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Sir Tom Stoppard, the first works.

5. Alberto’s Bridge

Sir Tom Stoppard’s Albert’s Bridge (Radio, 1967), develops themes similar to those of his previous works, concentrating specifically on the opposition between chaos and order. Like John Brown from A Separate Peace (1960), Albert cannot bear the chaos of everyday life and seeks an escape into a more orderly existence. In A Separate Peace, the problem was presented largely in terms of physical circumstances, with the hospital being a more orderly world than the outside world. At Albert’s Bridge, physical circumstances are equated with conceptual or psychological factors, which belong to the subjective world of individual perception. Hence the peace of mind that Albert finds high up among the geometrically arranged bridge girders, away from the human demands of his wife and son, is equated with the concept of seeing life from a distance, rather than seeing it up close. .

Albert: ‘The benches are filled with various bricks, windowed kiddiblocks; small toys move through the gaps, dodged by moving dots that have no color … It’s the most expensive toy town in the store, the detail is remarkable. ‘

Kate: I saw you today … leaving the salon. Six and six, I cut it off.

Albert: It’s just going to show: if you get far enough away, six and six pence doesn’t show up, and neither does anything, in the distance.

Kate: Well, life is very close, isn’t it?

Albert: Yes, it hits you when you come back down. (pp. 22-23.)

This concept of variable perspective is reinforced by Frazer, a potential suicide who climbs the bridge to jump. But from the heights of the bridge he escapes the pressure that caused him despair and, therefore, he no longer wants to jump. Back on the ground, the pressure builds up again and he climbs the bridge again, so he spends his time repeatedly going up and down the bridge. He explains: –

I can’t help it. They force me to get up and they cajole me. I’m a victim of perspective. ‘ (p. 35.)

Albert becomes completely dependent on his job and eventually abandons his wife and son in favor of the bridge. His family life is ruined by his longing for order. However, his situation does not last, the bridge finally collapses when 1,800 painters march on it without breaking the step; an excess of order on a physical level. The authorities have called in the army of painters because in planning the cheapest way to paint their bridge, like George Riley from Enter a Free Man, they relied entirely on logic and forgotten common sense; an excess of order at the mental level. Thus, the work illustrates, on several levels, the thesis that an excess of order causes collapse due to the alteration of some type of natural balance.

The four works discussed so far (A separate peace, Enter a free man, If you’re happy I’ll be frank) have a unity as a group or cycle of works. They are unified by the themes they explore and the methods by which they explore them. It is worth summarizing the observations made so far, as a basis for addressing Stoppard’s main works. Each of the ‘heroes’ is an individual struggling to establish some kind of relationship with the rest of the world. Ultimately, everyone fails to achieve what they wanted; ‘the world’ asserts its superior force over the individual The struggle is seen in terms of a series of dialectical oppositions, and failure arises not because one side of the argument is’ wrong but because one side has been affirmed to the exclusion of the other. The opposing principles take various forms; Chaos versus order, freedom versus responsibility, illusion versus reality, logic versus common sense, the individual versus ‘the establishment’, etc.

The key to dealing with these seemingly irreconcilable opposites is the concept of perspective. The world is too chaotic for John Brown and Albert, and too rigidly ordered for Gladys and Frank. But it is the same world. The way we see the world depends on the way we see it; reality is relative. This is the heart of the “world image” established by Stoppard in his early minor works. He continues to expand and elaborate on this vision in his longer works Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Jumpers, and comes to a definitive statement with Transvestites.

Read the full version of this essay at:

http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/stoppard.html

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