by Tom Stoppard
A gun shot.
ONE JUMPER, bottow row, second from left, is blown out of the pyramid. He falls downstage, leaving the rest of the pyramid intact. The music has stopped.
DOTTY, chanteuse, walks through the gap in the pyramid.) (The shot JUMPER is at her feet. He starts to move, dying, pulling himself up against DOTTY’s legs. She looks at him in surprise as he crawls up her body. His blood is on her dress. She holds him under his arms, and looks around in a bewildered way. She whimpers.)
Archie….
(The pyramid has been defying gravity for these few seconds. Now it slowly collapses into the dark, imploding on the missing part, and rolling and separating, out of sight, leaving only the white spot.
DOTTY does not move, holding the JUMPER.)
ARCHIE (voice only):…
(The Party hubbub comes back, at a higher pitch.) Quiet please…. The party is over…
A DRUNK (sings): It’s time to call it a day…
(This sets off a ripple of applause and cheers.
The party noise dies to silence.
The light contracts to a spot on DOTTY and the JUMPER, eerily. Frozen time, DOTTY still has not moved.)
DOTTY: Archie…
ARCHIE (off): Oh dear!
DOTTY: Archie…
ARCHIE (off): Just keep him out of sight till morning. I’ll be back.
DOTTY: Archie…
ARCHIE (off): Hush… I’ll be back at eight o’clock.
(Around her, the flat assembles itself, BEDROOM, STUDY, HALL.
The white spot remains—on the SCREEN now: but it is changing in character, and becomes a map of the moon photographed from a satellite… the familiar pitted circle. At the same time is heard the low tone of the TELEVISION VOICE, too low to admit comprehension. The picture changes to a close up of the moon’s surface.
We are watching a television programme about something that has happened on the moon.
The picture changes several times—an astronaut, a rocket, a moon-vehicle, etc.
The television set in the bedroom is on.
DOTTY is standing in the Bedroom. She hasn’t moved at all. She is dressed in a blood-stained party frock, holding up a corpse dressed in yellow trousers and singlet. She is composed, looking about her, clearly trying to decide what to do with the body.
In the STUDY, GEORGE is working at the desk, adding to a pile of manuscript.
The front door opens, CROUCH enters, using a master key. He is not wearing the white coat now, but a grey overall as worn by janitors. He is limping slightly. He is singing quietly to himself… ‘Gonna make a sentimental journey… gonna put my heart at ease… gonna take a sentimental journey…’
DOTTY has heard him. She turns down the sound of the TV, using the remote control device.)
DOTTY: Darling!…
CROUCH: It’s Crouch, Madam.
CROUCH continues and exits to kitchen.
DOTTY sits down on the bed, the corpse slumped over her knees. She glances at the TV. She turns up the volume.)
TV VOICE: —in a tight spot. And so in the crippled space capsule, Captain Scott is on his way back to earth, the first Englishman to reach the moon, but his triumph will be overshadowed by the memory of Astronaut Oates, a tiny receding figure waving forlornly from the featureless wastes of the lunar landscape.
(DOTTY changes the channel.
On the SCREEN: a big Procession in the streets of London, military in tone (brass band music) but celebratory: for five seconds.
DOTTY changes the channel.
A commercial: for three seconds.
DOTTY changes the channel.
The Moon Programme again.)
—which followed the discovery that the damage on impact had severely reduced the thrust of the rockets that are fired for take-off. Millions of viewers saw the two astronauts struggling at the foot of the ladder until Oates was knocked to the ground by his commanding officer…. Captain Scott has maintained radio silence since pulling up the ladder and closing the hatch with the remark, ‘I am going up now. I may be gone for some time.’
(DOTTY changes channel. The Procession on Screen. Military music. She looks gloomily, helplessly at the corpse. She notes the blood on her dress. She takes the dress off.
CROUCH enters from the Kitchen, carrying a bin of rubbish and several empty champagne bottles.
DOTTY hears the kitchen door. She turns the TV sound down low.)
