ARTIST DESCENDING A STAIRCASE
Anticipating other time-machine plays like Pinter’s Betrayal and David Hare’s Plenty, Artist reverses course in order to show how pivotal moments in the characters’ past haunt their present, how the despair of artists injured by love makes them want to crowd life out of their creations.
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It seems complicated, but Stoppard writes these symmetrical, dovetailing scenes so forcefully and with such telling detail that it’s easy to connect the splintered halves. And the further the action recedes, the better we see later events, including a possible murder and a suicide.
As the scenes rewind, we come closer and closer to glimpsing the cause not just of one man’s demise, but of the creative stagnation that afflicts all three artists. Donner, disillusioned by the irrelevance of art to human need, in 1972 is reduced to fabricating edible art, like a Michelangelo miniature made of sugar; his answer to world hunger is “Let them eat art.” The soft-spoken Martello, wary of “mental acrobatics,” contents himself with sculpting an aggressively metaphorical bust of a woman with straw hair and teeth made from fake pearl. Beauchamp, of course, is stuck trying to pass off aimless audio art as something vital.
But it’s not just Sophie’s end that disturbs them. Though she’s not an artist, the sensitive blind girl demonstrated a capacity for pure inspiration that eludes her talented lovers. Free of the visual world (except for her memory of a photo), Sophie embodied in her life the ideal they sought in vain on canvas. (Equally threatening is the fact that Sophie preferred the Pre-Raphaelites to the modernists; only blind faith sustained the latter, she believed, in their failing vision.)
If the eye is fooled in Joseph Sadowski’s cunning staging, the mind is happy to be dazzled. Sadowski has fleshed out the stories with tender loving care (the English accents are impeccable). You can almost hear the clicks as Stoppard’s marvelous invention falls neatly into place.
