ON THE RAZZLE

Optional Supplemental/Background Information

The following information gives some contextual information about the play including details about the playwright and the history of the story and the original production. It is intended for you to use as much or as little as interests you and is in no way required for you to be familiar with it in regards to our discussions.

SCOTT’S TAKE

I first read Stoppard in a Contemporary Playwrights class in grad school. That play was, understandably, ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. Having grown up in Oklahoma (where my first experience of professional theatre was seeing a drunk Richard Harris in a touring production of CAMELOT) I had very little experience with non-American plays. I also was no fan of Shakespeare, had never read any Beckett, and was completely unaware of Stoppard or his reputation as one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th-Century. So I was ill prepared for my encounter with R&G. I quickly paraded my ignorace be claiming that I thought the play was boring, there was no character development in sight and the playwright was obviously in love with his own wit. Graciously, my professor and classmates were very gentle in their responses which had little effect on my opinion of Stoppard.

9 months later I found myself in London for 6 weeks doing research for my thesis, which I had decided would be on Trevor Nunn, a former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (at age 27) and the director of the original productions of NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, CATS, LES MISERABLES, CHESS, STARLIGHT EXPRESS, etc. So part of my work was to see as many of his productions as I could. While many of these shows were still running, there was one production that I was dreading to see: a play at the National called ARCADIA by this smarty-pants Stoppard guy. As I was waiting for the show to start, I was reading the program which was scattered with topics like Romanticism, Lord Byron, chaos theory, and landscape architecture in the 19th-Century. I was prepared to be bored and unmoved. Cut to three hours later and I’m clamoring for the bookshop to buy the script and swearing to read everything this underappreciated genius had ever written.

When I returned to school that Fall, I started to make good on my oath. I first read his espionage thriller, HAPGOOD, which was about the nature of duality, cold war spying, quantuum mechanics, and wave/particle theory. I thought it was great. The second play was ON THE RAZZLE and I was unprepared for how different it was from these other two plays, and yet, clearly from the same mind. Stoppard has always displayed great with, but most often with fairly intellectual or high-brow topics. In ONE THE RAZZLE, he takes this wit and applies it to a low-brow 19th-Century Viennese farce. The jokes and puns come fast and furious and there is an embrace of theatre as pure entertainment that I wish were more in fashion on the stage these days. It is a play that requires a big stage, a big cast, big talent, and big skill to pull off. It is rarely produced because of these needs, but I have seen one production of it when I was living in New York. It was at the tiny Bowery theatre and was presented by what was basically of group of unpaid professional actors. It was abysmal and you could feel the need for specatacle and size trying to break free only to meet an ugly death at the hand of a silent audience.

Stoppard has stated that ON THE RAZZLE is the play he would most like to see produced again. I would love to oblige. It’s one of many great plays that could easily work as a holiday show for one of the country’s large regional theatres (as would RED NOSES from the first Play Date series). OSF did produce it in their 2007 season.

The BBC did record the original production from the National back in 1983. It did not translate well, partly because of the approach to filming theatre in those days, partly because the performances were tamped down for a much smaller medium, (only slightly) partly because the recording quality is so poor, and partly because they recorded in an empty auditorium but piped in the sounds of audience reactions. It hurts my heart to watch it as, to me, it makes what I think is an incredible script look tiny and dated and unfunny. If you find it, I would ask that you not watch it until after our discussion. I would hate for that recording to color your opinion of the play.

PLAYWRIGHT: TOM STOPPARD

“I think of plays as the description of an event that hasn’t happened yet.” - Tom Stoppard.

Tom Stoppard is one of the three greatest living playwrights in English-speaking world alongside Caryl Churchill and David Hare.  He is clearly the most well-known and most often produced of the three in the States.  His first success was ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD in 1967, which had its London premiere at the National Theatre when the company was still performing at the Old Vic. This began a long relationship with the National Theatre, which has produced 11 of his plays to date. He was awarded Most Promising Playwright by the Evening Standard Awards and the play won the Theatre Critic’s Award, the New York Drama Critic’s Award, and the Tony Award for Best New Play.

Stoppard was celebrated early in his career for his wit and for melding thematic ideas with bold theatricality. The 1970’s brought him acclaim for JUMPERS (which was an existential murder mystery involving a moon landing, academia, and a troupe of gymnasts), TRAVESTIES (THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST meets James Joyce, Lenin, and Tristan Tzara in a sort of Dadaist music hall), THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND (a parody of theatre critics, free will and THE MOUSETRAP), and EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR, which calls for a full symphony orchestra as one of the main characters.

