Rough Crossing
by Tom Stoppard
State Theatre Company.

Playhouse.

Tom Stoppard is well on the way to becoming a noun. A stoppard could be the kind of play you write while you are waiting to write a play, a mot boiler, probably retreaded from an obscure, Hapsburg whimsy by Nestroy. Or even Ferenc Molnar, whose The Play at the Castle dined on the ‘well-made’ confections of Victorien Sardou and was itself snaffled by P. G. Wodehouse to become The Play’s the Thing. Then the arch-snaffler Stoppard put it on a boat to New York and called it Rough Crossing.

The pity is that Stoppard has written highly distinctive, clever plays, such as Rosencranz and Gildenstern are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Professional. Foul and others, which revealed the universe as a non-sequitur and the problem of knowledge as gravely funny. He has a remarkable sense of the quirks and betrayals of language but, of late, his facility has become facile and, in plays like The Real Thing, his views have become self-servingly reactionary.

Rough Crossing in having no pretense to ideas exempts itself from scrutiny but nevertheless insists on admiration for its, verbal guile. Stoppard toys with the conventions of theatrical decorum by having a character arrive on stage when he is still supposed to be at the other end of a telephone conversation and another nonchalantly providing absurd amounts of continuity information, but his heart isn’t in it.

The Molnar /Wodehouse/Stoppard story revolves around two playwrights – Sandor Turai (Dennis Olsen) and Alex Gal (Henri Szeps) who only have until they reach New York to finish a play for immediate production. The play emerges from within the play when they persuade their lovelorn young musical collaborator Adam Adam (Paul Goddard) that the farewell tryst which he accidently overhears between his fiance Natasha (Tina Bursill) and the well-known cad Ivor Fish (Donald McDonald) is in fact only the actors rehearsing new lines for a play. If you can follow that. Stoppard likes these Chinese boxes.

Weaving through all this is Dvornichek (Ronald Falk), a newly recruited steward who doesn’t know a chimney from a funnel and can’t tell port from a cognac. It is Dvornichek who doubles as Murphy, breathless provider of the story-so-far. He also fails to serve nine cognacs to Turai before that particular balloon bursts.

Act I has the makings of snappy comedy and lingering absurdity when for instance, the young Adam’s time-lapse speech impediment puts his remarks permanently out of synch with Turai and Gal. But having established his comic situation Stoppard does little after interval except give the ludicrous plot a galumphing and unsurprising resolution.

Presented with such an able cast, director John Gaden has creditably shown an actor’s deference to peers, but Rough Crossing is under-directed. After all, the only way to make a flummery is to whip it into shape. Instead the actors are not only in different verbal solar systems, they are in different acting ones as well.

Dennis Olsen gave a strong impression that he’d rather not be there. Paul Goddard had his moments in Act I but was left draped over the piano for most of Act ll and McDonald and Bursill clung to their few good lines like lifebelts. It remained for the inventive Henri Szeps to produce some quietly comic business and Ronald Falk to pump his part full of over-agitated, but welcome, adrenalin to keep the show afloat.

Also on the plus side, Eamon D’ Arcy’s nautical decor is stylishly Cunard with double decking for eavesdropping and antechambers for conspiracies and John Comeadow’s lighting is creamily ambient. And while it may have been a coup for the playwright to have original songs from Andre Previn, the hat-and-cane finale was the giddy limit for what can only be called shoddy writing. Stoppard has said that he likes to try his hand at all sorts of theatre as five finger exercises. That may be true, but audiences to Rough Crossing might not be blamed for thinking that this Stoppard exercise is a two finger one instead.

“Choppy” The Adelaide Review, July, 1988. p.26.