by Tom Stoppard
(Immediately: Procession music.
Procession on Screen.
LIGHT UP Bedroom.
BONES exits to Kitchen, GEORGE closes the Front Door.
DOTTY hears the door.)
DOTTY: Archie!…
(DOTTY has been watching the TV screen. The JUMPER is hidden.
GEORGE goes to the Bedroom door, and opens it.)
GEORGE (from the doorway): It’s not Archie, it’s the police.
(DOTTY turns off the TV. The Screen goes white.)
DOTTY: What?
GEORGE: Inspector Bones. It’s about last night. Malicious complaints. Allegations.
DOTTY: What sort of allegations?
GEORGE (embarrassed, playing it down): Anonymous phone call, apparently. Tell you later.
(He tries to leave, the first of several false exits by him. DOTTY is numb.)
DOTTY: Did he mention an acrobat?
GEORGE: Yes. Don’t worry, I’ll smooth him over.
DOTTY: Smooth him over?
GEORGE: He’s gone to inspect the scene of the crime. What an absurd fuss.
DOTTY: George… you knew about it?
(GEORGE mistakes her gratitude for suspicion.)
GEORGE: Look, I’m perfectly willing to take the blame.
DOTTY: Oh, George… George… will you?
(She kisses him.)
GEORGE: If he’s going to be bloody-minded, I’ll shoot him in here.
DOTTY: Georgie!
GEORGE: You can try your charms on him. He’s dead keen to meet you. (False exit.) He seems quite interested in philosophy.
DOTTY: Oh?
GEORGE: Yes. I think I can get through to him. Get him to see that one can easily get things out of proportion.
DOTTY (enthusiastically): That’s just what Archie said about it.
GEORGE (nods, false exit): Said about what?
DOTTY: Well, about poor Duncan McFee.
GEORGE: What about Duncan McFee?
DOTTY: There’s no need to get it out of proportion. It’s a great pity, but it’s not as though the alternative were immortality.
GEORGE (nods; stops nodding): Sorry?
BONES (off stage): Hello! (Enters from Kitchen.)
DOTTY pushes GEORGE out of the Bedroom and closes the door. The Bedroom BLACKS OUT. GEORGE turns to meet BONES
who has appeared and is coming upstage, his flowers now in a metal vase.)
BONES: Tell me something——Who are these acrobats?
GEORGE: Logical positivists, mainly, with a linguistic analyst or two, a couple of Benthamite Utilitarians… lapsed Kantians and empiricists generally… and of course the usual Behaviourists… a mixture of the more philosophical members of the university gymnastics team and the more gymnastic members of the Philosophy School. The close association between gymnastics and philosophy is I believe unique to this university and owes itself to the Vice-Chancellor, who is of course a first-rate gymnast, though an indifferent philosopher.
(BONES stares at him and then walks into the Study and sits down like a man who needs to sit down. GEORGE follows him.)
A curious combination of interests, but of course in ancient classical Greece——
BONES: We are not in ancient bloody classical Greece.
GEORGE: I absolutely agree with you. In fact, I will have nothing to do with it. And in spite of the Vice-Chancellor’s insistence that I can jump better than I think, I have always maintained the opposite to be the case…. In the circumstances I was lucky to get the Chair of Moral Philosophy. (His tone suggests, rightly, that this is not much of a prize.) Only the Chair of Divinity lies further below the salt, and that’s been vacant for six months since the last occupant accepted a position as curate in a West Midland diocese.
BONES: Then why didn’t you… jump along with the rest?
GEORGE: I belong to a school which regards all sudden movements as ill-bred. On the other hand, McFee, who sees professorship as a licence for eccentricity, and whose chief delusion is that Edinburgh is the Athens of the North, very soon learned to jump a great deal better than he ever thought, and was rewarded with the Chair of Logic.
BONES: Are you telling me that the Professor of Logic is a part-time acrobat?
GEORGE: Yes. More of a gymnast, really—the acrobatics are just the social side.
BONES: I find this very hard to believe.
GEORGE: Oh, really? Why’s that?
