Five European Plays: Nestroy, Schnitzler, Molnár, Havel

Praise for On the Razzle

"On the Razzle puts [Stoppard’s] own distinctive spin on the farce … strewn with wordplays and verbal gymnastics, by turns brilliant and outrageously silly."

—New York Times

The play’s marriage of bristling intellectual wit and broad slapstick makes a curious, sometimes contradictory and always ingenious appeal to our highest and lowest natures—Oscar Wilde by way of ‘I Love Lucy.’

—Los Angeles Times

Praise for Undiscovered Country

A theatrical feast: a play that combines detailed psychology with a portrait of society … it’s a marvelous play because it pinpoints decadence with wit and irony.

—Guardian (UK)

Praise for Rough Crossing

Giddy with wordplay and dizzy with theatrical game-playing.

—Boston Globe

Adaptation in Stoppard’s terms means finding a sympathetic text and using it as a springboard for invention that leaves the original far behind … he weaves an increasingly amazing pattern of verbal misunderstandings, eccentric character development, showbiz spectacle, and sea-going hazards.

—Times (UK)

Accessible and ineffably charming … Radiant theater.

—Chicago Tribune

Praise for Largo Desolato

"Largo Desolato in Tom Stoppard’s version emerges as a wonderfully comic and unself-pitying piece … A comic writer of genius."

—Times (UK)

A bitter comedy. It’s Athol Fugard at his bleakest and Kafka at his most horrifically absurd.

—Newsday

Also by Tom Stoppard

PLAYS

The Hard Problem

Enter a Free Man

The Real Inspector Hound

After Magritte

Jumpers

Travesties

Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

Night and Day

Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth

Arcadia

The Real Thing

Dalliance

Hapgood

Indian Ink

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

The Invention of Love

Voyage: The Coast of Utopia Part I

Shipwreck: The Coast of Utopia Part II

Salvage: The Coast of Utopia Part III

Rock ‘n’ Roll

The Coast of Utopia: A Trilogy

TELEVISION SCRIPTS

A Separate Peace

Teeth

Another Moon Called Earth

Neutral Ground

Professional Foul

Squaring the Circle

Parade’s End

FICTION

Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon

TOM STOPPARD

FIVE EUROPEAN PLAYS

On the Razzle © 1981, 1982 by Tom Stoppard

Rough Crossing © 1985 by David Alter, as Trustee, and Tom Stoppard

Undiscovered Country, English Translation © 1980 by Tom Stoppard

Dalliance, English Translation © 1986 by Tom Stoppard

Largo Desolato © 1985 by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Reinbek bei Hamburg

Largo Desolato © 1985 by Václav Havel

Published by arrangement with DILIA

Largo Desolato, English Version © 1987 by Tom Stoppard

Introduction © 2018 by Tom Stoppard

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On the Razzle first published in 1981 by Faber and Faber, Ltd.; Dalliance first published in 1986 by Faber and Faber, Ltd.; Undiscovered Country first published 1986 by Faber and Faber, Ltd.; Rough Crossing first published in 1985 by Faber and Faber, Ltd.; Largo Desolato first published in the United States in 1987 by Grove Press; Largo Desolato published by arrangement with Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Reinbek Bei Hamburg

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Five European Plays is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copy-right Convention. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

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First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: October 2018

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover

Praise for On the Razzle

Also by Andrew Keen

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Dedication

Epigraph

On the Razzle

From Johann Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich machen

Production Credits

Characters

Author’s Note

Act One

Act Two

Dalliance

Liebelei by Arthur Schnitzler

Production Credits

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Undiscovered Country

Das weite Land by Arthur Schnitzler

Production Credits

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Act Five

Rough Crossing

From Ferenc Molnár’s Játék a kastélyban

Production Credits

Characters

A Note on the Accents

Act One

Act Two

Largo Desolato

by Václav Havel

Characters

Back Cover

INTRODUCTION

A translation when commissioned by a theatre is bespoke. There is no common principle uniting these five. Two of them, On the Razzle and Rough Crossing, are so free as to question their claim to be translations at all, yet they are unalike in the liberty they take. In the case of the other three, the goal was an English version as faithful to the original as the translator could make it, but by that measure the results in the event were various, too.

