The Theater: Ping Pong Philosopher

British Playwright Tom Stoppard chain-smokes ideas like cigarettes and emits the smoke with puffs of mirth. The latest display of his intellectual curiosity, verbal agility and quirky sense of humor is Jumpers (TIME, March 11), a comedy currently on view at Manhattan's Billy Rose Theater. Jumpers is a philosophical roller coaster careering dizzyingly along the parallel tracks of wit and logic over such subjects as the existence or nonexistence of God, the nature of good and evil, and the interdependence of ethics and metaphysics.

It is a breath-stopping ride. Among the passengers are George, an absent-minded professor of moral philosophy absorbed in his upcoming lecture billed "Man—Good, Bad or Indifferent?"; his ex-showgirl-songstress wife Dotty; and her psychiatrist lover, Sir Archibald Jumper, who is the vice chancellor and pragmatic villain of the college where George teaches. More bizarre companions include George's secretary, who likes to striptease while swinging by her teeth from a chandelier; a troupe of yellow-clad acrobats ("a mixture of the more philosophical members of the university gymnastics team and the more gymnastic members of the philosophy school"); and a corpse in a plastic bag named McFee.

Born in Zlin. Though Stoppard ravels and unravels the destinies of these characters, that is not his prime concern. Utilizing the Socratic method of perpetual questioning, he is assessing the destinies of 20th century man in a Shavian play of jousting ideas. In dramatic kinship, Jumpers is a child of Shaw's Heartbreak House. In that play, written shortly before World War I, Shaw dramatized the sundering of the social fabric of Western civilization. Stoppard is concerned with the moral fabric, the abyss of nonbelief. He sees man, devoid of metaphysical absolutes, as rending his fellow man and reducing the planet to a desolate, lifeless cipher rather like the moon, which is a key symbol in Jumpers.

Stoppard, with his large, luminous brown eyes that seem to pierce both inward and outward, is a bit of a moon gazer. His background, like his voice, has a trace of the exotic. He was born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937 as Thomas Straussler. When he was two years old, his father, a doctor, moved to Singapore. As the Japanese began infiltrating Southeast Asia, Tom, his mother and his older brother were sent on to India. (His father later died in a Japanese prison camp.) Tom learned English in Darjeeling. Taking his stepfather's name, he arrived in England in 1946 as Tom Stoppard.

At 17 he quit school to sign on as a cub reporter with a Bristol paper. Starting on the police beat, he was eventually reviewing films and plays. In retrospect, he says, "I didn't really enjoy it. I felt I was a critic by instinct, not by credentials. I kept thinking I only put into print what other people were saying in the bar during intermission." Nonetheless, he made amusing use of the experience later when he wrote The Real Inspector Hound (TIME, May 8, 1972), a caustic spoof of two rather addlepated drama critics flexing their cliches on an Agatha Christie-style mystery thriller.