by Tom Stoppard
BEAUCHAMP: John who?
MARTELLO: Augustus John.
BEAUCHAMP: No, no, it was Edith Sitwell.
MARTELLO: Rubbish!—you’re getting old, Beauchamp.
BEAUCHAMP: I am two years younger than you, Martello.
MARTELLO: Anybody who is two years younger than me is senile. It is only by a great effort of will that my body has not decomposed. Which reminds me, you can’t leave Donner lying there at the bottom of the stairs for very long in this weather, and that is only the practical argument; how long can you ethically leave him?
BEAUCHAMP: It is nothing to do with me.
MARTELLO: Beauchamp, I am shocked. You were at school together. You signed his first manifesto, as he signed yours. You have conjured with his name and travelled on his ticket; shared his roof, his prejudices, his occasional grant; eaten his bread and drunk his health (God forgive my brain!—it is so attuned to the ironic tone it has become ironical in repose; I have to whip sincerity out of it as one whips responses from a mule!)—to put it plain, you have been friends for over sixty years.
BEAUCHAMP: Well, the same goes for you.
MARTELLO: Yes, but you killed him.
BEAUCHAMP: I did no such thing! And you have good reason to know it! I am thoroughly disillusioned in you, Martello. I was willing to bend over backwards to see your side of it, but I can’t stand a chap who won’t come clean when he’s found out.
MARTELLO: I, on the other hand, admire your hopeless persistence. But the tape recorder speaks for itself. That is, of course, the point about tape recorders. In this case it is eloquent, grandiloquent, not to say Grundigloquent—Oh God, if only I could turn it off!—no wonder I have achieved nothing with my life!—my brain is on a flying trapeze that outstrips all the possibilities of action. Mental acrobatics, Beauchamp—I have achieved nothing but mental acrobatics—nothing!—whereas you, however wrongly and for whatever reason, came to grips with life at least this once, and killed Donner.
BEAUCHAMP: It’s not true, Martello!
MARTELLO: Yes, yes, I tell you, nothing!—Niente! Nada! Nichts!—Oh, a few pieces here and there, a few scandals—Zurich—Paris—Buenos Aires—but, all in all, nothing, not even among the nihilists! (Pause.) I tell you, Beauchamp, it’s no secret between us that I never saw much point in your tonal art. I remember saying to Sophie, in the early days when you were still using gramophone discs, Beauchamp is wasting his time, I said, there’ll be no revelations coming out of that; no truth. And the critics won’t listen either. And they didn’t. But this time you’ve got them by the ears. It has the impact of newsreel. In my opinion it’s a tour de force.
BEAUCHAMP: You are clearly deranged. It is probably the first time a murderer has tried to justify himself on artistic grounds. As it happens, you are also misguided. Far from creating a tour de force, you ruined what would have been a strand in my masterwork of accumulated silence, and left in its place a melodramatic fragment whose point will not be lost on a jury.
(He presses TAPE switch: ‘—There you are——’ etc.)
There indeed he is, ladies and gentlemen, caught by the fortuitous presence of a recording machine that had been left running in the room where Mr. Donner was quietly working on a portrait from memory, a portrait fated to be unfinished.
MARTELLO: Poor Donner, he never had much luck with Sophie.
BEAUCHAMP: For the existence of this recording we have to thank Mr. Beauchamp, a fact which argues his innocence, were it ever in doubt. Mr. Beauchamp, an artist who may be familiar to some of you——
MARTELLO: If you are extremely old and collect trivia——
BEAUCHAMP: —and his friends, Mr. Donner and the man Martello, lived and worked together in a single large attic studio approached by a staircase, which led upwards from the landing, and was guarded at the top by an insubstantial rail, through which, as you will hear, Mr. Donner fell.
MARTELLO: An accident, really.
BEAUCHAMP: If you say so.
MARTELLO: You didn’t mean to kill him. It was manslaughter.
BEAUCHAMP: You will hear how Mr. Donner, while working, dozed off in his chair …
(TAPE: Droning.)
Footsteps approach.
(TAPE: Footsteps.)