From the late 70’s to the mid-80’s he mostly wrote adaptations of lesser-known 19th-Century plays from the continent and all premiered at the National Theatre: UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY (from Schnitzler’s THE WHITE LAND), DALLIANCE (from Schnitzler’s LIEBELEI), ROUGH CROSSING (from Molnar’s PLAT AT THE CASTLE), and ON THE RAZZLE (from Nestroy’s EINEN JUX WILL ER SICH MACHEN). ON THE RAZZLE may be one of the most ridiculous plays every written and one of my dream comedies to direct.

The 80’s saw only two original plays from Stoppard: THE REAL THING and HAPGOOD. THE REAL THING is a pseudo-autobiographical romantic comedy, of sorts, where Stoppard explored the nature of love, truth, revolution, art, and cricket bats.  The play was hailed as the first time Stoppard presented characters who were driven by their heart rather than their wit and it won a slew of awards in London and New York. HAPGOOD was a Cold War spy thriller that also explores quantum mechanics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and duality.  The original production was considered a failure and is one of Stoppard’s least well-known and produced works.  However, I think it has been seriously misjudged and is his best least well-known play. HAPGOOD would easily make an appearance in my Dream Season 3.0.

MEDIA: TOM STOPPARD and ON THE RAZZLE

Stoppard on ON THE RAZZLE —

On the Razzle is an adaptation of Einen Jux will er sich machen by Johann Nestroy (1801-62), who flourished as a comic actor and playwright in Vienna during the 1840s and ‘50s. Nestroy wrote eighty-odd plays, a hadful of which are still regularly performed in that city, while thirty or fouty others have had at least one revival in the German-speaking theatre since the Second World War. It is still as a Viennese writing for Vienna that his fame survives, for his eccentric way with language and his immersion in Viennese dialect gives partial truth to the assertion of one critic that Nestroy is “untranslatable, even into German”.

On the Razzle is not, and could not be, labelled “a translation”. All the main characters and most of the plot come from Nestroy but almost none of the dialogue attempts to offer a translation of what Nestroy wrote. My method might be compared to cross-country hiking with map and compass, where one takes a bearing on the next landmark and picks one’s own way towards it.

Nestroy’s way was satirical and verbally outrageous and often turned on a local reference. He also liked to include comic songs between scenes. On the Razzle makes no use of dialect, ignores period flavour in dialogue, and has no songs. It is still set in Vienna (though about fifty years later than Einen Jux) but not essentially so. The two essentials which this play takes from the original are, firstly, the almost mythic tale of two country mice escaping to town for a day of illicit freedom, adventure, mishap and narrow escapes from discovery; and, secondly, the prime concern to make the tale as comic an entertainment as possible.

Having no German I am indebted to Nevil and Stephen Plaice who prepared a close literal translation for me at the request of the National Theatre (and who suggested the title). To Peter Wood, who directed the National Theatre production, is owed the idea of bringing a new version of Einen Jux from the DAnube to the South Bank.

I say “new” version because there is already a celebrated old one, Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker. It is not widely known — I didn’t know it myself —that Wilder’s play and (hence Hello Dolly! as well) is an adaptation of Einen Jux. When I discovered this I turned to other Nestroy plays thinking that perhaps in bringing a play from this almost unkown comic master into the English theatre I should take a path less famously trod, but I soon returned to Jux (its title contracting as affection grew). Firstly, this was the play which Peter Wood most wanted to do, attracted by the mythic quality mentioned above. Secondly, Wilder’s temperament, which serves The Matchmaker so well, made gentler and more dignified use of the original than I intended, while, furthermore, his adaptation of the plot was rather more free than anthing I had in mind. For example Dolly Levi, the matchmaker of the title, is Wilder’s own invention.

So I offer myself the hope that the differences between the two are at least as great as the similarities, and that On the Razzle, if not an absolutely essention addition to the canon of adaptations in English from Einen Jux will er sich machen, is at least a welcome one.

