Inspiring Older Readers
After Magritte by Tom Stoppard
This is a play I’m very fond of ever since I first saw it produced by the drama department when I was at Bangor University in the early Seventies. It’s only a short, absurdist comedy that runs to maybe 40 minutes on stage and quite often the text gets coupled with the slightly earlier The Real Inspector Hound which is also a surreal or absurdist comedy with something of a detective theme at its heart. In many ways it has quite a lot in common with the earlier dramatic device known as the interlude – something which filled a break between more substantial dramas during a lengthy evening at the theatre.
I’ve never read the play script before and I was delighted at how much more there was to uncover in the text than I had assumed. Watching a play being performed is, of course, very different to reading the play script but I’m of the opinion that the chance to chew over and reflect on the the way script was written can be a more pleasurable experience than sitting in an uncomfortable theatre seat, trying to concentrate and not miss anything.
Watching the play, the humour seems broad and farcical but reading it provides you with a bit more subtlety and the knowing references and word-plays don’t slip past you as they are prone to do in a live performance.
The play doesn’t really demand an explanation of the ‘plot’ – setting out the action of the play would in itself be an absurdist act because it ultimately can’t, and isn’t meant to, make sense. Writing for The Times, Irving Wardle did as good a job as possible or needed:
'Mother lies prone on an ironing board under a basket of fruit suspended from the ceiling, while a young couple - the girl in a ball dress, the man stripped to the waist in waders - are frantically changing light bulbs; through a street window at the back a policeman spies on this domestic scene in a posture of frozen astonishment...You see the author at full stretch when the police burst in and embark on a lunatic investigation involving four characters who all see the facts in a totally different light, and pounce on every ambiguous word to shoot off in their own direction: the dialogue operates like a railway junction with a madman switching over the points.'
Stoppard is deliberate and careful with his scene sets which reference and even echo Magritte paintings and this serves to underscore the surrealist credentials of the play. On top of this, the oddly concocted crime that is being investigated by the policeman (Holmes – yes, Holmes – get it?) and his Inspector, named Foot (cue plenty of more than obvious puns), is supposed to have happened after our dancing couple – Thelma and Harris- and Harris’s Mother have left a Magritte exhibition.
So what – other than produce a stream of fizzing, delightful and downright funny dialogue – is Stoppard trying to do with this play? When we start to look for meaning in any artwork there’s always a danger of being overly po-faced or pretentious in ascribing meaning to something that is essentially just an entertainment. However, I am persuaded by those who think that in this case Stoppard is inviting us to look beneath the surface of what we’re tempted to think of as reality.
Jagwinda Uchman in his paper entitled 'Words and Images: Tom Stoppard’s After Magritte' captures the themes concisely:
“The play deals … with the questions of defining reality, mysteries of perception, slippery elusiveness of empirical and logical truth, the nature of point of view, the reliability of witnesses and testimony and, finally, the conflict between appearance and reality.”
These were favourite themes for Stoppard at this time and anyone familiar with his play 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead' will recognise the territory he's in. I don't think this relatively short play is in the same league as Rosencrantz but it's certainly a useful companion piece - and, all that aside, lots of fun.
I’ve got a bit of a taste for reading plays again ( although I have to admit that it does rather come and go ) so while I’m in that slot, I’ve got a few more lined-up.
Terry Potter
December 2018