Sir Tom Stoppard’s Early Works.
5. Albert Bridge
Sir Tom Stoppard’s Albert’s Bridge (Radio, 1967) develops similar themes to his earlier works, concentrating specifically on the opposition between chaos and order. Like John Brown in A Separate Peace (1960), Albert cannot bear the chaos of everyday life and seeks an escape into a more orderly existence. In A Separate Peace, the problem was presented largely in terms of physical circumstances, the hospital being a more orderly world than the outside world. In Albert’s Bridge, physical circumstances are equated with conceptual or psychological factors, which belong to the subjective world of individual perception. Thus, the tranquility that Albert finds high up among the geometrically ordered bridge girders, far from the human demands of his wife and child, is equated with the concept of viewing life from a distance, rather than seeing it close up.
Albert: ‘The benches are alphabetized with various bricks, kiddiblocks with windows; Tiny toys move through the gaps, dodged by moving dots that have no color… It’s the most expensive toy town in the store, the detail is remarkable.’
Kate: I saw you today… coming out of the hairdresser’s. Six and six, they cut it off.
Albert: Just for show: if you go far enough, sixpence and sixpence don’t show, and neither does anything, in the distance.
Kate: Well, life is very close, isn’t it?
Albert: Yeah, it hits you when you come back down. (pp. 22-23.)
This concept of variable perspective is reinforced by Frazer, a potential suicide who climbs onto the bridge to jump. But from the top of the bridge he escapes from the pressure caused by his despair and that is why he no longer wants to jump. Back on the ground, the pressure builds again and he climbs back onto the bridge, so he spends his time repeatedly going up and down the bridge. He explains:-
I can’t help it. They force me up and they force me down. I am a victim of perspective. (p. 35.)
Albert becomes completely dependent on his work, eventually abandoning his wife and son in favor of the bridge. His family life is ruined by his desire for order. However, his situation does not last, the bridge finally collapses when 1,800 painters march on it without breaking stride; an excess of order at the physical level. The authorities have called in the army of painters because in planning the most economical way to paint the bridge, like George Riley from Enter a Free Man, they have relied entirely on logic and forgotten common sense; an excess of order at the mental level. Thus, the work illustrates, on several levels, the thesis that an excess of order causes collapse due to the rupture of some kind of natural balance.
The four works discussed so far (A Separate Peace, Enter a Free Man, If You Rejoice, I’ll Be Frank) have a unity as a group or cycle of works. They are unified by the themes they explore and the methods by which they explore them. It is worth summarizing the observations made so far, as a basis for discussing Stoppard’s main works. Each of the ‘heroes’ is an individual struggling to establish some kind of relationship with the rest of the world. In the end, they all fail to achieve what they were fighting for; “the world” asserts its superior power over the individual. The struggle is seen in terms of a series of dialectical oppositions, and failure arises not because one side of the argument is “wrong” but because one side has asserted itself to the exclusion of the other. other. Opposing principles take a number of forms; Chaos versus Order, Freedom versus Responsibility, Illusion versus Reality, Logic versus Common Sense, the Individual versus ‘The Establishment’, etc.
The key to dealing with these seemingly irreconcilable opposites is the concept of perspective. The world is too chaotic for John Brown and Albert, and too rigid for Gladys and Frank. But it is the same world. The way we see the world depends on the way we look at it; reality is relative. This is the heart of the ‘world picture’ established by Stoppard in his early minor works. He continues to expand and elaborate on this point of view in his longer works Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Jumpers, and he makes a definitive statement with Travesties.
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