Undiscovered Country is somewhat shorter than the German, partly owing to a decision to perform the play with one intermission instead of Schnitzler’s two. As a translator I don’t recall feeling disturbed on behalf of the author by these cuts, nor by my willingness in rehearsal to alter Schnitzler here and there in small ways to sharpen the pace beyond strict fidelity. As a playwright, of course, I might disapprove but a lifetime in making theatre teaches a degree of latitude. Translating a play is not a job for linguists. This is a position no doubt easier to maintain as a translator of a play than as a playwright in translation. Once, in Italy, watching a play of my own I couldn’t help noticing that a very large chunk of my second act had gone missing. When I enquired about this, the disarming reply was, ‘We thought we would perform what we had time to rehearse.’ So, on the whole, I count Undiscovered Country among the respectful of these translations.

I hope Schnitzler would put Dalliance in the same company. But it has to be said that the third act of Liebelei has been moved from a flat in a poor quarter of Vienna to the wings of the opera house during a rehearsal, complete with tenor, soprano, conductor, stage manager, and unseen musicians. The change was made by the director, and I insist that it was a brilliant stroke. At the end of Dalliance the heroine Christine, one of Schnitzler’s ‘sweet girls’ who exist to be seduced by the young bloods of the town, learns that her lover has been killed in a duel, and she runs off intent on dying on his grave. The imported mise-en-scene did not seem out of place, Christine’s father being a musician at the opera, and the duet between the unwitting singers turned the screw on the scene. Perhaps it was the singing that pushed me to an excess of ‘translation’, Christine’s final speech of vituperation. Looking now at these three invented lines, I would say they observe the spirit if not the letter. And having said so, I must add that by coincidence I have been reading ‘a translation manifesto’, Sympathy for the Traitor by Mark Polizzotti (2018) which quotes a nineteenth century critic thundering, ‘The instant a man says, "I will give you the spirit of the author …" it is all over with the original. Translation, in such a case, becomes a mere cover for individual egotism and vanity.’ Touché! But I won’t go back on my words. I can hear myself now, in rehearsal, making the case for Christine putting the boot in on her exit. It was 1986, and I was in no doubt I was serving the play, the character, the author, and the times; thus perhaps adding presumption to egotism.

Undiscovered Country and Dalliance were directed by Peter Wood, who knew Vienna and worked a few times at the Burgtheater, more than once with me as his author. At some point he discovered Johann Nestroy (1801–1862) who flourished as a comic actor and playwright in Vienna during the 1840s and ‘50s. Nestroy was prolific but wrote as a Viennese for Viennese, and it’s mainly in Vienna that his flame still burns, for his immersion in dialect and his inventive way with language make him, it has been said, ‘untranslatable, even into German.’ On the Razzle is an adaptation of Einen Jux will er sich machen, which is one of Nestroy’s most loved plays at home, as well as having a secret life almost everywhere else because it is the source of The Matchmaker, by Thornton Wilder, which was turned into Hello Dolly! The story is the mythic tale of two country mice escaping to town for a day of illicit freedom, adventure, mishap, and narrow escapes from discovery, with enough sub-plots to keep everything lively. Having grasped the mechanism I pretty much liberated myself from Nestroy’s dialogue and, so to speak, went on the razzle. En route for the National Theatre, we opened the play at the Edinburgh Festival, where the local authorities veto’d the ‘flaming pudding’ called for in my text. This was a blow. The ‘flaming pudding’ came at the climax of the restaurant scene. I suggested electric candles on a birthday cake and re-wrote to make it Madame Knorr’s birthday, and that’s how the play remained.