BONES (rising): I don’t like it, Clarence! The way I had it, some raving nutter phones up the station with a lot of bizarre allegations starting off with a female person swinging naked from the chandeliers at Dorothy Moore’s Mayfair residence and ending up with a professor picked off while doing handsprings for the cabaret, and as far as I’m concerned it’s got fruit-cake written all over it; so I tell my Sergeant to have a cup of tea and off I go thinking to myself, at last a chance to pay my respects in person, and blow me if it doesn’t start to look straight up as soon as I put one foot in the door——Don’t go, will you?
(He has moved to the door, with his vase of flowers, and leaves, closing the Study door behind him. In front of the Bedroom door, he briefly smooths his hair, brushes his lapels with his hands, brings out the gramophone record (which has a picture of DOTTY on it), and knocks on the Bedroom door, a
mere tap, and enters the Bedroom.
The light is romantic: pink curtains have been drawn across the french window, and there is a rosy hue to the lighting.
DOTTY, gowned, coiffed, stunning, rises to face the Inspector. Music is heard… romantic Mozartian trumpets, triumphant.
DOTTY and BONES face each other, frozen like lovers in a dream.
BONES raises his head slightly, and the trumpets are succeeded by a loud animal bray, a mating call, DOTTY, her arms out
towards him, breathes, ‘Inspector…’ like a verbal caress. From BONES’s lifeless fingers, the vase drops. There is a noise such as would have been made had he dropped it down a long flight of stone stairs.
BONES is dumbstruck.
DOTTY lets go a long slow smile: ‘Inspector….’
From behind the closed curtains, the stiff dead JUMPER falls
into the room like a too-hastily-leaned plank.
QUICK FADE to BLACKOUT, in Bedroom only.
None of the sounds have been imaginary: they have come from GEORGE’s coincidental tape-recorder, which he now switches off and rewinds slightly, GEORGE picks up his manuscript, snaps his fingers at the SECRETARY, and starts off.)
GEORGE: Professor McFee’s introductory paper, which it is my privilege to dispute, has I think been distributed to all of you. In an impressive display of gymnastics, ho ho, thank you, Professor McFee bends over backwards to demonstrate that moral judgements belong to the same class as aesthetic judgements; that the phrases ‘good man’ and ‘good music’ are prejudiced in exactly the same way; in short, that goodness, whether in men or in music, depends on your point of view. By discrediting the idea of beauty as an aesthetic absolute, he hopes to discredit by association the idea of goodness as a moral absolute and as a first step he directs us to listen to different kinds of music. (He reaches for the tape-recorder.) Professor McFee refers us in particular to the idea of beauty as conceived by Mozart on the one hand, and here I am glad to be able to assist him… (Plays the Mozart again, very brief.)… and, on the other hand, as conceived by a group of musicians playing at a wedding feast in a part of Equatorial Africa visited only by the makers of television documentaries, one of which the Professor happened to see on a rare occasion when he wasn’t out and about jumping through the Vice-Chancellor’s hoop, I can’t say that, one of which he happened to see. He invites us to agree with him that beauty is a diverse notion and not a universal one. Personally, I would have agreed to this without demur, but the Professor, whose reading is as wide as his jumping is high…
(The SECRETARY raises her head.)
