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Brian Bedford.
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| Cast of Jumpers. Brian Bedford, right. |
A dazzlingly complex intellectual farce that knits together
philosophical disquisition with the techniques of sex comedy and murder mystery
to form a weave of sometimes puzzling, but often high-spirited, metaphysical
geniality.
George Moore (Brian Bedford) is a middle-aged professor of
moral philosophy at a London college. His wife, Dotty (Jill Clayburgh), is a
beautiful young woman, a former singing star now suffering the symptoms of a
mental breakdown. She is having an affair with her psychiatrist, Archie Jumper
(Remak Ramsey), who also happens to be a lawyer, a philosopher, a gymnast, and
the vice-chancellor of the school at which George teaches.
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| Cast of Jumpers. |
Dotty’s instability is such that, in this age when men have
landed on the moon, she is incapable of getting through a familiar romantic
song about that orb without forgetting all the words. George is a shabby,
distracted type, a man whose universe is completely bounded by his intellectual
speculations. He is dedicated to demonstrating, in a lecture he is preparing,
the validity of moral philosophy and the existence of God, even in a world
dominated by belief in the inevitability of logic.
With surrealistic relish, Stoppard dramatizes the plight of
his characters in a “headlong, nonstop, delirious” plot “of insane action,” as
Jack Kroll expressed it, during which an acrobat-philosopher is pistol-shot out
of a human pyramid while entertaining at a party in the Moores’ flat, is hidden
by Dotty in her bedroom closet, and becomes the subject of an investigation (of
which she becomes the prime subject) conducted by an engagingly inflated
Scotland Yard detective (William Rhys).Through it all, George walks blindly
around in his abstracted haze, oblivious of the suffering of his wife, the
murder of the acrobat, and even the striptease on a trapeze done by his
secretary (Joan Byron).
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| Remak Ramsey, Brian Bedford, Joan Byron. |
The multilayered absurdist comedy, with its extensive
philosophical arguments and speeches, and its unusual juxtaposition of
characters and events, was far too enigmatic for several critics: “Some plays
are more difficult to understand than others, and Jumpers seems to me the most difficult of the lot,” decided Richard
Watts. A few others remarked on how dull it was. Martin Gottfried, for one,
called it “boring as hell.” Yet the majority acclaimed Jumpers as a cerebrally and theatrically provocative work of the
first order. John Beaufort pointed out some of the ideas that Stoppard’s
verbally dense, yet consistently witty, philosophical satire touched on: “the
crisis of religious beliefs and ethical concepts, the threat of ruthless
pragmatism, the dominance of technocrats and experts, the unquestioning worship
of power.” Edwin Wilson noted, “At combining madcap invention with cerebration
[Stoppard] may well be unequalled in today’s English-speaking theatre.”
Brian Bedford’s George Moore (sharing his name with the
famous philosopher) was the mainstay of the show. Given the Drama Desk Award
for Outstanding Performance, his extremely long and convoluted speeches
required a feat of prodigious memory. Clive Barnes called him “a flustered
delight. His puzzled honesty and questioning authority so beautifully, yet
amusingly, suggest a philosopher at the end of his tether.” Jill Clayburgh,
however, received many cutting criticisms for the inaptness of her performance,
although her good looks (she appeared nearly nude for part of the play) were
commended. There was also disapproval of the unwieldy production directed by
Peter Wood, who also did the London original, and the heavy, obtrusive sets of
renowned Czech designer Josef Svoboda.