Someone has entered quietly. Who? No visitors came to this place. Martello and Mr. Beauchamp met their acquaintances outside, formerly at the Savage, latterly in public houses. And Mr. Donner, who was somewhat reclusive, not to say misanthropic, had no friends at all—except the other two, a fact whose importance speaks for itself——
(TAPE: ‘Ah! There you are …’—and is switched off.)
Not, ‘Who the devil are you?’, or ‘Good Lord, what are you doing here, I haven’t seen you for donkey’s years!’—no.
‘Ah. There you are.’ The footsteps can only have belonged to the man Martello.
MARTELLO: Or, of course, the man Beauchamp. I don’t see where this is getting us—we already know perfectly well that it was one of us, and it is absurd that you should prevaricate in this way when there is no third party to impress. I came home to find Donner dead, and you at the top of the stairs, fiddling with your tape-recorder. It is quite clear that I arrived just in time to stop you wiping out the evidence.
BEAUCHAMP: But it was I who came home and found Donner dead—with your footsteps on the machine. My first thought was to preserve any evidence it had picked up, so I very quietly ascended——
MARTELLO: Beauchamp, why are you bothering to lie to me? You are like a man on a desert island refusing to admit to his only companion that he ate the last coconut.
BEAUCHAMP: For the very good reason that while my back was turned you shinned up the tree and guzzled it. And incidentally—I see that you have discovered where I keep my special marmalade. That’s stealing, Martello, common theft. That marmalade does not come out of the housekeeping——
MARTELLO: It must have been Donner.
BEAUCHAMP: It was not Donner. Donner never cleaned the tub and he always helped himself to cheese in such a way as to leave all the rind, but he never stole my marmalade because he didn’t like marmalade. He did steal my honey, I know that for a fact. And he had the nerve to accuse me of taking the top off the milk.
MARTELLO: Well, you do.
BEAUCHAMP (furiously): Because I have paid the milkman four weeks running! It’s my milk!
MARTELLO: I suppose we should leave a note for him. Two pints a day will be enough now.
BEAUCHAMP: Since you will be in jail, one pint will be ample. Poor Donner. He was not so easy to get on with in recent years, but I shall always regret that my last conversation with him was not more friendly.
MARTELLO: Were you rowing about the housekeeping again?
BEAUCHAMP: No, no. He was rather unfeeling about my work in progress, as a matter of fact.
MARTELLO: He was rude about mine the other day. He attacked it.
BEAUCHAMP: He said mine was rubbish.
MARTELLO: Did he attack you? Was that it?
BEAUCHAMP: Why did he resent me? He seemed embittered, lately …
MARTELLO: He’d been brooding about Sophie.
BEAUCHAMP: And that ridiculous painting. What was the matter with the man?
MARTELLO: I think I was rather at fault …
BEAUCHAMP: I paid him the compliment of letting him hear how my master-tape was progressing …
Flashback
(BEAUCHAMP’s ‘master-tape’ is a bubbling cauldron of squeaks, gurgles, crackles, and other unharmonious noises. He allows it to play for longer than one would reasonably hope.)
BEAUCHAMP: Well, what do you think of it, Donner? Take your time, choose your words carefully.
DONNER: I think it’s rubbish.
BEAUCHAMP: Oh. You mean, a sort of tonal debris, as it were?
DONNER: No, rubbish, general rubbish. In the sense of being worthless, without value; rot, nonsense. Rubbish, in fact.
BEAUCHAMP: Ah. The detritus of audible existence, a sort of refuse heap
of sound …
DONNER: I mean, rubbish. I’m sorry, Beauchamp, but you must come to terms with the fact that our paths have diverged. I very much enjoyed my years in that child’s garden of easy victories known as the avant garde, but I am now engaged in the infinitely more difficult task of painting what the eye sees.
BEAUCHAMP: Well, I’ve never seen a naked woman sitting about a garden with a unicorn eating the roses.
DONNER: Don’t split hairs with me, Beauchamp. You don’t know what art is. Those tape recordings of yours are the mechanical expression of a small intellectual idea, the kind of notion that might occur to a man in his bath and be forgotten in the business of drying between his toes. You can call it art if you like, but it is the commonplace of any ironic imagination, and there are thousands of clerks and shop assistants who would be astonished to be called artists on their bath night.
BEAUCHAMP: Wait a minute, Donner——
DONNER: And they, incidentally, would call your tapes——
BEAUCHAMP: Quiet!——
DONNER: —rubbish.
