One false move and we could have a farce on our hands. - Tom Stoppard on the razzle in Vienna

On the Razzle, a 1981 Tom Stoppard play, is efficient.  We are only fifteen pages in, a half hour at most, when Stoppard clears the stage of everyone but Zangler, a Viennese shopkeeper, who delivers a monologue:

ZANGLER:  Well, that seems all right.  Just the ticket.  First class.  Why do I have a sense of impending disaster?  (He reflects.)  Sonders is after my niece and has discovered the secret address where I am sending her to the safe keeping of my sister-in-law Miss Blumenblatt, who has never laid eyes on him, or, for that matter, on Marie either since she was a baby – while I have to leave my business in the charge of my assistant and an apprentice, and follow my new servant, whom I haven’t had time to introduce to anyone, to town to join the parade and take my fiancée to dinner in a fashionable restaurant in a uniform I can’t sit down in.

One false move and we could have a farce on our hands.  (He exits.)  (84)

I regard this as the height of courtesy, an author summarizing his own work, not only the plot but the method.  What else is a farce built of but this kind of needless complication?  Needless but comically potent, thus essential.

That assistant and apprentice use the absence of the owner to knock off early and hit the town, to go on the razzle, and somehow end up in the same restaurant as their boss, in the company of a woman who is, unknown to anyone, the above-mentioned boss’s fiancée, leading to – well, the usual stuff.  Leading to a scene where all of the characters flee a room “by different routes but with identical timing,” through every door and window and even “by the chimney, if possible.”

On the Razzle is full of puns ("I won't feel married until we've had the consommé") and spoonerisms and other gibberish, which I am told are a low form of humor.  The merchant has particular trouble with his cant phrases and can always use a little help:

ZANGLER:  Everything’s arranged…  He’s emptied my seal but his lips are pursed.  No – he pursed to suppose – no –

MELCHIOR:  Supper is served –

ZANGLER:  No! – Oh, supper is served! (121)

On stage the speed of the patter must make some high proportion of the jokes blast by, but as long as someone hears it and someone is laughing, soon enough everyone is laughing.  Since, I was reading, though, I had the privilege of laughing at every single joke, such as this one, where Melchior is applying for a job as Zangler’s servant:

ZANGLER:  You strike me as highly impertinent.

MELCHIOR:  I was just talking shop.  Please disregard it as the inexperience of blushful youth, as the poet said.

ZANGLER:  Do you have a reference?

MELCHIOR:  No, I just read it somewhere.  (78)

Foyle’s War fans will enjoy imagining Melchior as Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle, since Michael Kitchen originated the role.

The play is an adaptation but not at all a translation, Stoppard insists, of Johann Nestroy’s mid-19th century Austrian play Einen Jux will er sich machen, which means that I am kicking off my look at Austrian literature with a work that feels like cheating.

I know what youth is. And I can't shoot them all - another Schnitzpard play

Schnitzpard’s other play, Das weite Land / Undiscovered Country (1911 / 1979), is longer and more ambitious than the earlier and later Dalliance, and is less punchy, but features a more complex – an aggravatingly complex – lead character.  Like Dalliance, the play climaxes with an offstage pistol duel over adultery.  What a strange society.

This time the male lead, Friedrich, is older, with a grown son, but still a lady-killer.  His wife is long-suffering; his friends suffer in a different way: car accidents, suicide, mountaineering  fatalities.  For an act or so I wondered if I was reading a play about a dashing serial killer, but no, he is just the lucky one of the bunch.  As is typical with Schnitzler if not Stoppard, death is a constant presence.

FRIEDRICH:  Oh yes – how is Stanzides?

MAUER:  I’m just going to see him, as a matter of fact.  He’s very impatient, considering he ought to be grateful he didn’t break his neck.

FRIEDRICH:  Not to mention mine.  I was thrown thirty feet up the road.  But it’s certainly true that the insurance companies will soon be turning down anyone who is acquainted with me.  (I, 69-70)

And this is just after the funeral for the suicide.

