Sir Tom Stoppard the Early Plays If You're Glad I'll be Frank

Sir Tom Stoppard, the early Plays

4. If You're Glad I'll be Frank

In Sir Tom Stoppard's play If You're Glad I'll be Frank (Radio 1966), a change of direction is clearly seen. Here the central couple are, in fact, separated, and although they try to meet they are unable to do so. Their relationship is frustrated, it seems, not only within the play itself but also as a result of Stoppard's decision to sacrifice human relationships to metaphysics. With this play Stoppard abandons his mentors (Enter a Free Man being heavily derivative of Robert Bolt and Arthur Miller) and his real strength as a playwright starts to show through. The theme of individual liberty versus the established order is continued, but takes metaphysical flight as the established order becomes Time itself. Gladys, the speaking clock, reflects on the nature of Time while trapped at her desk metering out ten second intervals She sees through the usual human time-scales into a vertiginously disorientating vision of relativity.

The contrast between two concepts of time is reflected in the two forms of language used by Gladys. In performance her free verse is spoken simultaneously with the rigid repetitive rhythm of the speaking clock. In this way Stoppard makes his point directly on the audience's perceptions. The dual perception of these scales drives Gladys towards a mental breakdown; we might see her as trapped between excessive order and excessive chaos, She wants to rebel against her role as mediator between the two.

'At the third stroke I'm going to give it up, yes, yes - it's asking too much, for one person to be in the know of so much.' (p.22)

Ultimately though, she accepts the established order and continues to measure out ten second intervals under the guiding hand of the First Lord of the Post Office, who 'sets her right'. The story is of chaos trying to overrun order, but failing.

The 'depth' which Stoppard formerly tried to give his Plays by the characters and their relationships is now given by the complexity of structure, in which the themes are presented simultaneously on a number of levels. Gladys's frustration at the rigidity of our concept of time is paralleled by Frank's attempts to squeeze a few minutes out of his schedule as a bus driver, to rescue Gladys from the G.P.O. building. Every time he stops the bus, Ivy the conductress, frightened of the threat to convention (chaos disrupting order), chases after him shouting, 'Frank we'll get behind time . . . I ask you to remember the schedule . . . The passengers have noticed' etc., representing the pressure of established order limiting individual action.

Another level on which the accepted order is represented is the G.P.O. hierarchy, and the procedure by which a member of the public ought to approach its senior officials. Frank, like John Brown and George Riley before him, rebels against the accepted order and pursues his ow n course. He charges through a series of offices in the G.P.O. building and bursts in upon a board meeting presided over by the First Lord. Frank's rebellion is frustrated however, just as Gladys's was, by the authoritative voice of the First Lord.

'My dear fellow - there's no Gladys - we wouldn't trust your wife with the time - it's a machine, I thought everyone knew that.' (p.25)

Although these characters have struggled to rebel against order and authority they are quite relieved to have failed. On a metaphysical level this suggests that order and chaos co-exist in some kind of natural balance that cannot be violated. In human terms it suggests that the autonomy of the individual is limited by the order of the universe, physical and social, in which he exists, and that this is the cause of both frustration and comfort.

Another characteristic of Stoppard's work to emerge in If You're Glad I'll be Frank is deliberate ambiguity. Is Gladys really being h eld prisoner by the G.P.O. to act as the speaking clock? Or is the speaking clock just a machine and Frank's idea that it is his wife just a delusion? This question is unanswerable; it adds a deliberate quality of mystery to the play by throwing into doubt our assumptions about which aspects of the play represent objective reality, and which represent subjective, and possibly deluded experience. This important point will be further discussed in relation to Stoppard's major Plays Jumpers and Travesties.

Read the full version of this essay at: http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/stoppard.html

Ian Mackean runs the site http://www.literature-study-online.com, which features a substantial collection of English Literature Resources and Essays, and where his sites on Books Made Into Movies, and Short Story Writing can also be found. He is the editor of The Essentials of Literature in English post-1914, published by Hodder Arnold. When not writing about li terature or short story writing he is a keen amateur photographer, and has made a site of his photography at http://www.photo-zen.com

Author:: Ian Mackean
Keywords:: Tom Stoppard,Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,English Literature,Plays,Drama,British,Theatre
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