. A pity. At its best, Jumpers suggests the Shaw of Man and Superman, the Wilder of The Skin of Our Teeth.

Timothy Foote

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