Sir Tom Stoppard, The Early Plays: If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank
Sir Tom Stoppard, early works
4. If you are happy, I will be frank
In Sir Tom Stoppard’s If You’re Glad I’ll be Frank (Radio 1966), a change of course is clearly visible. Here the central couple is, in fact, separated, and although they try to meet, they fail. Their relationship is thwarted, it seems, not only within the work itself, but also as a result of Stoppard’s decision to sacrifice human relationships to metaphysics. With this play, Stoppard abandons his mentors (Enter a Free Man draws heavily from Robert Bolt and Arthur Miller) and his true strength as a playwright begins to show. The theme of individual freedom versus the established order continues, but takes metaphysical flight as the established order becomes Time itself. Gladys the talking clock ponders the nature of Time while she is stuck at her desk measuring ten second intervals. She sees through the usual human timescales in a dizzyingly disorienting view of relativity.
The contrast between two concepts of time is reflected in the two forms of language used by Gladys. In her performance, her free verse is spoken simultaneously with the stiff, repetitive rhythm of the talking clock. In this way Stoppard makes her point directly about the perceptions of the audience. The dual perception of these scales leads Gladys to a mental breakdown; we could see it caught between excessive order and excessive chaos. She wants to rebel against her mediating role between them.
‘At the third blow I’m going to resign, yes, yes, it’s asking too much, for one person to be aware of so much.’ (p. 22)
Ultimately, however, she accepts the established order and continues to measure ten-second intervals under the guidance of the First Lord of the Post Office, who ‘corrects’ her. The story is of chaos trying to invade order, but failing.
The ‘depth’ that Stoppard previously tried to give his works through the characters and their relationships is now given by the complexity of the structure, in which the themes are presented simultaneously on several levels. Gladys’s frustration with the rigidity of our concept of time is paralleled by Frank’s attempts to squeeze a few minutes out of his schedule as a bus driver, to rescue Gladys from the GPO building. Every time he stops the bus, Ivy, the driver, frightened by the threat to the convention (chaos disrupts order), chases after him yelling, ‘Frank, we’ll be late. . . I ask you to remember the schedule. . . The passengers have noticed’, etc., which represents the pressure of the established order that limits individual action.
Another level at which the accepted order is represented is the GPO hierarchy and the procedure by which a member of the public should approach their senior officials. Frank, like John Brown and George Riley before him, rebels against the accepted order and goes his own way. He charges through a series of offices in the GPO building and crashes a board meeting chaired by the First Lord. However, Frank’s rebellion is thwarted, as is Gladys’s, by the authoritative voice of the First Lord.
“My dear friend, there is no Gladys, we would not trust your wife with time, she is a machine, I thought you all knew that.” (p. 25)
Although these characters have struggled to rebel against order and authority, they are relieved to have failed. On a metaphysical level, this suggests that order and chaos coexist in some kind of natural balance that cannot be violated. In human terms, it suggests that the autonomy of the individual is limited by the order of the universe, physical and social, in which he exists, and that this is the cause of both frustration and comfort.
Another characteristic of Stoppard’s work that emerges in If You’re Glad I’ll be Frank is deliberate ambiguity. Is Gladys really being held prisoner by the GPO to act as the talking clock? Or is the talking clock just a machine and Frank’s idea that she is his wife just an illusion? This question has no answer; adds a deliberate quality of mystery to the work by calling into question our assumptions about which aspects of the work represent objective reality and which represent subjective and possibly misleading experience. This important point will be discussed later in connection with Stoppard’s major plays, Jumpers and Travesties.
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