Website design By BotEap.comSir Tom Stoppard, early works.

Website design By BotEap.com5. Albert Bridge

Website design By BotEap.comSir Tom Stoppard’s Albert’s Bridge (Radio, 1967), develops similar themes to his earlier works, concentrating specifically on the opposition between chaos and order. Like John Brown in 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. In Albert’s Bridge, physical circumstances are equated with conceptual or psychological factors, which belong to the subjective world of individual perception. Thus, the tranquility that Albert finds high up among the geometrically arranged bridge girders, away from the human demands of his wife and child, is equated with the concept of seeing life from a distance, rather than seeing it from above. close up.

Website design By BotEap.comAlbert: ‘The benches are alphabetized with various bricks, kiddiblocks with windows; The tiny toys move through the gaps, dodged by moving dots that have no color… It’s the most expensive toy city in the store, the detail is remarkable.’

Website design By BotEap.comKate: I saw you today… leaving the salon. Six and six, they cut it off.

Website design By BotEap.comAlbert: Just for show: if you zoom out far enough, sixpence and sixpence don’t show, and neither does anything, in the distance.

Website design By BotEap.comKate: Well, life is very close, isn’t it?

Website design By BotEap.comAlbert: Yeah, it hits you when you go back down. (pp. 22-23.)

Website design By BotEap.comThis concept of variable perspective is reinforced by Frazer, a potential suicide who climbs onto the bridge to jump. But from the top of the bridge he escapes from the pressure caused by his desperation and that is why he no longer wants to jump. Back on the ground, the pressure builds up again and he climbs back onto the bridge, so he spends his time repeatedly ascending and descending the bridge. He explains:-

Website design By BotEap.comI can’t help it. They force me to go up and they force me to go down. I am a victim of perspective. (p. 35.)

Website design By BotEap.comAlbert becomes completely dependent on his job, eventually abandoning 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 over it without breaking stride; 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 the bridge, like George Riley from Enter a Free Man, they have 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 breakdown of some kind of natural balance.

Website design By BotEap.comThe four plays discussed so far (A Separate Peace, A Free Man Enters, If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank) have a unity as a group or cycle of plays. 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 sort of relationship with the rest of the world. In the end, everyone fails to achieve what they were fighting for; “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 asserted itself to the exclusion of the other. other. The opposing principles take a number of forms; Chaos versus Order, Freedom versus Responsibility, Illusion versus Reality, Logic versus Common Sense, the Individual versus ‘The Establishment’, etc.

Website design By BotEap.comThe 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 rigid for Gladys and Frank. But it is the same world. The way we see the world depends on the way we look at it; reality is relative. This is the heart of the ‘image of the world’ established by Stoppard in his early minor works. He continues to expand and elaborate on this point of view in his longest works Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Jumpers, and comes to a definitive statement with Travesties.

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