Jumpers is one of my favorite Tom Stoppard plays. (Disclosure: I’ve never seen it, just read it.)
It’s set in an alternate universe where the moon landing, accomplished by Great Britain, ended in disaster, rather than triumph. The lunar module was damaged to the point that it could only lift off with the weight of one astronaut, not two.
The whole world watched as the two astronauts on the moon fought, fundamentally to the death, to be the one up the ladder, not the one marooned.
Captain Scott wins the fight, leaving his subordinate Oates stranded and doomed. Scott’s parting line is “I am going up now. I may be gone for some time.”
It’s an inversion of the real-world Antarctic exploration, led by a Captain Scott, in which Lawrence Oates, injured and dying, walked out of the tent and into a blizzard, hoping to increase his companions’ chances of survival by lessening their burdens. His parting line is recorded in their diaries as “I am just going outside and may be some time.”
The fact that absolutely everyone in the expedition ended up dying anyway doesn’t lessen the nobility of Oates’s gesture.
The characters in Jumpers live in a world where they don’t have such selfless and altruistic role models to point to. Instead, they all gathered together and watched what should have been a triumphant moment for humanity turn into a display of our “every man for himself” base instincts. Now they’re left questioning whether morality and ethics are just arbitrary nonsense.
Despite all that, because it’s Tom Stoppard, it’s pretty funny.
The actual plot concerns a washed-up stage actress who throws a wild party, much to the annoyance of her husband, a professor of moral philosophy. A troupe of non-especially athletic acrobats attends, and one of them is shot. The rest of the play is spent watching the various assumptions and misunderstandings that arise from the murder.
A lot of the humor comes from unexpected twists of language:
When Archie presents Inspector Bones a coroner’s report (which the audience knows is phony, and part of a cover-up
BONES: Is this genuine?
ARCHIE (testily): Of course it’s genuine. I’m a coroner, not a forger.
Later, the professor says, “I had hoped to set British moral philosophy back forty years, which is roughly when it went off the rails…”
One of the ideas George, the moral philosopher, is wrestling with is Zeno’s paradox, which purports to prove that a head start can never be overcome, and an arrow shot from a bow can’t move. To illustrate his point, he’s gathered a tortoise, a hare, a bow, and an arrow. Chaos ensues.
(I hope this diagram from the Wikipedia article about Zeno’s paradox answers any questions you may have.)
I’m the type of nerd who read and enjoyed Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter in high school, which also spends lots of time on Zeno’s paradox and also links it to the fable of the tortoise and the hare. So it was fun for me to find those ideas surfacing here, too. (Stoppard’s play actually predates that book by a few years, but we’re talking about my experience.)
Side note: if you’re also the type of nerd who read and enjoyed Gödel, Escher, Bach, and now you read blogs about books, may I recommend Le Ton beau de Marot, Hofstadter’s book about the complexities of translation.
Like I said, I’ve never seen this show. Just going by the stage directions Stoppard included in his text it feels…difficult to stage. For example, the tortoise has stage directions.
The directions for the troupe of acrobats at the moment of the murder have only a passing relationship with physics. They’re literally asked to defy gravity, if only for a few seconds.
The JUMPERS are assembling themselves into a human pyramid composed thus: SIX JUMPERS in three-two-one formation, flanked by the other two standing on their hands at the pyramid’s base.
ONE JUMPER, bottom row, second from left, is blown out of the pyramid. He falls downstage, leaving the rest of the pyramid intact.
The pyramid has been defying gravity for these few seconds. Now it slowly collapses into the dark, imploding on the missing part, and rolling and separating, out of sight.
At the very end (page 85 out of 87 in my edition), Stoppard makes a tiny concession in case the actors aren’t fabulous acrobats.
The CHAPLAINS back-flip into the middle of the stage, flanking CLEGTHORPE now; or cartwheels if back-flips are not possible.
This spoke to me. If I needed a slogan for my acrobatic level, it would be “Or cartwheels if back-flips are not possible.”