… all right, all right, the Professor bolsters up his argument with various literary references
including a telling extract from Tarzan of the Apes in which the boy Tarzan on seeing his face for the first time reflected in a jungle pool, bewails his human ugliness as compared to the beauty of the apes among whom he had grown up. I won’t dwell on Professor McFee’s inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, but as regards the musical references it might be worth pointing out that the sounds made by Mozart and the Africans might have certain things in common which are not shared by the sound of, say, a bucket of coal being emptied on to a tin roof. Indeed, I have brought with me tonight two further trumpet recordings, starting off with the trumpeting of an elephant… (He plays the braying sound heard before.)… and I invite Professor McFee to admit that the difference between that and his beloved Mozart may owe more to some mysterious property of the music than to his classically trained ear. Anticipating his reply that the latter sound is more beautiful to an elephant, I riposte with… (He plays the remaining sound, as heard before.)… which is the sound made by a trumpet falling down a flight of stone stairs. However, it is not my present concern to dispute Professor McFee’s view on aesthetics but only to make clear what those views must lead him to, and they lead him to the conclusion that if the three sets of noises which we might label ‘Mozart’, ‘elephant’ and ‘stairs’, were playing in an empty room where no one could hear them, then it could not be said that within the room any one set of noises was in any way superior to either of the other two. Which may, of course, be the case, but Professor McFee does not stay to consider such a reductio ad absurdum, for he has bigger fish to fry, and so he goes on to show, likewise but at even greater length, that the word ‘good’ has also meant different things to different people at different times, an exercise which combines simplicity with futility in a measure he does not apparently suspect, for on the one hand it is not a statement which anyone would dispute, and on the other, nothing useful can be inferred from it. It is not in fact a statement about value at all; it is a statement about language and how it is used in a particular society. Nevertheless, up this deeply-rutted garden path, Professor McFee leads us, pointing out items of interest along the way… the tribe which kills its sickly infants, the tribe which eats its aged parents; and so on, without pausing to wonder whether the conditions of group survival or the notion of filial homage might be one thing among the nomads of the Atlas Mountains or in a Brazilian rain forest, and quite another in the Home Counties. Certainly a tribe which believes it confers honour on its elders by eating them is going to be viewed askance by another which prefers to buy them a little bungalow somewhere, and Professor McFee should not be surprised that the notion of honour should manifest itself so differently in peoples so far removed in clime and in culture. What is surely more surprising is that notions such as honour should manifest themselves at all. For what is honour? What are pride, shame, fellow-feeling, generosity and love? If they are instincts, what are instincts? The prevailing temper of modern philosophy is to treat the instinct as a sort of terminus for any train of thought that seeks to trace our impulses to their origins. But what can be said to be the impulse of a genuinely altruistic act? Hobbes might have answered self-esteem, but what is the attraction or the point in thinking better of oneself? What is better? A savage who elects to honour his father by eating him as opposed to disposing of the body in some—to him—ignominious way, for example by burying it in a teak box, is making an ethical choice in that he believes himself to be acting as a good savage ought to act. Whence comes this sense of some actions being better than others?—not more useful, or more convenient, or more popular, but simply pointlessly better? What, in short, is so good about good? Professor McFee succeeds only in showing us that in different situations different actions will be deemed, rightly or wrongly, to be conducive to that good which is independent of time and place and which is knowable but not nameable. It is not nameable because it is not another way or referring to this or that quality which we have decided is virtuous. It is not courage, and it is not honesty or loyalty or kindness. The irreducible fact of goodness is not implicit in one kind of action any more than in its opposite, but in the existence of a relationship between the two. It is the sense of comparisons being in order.
(Music! Lights! Dorothy Moore—in person!
… In fact, a track from DOTTY’s record, playing in the
Bedroom, and DOTTY swinging and miming to it, as BONES leaves the Bedroom, the opening of the door triggering off the scene, GEORGE also goes into the Hall, where he meets BONES.
We can’t hear what they say because the music is loud.
GEORGE takes BONES downstage to the Kitchen exit, and goes off with him. DOTTY continues to sway and mime: the song is ‘Sentimental Journey’.
The dead JUMPER is where he fell.
The SECRETARY moves to the typewriter.
The Front Door opens and ARCHIE enters, and stops just inside
the door, almost closing it behind him. He stands listening—an impressive figure, exquisitely dressed: orchid in buttonhole, cigarette in long black holder, and everything which those details suggest. He carefully opens the door of the Study. The
SECRETARY looks up. She nods at him, but it is impossible to draw any conclusions from that.
ARCHIE withdraws, closing the door. He comes downstage and looks along the corridor into the Kitchen wing. He returns to the Front Door and opens it wide.
SEVEN JUMPERS in yellow tracksuits enter smoothly, FOUR of them carry a machine of ambiguous purpose: it might be a television camera. They also carry a couple of lights on tall stands, suitable for filming (these items may be all in one box). SIX enter the Bedroom, ARCHIE opening the door for them.
