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After Magritte

After Magritte is a surreal comedy written by Tom Stoppard in 1970. It was first performed in the Green Banana Restaurant at the Ambiance Lunch-hour Theatre Club in London.(Current citation on page)

History

After Magritte was written during the time in Tom Stoppard’s life when he was putting out some of his most well-known plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound. Stoppard was well established within writing stage, radio, and television plays and writing plays for radio and television. This idea struck Tom Stoppard first when he wrote the Radio play, An Artist Descending a Staircase which was based on a Marcel Duchamp painting of a similar name. Around this time Tom Stoppard was beginning to become interested in bringing his plays over to an American stage(notable Biography citation)

Motifs

Surrealism

Surrealism in an art acts strangely because with the naked eye it’s not obvious what the art expresses. The basis of the surrealism in this play is based on the predisposition that Rene Magritte was a surrealist painter, therefore Tom Stoppard brought the characters inside of Magritte’s surreal reality alive. The idea is partially that the surrealist schools of thought are shared between art forms, but also to just bring the world of Magritte out of just a still image and make the illogical situations be perpetually illogical. (Keir Elam citation)

Absurdism (Art VS Reality)

Absurdism is based off the idea that humans are always in the search of inherent meaning in life, even when there is no meaning, at least none that life on earth could understand. Rene Magritte puts characters into situations that are devoid of meaning to our eyes, and Stoppard continues this idea of the characters trying to find meaning in their eyes that don’t actually know why they are in this painting and why they are doing certain things. "Several critics have noticed the specific quality o f language in the play, the use of puns and the fact that language is an inadequate means of describing reality" (Words and Images citation)

Setting of the play

The setting of the play takes place in a unspecified Rene Magritte painting. Stoppard describes it as: “The only light comes through the large window which is facing the audience…The central ceiling light hangs from a long flex which disappears up into the flies. The lampshade itself it a heavy metal hemisphere, opaque,…similarly hanging from the flies, is a fruit basket attractively overflowing with apples, oranges, bananas, pineapple, and grapes,…It will become apparent that the light fixture is on a counterweight system, it can be raised and lowered, or kept in any vertical position, by means of the counterbalance, which in this case is a basket of fruit. Most of the furniture is stack up against the street door in a sort of barricade, an essential item is a long low bench-type table, about eight feet long, but the pile also includes a settee, two comfortable chairs, a TV set, a cupboard and a wind up gramophone with an old-fashioned horn…” (Faber and Faber 1996 edition citation)

·       This stage picture evokes similarities between L'assassin menacé by Magritte himself and of the beginning of the play Tango by Slawomir Mrożek.

A list of characters

• Harris
• Thelma
• Mother
• Foot
• Holmes

A synopsis of the play

The play begins with an astonished policeman looking through the window of a house, in which a group of people are posed in a bizarre, surreal tableau reminiscent of the paintings of René Magritte. Finding this suspicious, he calls in his inspector.

Inside the room, a rational explanation for the tableau gradually becomes apparent. Two ballroom dancers, a man and a woman named Reginald and Thelma Harris, are hurriedly getting ready for an event. A lampshade which had used bullets as a counterweight has broken and a woman crawls on the floor to look for them. The mother plays the tuba.

The inspector arrives and asks about the family's memories of a man they had seen outside of the Tate Gallery, where a René Magritte exhibit is being held. The inspector invents an entirely false story, accusing the family of complicity in a crime known as the Crippled Minstrel Caper. As he continues, the stage picture becomes increasingly ridiculous. For instance, the couple offers the inspector a banana as the male dancer stands on one foot. One scene is even performed in total darkness. By the end of the play, the characters are posed in another Magritte-like tableau.

Premiere

Actors and characters for premiere at the Green Banana Restaurant at the Ambiance Lunch-hour Theatre Club in London.

• Harris - Stephen Moore
• Thelma - Prunella Scales
• Mother - Josephine Tewson
• Foot - Clive Barker
• Holmes - Malcom Ingram

Directed by Geoffrey Reeves