chapter 7 Stoppard’s Time Shifts
Tock, tick goes the universe and then recovers itself.1 bernard, Arcadia ∵
A pattern that Stoppard has made all his own is the time shift. Time is a vector through space and in the real world it is unidirectional and few, if any, play- wrights have taken such liberty with the concept as Stoppard. It generates a freedom which produces a number of theatrical capabilities. In addition to offering rather obvious increased possibilities for the narrative of a play alter- ing time allows Stoppard to change perspective in plays, such as Indian Ink and Rock ‘N’ Roll (in the process reflecting the relativist leitmotif so prevalent in much of his work). In Stoppard’s hands time can deployed in a structural way as part of the vehicle of Arcadia or The Coast of Utopia, permitting him to pick up the theme of a play, or to allow him to reprise arguments as part of his on-stage debates in Travesties and The Invention of Love. But, Stoppard wastes nothing and time shifts provide freedom around the edges of his plays: freedom for humour2 and mystery and, so he argues, the chance to make an emotional point in Artist Descending a Staircase. An early experiment with the time shift on the stage occurs in Enter a Free Man with a quick shift forwards and backwards in time from the home, which Riley has just left, to the pub, where Riley suggests he has just left his wife, and back to the living room of Riley’s home earlier in the day where the audi- ence sees the events that caused Riley to leave. In this brief operation of the time shift Stoppard can build both the narrative and the audience’s curiosity, a technique he also uses in The Real Inspector Hound as he both reprises the plot and resolves the mystery. From that point of departure the time shift became a recurrent feature in much of Stoppard’s work.
1 Arcadia, page 66. 2 For example, Anthony Jenkins comments on Enter a Free Man that, ‘The reversed time-loop adds comic point to Riley’s delusions’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, pages 4–5.
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Emotional Recall
Stoppard employs time shift in Artist Descending a Staircase and with it offers up several insights into his reasons for using it, particularly emphasising how it enables him to address the emotional side of the characters. The play is a series of sequentially regressing flashbacks from the present time (1972, when the play was first performed) until 1914, the furthest point, is reached whereaf- ter the flashbacks run sequentially forwards – a structural palindrome.3 As the stage directions instruct, ‘the play is set temporally in six parts, in the sequence ABCDEFEDCBA’.4 The structure of the play is thus:
Scene sequence Time period Date Dramatis personae
1 A Here and now B, M 2 B A couple of hours ago B, D 3 C Last week D, M 4 D 1922 S, M, B, D 5 E 1920 S, M, B, D 6 F 1914 B, D,M 7 E 1920 S, M, B, D 8 D 1922 S 9 C Last week D, M 10 B A couple of hours ago B, D 11 A Here and now B, M
Dramatis personae: B=Beauchamp M=Martello D=Donner S=Sophie
Stoppard explains that there are two reasons for the use of the time shift device:
3 Gordon House, director of the production of Artist Descending a Staircase which was first broadcast on 10 January 2016 on bbc Radio 3, explained that it is ‘a play constructed in an elegant palindrome’. 4 Artist, page 111. Michael Billington comments, ‘I can…think of no radio play in history con- structed quite like this one’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the playwright, page 93.