Rough Crossing has its origin in a play by the Hungarian Ferenc Molnár, which under the title The Play’s the Thing was presented in Great Neck, Long Island, New York, in 1926, ‘for the first time on any stage in any language’, as asserted in the Samuel French edition. In 1948, The Play’s the Thing, ‘adapted from the Hungarian by P.G. Wodehouse’, was a hit on Broadway. A literal translation of the Molnár was sent my way by Peter Wood and the National Theatre as a follow-up to On the Razzle. The Molnár, titled in translation Play at the Castle, is set, as is the Wodehouse, in a palatial house on the Italian Riviera. Rough Crossing is set on an ocean liner, and that’s not all: it includes my debut and swansong as a songwriter, music by André Previn, and a lot of ocean liner jokes. As I said above, a translation in this business is a bespoke affair. I elaborated the role of the ship’s steward for the actor (Michael Kitchen) who had unforgettably played the manservant in On the Razzle. It’s the steward who has the line which I remember as a shaft of light on the mysteries of live theatre. His employer asks him, ‘When do you sleep?’ The steward replies, ‘In the winter, sir.’ This little exchange is tucked away in Molnár’s second act, and I was intrigued and puzzled that Wodehouse had promoted it to be the curtain line of act one. The first time Rough Crossing was performed and ever after, the line was received with a gale of laughter, occasionally with applause. It was surefire. Did Wodehouse anticipate its effect, or did he move it astutely when he experienced it in action? Peter and I, however, did not move the line, for we already had our first act curtain. It was a song. Like the good ship SS Italian Castle, we had moved a long way from Molnár.

In sum, Largo Desolato is the only one of these five translations to cleave to its original, down to its very punctuation (Havel ends speeches with a dash instead of a full stop). The fact that the author was still living would have been reason enough, but there was more. I was personally invested in Havel’s play, which he dedicated to me. I met him in 1977 when he was under house arrest at his home in the country outside Prague. He wrote Largo Desolato in 1983 when he had been released from prison but was under constant surveillance. I was in no mind to serve his play through judicious cuts or ‘brilliant strokes.’

Peter Wood and I worked together on at least a dozen occasions from Jumpers (1972) to Indian Ink (1995), taking in the first performances of Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, and—in Vienna—the first German Arcadia. He was a teaching director, and I learned from watching him teach. He could be quiet and meditative, but his style was gregarious verging on flamboyant. His mode of address was theatrical verging on scatological. His rehearsals were full of jokes and laughter, too full, I sometimes thought, but sometimes he would make an actor cry. Actors, especially young actors, adored him, and the ones who didn’t vowed never to work with him again. He was a serious cook, which was a big plus for our working suppers in Warwick Avenue, and a serious gardener in his Somerset village, where latterly he liked to spend most of his time, with his dog True and his parrot Mrs. Siddons (inherited from one of his productions). Peter’s eightieth birthday party was in the village hall, attended mostly by villagers with just a few theatre folk from London. He told us how, as a country boy in town for the first time, he was at Liverpool Street station, en route to an interview for a place at the University of Cambridge, when a German bomb fell through the glass roof. He got his place at Cambridge, and at dinner in hall when he bowed his head at table there fell ‘a tinkle of glass and dust’ over his plate. ‘What on earth is that?’ enquired an elderly don. ‘It’s the roof of Liverpool Street station’, said Peter. He got to Cambridge and started to direct plays. His was the generation of Peter Hall and Peter Brook. When I was about twenty I saw his work for the first time, a revelatory production of The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill.

*

I dedicated Dalliance to Peter when it was first published. Undiscovered Country had no dedication, but when both plays came out in one volume I again dedicated the book to him. Over seven years, 1979 to 1986, Peter directed four of my translations. Fortuitously, all four are here between these covers.

In memoriam Peter Wood (1927–2016)

ON THE RAZZLE

from

Einen Jux will er sich machen

by Johann Nestroy

PRODUCTION CREDITS

On the Razzle was first performed on 1 September 1981 at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, as part of the 1981 Edinburgh International Festival, and opened to the press on 22 September 1981 at the Lyttelton Theatre.