Friedrich is a perfect hypocrite – he always has a reason, a good one, for whatever he does, no matter how it contradicts something else he does.  He is sincere when that is useful, cynical when he needs to be.  As I said, aggravating.  I suppose the ultimate success of the play depends on whether the production and Schnitzpard are convincing in giving Friedrich a core that makes him more than a specimen.  If he earns these words near the end:

FRIEDRICH:  Hush!  I know what youth is.  It’s not an hour since I saw it.  It glows, it laughs, it has an insolence in its eye.  I know what youth is.  And I can’t shoot them all…  (V, 147, italics not mine)

Dalliance ends with a sort of sincere and surprised despair, while Friedrich’s despair is more of a long-cultivated philosophy of life.

In the introduction to the volume that contains Dalliance and Undiscovered Country, Tom Stoppard describes the technical side of the adaptation in some detail.  Knowing no German, he began with a trot, and went through it word by word with an expert in German.  This is “the high water-mark of literal accuracy” after which the playwright and director begin to rampage through the script, filling it with their own ideas and improvements and jokes – I more or less assume that every actual joke is Stoppard’s – until the word “translation” becomes an embarrassment and “adaptation” is quietly substituted.  “[A] surprising number of critics turned out to be Schnitzler purists,” Stoppard says (ix-x).  Not me, though.  I wish there was more jolly Schnitzpard for me to read.

Schnitzler and Stoppard collaborate - our love is eternal, of course, but there is a limit.

Special surprise bonus Schnitzler for the next two days!  I didn’t mean to read it, but I did.

Specifically, I read two Tom Stoppard adaptations of Arthur Schnitzler plays, Dalliance, a version of Liebelei (1895, English version performed in 1986) and Undiscovered Country, an adaptation of Das weite Land (1911, performed 1979).  Edith Grossman, telling reviewers how to do their jobs in Why Translation Matters,  demands that authors and translators be treated as creative co-equals.  In this case, I think she is correct, and will write accordingly.

I will call the composite author Schnitzpard.

Schnitzpard’s play begins with Chekhov’s gun:

FRITZ is discovered practising marksmanship with a duelling pistol…  It is clear from the way FRITZ inspects the target that he is not much of a shot.  There does not appear to be a hole in the target at all. (I., 5)

So the only question is who, by the end of Act III, is gonna get plugged.  Things are not looking good for Fritz, but who knows, his fate may end up being ironic somehow.

Fritz is just a student, but he is having an affair with a married woman, and at the same time having a fling with a seamstress who works at a theater.  The seamstress makes the mistake of falling in love.  Fritz and the seamstress each have friends who understand things better:

MIZI:  Well, next time we go out anywhere together you must wear your uniform.

THEODORE:  I only put it on for funerals [foreshadowing!].  But I’ll be wearing it for August – I’ve got manoeuvres.

MIZI:  Heavens, it won’t wait till August.

THEODORE:  No, that’s true – our love is eternal, of course, but there is a limit.  (I., 11-12)

Theodore's lines should be read in a Wildean spirit.

The very short third and final act is set backstage at the seamstress’s theater, with a rehearsal taking place on stage, meaning of course the actual backstage of whatever theater we might be in – typical Schnitzpardian theatrical playfulness – but with a point.  The contrast between the singing and botched cues in the background and the audience’s knowledge, my knowledge, that Chekhov’s gun has gone off in a duel with who knows what result while the women, knowing nothing about the duel, fret about entirely pointless problems, creates some outstanding tension.  There are lots of nice bits to quote, but they would resolve the tension a bit too abruptly.

Dalliance is a conventional play in many ways – love affairs and goofing around take up most of the action.  It is hardly as innovative as La Ronde (written 1897) or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1968) but is written with a lot of zing.  I would love to see it.

Page numbers refer to the 1986 Faber and Faber edition of Schnitzpard’s plays.