Jumpers

by Tom Stoppard

“Jumpers is simply dazzling. It takes your breath away with its sheer exuberance of literacy, its cascade of words and conspicuous display of intellect. It is also extraordinarily funny. Jumpers is one of the wittiest and most stimulating plays of the last decade or so.”―Clive Barnes, New York Times
Murder, marriage, and metaphysics link the bizarre series of events in this high-spirited comedy, winner of the Evening Standard ’s Best Play Award. George Moore is an aging professor of moral philosophy whose quest to compose a lecture on “Man―Good, Bad, or Indifferent?” is put on hold while he ponders the existence of his sock. He is joined by his youthful wife, Dotty, a former musical star on a downward spiral whose charm may explain the corpse in the next room; George’s specially trained hare, Thumper; and a chorus of poorly trained gymnasts whose exploits set the stage for this topsy-turvy world.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Fiction, Philosophy, 20th Century, Humor

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Sir Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.

Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.

He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unlike mystery novels, life does not guarantee a denouement; and if it came, how would one know whether to believe it?

Jumpers is a very Clockwork Orange philosophical farce. Sexual hijinks compete with the Absurd, while the core of players contend with the possibility of a moral God, infidelity and an inconvenient corpse in the boudoir. There are some fascinating passages but ultimately it is somewhat tiresome.

I wish I had enjoyed this more. 2.5 -- rounded up.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stoppard is obviously a genius. I had hoped earlier in his career he was less jaded about love than The Real Thing suggests, but that was my only real disappointment with Jumpers.

It's not about love, anyway, although it isn't silent on the subject. It's about academic philosophy. The Jumpers are a team of philosophy professors who spend their time tumbling. Their ringmaster is the Vice Chancellor Sir Archibald Jumper, who is a jack-of-all trades. The play pits his moral relativism against the moral absolutism of George Moore, the protagonist.

In grand Stoppard tradition, there are a bunch of other elements that defy coherent explanation but work in the play: Dottie, the actress who is the much younger wife of George and who appears to be having a mental breakdown; the murder of one of the Jumpers, whose dead body is onstage for much of the play; omnipresent images of the moon landing (Stoppard was apparently interested in whether it would ruin the moon as a poetic trope, and set the play on a colony there); Archie's - er - multifaceted relationship to Dottie; George's and Dottie's inability to communicate their mutual need and longing; a tortoise, a hare, and a goldfish; a secretary who never speaks; and a lot of characteristically Stoppard-esque double entendres.

In sum, it is entertaining, even if you're not interested in the philosophical argument.

[Leo Robertson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brilliant in parts though more like a poorly disguised philosophical treatise on the existence of God than a play.

I bet some people have got it working successfully but I can’t “see” it when I read this 😅

[dead letter office · Rating 4 out of 5]

an academic/acrobatic troupe of university professors becomes entangled in an investigation after one of their number is murdered at a wild soiree. a former actress, struggling with lunacy after seeing the heartless act of an astronaut televised live from the moon, is the primary suspect. her husband the philosophy professor dictates lectures to the mirror, for the benefit of his secretary/stenographer, while the investigation unfolds in the bedroom, where the dean of the department examines his mostly-mad wife.

the plot is something only stoppard could cook up and carry out. it manages to be wild, funny, witty, and surreal, while still somehow dealing in the abstract. only stoppard could remain philosophical in the face of all the chaos he creates, and still find space for the really human despair the heroine feels at watching the astronaut's abandonment on the face of the moon.

if i had to guess why stoppard writes such brilliant, involuted plays, i would speculate that all of the wordplay and absurdity and glitter is meant to dazzle his audience into seeing some truth that can't be faced head-on. what seems like an absurd aside, the madness induced by the tragedy on the moon, with its echoes of the tragedy at the south pole, seems to me the central point of the play.

not stoppard's best, which mostly just tells you how great stoppard is.