DOTTY: What time is it, Crouch?
CROUCH: Nearly nine o’clock, Madam.
(CROUCH leaves by the Front Door as the SECRETARY enters. The SECRETARY hurries in, in the act of taking off her overcoat and hat.
CROUCH lets himself out, closing the Front Door. The SECRETARY enters the Study, closes the door behind her, hangs up her hat and coat on a hook on the downstage side of the wardrobe, sits down at her desk, and arranges her notebook and pencil. GEORGE has continued to write without looking up.)
DOTTY (very quietly): Help! (Slightly louder.) Help!
(GEORGE looks up and stares thoughtfully at the audience (into the mirror). He looks down again and continues to write.
The Bedroom BLACKS OUT.
GEORGE stops writing, gets to his feet. His system—for preparing lectures—is to scrawl them over many pieces of paper, which he then dictates to the SECRETARY who will type them out. In dictating, GEORGE prefers to address the large mirror in the fourth wall. He does not take much notice of the SECRETARY.
GEORGE now collects the pages into a tidy sheaf, takes a pace back from the mirror, assumes a suitable stance, and takes it from the top….)
GEORGE: Secondly!…
(He has ambushed himself. He looks around and retrieves the missing sheet from behind his desk.)
DOTTY (off): Help!
(GEORGE takes up his stance anew.)
GEORGE: To begin at the beginning——
DOTTY (off. Panic): Help! Murder!
(GEORGE throws his manuscript on to the desk and marches angrily to the door.)
(Off.) Oh, horror, horror, horror! Confusion now hath made its masterpiece… most sacriligious murder!——(Different voice.) Woe, alas! What, in our house?
(GEORGE, with his hand on the door handle, pauses. He returns to his desk and picks up his papers.)
GEORGE: To begin at the beginning: is God? (Pause.) I prefer to put the question in this form because to ask, ‘Does God exist?’ appears to presuppose the existence of a God who may not, and I do not propose this late evening to follow my friend Russell, this evening to follow my late friend Russell, to follow my good friend the late Lord Russell, necrophiliac rubbish!, to begin at the beginning: is God? (He ponders a moment.) To ask, ‘Is God?’ appears to presuppose a Being who perhaps isn’t… and thus is open to the same objection as the question, ‘Does God exist?’… but until the difficulty is pointed out it does not have the same propensity to confuse language with meaning and to conjure up a God who may have any number of predicates including omniscience, perfection and four-wheel-drive but not, as it happens, existence. This confusion, which indicates only that language is an approximation of meaning and not a logical symbolism for it, began with Plato and was not ended by Bertrand Russell’s theory that existence could only be asserted of descriptions and not of individuals, but I do not propose this evening to follow into the Theory of Descriptions my very old friend—now dead, of course—ach!—to follow into the Theory of Descriptions, the late Lord Russell——!
—if I may so refer to an old friend for whom punctuality was no less a predicate than existence, and a good deal more so, he would have had us believe, though why we should believe that existence could be asserted of the author of ‘Principia Mathematica’ but not of Bertrand Russell, he never had time, despite his punctuality, not to mention his existence, to explain, very good, keep to the point, to begin at the beginning: is God? (To SECRETARY.) Leave a space. Secondly! A small number of men, by the exercise of their intellects and by the study of the works both of nature and of other intellects before them, ha
ve been able to argue coherently against the existence of God. A much larger number of men, by the exercise of their emotional and psychological states, have affirmed that this is the correct view. This view derives partly from what is known as common sense, whose virtue, uniquely among virtues, is that everybody has it, and partly from the mounting implausibility of a technological age as having divine origins—for while a man might believe that the providence of sheep’s wool was made in heaven, he finds it harder to believe the same of Terylene mixture. (He leans into the mirror intently.) Well, the tide is running his way, and it is a tide which has turned only once in human history…. There is presumably a calendar date—a moment—when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it. (And squeezes a blackhead in the imaginary mirror. Then he straightens up and is the lecturer again.) It is now nearly fifty years since Professor Ramsay described theology and ethics as two subjects without an object, and yet, as though to defy reason, as though to flaunt a divine indestructibility, the question will not go away: is God?