The cast was as follows:

CHARACTERS

Weinberl

Christopher

Sonders

Marie

Zangler

Gertrud

Belgian Foreigner

Melchior

Hupfer

Philippine

Madame Knorr

Mrs Fischer

Coachman

Waiter One

Waiter Two

German Man

German Woman

Scots Man

Scots Woman

Constable

Lisette

Miss Blumenblatt

Ragamuffin

Piper, Citizens, Waiters, Customers, etc.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Although this text, like the first edition, is in two acts, the original production was done with two intermissions, the middle act beginning with ‘The Journey to Vienna’ and ending with the Restaurant Scene.

ACT ONE

Zangler’s shop.

In which customers are served with great panache by WEINBERL and CHRISTOPHER. MARIE is the cashier in a gilded cage. Old-fashioned spring-loaded canisters travel on wires between the cage and the counters. A chute delivers a large sack of flour from up above to a position behind Weinberl’s counter. There is a trap door to a cellar. SONDERS, incognito, is among the customers.

A town clock chimes the hour. Customers are being ushered out by Christopher. Sonders remains. Shop closing for lunch.

Zangler’s room can occupy the stage with the shop, the action moving between the two.

ZANGLER and GERTRUD. Zangler is usually worked up, as now. Gertrud never is.

ZANGLER My tailor has let me down again.

GERTRUD Yes, I can see.

ZANGLER No, you damned well can’t. I’m referring to my new uniform which hasn’t arrived yet, and today is the grand annual parade with the massed bands of the Sporting and Benevolent Societies of the Grocers’ Company. It’s enough to make one burst a bratwurst. I’ll feel such a fool … There I’ll be, president-elect and honorary whipper-in of the Friends of the Opera Fur and Feather Club, three times winner of the Johann Strauss Memorial Shield for duck-shooting, and I’ll have to appear before the public in my old uniform. Perhaps I’d better not go out at all. That fortune-hunter Sonders is after my ward.

GERTRUD My word.

ZANGLER My ward! I won’t rest easy until Marie is safely out of his reach. Now, don’t forget, Marie’s luggage is to be sent ahead to my sister-in-law’s, Miss Blumenblatt at twenty-three Carlstrasse.

GERTRUD Miss Blumenblatt’s.

ZANGLER What is the address?

GERTRUD Twenty-three Carlstrasse.

ZANGLER What is it?

GERTRUD Twenty-three Carlstrasse.

ZANGLER Very well. Marie can stay with her until Sonders finds some other innocent girl to pursue, and furthermore it will stop the little slut from chasing after him. I’m damned sure they’re sending messages to each other but I can’t work out how they’re doing it.

Zing! In the shop—now closed—a cash-canister zings along the wire to Marie in her gilded cage.

Zangler’s shop.

The shop is closed. Weinberl and Christopher are absent. Sonders, half hidden, has sent the canister. Zangler is on to him.

ZANGLER Sonders!

MARIE Uncle!

SONDERS Herr Zangler!

ZANGLER Unhand my foot, sir!

SONDERS I love your niece!

ZANGLER (outraged) My knees, sir? (mollified) Oh, my niece. (outraged) Well, my niece and I are not to be prised apart so easily, and nor are hers, I hope I make my meaning clear?

SONDERS Marie must be mine!

ZANGLER Never! She is a star out of thy firmament, Sonders! I am a Zangler, provision merchant to the beau-monde, top board for the Cheesemongers and number three in the Small Bore Club.

SONDERS Only three?

ZANGLER Do you suppose I’d let my airedale be hounded up hill and—my heiress be mounted up hill and bank by a truffle-hound—be trifled with and hounded by a mountebank?! Not for all the tea in China! Well, I might for all the tea in China, or the rice—no, that’s ridiculous—the preserved ginger then—no, let’s say half the tea, the ginger, a shipment of shark-fin soup double-discounted just to take it off your hands—

SONDERS All you think about is money!

ZANGLER All I think about is money! As far as I’m concerned any man who interferes with my Marie might as well have his hand in my till!

SONDERS I make no secret of the fact that I am not the éminence grise of Oriental trade, but I have expectations, and no outstanding debts.

A man, a FOREIGNER, visible in the street, starts knocking on the shop door. Marie has emerged from her cage and goes to deal with it.

FOREIGNER Grus Grott! (He enters and shakes hands all round.)

