Beliefs in Jumpers

Tom Stoppard's play Jumpers has been described thus: "The Radical Liberal Party has made the ex-Minister of Agriculture Archbishop of Canterbury, British astronauts are scrapping with each other on the moon, and spritely academics steal about London by night indulging in murderous gymnastics: this is the kind of manic, futuristic, topsy-turvy world in which Stoppard's dazzling new play is set.

And if I add that the influences apparently include Wittgenstein, Magritte, the Goons, Robert Dhery, Joe Orton, and The Avengers, you will have some idea of the heady brew Stoppard has concocted.

The protagonists include an aging Professor of Moral Philosophy - trying to compose a lecture on "Man - Good, Bad or Indifferent" - while ignoring a corpse in the next room; his beautiful young wife, an ex-musical comedy Queen, lasciviously entertaining his university boss down the hall; her husband's specially trained hare, Thumper; and a chorus of gymnasts, Jumpers" (Michael Billington, in The Guardian). This synopsis of Jumpers shows it as it is: Jumpers was never going to be an easy play to view, or to understand.

Jumpers can be read in many ways, as a play that concerns itself the idea of belief: the belief that there can be a moral philosophy, the belief in the solid, basically good, nature of man, the belief in the power of relationships, the belief in an all-seeing, all-knowing being, God. The play, read in the light of beliefs, can be seen as a great moral discussion on the power of belief, to support, but also to corrupt.

For example, in the play, the academic believes so much in the theoretical side of what he is doing, and is so consumed by his theoretical, philosophical wanderings, that he fails to see practical examples of his philosophy, he misses his 'philosophical questions in action' (and thus through his belief in his philosophy, becomes corrupted).

The play asks a great deal of its audience, its actors, indeed, asks the audience and actors to lay themselves in the hands of Stoppard, to believe in Stoppard, as the issues he raises are so complex, and so complexly portrayed, that often, without this belief, the play could become nothing more than a series of ambiguities.

The play therefore asks a great deal of its audience, with regard to their belief in the playwright: they need to believe that Stoppard himself is well-versed in the issues he raises in the play; that the way in which Stoppard chooses to raise, and to develop, these issues is the best way to confront these issues; that Stoppard himself, as the playwright, has the best interests of the audience at heart, and is not just entertaining himself with the issues he raises, and the ways in which he develops them throughout the play (a common criticism of Stoppard is that he is an arrogant playwright, more interested in the words and the literary construction of the play than his audience).

Continuing on from this issue of the common criticisms of Stoppard, the play Jumpers (in particular) raises many questions about the beliefs of Stoppard himself: What are his beliefs with regard to the role, and the responsibilities, of a playwright, and where does he believe his responsibilities lie? (with the audience? with himself? with the critics?) How do his beliefs concerning his role and responsibilities as a playwright translate to the productions he produces? We will now move on to some examples from the play of the above-mentioned points of discussion, for example the way in which Stoppard asks his audience to believe in the way he is portraying the issues: Jumpers uses the juxtaposition between physical acrobatics on stage to parallel the mental acrobatics used by the academics he parodies, when they are wrestling with the problems of moral philosophy.

In Jumpers, Stoppard holds the belief that it is possible to sustain an entertaining show whilst involving his audience in an intellectual discussion.

However, presenting intellectual discussions within such an entertaining show often bemuses the audience, and it has been argued that, in Jumpers, this confuses the issue under discussion for many audience members: the acrobatics get in the way of the understanding of the issues he is trying to put across (although this, it could be argued, perhaps represents (stands as a metaphor for) the blanketing of the intuitive, practical, understanding of basic philosophical (moral) issues when they are discussed in an overly in-depth, academic, manner?).

Stoppard's consuming belief that a discussion of deep philosophical issues can be presented in the midst of such blatant and 'showy' entertainment is therefore questionable, as his belief that an audience can pick out his many messages, both direct and subliminal, is questionable. This aspect of Stoppard's Jumpers - and other of his plays - has often been attacked by many critics: one critic said of Jumpers "the play went on five minutes too long....is it because Mr.

Stoppard cannot control his flow of language and gimmicks?" (John Weightman); another said "Jumpers had a brilliant, surrealist opening scene, but quickly spiraled downhill into an undergraduate panto/wordgame" (Peter Buckley). Yet, Stoppard himself defends his belief in language, the pleasure he takes in language, saying "I'm hooked on style....on things I find difficult to express." Perhaps it is this belief that led him to undertake a project such as Jumpers, which tries to bring complex, moral philosophy to the attention of the audience.

His belief that such an issue, with a multiplicity of arguments and resolutions, could be dealt with in a play is something to be lauded, which in itself is something to encourage belief from the audience (another, recent, and perhaps more successful, play that asks the same thing of its audience is Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, which discusses the (unknown) role of Heisenberg in the building of the nuclear bomb).

That Stoppard chose to entangle these issues with so much 'visual entertainment' could also be read as his belief that such a complicated topic needed to be dealt with in a manner fitting to the issue: to have many characters, each with their own moral stand-point and dilemma, each with their own belief in their standpoint and solutions, to represent the many facets of the argument; to have many visual tricks (acrobatics, for example), to represent the mental processes supporting the moral debates, and to visually represent the confusion and multiplicity of trains of thought and outcomes.

Yet, through this visual trickery, Jumpers - it.