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Jumpers
Tom Stoppard

    Jumpers is quick, witty, highly improbable and deeply erudite. In other words, it is vintage Tom Stoppard farce. Built on metaphysical propositions, the play may suggest that metaphysical theorems, speculations, and linguistic puzzles, all of which here abound, can only be farcical. When asked by the National Theatre’s interviewer what the play was about “in essence,” Stoppard said: “Gosh, it’s not a question that’s easy to answer.” He did not add the standard line, "if I knew I would not have needed to write the play."
    Stoppard is in no way standard. He did say, it’s about “a man trying to find the answer of how to behave morally and ethically.” The current New York audience for the play’s revival might or might have reached an equal level of command over the material, and it’s doubtful they or anyone for that matter followed the intricacy of every philosophical argument. They probably responded more simply to the view of the lead actor, Simon Russell Beale (playing Professor George Moore), that the action centers on “a man trying to write a lecture....It’s also about a married couple trying to find some value in their relationship.”
    Act I puts both problems onstage in uncompromising fashion. Beale holds the boards alone, working through his lecture aloud and striking a mild anxiety in the audience as they lose the thread of his discourse on the existence of God. Will they be able to follow the play? His wife calls from the next room: “murder,” “rape,” “help,” but fails to gain his attention. Dry marriage; zero relationship. Then Act II  crackles and sparks as conundrums increase and a murder plot gets under way.
    To get it right: George Moore is a moral philosopher at a second rate university absorbed in a quest for moral integrity, while his slightly dotty wife Dotty (Essie Davis), a prematurely retired musical comedy actress, tries forlornly to shake George out of his tree of abstractions. They live in a luxury flat open to blue sky and twinkling stars, so, early on, she sings half of the juney-moon lyrics of “Fly Me To the Moon.” But neither song nor her sexy come-ons in skimpy lingerie ever lead George to her bed. “What is good,” he instead cries out to the heavens; or more immediately, to the leggy secretary taking dictation from him,“What did Zeno really mean:” or, does the theory of “the uncaused first cause refer to God”?
    Dotty’s comfort rather comes from the preposterous Sir Archibald Jumper. Natty in a pin stripped, double breasted suit, a distinguished psychiatrist and Vice-Chancellor of the university, also a lawyer and a coroner, Archie is conveniently on hand to formulate legalistic pronouncements to save Dotty from possible prosecution for the murder of one Professor McFee, George’s rival for a major position and now hanging on a hook inside a closet door. So, there’s a detective-mystery story to be figured out.
    Stoppard has used the genre hilariously several times as it calls for an acute study of the links between word and fact, very much his vantage of choice. Here he uses the form as a skeleton on which to hang sober, enduring ethical questions. It seems one Professor McFee was mysteriously shot dead during the Moore’s victory celebration of the Radical Liberals party, on which occasion they stuffed McFee into a plastic body bag. The story the Moores tell the wooden headed investigator Bones adds up to the hypothesis that McFee shot himself either while on a jaunt in a nearby park or while inside the bag. But the oily-philosopher-lover-Jumper plainly excels in feats of gymnastic logic to explain away merely apparent confusions and save Dotty from possible prosecution–a team of acrobats execute a series of jumps and leaps across the stage to nail the analogy of physical to mental exercises.
    The absurd situation and daffy sight gags keep the audience in constant laughter through Act II, although none of the comic bits add up to consequential action in a logical plot. It hardly matters. The rumpled Beale in a baggy, grey cardigan is himself a sight gag pivoting on his clumsy passivity in the real world. He manages unintentionally to impale his pet hare Thumper with an arrow and crush his pet tortoise under foot, both fatalities also underscoring the script’s ongoing questions about the meanings of death, ontology, and longing for an Absolute in our (regrettably) relativist universe. Oblivious George lives from the neck up. Dotty is not so much disturbed by the bloody corpse of the jumper McFee falling into her arms from the closet door as by the (televised) moon landing. It will change our perspective, she wails, dislodge us from the center of the world, and cause a nation wide collapse into liberalism and general cultural decline. Almost predictably, televised pictures of the event absorbing her and her unfazed lover Archie are in fact of a gyrating naked lady, herself. At the close, Dotty in a glamorous glitter outfit does fly up to perch on a silver half moon.
    Farce is Stoppard’s adopted language of mistake and misapprehension raised exponentially to the nth degree of theatricality. Everyday linguistic metaphors explode into act, gesture, a quick double take. The whole offers a wickedly just satire of our rather limited moral intelligence, male and female, in a form too well mannered and funny to feel cruel. But summary here fails to catch the spirit of the piece moving on light beams in space. Jumpers is Stoppard’s second full length play initially performed to prize winning acclaim by the National Theatre in 1980. To a degree, it anticipates Travesties: neither play takes off from a famous historical figure, a  strategy that Stoppard later favors with Arcadia and of course the more famous Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. So, despite the likeness of the names, Jumpers is not out to parody the naturalist philosopher Sir Thomas Moore. George Moore rather embodies a stereotypical image of a dithering academic unattuned to any but symbolic realms--thus the condition of education, present and future. Beale says he took a short course in philosophy to prepare for the role, a peak after all in Stoppard’s range of experiments in dramatizing the perils of rationality and reason. Moore at one point defines philosophy as the pursuit of multiple subjects without an object,  pretty much an analysis of both play and role. It called all the more acutely for Beale’s skillful timing and superior verbal agility. The dense speeches, many of them long arguments, came trippingly off his tongue, along with the script’s generous lashings of spoof, pun, and repartee. They prove, at the least, that Beale and Stoppard are well matched.
    Stoppard’s productivity has been prodigious. He has written about a dozen plays, twice as many radio and television plays and adaptations. He was knighted in 1997 and made a member of the Order of Merit in 2000. To the French he is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, to Americans the winner of three Tony Awards for Best Play and an Academy Award  for Best Screenplay for his co-authorship of the film, Shakespeare in Love.

    New York, May 2, 2004                                                                              - Nina DaVinci Nichols