Status Updates From Tom Stoppard: Plays 2

"It seems there is something divine about modern art nonetheless, for it is only sustained by faith. That is why artists have become as complacient as priests. They do not have to demonstrate their truths. Like priests they demand bread, wine, a tin of soup (...)"

"I was tracing a finger along a raised edge along the wall, and I was suddenly totally happy, not elated or particularly pleased, or anything like that— I mean I experienced happiness as a state of being: everywhere I looked, in my mind, nothing was wrong. You never get that back when you grow up; it's a condition of maturity that almost everything is wrong, all the time, and happiness is a borrowed word (...)" damn

Of course, a philosopher’s clerk wouldn’t get the really interesting work straight off, I know that. It’ll be a matter of filing the generalizations, tidying up paradoxes, laying out the premises before the boss gets in—that kind of thing; but after I’ve learned the ropes I might get a half share in a dialectic, perhaps, and work up towards a treatise….

Silence is the sound of time passing.

Don’t ask when the pendulum
began to swing.
Because there is no pendulum.
It’s only the clock that goes tick tock
and never the time that chimes.
It’s never the time that stops.

Tom Stoppard week!

A minor masterpiece that is both playful and philosophical: Albert gains a new perspective on the world, later share by the not-yet clinically depressed Fraser, and because of some kooky bureaucratic calculations, gets to paint a whole bridge on his own. On the ground around him relationships fall apart and even a trip to Paris only reveals how same everything is from the top. Up until his River Kwai moment.

A very Christopher Nolanesque radio play, kind of like Inception in construction, but more like Memento in subject matter: two aging artists must uncover which of them murdered a third, and a series of flashbacks sends them hurtling back to France on the cusp of the Great War. Along the way, they become entangled with a blind woman who later haunts as inspiration for various forms of avant-gardisms.

An amusing story that ends up tragically serious for the dissolute Dominic, a city-dweller who spends all he has to get from one possible source of money to the next, costing him more and more as the taxi driver takes all. And while the short play very specifically deals with a bootless Mr Boot counting shillings and pence in his head, a more universal characteristic reveals how we borrow from Peter to pay back Paul.

The first version of Indian Ink played much more breezily for the radio - not so many interruptions from Prof. Pike, but his footnoting presence in the letter scenes still assures he (and thus scholarship) will forever have the wrong end of the stick. Layered among the many literary references is a hint about later play Invention of Love'a Housman, a subtle call-out to Edenic Out of Africa.

After reading Dan Falk's In Search of Time, it's amusing to read a play pre-dating that book that riffs so much on the unknowable qualities of Time that only a few minds like Gladys fully comprehend, hidden under the surface of cycling hours, minutes and seconds pip pip pipping. Frustrated Frank tries to rescue her from the baffling bureaucracy, even allowing her to go back and be a nun if the Lord wills it.