[Eric Norris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jumpers is a play about philosophy and acrobatics. And murder. Perennially popular as murder is among playwrights, I think we should admit that plays with acrobats and philosophers probably are not for everyone. Still, for those maniacs for whom a frivolous blend of acrobatics and philosophy (and murder) present no obstacle to enjoyment, Jumpers is a play that needs to be seen. I am one of those loons and I loved it. The intersection of moral philosophy, madness, infidelity, homicide, and physical and mental gymnastics in one disorderly household all makes beautiful and lyrical sense to me. The fundamental question the play asks “Man—Good, Bad, or Indifferent?” is answered. But not in the way one expects. Without giving too much away, I will say that the scene with the hare and the tortoise and the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the end of the play is one of the most poignant and funny pieces of theater I have ever seen. Odd that I should type “seen.” As I said above, even though I didn’t see the play, I only read it last night, in one sitting, I feel like I have seen it, which is a testimony to Stoppard's writing. Clear and brilliant.

[D. J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stoppard's wit and absurdity is on full display in 'Jumpers.' Although I haven't seen it performed on stage, it was a great pleasure to read (even if Stoppard himself is suspicious of definitive written texts).

The story is a bit hard to follow at times because it operates in the realm of the surreal and absurd. But, if one realizes this from the get-go, and involves himself in the silliness of it all, one will realize how much fun Stoppard is having.

'Jumpers' reads like a Monty Python film, and it must have been influential on Matt Lucas and David Williams (creators of 'Little Britain'). It is grounded in traditional British bedroom farce, but served with a wonderful helping of the surreal.

Stoppard constantly side-tracks the story by letting the main character, George Moore (professor of moral philosophy), dictate his thoughts to his secretary. All the while, his wife (in a bedroom across the hall) has killed an acrobat at a soire and has hidden the body behind her door. Why? She cannot handle the fact that an astronaut has died in outer space.

Do yourself a favor and pick up this play and read it!

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've come to appreciate I don't know jack about Tom. I must see some of these plays mounted, but I think they seldom are. Is that they are difficult and American audiences are too impatient to work hard enough to sit through them. I think so-twice!

Stoppard was so much more comfortable when all I knew was R&G and Shak in love. Then he was my clever fellow. Now, well he's a mature fellow who has written a lot more than I realized and nobody's clever fellow but his own.

[Kyle C · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Moore is a professor of ethics; Dotty Moore is his former student, his wife, a musical star, and a logical positivist. The play begins absurdly: Dotty is singing, gymnasts are somersaulting around her (the so-called "jumpers"), and George is preparing a lecture on the existence of God. His central question is, "Are God?" (which sort of makes sense once you hear his reasoning around it). It is hard—especially reading the play, rather than watching it—to know what is happening. There is a body slumped on the ground. There is a secretary swinging in and out of view on a pendulum. The moon-landing is blaring on TV. The Radical Liberal spokesman for Agriculture has been appointed the Archbishop of Canterbury. In all this, George, so focused on fine-tuning his disquisition, seems oblivious—the typical distracted professor. He barely notices the show around him, he doesn't notice the dead body, he has a pet tortoise and a pet rabbit and wants to test out Zeno's paradox so much that the police detective strolling around his apartment barely captures his attention. His goal is "to set British moral philosophy back forty years." He delights in obfuscation and confusion.

Who are the jumpers in the background? George tells the detective simply: "logical positivists, with a linguistic analyst or two, a couple of Benthamite Unitarians...lapsed Kantians and empiricists generally...and of course the usual Behaviorists." They are, ironically, the sort of philosophers who do not "jump" to conclusions; they do not believe in aesthetic or moral categories, they do not believe in metaphysical realities that cannot be verified (or falsified). So in a comic turn of events, George is the one who wants to "jump to conclusions", who wants to prove the existence of God, or the truth of moral precepts and universals like good and bad and beautiful, relying on sinuous syllogisms. Yet his obsession with language, logic and truth, ultimately makes him a poor interpreter of reality. He cannot identify a corpse; he cannot distinguish a cry for attention from a cry for help; when he sees the Vice-Chancellor subjecting Dotty—nude—to a "dermatographic test," an exam which is purportedly meant to identify emotional disturbances under her skin, he is not sure whether this is legitimate science or a pretext for sexual infidelity.

The rationalist, the positivist, the empiricist, might say that there are no statements about the divine or about morality that are meaningful. If words do not refer to things that can exist in the world, then sentences using them cannot be verified or falsified and have no truth value. But George's obsession with metaphysics divorces him—and his fellow metaphysicians—from reality, rendering them incomprehensible to others. Their grammar devolves and their understanding of words warps, and George's ethical a priori gets confused with real-world ethical priorities. When he tells the detective that a man that Dotty is eating the corpse, he is not so much aggrieved by her cannibalism as by the suggestion that she is eating the body raw. He doesn't seem to feel offended at the moral evil here but at any breach in etiquette.