From TOM STOPPARD: A LIFE by Hermione Lee —

On the Razzle, worked on rapidly and staged in 1981, first at the Edinburgh Festival and then at the National, was a different kind of Viennese spectacle from [Schnitzler’s] Undiscovered Country. Johann Nestroy belonged to an earlier generation — he died the year Schnitzler was born — and to a world of farce. pantomime and musical comedy. Nestroy was a singer, an actor, a playwright, a composer, and entertainer and a hugely popular Viennese theatrical phenomonon. No cynical melancholy, world-weariness or introspection here: the social satire was much broader and the pace was quicker. Nestroy loved wordplay and regional dialects. He had music and songs in all his plays. His comedy of 1842, Einen jux will er sich machen “He’s out for a fling”), was a free translation of a little-known English one-act comedy. It told the story of two country mice who abandon the shop for a spree in the big city, while their master goes to court his wealthy fiancée and the master’s niece tries to run off with her boyfriend. There is an explosion of coincidences, disguises, chases, crises and comic reuntions. It was a huge success. It was adapted, twice, in the 1930s and 1950s, by the American playwright Thornton Wilder, who grafted on the character of Dolly of Yonkers matchmaker (played by Ruth Gordon in a famous production), leading eventually to Barbra Streisand and Louis Armstrong in Hello, Dolly!)

In Stoppard’s version there was no matchmaker, no dialect, no music and not much respect for the original text. He felt he could be joyously free with this funny old farce. Most of the dialogue was his own invention. His version was laden, possibly over-laden, with puns, double ententres, malapropisms, misfiring clichés and gleefully sexual innuendo. Much of the plot depends on a very slow pantomime horse called Lightning (a joke he would use again for the tortoise in Arcadia), and the play did go like lightning. The audience didn’t have time to stop laughing before the next joke came along.

Everyone has a verbal tic. Zangler the ludicrous grocer puts his foot in his mouth every time he opens it. His glib, opportunis, bungling servant Melchior does the word “classic” to death. The ingenue niece says “it’s not proper” to every suggestion. The country-mouse heroes, Weinberl and Christopher, swap lofty, sentimental hopes and dreams and pronouncements on the class system, while wriggling in and out of endless scrapes. there’s a whole raft of jokes about the Scottish mania which has hit Vienna after Verdi’s Macbeth, involving kilts, sporrans and Mac-iavelli: “Even the chocolate cake — Sachertartan!” There are quick nods to other comedies, from the Marx Brothers to My Fair LAdy. There are excruciating puns: “the wurst is yet to come”. There are joke about language, perfect for a play in translation set in Vienna, including a saucy French maid, a messenger from Belgium speaking cod “foreign” (“Ich comen looken finden Herr Sonders”), a spoof on Italian waiters, and some Anglo-German misunderstandings:

MELCHIOR: What weather we’re having, eh! Turning out a bit dank. Is it cold outside?

GERMAN MAN: Bitte?

MELCHIOR: Is it? Last night was definitely dank. Would you say tonight was as dank or not as dank?

GERMAN MAN: Danke.

MELCHIOR: (amazed) Danker?

GERMAN MAN: Bitte.

MELCHIO: Please yourselves.

Silliest of all are Zangler’s mishaps with language — “God in Himalayas!” “Quick, fetch me a half-wittend cab you hansom fool!” — where cliché takes on a surreal life of its own:

ZANGLER: I feel like the cake of the week.

WEINBERL: That’s very well put, Chief.

ZANGLER: I don’t mean cake of the week —

WEINBERL: Not the cake of the week — the Sheikh of Kuwait —

ZANGLER: No —

WEINBERL: The clerk of the works —

ZANGLER: No!

WEINBERL: The cock of the walk?

ZANGLER: That’s the boy. I feel like the cock of the walk.

Zanglerism is catching, so Malchior starts talking like his master, as if he’s involuntarily learnt to speak Dogg [from another Stoppard play]: “Don’t have dinner with him, miss! — he’ll alter you before the dessert — no — he’ll desert you before the altar.” “What is all this nonsense?” comes the reply, and that’s the delight of it. No one knows what’s going to come out of their mouth next, what they will have to invent to get out of a scrape, or who they are going to have to pretend to be. Shakespeareanly, “Christopher” is a woman who is playing a boy pretending to be a woman disguised as another woman: “I’m not the woman you think I am. I’m not even the waoman you think is the woman you think I am.” Mistaken for someone else, Melshior indignantly erupts: “I am about the only person here who isn’t pretending to be someone else!”

Everything depended on how it was done, and as soon as they went into rehearsal Stoppard and Wood became, as always, their own comedy duo, working together to squeeze every inch of laughter, every turn of surprise, out of the script. Felicity Kendal, a star of stage and screen, famous in her mid-thiries for the television sitcom The Good Life, and palying big parts in that National Theatre season of 1980-1 (Desdemona to Paul Scofield’s Othello, Constanze in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus), was cast as Christopher. Though Shaffer and Stoppard were very different kinds of writers, she thought that what they had in common was the writing of “great arias” for actors.