ONE JUMPER goes downstage to watch the Kitchen exit.
In the Bedroom, DOTTY is surprised but pleased by the entry of
ARCHIE and the JUMPERS. They put down the ‘camera’ and the
lights. They have come to remove the body.
The song dominates the whole scene. Nothing else can be heard, and its beat infects the business of removing the body, for
DOTTY continues to sway and snap her fingers as she moves about welcoming the troops, and the JUMPERS lightly respond, so
that the effect is a little simple improvised choreography between the JUMPERS and DOTTY.
ARCHIE moves downstage, facing front, and like a magician about to demonstrate a trick, takes from his pocket a small square of material like a handkerchief, which he unfolds and unfolds and unfolds until it is a large plastic bag, six-feet tall, which he gives to TWO JUMPERS. These TWO hold the mouth of the bag open at the door; as the climax of the ‘dance’ the
FOUR JUMPERS throw the body into the bag: bag closes, bedroom door closes, JUMPERS moving smoothly, front door closes, and on the last beat of the song, only ARCHIE and
DOTTY are left on stage.)
BLACKOUT
END OF ACT ONE
ACT TWO
The Bedroom is blacked out, but music still comes from it—presumably the next track on the album.* Only a minute or two have passed.
BONES appears from the Kitchen entrance. He is pushing a well-laden dinner-trolley in front of him. It has on it a covered casserole dish, a bottle of wine in an ice bucket, two glasses, two plates, two of every-thing… dinner for two in fact, and very elegant.
He is followed by GEORGE holding a couple of lettuce leaves and a carrot, which he nibbles absently.
GEORGE: What do you mean, ‘What does he look like?’ He looks like a rabbit with long legs. (But BONES has stopped, listening to Dotty’s voice, rather as a man might pause in St. Peter’s on hearing choristers….)
BONES: That was it…. That was the one she was singing….
I remember how her voice faltered, I saw the tears spring into her eyes, the sobs shaking her breast… and that awful laughing scream as they brought the curtain down on the first lady of the musical stage—never to rise again! Oh yes, there are many stars in the West End night, but there’s only ever been one Dorothy Moore….
&n
bsp; GEORGE: Yes, I must say I envy her that. There have not been so many philosophers, but two of them have been George Moore, and it tends to dissipate the impact of one’s name. But for that, I think my book Conceptual Problems of Knowledge and Mind would have caused quite a stir.
BONES: Any chance of a come-back, sir?
GEORGE: Well, I’m still hoping to find a publisher for it. I have also made a collection of my essays under the title, Language, Truth and God. An American publisher has expressed an interest but he wants to edit it himself and change the title to You Better Believe It…. I suppose it would be no worse than benefitting from my wife’s gramophone records.
BONES: A consummate artist, sir. I felt it deeply when she retired.
GEORGE: Unfortunately she retired from consummation about the same time as she retired from artistry.
BONES: It was a personal loss, really.
GEORGE: Quite. She just went off it. I don’t know why.
BONES (coming round to him at last): You don’t have to explain to me, sir. You can’t keep much from her hard-core fans. Actually, I had a brother who had a nervous breakdown.
It’s a terrible thing. It’s the pressure, you know. The appalling pressure of being a star.
GEORGE: Was your brother a star?
BONES: No, he was an osteopath. Bones the Bones, they called him. Every patient had to make a little joke. It drove him mad, finally.
(They have been approaching the Bedroom door, but BONES
suddenly abandons the trolley and takes GEORGE downstage.)
(Earnestly.) You see, Dorothy is a delicate creature, like a lustrous-eyed little bird you could hold in your hand, feeling its little brittle bones through its velvety skin—vulnerable, you understand; highly strung. No wonder she broke under the strain. And you don’t get over it, just like that. It can go on for years, the effect, afterwards—building up again, underneath, until, one day—Snap!—do something violent perhaps, quite out of character, you know what I mean? It would be like a blackout. She wouldn’t know what she was doing. (He grips GEORGE’s elbow.) And I should think that