It's ultimately not my favorite Stoppard play but I enjoyed the silly humor and absurdity of it.

[heptagrammaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Also starring, absent from the list of dramatis personae: a turtle and in absentia a hare.)

At a party thrown to celebrate a Radical Liberal coup d'état the Chair of Logic is murdered whilst performing in a gymanstics routine. Dorothy Moore—a musical-comedy actress much famed for a song abour a harvest moon who retired, in the middle of the thing, the play being the thing, dramatically, for men had walked on the moon and taken all the shine out of it—may or may not have done it. (Ba-bom-a-bom-bom / Ba-bom-a-bom-bom / Ba-bom-a-bom-bom / Ba-dang-a-dang-dang /Ba-ding-a-dong-ding)

[Salvatore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rough start but as it goes on it becomes more interesting and more absurd. Not my favourite Stoppard by any means. But an amusing romp on a handful of genres - how academia can be a bit like theatrics.

[CM · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Do not despair—many are happy much of the time; more eat than starve, more are healthy than sick, more curable than dying; not so many dying as dead; and one of the thieves was saved. Hell's bells and all's well—half the world is at peace with itself, and so is the other half; vast areas are unpolluted; millions of children grow up without suffering deprivation, and millions, while deprived, grow up without suffering cruelties, and millions, while deprived and cruelly treated, none the less grow up."


Hysterical but also fun, this 2-act satirical take on academic philosophers# centers on George, a professor of ethics struggling to finish his manuscript, and his wife Dotty, a much younger singer retired early after marriage, in a night of celebration where a murder of a fellow philosopher/acrobat during a human pyramid stunt* has taken place. Age-old philosophical conundrums like the question of God's existence and Good versus Evil make their appearance here.

The first act, particularly the opening, can be quite slow-going with so much stage direction that is almost jarring to read but the 2nd half of the play, when the investigation into the crime is on-going, is an effective paid-off to all the set-up. The minor political element of the book may be dated but the other parts of this entertaining and cerebral play is still a satisfying read, as long as the reader is willing to go beyond the opening. If your edition does not include a coda, please try to find an older edition as that dream-coda is a farcical conclusion not to be missed.


#More enjoyable to those knowing a bit of analytic philosophy
*Yes, they have a team of acrobats/jumpers who are also philosophers. You can see it's also an absurdist play.

[Shelby (Grace with Books) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tom Stoppard certainly knows how to make me question all my beliefs within the context of a play. In this instance, he discusses the existence of God. Throughout this book, our main characters are both deep/meaningful and absurd! All of this is happening in the middle of a murder mystery and it's just the level of insanity that Stoppard would write. I love him as a playwright but this just simply wasn't the play for me.

[Alex Tischer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Celebrating Stoppard's birthday! Jumpers is a wild ride, a hilarious rebuke yet embrace of academia. "Is God" or "Are God"?

[Ant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A highly enjoyable romp through some interesting philosophy, made all the more enjoyable by some dry one liners.

[Tikhon Jelvis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant play. The world would certainly be more interesting if practicing philosophers were amateur acrobats who tried to bribe police inspectors with the Chair of Divinity. I think I gained both more and less respect for academic philosophy after reading it.

The play itself is a surreal, hard-to-follow murder story, draped over the skeleton of a philosophy lecture on objective moral values. If you're not interested in this philosophy or in things happening without obvious cause or consequence, it might not be for you. But it fit me, now, perfectly. Besides, the whole play could be carried on wordplay and raw wit alone.

For me, it started out weakly and only came together towards the end of Act I. But when the pieces fell in place, they really fell. Everything that had confused me became retroactively hilarious and profound. Don't put the text down until you're done with the first act!

I'd love to see an actual production of Jumpers, but it's also worth reading. The stage directions are part of the effect and sometimes hilarious—how would you act out a "delicious unraped laugh"? The play has visual aspects which are probably better in reality than on text.

I'm not sure I'd strictly recommend the play to anyone. I absolutely loved that, but how much of that is my particular sense of humor and tolerance for the odd and disjoint? I know perfectly reasonable people who would have probably hated the whole thing.