It was her first job with Stoppard and Wood. She watched this “exceptional team” with delight as they worked their magic tricks and joked at each other’s expense to put the actors at their ease. She saw that Wood had a superb comic talent and understood exactly what to do with a Stoppard script. It was a long, tough rehearsal period, a big cast, a very complicated paly to put on, and physically demanding — but it was fun.

Her Christopher was a magnetic comic turn: husky, jaunty, crop-haired, wide-eyed, quick-thinking. At first she had no idea how to “get” a young boy. She felt she was being too “feminine” or — “ghastly!” — too like Oliver Twist. She used her own nine-year-old son as a model. She could see that Stoppard, with his four sons, knew all about boys’ behaviour too. (For the boys, especially Barny, On the RAzzle with all its rude jokes was a favourite among their father’s plays.) The turning point came when she realised that her feet looked too small. She asked for her boots to be two sizes bigger. Then the whole thing “came together”. After that she had no anxieties at all. She know she was good in this play.

This was her first phase of working with and getting to know Stoppard, and she was one of three actors in the productino who then became part of his team. The others were Dinsdale Landen and Michael Kitchen. For Kitchen, stylish and suave, the whole production was a dream of pleasure though it was also extremely hard work. He “had never had a better time in a rehearsal”. Wood and Stoppard’s first idea had been to cast him as Weinberl (played eloquently by Ray Brooks) but he was even more pleased with Melchior. For a time he would become close to the Stoppard family, and forever after he would think of Stoppard with unbounded admiration. “He is to theatre and screen and intellect what Federer is to tennis. Elegant, durable, brilliant, beautiful.”

Dinsdale Landen, one of Stoppard’s favourite actors - a comic genius, he thought — played Zangler, and he too became a good friend. Stoppard loved his pompous, grandiose, absured performance, with his handlebar moustace, jingling spurs, too-tight-uniform and booming, plummy voice. He loved the way Landen kept making up extra jokes on the spur of the moment. In the restaurant scene, full of near-miss encounters, colliding waiters, screens, revolving doors and rapid exits, Zangler at one point hears the voice of Melchior emanating from somewhere, and can’t work out where it’s coming from. To Stoppard’s delight, in an impromptu stroke, Landen looked into the hanging flower-basket, suspended over the table, as though in some strange way Michael Kitchen might be inside it. In the next scene, Zangler is chasing his nieve and her lover through a garden. The Lyttelton stage has a revolve, which was put to maximum use in Carl Toms’ design. There was a ladder leaning in the corner of the garden and Landen shouted “A ladder!” and then ran through the central passage of the summerhouse, which was revolving. Then he emerged from the driection in which he’d entered, and cried out: “Another ladder!” Stoppard was enchanted by this invention. It still made him laugh years later, thinking about it.

Everyone in the show was having a ball; so were the audiences. But there were criticisms. The early ones were from Miriam [Stoppard], who thought some of the puns were worked to death, and from his mother, who read an early draft and complained that it was too rude. This produced a heated reaction. Where were these four-letter words she was complaining about? There weren’t any! Yes, there was a huge amount of sexual innuendo, but the original was riddled with it. And was it any worse than Morecambe and Wise? He explained that one particularly crude passage was needed because he was working towards the line, “This place is begining to lose its chic for me'“: which is a funny line only if the speaker has just said something very coarse.” Ruefully, he added that perhaps there was so much sex in the play because Miriam had been away for three weeks.

“I’m afraid I’ve made the Coachman in Act II sex-obsessed — I think it’s funny but perhaps I’m losing my objectivity as middle-age overtakes me . . . or Miriam’s lengthy absence, of course — the sor of thing that probably won’t occur to anobody when Razzle is set for O Levels: ‘Explain Stoppard’s motivation for making the Coachman obsessed with sex.’ Only Oliver will answer: ‘His wife was in America for 3 weeks — next question.’”

More seriously, he said that he didn’t want to be too faithful to the original. He needed to “find a tone which updaes the romp.” And with some irritation, the forty-four-year-old playwright told his mother: “I do know what I’m doing”.

There was considerably more irritation at being ticked off, in a lengthy Sunday Timesreview by the poet and theatre critic James Fenton, for his “complete misunderstanding” of the dynamics of NEstroy’s plot. Fenton criticised Stoppard for apparently not realising that Weinberl had been played in the original by Nestroy himself, and had had a more important role to play than Stoppard allowed him. It annoyed SToppard that Fenton would assume that he would not have done his homework. Other critics, like Irving Wardle in The Tiems, enjoyed the comedy’s “atmostphere of inspired lunacy”, singling out for paise Kitchen and Landen, Kendal’s “marvellouse, quick-witted performance” and Harold Innocent’s “sex-crazed coachman”. Peter Wood got the Laurence Olivier award for best director.

