Ping Pong Philosopher

By I.E. Kalem

British Playwright Tom Stoppard chain-smokes ideas like cigarettes and emits the smoke with puffs of mirth. The latest display of his intellectual curiosity, verbal agility and quirky sense of humor is Jumpers (TIME, March 11), a comedy currently on view at Manhattan's Billy Rose Theater. Jumpers is a philosophical roller coaster careering dizzyingly along the parallel tracks of wit and logic over such subjects as the existence or nonexistence of God, the nature of good and evil, and the interdependence of ethics and metaphysics.

It is a breath-stopping ride. Among the passengers are George, an absent-minded professor of moral philosophy absorbed in his upcoming lecture billed "Man--Good, Bad or Indifferent?"; his ex-showgirl-songstress wife Dotty; and her psychiatrist lover, Sir Archibald Jumper, who is the vice chancellor and pragmatic villain of the college where George teaches. More bizarre companions include George's secretary, who likes to striptease while swinging by her teeth from a chandelier; a troupe of yellow-clad acrobats ("a mixture of the more philosophical members of the university gymnastics team and the more gymnastic members of the philosophy school"); and a corpse in a plastic bag named McFee.

Born in Zlin. Though Stoppard ravels and unravels the destinies of these characters, that is not his prime concern. Utilizing the Socratic method of perpetual questioning, he is assessing the destinies of 20th century man in a Shavian play of jousting ideas. In dramatic kinship, Jumpers is a child of Shaw's Heartbreak House. In that play, written shortly before World War I, Shaw dramatized the sundering of the social fabric of Western civilization. Stoppard is concerned with the moral fabric, the abyss of nonbelief. He sees man, devoid of metaphysical absolutes, as rending his fellow man and reducing the planet to a desolate, lifeless cipher rather like the moon, which is a key symbol in Jumpers.

Stoppard, with his large, luminous brown eyes that seem to pierce both inward and outward, is a bit of a moon gazer. His background, like his voice, has a trace of the exotic. He was born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937 as Thomas Straussler. When he was two years old, his father, a doctor, moved to Singapore. As the Japanese began infiltrating Southeast Asia, Tom, his mother and his older brother were sent on to India. (His father later died in a Japanese prison camp.) Tom learned English in Darjeeling. Taking his stepfather's name, he arrived in England in 1946 as Tom Stoppard.

At 17 he quit school to sign on as a cub reporter with a Bristol paper. Starting on the police beat, he was eventually reviewing films and plays. In retrospect, he says, "I didn't really enjoy it. I felt I was a critic by instinct, not by credentials. I kept thinking I only put into print what other people were saying in the bar during intermission." Nonetheless, he made amusing use of the experience later when he wrote The Real Inspector Hound (TIME, May 8, 1972), a caustic spoof of two rather addlepated drama critics flexing their cliches on an Agatha Christie-style mystery thriller.

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger triggered Stoppard's desire to write plays--as it did many another English no-school-tie boy. His first full-length play, A Walk on the Water (about the family of a noninventive inventor), was produced on BBC television during the week of President Kennedy's assassination. "It wasn't the greatest week to have a comedy on," Stoppard recalls. Three years later came Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead--and fame. In view of the gentle, unassuming nature of Tom Stoppard's personality, fame is a word no weightier than a feather.

Although George, the philosopher-hero of Jumpers, expresses a need for metaphysical convictions, Stoppard claims he himself vacillates between uncertainties: "I might subscribe to certain beliefs on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and to a totally different set on Tuesday and Thursday. I think that a sense of conflict between one's emotional response to absolute morality and one's rational sense of the implausibility of there being a God is obviously a part of what I call 'the Ping Pong game.' I always write about two people arguing. I play Ping Pong with myself, but there is no killing shot. It is like Ping Pong against a clock; there is a tendency for the argument to be won by the person who finishes speaking when the bell goes, rather than because there is nothing left to say."

Catch-23. The organic process of writing fascinates Stoppard: "I half commit myself to some distant future date. I often talk to someone about it and suggest that in six months it will be done, so I set up a kind of deadline. But most of the intervening period disappears in a kind of anxious state of walking about. You cannot start until you know what you want to do, and you do not know what you want to do until you start. That is catch-23. Panic breaks that circle. Finally a certain force in the accumulated material begins to form a pattern. Most people think that you build a skeleton and then you know whether you are going to write a dog, a giraffe or whatever. What happens, in fact, is that you do a perfect little finger, and then you do four others, and then you write a wrist. You begin to get a sense of what kind of animal it might be."

Stoppard is particularly drawn to playwrights who shake up an audience's habitual patterns of thought. That is one reason he admires Harold Pinter: "Pinter invented something--not the poetry of ordinary conversation that he is usually credited with, but the notion that you do not necessarily believe what people tell you in a theater. Formerly you did so, unless there was reason for skepticism--as in an Agatha Christie play. In Pinter's plays there is no surface reason for not telling the truth, but he has persuaded an entire generation of theatergoers that people are not necessarily telling the truth, even when they have no reason for not doing so. He broke the first rule of the theater: that you do not betray the audience."

Two auspicious dates loom ahead on Tom Stoppard's calendar. His second wife Miriam is due to give birth in four or five months: "If it's a girl, the name is Martha; if it's a boy, Edmund." No ambiguities there. And on June 10, the Royal Shakespeare Company presents his latest play, Travesties. It deals with "the notion that at a certain time, in a certain place (Zurich), Lenin and Joyce were there together, rubbing shoulders -- the great revolutionary and the great artist." It could be a titanic Ping Pong game. -I.E. Kalem

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