ZANGLER We’re closed for lunch. What expectations?

FOREIGNER Enshuldigen!

ZANGLER Closed!

FOREIGNER Mein heren! Ich nicht ein customer …

ZANGLER What did he say?

MARIE I don’t know, Uncle, I think he’s a foreigner.

FOREIGNER Gut morgen—geshstattensie—bitte shorn—danke shorn …

ZANGLER We’re closed! Open two o’clock!

FOREIGNER Ich comen looken finden Herr Sonders.

ZANGLER Here! Sonders!

FOREIGNER Herr Sonders?

ZANGLER No, there Sonders.

FOREIGNER Herr Sonders? Ich haben ein document.

ZANGLER He’s a creditor!

FOREIGNER Herr Sonders!

ZANGLER No debts, eh?

FOREIGNER Ja—dett!—

SONDERS Nein, nein—I’m busy. Comen backen in the morgen.

Sonders ushers the foreigner out of the shop. The foreigner is in fact a legal messenger who has come from Belgium to announce the death of Sonders’s rich aunt. He succeeds in this endeavour at the end of the play.

ZANGLER I thought you said you had no debts!

SONDERS No outstanding debts—run-of-the-mill debts I may have. I probably overlooked my hatter, who is a bit short. But as for my expectations, Herr Zangler, I have the honour to inform you that I have a rich aunt in Brussels.

ZANGLER A rich aunt in Brussels! I reel, I totter, I am routed from the field! A rich aunt in Brussels—I’m standing here with my buttons undone and he has a rich aunt in Brussels.

SONDERS She’s going to leave me all her money.

ZANGLER When is that?

SONDERS When she’s dead, of course.

ZANGLER Listen, I know Brussels. Your auntie will be sitting up in bed in a lace cap when Belgium produces a composer.

SONDERS I hope so because while she lives I know she’ll make me a liberal allowance.

ZANGLER A liberal allowance!? How much is that in Brussels? I’m afraid I never do business on the basis of grandiloquent coinage, and in the lexicon of the false prospectus ‘a liberal allowance’ is the alpha and oh my God, how many times do I have to tell you?—I will not allow my ward to go off and marry abroad.

SONDERS Then I’ll stay here and marry her, if that’s your wont.

ZANGLER And meanwhile in Brussels your inheritance will be eaten to the bone by codicils letting my wont wait upon her will like the poor cat with the haddock.

SONDERS The what?

ZANGLER Look to the aunt! Don’t waste your time mooning and skulking around my emporium—I’m sending Marie away to a secret address where you will never find her, search how you will. (to Gertrud who has entered with Zangler’s old uniform) What is it?!

GERTRUD Twenty-three Carlstrasse, Miss Blumenblatt’s.

SONDERS Twenty-three Carlstrasse …! Miss Blumenblatt’s!

ZANGLER (spluttering) You old—you stupid—

GERTRUD Should I let Marie have the new travelling case?

ZANGLER —old baggage!

GERTRUD Not the new travelling case …

SONDERS (leaving) My humble respects …

GERTRUD Here is your old uniform. And the new servant has arrived.

SONDERS Your servant, ma’am!

GERTRUD His.

Sonders goes.

ZANGLER You prattling old fool, who asked you to open your big mouth?

GERTRUD You’re upset. I can tell.

ZANGLER Where is Marie?

GERTRUD She’s upstairs trying on her Scottish travelling outfit you got her cheap from your fancy.

ZANGLER My fancy? My fiancée! A respectable widow and the Madame of ‘Madame Knorr’s Fashion House.’

GERTRUD I thought as much—so it’s a betrothal.

ZANGLER No it isn’t, damn your nerve, it’s a hat and coat shop! Now get out and send in the new servant. And don’t let Marie out of your sight. If she and Sonders exchange so much as a glance while I’m gone I’ll put you on cabbage-water till you can pass it back into the souppot without knowing the difference.

Exit Gertrud.