If you know what to expect, go for it. It hits those expectations and more.

[Kyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Years ago, when I started taking an interest in plays like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, someone told me to read everything Stoppard wrote, which for the most part has been good advice. A play like Jumpers, however, makes this simple pleasure a chore: not that the dialogue is too hard to follow, just pointless to pay any attention to. George ineffectually prepare his notes for a lecture never delivered, all the while his wife Dotty entertains two suitors in her bedroom, perhaps murdering a third? So much of the play is George's endless dictation on whether Man or God is or are Good or Evil or... the distraction of yellow-jumpsuited fellow philosophers seem like weak attempts to make the play seem more like television. At least some restraint prevented them from assembling into a human pyramid as a trolley-car dilemma dumbshow.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

As expected, another dazzling "throw-one's-brain-in-the-blender" experience from Stoppard. While I wouldn't rank this with his three great masterpieces---Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Thing, and, of course, Arcadia--it certainly deserves to stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the top of the next tier with Hapgood. Almost impossible to summarize, the play brilliantly collapses distinctions, so that mental gymnastics becomes real gymnastics, office politics bleeds into actual politics ( which is really just office politics on steroids), and the concepts of good and evil waver between absolute touchstones of human behavior and relativistic matters of taste. Throw in murder and moon landings, and one has an equally exhausting and exhilarating experience.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the philosophy, although George's (practically) monologues when he rehearses his debate could be borderline dense for a heterogeneous audience. Tom Stoppard's play demands the audience's attention and consideration about the question of God's existence and the human judgment of morality amidst a chaotic and sometimes ludicrous backdrop of murder and insanity. Sometimes I enjoy reading a play by itself, but this one I think I would personally glean more if I ever got the chance to see it performed live.

[Tom O'Brien · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the bits I could understand, learned from the bits that I struggled with, and wasn't too upset by the bits where I had no idea what was going on.

Even the bedroom farce moments; the misunderstandings, the barely hidden from view vital element and so on, were so well handled and in the context of such wit and intelligence that they slid by easily.

The wordplay, both serious and playful, was rich and rapid, the ideas were densely packed and the humanity at the centre of it all was both absurd and moving.

So far I have read this and Arcadia and and looking forward to more.

[Will · Rating 1 out of 5]

I suppose for people who don't know Cantor's theorem or Russell's theory of descriptions, it seems smart of Stoppard to name-drop them (back cover blurbs call this "genius"). To people who actually know what these terms mean, to see so many of them (Zeno's paradoxes, Aristotle's prime mover, etc. etc.) mentioned in passing, in quick succession, isn't impressive in itself. Jumpers is clever at times, but mostly it's just a know-it-all narrating a glossary.

[Ashley Kjos · Rating 2 out of 5]

You know, pretty funny.

[Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A relatively early work, and it shows. Predictably witty and intelligent, of course, but the farce doesn't carry the play even as well as it does in, say, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead .

[Jenny Webb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I read something by Stoppard I am struck 1. his intelligence, wit, and humor and 2. the thouht "I should read more of his works." No exceptio here. The (literal) lunacy of the modern moral/ethical/philosophical/religious relation was as fascinating as it was disorienting. Would absolutely love to see this staged.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a relatively early work, but it's got all the hallmarks of my favorite works - music (including some composed by Stoppard), philosophy, clever wordplay, and zany happenings.

Framed as both a murder mystery and a story about an argument between moral philosophies, it is brilliant at refusing to answer questions. Also, best ever use of Zeno's paradox.

[Lesley · Rating 2 out of 5]

The play is potentially impressive. I was trying to pry into the fabric, to swing along the acrobatic rhythm, but failed. I felt like not gaining much from the play itself except the garrulous lectures on logical positivism. The character Dotty got the most of my attention. Favourite line: "life itself is the mundane figure which argues perfection at its limiting curve."

[Sleepover137 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I'm missing a lot of points this play is trying to make. However, I still thought it was funny and well written. I also really liked the philosophical ideas presented in there. They really made me think, which I liked.

[Rolls · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite plays. It is the definition of the term "an embarrassment of riches."

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

ok, so maybe i only half read it and saw the play twice. that mostly counts.

[Eevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

AMAZING

[Lane Wilkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended by the ineffable Herb Granger. I can't tell whether this is the perfect indictment or the perfect paean to existentialism.