DOTTY (off): Rape!
GEORGE: And then again, I sometimes wonder whether the question ought not to be, ‘Are God?’ Because it is to account for two quite unconnected mysteries that the human mind looks beyond humanity and it is two of him that philosophy obligingly provides. There is, first, the God of Creation to account for existence, and, second, the God of Goodness to account for moral values. I say they are unconnected because there is no logical reason why the fountainhead of goodness in the universe should have necessarily created the universe in the first place; nor is it necessary, on the other hand, that a Creator should care tuppence about the behaviour of his creations. Still, at least in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, nothing is heard either of a God who created the universe and then washed his hands of it, or, alternatively, a God who merely took a comparatively recent interest in the chance product of universal gases. In practice, people admit a Creator to give authority to moral values, and admit moral values to give point to the Creation. But when we place the existence of God within the discipline of a philosophical inquiry, we find these two independent mysteries: the how and the why of the overwhelming question: ——
DOTTY (off): Is anybody there?
GEORGE (pause): Perhaps all mystical experience is a form of coincidence. Or vice versa, of course.
(DOTTY screams. It sounds in earnest. Of course, nothing can be seen.)
(Murmurs.) Wolf….
DOTTY (off): Wolves!—Look out!
(GEORGE throws his manuscript down furiously.)
(Off.) Murder—Rape—Wolves!
(GEORGE opens his door and shouts at the enclosed Bedroom door.)
GEORGE: Dorothy, I will not have my work interrupted by these gratuitous acts of lupine delinquency!
(The Procession Music, which had been allowed to fade out, is brought up by the opening of the Study Door.)
And turn that thing down!—you are deliberately feigning an interest in brass band music to distract me from my lecture! (He closes his door, and from behind it produces a quiver of arrows and a bow. These he brings downstage and places them on his desk.)
(Pleasantly.) Does, for the sake of argument, God, so to speak, exist?
(He returns upstage and finds an archery target, which he leans up against the upstage bookcase, resting on the day-bed.)
(To mirror.) My method of inquiry this evening into certain aspects of this hardy perennial may strike some of you as overly engaging, but experience has taught me that to attempt to sustain the attention of rival schools of academics by argument alone is tantamount to constructing a Gothic arch out of junket.
(He extracts an arrow from the quiver.)
Putting aside the God of Goodness, to whom we will return, and taking first the God of Creation—or to give him his chief philosophical raison d’être, the First Cause—we see that a supernatural or divine origin is the logical consequence of the assumption that one thing leads to another, and that this series must have had a first term; that, if you like, though chickens and eggs may alternate back through the millennia, ultimately, we arrive at something which, while perhaps no longer resembling either a chicken or an egg, is nevertheless the first term of that series and can itself only be attributed to a First Cause—or to give it its theological soubriquet, God. How well founded is such an assumption? Could it be, for instance, that chickens and eggs have been succeeding each other in one form or another literally for ever? My old friend—Mathematicians are quick to point out that they are familiar with many series which have no first term—such as the series of proper fractions between nought and one. What, they ask is the first, that is the smallest, of these fractions? A billionth? A trillionth? Obviously not: Cantor’s proof that there is no greatest number ensures that there is no smallest fraction. There is no beginning. (With a certain relish he notches his arrow into the bowstring.) But it was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.
(He is about to fire the arrow, but changes his mind, and turns back to the mirror.)
Furthermore, by a similar argument he showed that before reaching the half-way point, the arrow had to reach the quarter-mark, and before that the eighth, and before that the sixteenth, and so on, with the result, remembering Cantor’s proof, that the arrow could not move at all!
DOTTY (off): Fire!
(GEORGE fires, startled before he was ready, and the arrow disappears over the top of the wardrobe.)