(Smack!)
BEAUCHAMP: Missed him! I don’t want that fly buzzing around the microphone—I’m starting up a new loop.
DONNER: I see I’m wasting my breath.
BEAUCHAMP: I heard you. Clerks—bath-night—rubbish, and so on. But my tapes are not for clerks. They are for initiates, as is all art.
DONNER: My kind is for Everyman.
BEAUCHAMP: Only because every man is an initiate of that particular mystery. But your painting is not for dogs, parrots, bicycles … You select your public. It is the same with me, but my tapes have greater mystery—they elude dogs, parrots, clerks and the greater part of mankind. If you played my tape on the radio, it would seem a meaningless noise, because it fulfils no expectations: people have been taught to expect certain kinds of insight but not others. The first duty of the artist is to capture the radio station.
DONNER: It was Lewis who said that.
BEAUCHAMP: Lewis who?
DONNER: Wyndham Lewis.
BEAUCHAMP: It was Edith Sitwell, as a matter of fact.
DONNER: Rubbish.
BEAUCHAMP: She came out with it while we were dancing.
DONNER: You never danced with Edith Sitwell.
BEAUCHAMP: Oh yes I did.
DONNER: You’re thinking of that American woman who sang negro spirituals at Nancy Cunard’s coming-out ball.
BEAUCHAMP: It was Queen Mary’s wedding, as a matter of fact.
DONNER: You’re mad.
BEAUCHAMP: I don’t mean wedding, I mean launching.
DONNER: I can understand your confusion but it was Nancy Cunard’s coming-out.
BEAUCHAMP: Down at the docks?
DONNER: British boats are not launched to the sound of minstrel favourites.
BEAUCHAMP: I don’t mean launching, I mean maiden voyage.
DONNER: I refuse to discuss it. Horrible noise, anyway.
BEAUCHAMP: Only because people have not been taught what to listen for, or how to listen.
DONNER: What are you talking about?
BEAUCHAMP: Really, Donner, your mind keeps wandering about in a senile chaos! My tape. If I had one good man placed high up in the BBC my tape would become art for millions, in time.
DONNER: It would not become art. It would become a mildly interesting noise instead of a totally meaningless noise. An artist is someone who is gifted in some way which enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted. To speak of an art which requires no gift is a contradiction employed by people like yourself who have an artistic bent but no particular skill.
(Smack!)
BEAUCHAMP: Missed!
DONNER: An artistic imagination coupled with skill is talent.
BEAUCHAMP: Where is he?—Ah——
(Smack!)
Damn!
DONNER: Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
BEAUCHAMP: A perfectly reasonable summary.
(Thump! fist an desk.)
DONNER: Beauchamp!
BEAUCHAMP: Did you get him?
DONNER: I am trying to open your eyes to the nakedness of your emperor.
BEAUCHAMP: But Donner, ever since I’ve known you you’ve been running around asking for the name of his tailor—symbolism, surrealism, imagism, vorticism, fauvism, cubism—dada, drip-action, hard-edge, pop, found objects and post-object—it’s only a matter of days since you spent the entire housekeeping on sugar to make an edible Venus de Milo, and now you’ve discovered the fashions of your childhood. What happened to you?
DONNER: I have returned to traditional values, that is where the true history of art continues to lie, not in your small jokes. I make no apology for the past, but precocity at our age is faintly ludicrous, don’t you think?
BEAUCHAMP: At our age, anything we do is faintly ludicrous. Our best hope as artists is to transcend our limitations and become utterly ludicrous. Which you are proceeding to do with your portrait of Sophie, for surely you can see that a post-Pop pre-Raphaelite is pure dada brought up to date——
(Smack!)
DONNER: Shut up, damn you!—how dare you talk of her?!—how dare you——
(And weeps——)
—and would you stop cleaning the bath with my face flannel!!!
(Pause.) I’m sorry—please accept my apology——
BEAUCHAMP: I’m sorry, Donner … I had no idea you felt so strongly about it.
DONNER: (Sniffle.) Well, I have to wash my face with it.
BEAUCHAMP: No, no, I mean about your new … Donner, what has happened?—What happened between you and Martello? You have not been yourself … since you smashed your Venus and began your portrait … You have … shunned me——
DONNER: I did not intend to.