GLOSSARY

• Eminence grise - a powerful decision-maker or adviser who operates "behind the scenes", or in a non-public or unofficial capacity.

• Beau monde - The world of high society and fashion.

• Gruss grott - A greeting in Austria.

• Entschuldigung - “Forgive me”.

• Frogging - Ornamental braid or coat fastenings consisting of spindle-shaped buttons and loops.

• Emmental - A valley in Switzerland and also a Swiss cheese.

• Gadarene - The place where Jesus confronted a man whose possession by demons gave him a level of superhuman strength like Samson.

• Scaramouche - A stock clown character of the 16th-century commedia dell'arte. The role combined characteristics of the servant and the henchman and he was often beaten by Harlequin for his boasting and cowardice.

• Beagling - The hunting of hares and rabbits (but not foxes) by beagles by scent.

• Cack - Shit.

• Worsted - The fabric made from a high-quality wool yarn.

• Messalina - Third wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, a paternal cousin of Nero, a second cousin of Caligula, and a great-grandniece of Augustus. A powerful and influential woman with a reputation for promiscuity.

• Panoply - an impressive collection of things.

• Sachertorte - A classic Austrian chocolate cake layered with apricot preserves.

• German Pessimism - Schopenhauer’s philosophy that life is not worth living.

• Pippin - A person or thing that is admired. Or any of several varieties ofapple with a rounded oblate shape.

• Conferance or Williams - Varieties of pear.

• Fort William - A Town in the Scottish West Highlands.

• “Ne'er cast a clout till May is out” - Old English phrase meaning “Do not put away your winter clothes too early in the year.”

• Gateau - A very rich cake.

• Trockenbeerenauslese - German term for medium to full-bodied dessert wine.

• Chinoiserie - The European interpretation and imitation of Chinese and other East Asian artistic traditions, especially in the decorative arts, garden design, architecture, literature, theatre, and music.

• Cabertosser - A caber toss is a traditional Scottish athletic event in which competitors toss a large tapered pole called a "caber".

• Braemar - A village in Aberneeshire, Scotland.

• Hunting-Stuart - Often considered as a general tartan.

• Comme il faut - Correct behavior or etiquette.

• Déshabillé - Dressed in a careless or too casual way.

• Jereboams and Bollinger - Varieties of champagne.

Short interview with Stoppard discussing original production of ON THE RAZZLE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THEATRE

• 1964: A Walk on the Water

• 1965: The Gamblers, based on the novel The Gambler by Dostoevsky

• 1966: Tango, adapted from Sławomir Mrożek's play and Nicholas Bethell translation, premiered at the Aldwych Theatre

• 1966: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

• 1968: Enter a Free Man.

• 1968: The Real Inspector Hound

• 1969: Albert's Bridge

• 1969: If You're Glad I'll Be Frank

• 1970: After Magritte

• 1971: Dogg's Our Pet

• 1972: Jumpers

• 1972: Artist Descending a Staircase

• 1974: Travesties

• 1976: Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land

• 1976: 15-Minute Hamlet

• 1977: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

• 1978: Night and Day

• 1979: Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth

• 1979: Undiscovered Country – an adaptation of Das Weite Land by the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler

• 1981: On the Razzle based on Einen Jux will er sich machen by Johann Nestroy

• 1982: The Real Thing

• 1983: English libretto for The Love for Three Oranges.

• 1984: Rough Crossing based on Play at the Castle by Ferenc Molnár

• 1986: Dalliance An adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Liebelei

• 1987: Largo Desolato, translation of a play by Václav Havel

• 1988: Hapgood

• 1993: Arcadia

• 1995: Indian Ink – based on Stoppard's radio play In the Native State

• 1997: The Invention of Love

• 1997: The Seagull – translation of the play by Anton Chekhov

• 2002: The Coast of Utopia is a trilogy of plays: Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage

• 2004: Enrico IV (Henry IV) – translation of the Italian play by Luigi Pirandello

• 2006: Rock 'n' Roll

• 2010: The Laws of War – contributor to a collaborative piece for a one-night benefit performance in support of Human Rights Watch.

• 2015: The Hard Problem

• 2020: Leopoldstadt