Help—rescue—fire!
GEORGE (shouts furiously): Will you stop this childish nonsense!
Thanks to you I have lost the element of surprise! (He tosses the bow away, tries to peer on tiptoe over the wardrobe, which is too high, and desists. He picks up his script, and then puts it down again, and sits on the corner of his desk, one leg swinging, arms folded. He notices that his socks do not match. The SECRETARY, unruffled, waits patiently, her pencil is poised. (It may as well be stated now that she never speaks.)) (Subdued at first.) Look…. Consider my left sock. My left sock exists but it need not have done so. It is, we say, not necessary, but contingent. Why does my sock exist? Because a sock-maker made it, in one sense; because, in another, at some point previously, the conception of a sock arrived in the human brain; to keep my foot warm in a third, to make a profit in a fourth. There is reason and there is cause and there is the question, who made the sock-maker’s maker? etcetera, very well, next! see, see, I move my foot which moves my sock. (Walks.) I and my foot and my sock all move round the room, which moves round the sun, which also moves, as Aristotle said, though not round the earth, he was wrong about that. There is reason and there is cause and there is motion, each in infinite regress towards a moment of origin and a point of ultimate reference—and one day!—as we stare into the fire at the mouth of our cave, suddenly!
in an instant of grateful terror, we get it!—the one and only, sufficient unto himself, outside the action, uniquely immobile!—the Necessary Being, the First Cause, the Unmoved Mover!!
(He takes a climactic drink from his tumbler, which however contains only pencils. He puts the tumbler down, leaving a pencil in his mouth.)
(Indistinctly.) St. Thomas Aquinas….
(He drops the pencil back into the tumbler.)
(Quietly.) Of the five proofs of God’s existence put forward by St. Thomas Aquinas, three depended on the simple idea that if an apparently endless line of dominoes is knocking itself over one by one then somewhere there is a domino which was nudged. And as regards dominoes, I haven’t got any further than St. Thomas.
(The music from the TV Procession has been quietly reestablishin
g itself in the background.)
Everything has to begin somewhere and there is no answer to that. Except, of course, why does it? Why, since we accept the notion of infinity without end, should we not accept the logically identical notion of infinity without beginning? My old——Consider the series of proper fractions. Etcetera. (To SECRETARY.) Then Cantor, then no beginning, etcetera, then Zeno. Insert: But the fact is, the first term of the series is not an infinite fraction but zero. It exists. God, so to speak, is nought. Interesting. Continue.
By missing the point of a converging series Zeno overlooked the fallacy which is exemplified at its most picturesque in his famous paradoxes, which showed in every way but experience that an arrow could never reach its target, and that a tortoise given a head start in a race with, say, a hare, could never be overtaken—and by way of regaining your attention I will now demonstrate the nature of that fallacy; to which end I have brought with me a specially trained tortoise—(which he takes from the smaller wooden box)—and a similarly trained, damn and blast!——(He has opened the larger box and found it empty. He looks round.)
Thumper! Thumper, where are you, boy?
(Failing to find Thumper under the desks or the bed, he leaves the room and, carrying the tortoise, enters the Bedroom, opening the door wide and leaving it open as the Bedroom lights up. Procession on Screen. Procession music loud now, as though we travelled with him. The body of the JUMPER is nowhere in sight. However, DOTTY’s nude body is sprawled face down, and apparently lifeless on the bed. GEORGE takes in the room at a glance, ignores DOTTY, and still calling for Thumper goes to look in the bathroom.
GEORGE reappears from the Bathroom after a second or two. Mixed in with the TV music now is a snatch of commentary.)
TV VOICE:… beautiful blue sky for the fly-past, and here they come!
(Very loud: the jet planes scream and thunder on the sound track and scream and thunder across the SCREEN. In mid-flight they are cut off GEORGE has turned off the TV: silence and white Screen, GEORGE still moving towards the door, from the bed where the TV switch is lying.)
GEORGE: Are you a proverb?