BEAUCHAMP: Have I offended you? Is it about the milk?
DONNER: No. I have just been—sad.
BEAUCHAMP: Do you blame me for Sophie?
DONNER: I don’t know. It was a long time ago now. It is becoming a good likeness, isn’t it?
BEAUCHAMP: Oh yes. She would have liked it. I mean if she could have seen it. A real Academy picture …!
DONNER: Yes.
BEAUCHAMP: I don’t know, Donner … before the war, in Soho, you were always making plans to smuggle a live ostrich into the Royal Academy; and now look at you. In Zurich in 1915 you told Tarzan he was too conservative.
DONNER: Tarzan?
BEAUCHAMP: I don’t mean Tarzan. Who do I mean? Similar name, conservative, 1915 …
DONNER: Tsar Nicholas?
BEAUCHAMP: No, no, Zurich.
DONNER: I remember Zurich … after our walking tour. God, what a walk! You were crazy, Beauchamp, you and your horse.
BEAUCHAMP: I’ll never forget it. That really was a walk. When we got to Zurich, my boots were worn to paper. Sat in the Café Rousseau and put my feet up, ordered a lemon squash.
DONNER: The Café Rousseau was Monte Carlo later.
BEAUCHAMP: Monte Carlo was the Café Russe.
DONNER: Was it?
BEAUCHAMP: Put my feet up and ordered a citron pressé in the Café Rousseau.
DONNER: Still doesn’t sound right.
BEAUCHAMP: Couldn’t have it—no lemons. The waiter was very apologetic. No lemons because of the war, he said. Good God, I said, is Switzerland at war?—things have come to a pretty pass, is it the St. Bernard?—Not a smile. Man at the next table laughed out loud and offered me a glass of squash made from lemon powder, remarking, ‘If lemons don’t exist, it is necessary to invent them.’ It seemed wittier at the time, I don’t know why.
DONNER: Voltaire!—of course, the Café Voltaire!
BEAUCHAMP: That was a rum bird.
DONNER: Voltaire?
BEAUCHAMP: No, Lenin.
DONNER: Oh yes. Very rum.
BEAUCHAMP: Ve
ry liberal with his lemon powder but a rum bird nevertheless. Edith saw through him right away. She said to him, ‘I don’t know what you’re waiting for but it’s not going to happen in Switzerland.’ Of course, she was absolutely right.
DONNER: Edith was never in Switzerland. Your memory is playing you up again.
BEAUCHAMP: Oh yes she was.
DONNER: Not that time. That time was Hugo Ball and Hans Arp, Max, Kurt, André … Picabia … Tristan Tzara——
BEAUCHAMP: That was him!
DONNER: What was?
BEAUCHAMP: Conservative. But he had audacity. Wrote his name in the snow, and said, ‘There! … I think I’ll call it The Alps.’
DONNER: That was Marcel. He used to beat Lenin at chess. I think he had talent under all those jokes. He said to me, ‘There are two ways of becoming an artist. The first way is to do things by which is meant art. The second way is to make art mean the things you do.’ What a stroke of genius! It made anything possible and everything safe!—safe from criticism, since our art admitted no standards outside itself; safe from comparison, since it had no history; safe from evaluation, since it referred to no system of values beyond the currency it had invented. We were no longer accountable. We were artists by mutual agreement.
BEAUCHAMP: So was everyone from Praxiteles to Rodin. There’s nothing divine about classical standards; it’s just a bigger club.
DONNER: It seems there is something divine about modern art nonetheless, for it is only sustained by faith. That is why artist have become as complacent as priests. They do not have to demonstrate their truths. Like priests they demand our faith that something is more than it appears to be—bread, wine, a tin of soup, a twisted girder, a mauve square, a meaningless collection of sounds on a loop of tape …
(This is said so bitterly that——)
BEAUCHAMP: Donner … what happened?—what did Martello say to you?
DONNER: It really doesn’t matter. And how do I know he wasn’t lying, just getting his own back?—you see, I damaged his figure, slightly … He was working on it—I didn’t know what it was—And I brought him a cup of tea——
Flashback
(MARTELLO is scraping and chipping, and clicking his tongue, and scraping again. He sighs.)