This place is beginning to lose its chic for me. I bestride the mercantile trade of this parish like a colossus, and run a bachelor establishment second to none as far as the eye can see, and I’m surrounded by village idiots and nincompetent poops of every stripe. It’s an uphill struggle trying to instil a little tone into this place.

There is a knock on the door.

Entrez!

There is a knock on the door.

(Furiously) Come in!

Enter MELCHIOR.

MELCHIOR Excuse me, are you the shopkeeper, my lord?

ZANGLER You do me too much honour and not enough. I am Herr Zangler, purveyor of high-class provisions.

MELCHIOR I understand you are in desperate need of a servant.

ZANGLER You understand wrong. There’s no shortage of rogues like you, only of masters like me to give them gainful employment.

MELCHIOR That’s classic. And very true. A good servant will keep for years, while masters like you are being ruined every day. How’s business by the way?—highly provisional, I trust?

ZANGLER You strike me as rather 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.

ZANGLER Have you got a testimonial?

MELCHIOR (producing a tattered paper) I have, sir. And it’s a classic, if I say so myself.

ZANGLER Do you have any experience in the field of mixed merchandise?

MELCHIOR Definitely, I’m always mixing it.

ZANGLER Well, I must say, I have never seen a testimonial like it.

MELCHIOR It’s just a bit creased, that’s all.

ZANGLER ‘Honest, industrious, enterprising, intelligent, responsible, cheerful, imaginative, witty, well-spoken, modest, in a word classic …’

MELCHIOR When do you want me to start?

ZANGLER Just a moment, aren’t you forgetting the interview?

MELCHIOR So I am—how much are you paying?

ZANGLER Six guilders a week, including laundry.

MELCHIOR I don’t do laundry.

ZANGLER I mean the housekeeper will wash your shirts.

MELCHIOR That’s classic. I like to be clean.

ZANGLER And board, of course.

MELCHIOR Clean and bored.

ZANGLER And lodging.

MELCHIOR Clean and bored and lodging—

ZANGLER All included.

MELCHIOR Ah, board and lodging. How about sharing a bed?

ZANGLER I won’t countenance immorality.

MELCHIOR Own bed. As for the board, at my last place it was groaning fit to bust, the neighbours used to bang on the walls.

ZANGLER I assure you, no one goes hungry here: soup, beef, pudding, all the trimmings.

MELCHIOR Classic. I always have coffee with my breakfast.

ZANGLER It has never been the custom here for the servant to have coffee.

MELCHIOR You wouldn’t like me to drink liquor from the stock.

ZANGLER Certainly not.

MELCHIOR I should prefer to avoid the temptation.

ZANGLER I’m glad to hear it.

MELCHIOR Agreed, then.

ZANGLER What? Well, if you do a good job … coffee then.

MELCHIOR From the pot?

ZANGLER Ad liberandum.

MELCHIOR Is that yes or no?

ZANGLER Yes.

MELCHIOR Sounds classic. Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?

ZANGLER No … I don’t think so.

MELCHIOR Well, that seems satisfactory. You won’t regret this, sir—I have always parted with my employers on the best of terms.

ZANGLER You have never been sacked?

MELCHIOR Technically, yes, but only after I have let it be known by subtle neglect of my duties that the job has run its course.

ZANGLER That’s very considerate.

MELCHIOR I don’t like to cause offence by giving notice—in a servant it looks presumptuous.

ZANGLER That shows modesty.

MELCHIOR Your humble servant, sir.

ZANGLER Yes, all right.

MELCHIOR Classic!

ZANGLER Only you’ll have to stop using that word. It’s stupid.

MELCHIOR There’s nothing stupid about the word. It’s just the way some people use it without discrimination.

ZANGLER Do they?

MELCHIOR Oh yes. It’s absolutely classic. What are my duties?

ZANGLER Your duties are the duties of a servant. To begin with you can make my old uniform look like new—and if that tailor shows his face tell him to go to hell.

Enter tailor, HUPFER. Hupfer brings with him Zangler’s new uniform on a tailor’s dummy. The complete rig-out includes a ridiculous hat with feathers etc., polished riding boots with monstrous shining and very audible spurs, and the uniform itself which is top heavy with