Enter a Free Man, by Tom Stoppard

I’m a huge Tom Stoppard fan and have been since high school. He never fails to disappoint. A number of years ago I stumbled upon a used copy of one of the Stoppard works I had not read, Enter a Free Man. This is a reworked play from 1968 based upon Stoppard’s earlier A Walk on Water (1960). I purchased it years ago but never got around to reading it. I usually would read the first couple of pages and then abandon it altogether. That happened at least twice. Not sure why. Last night I ended up reading the entire play in one sitting after having finished The Aeneid. Remarkably I found it to be quick and easy read.

The story is about George Riley, a perpetually unemployed and failed inventor living with his wife and his 19-year old daughter, the latter who supports the family with her income. Every Saturday George leaves home (“This time for good!”), swearing never to return, to go down to the pub where he entertains the denizens with his half-truth, half-imaginary exploits and new, glorious invention. Wealth and success are always just around the corner. There is a tinge of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in this.

And while the pub scenes are classic 1960s-1970s Stoppard with their kaleidoscope of wit, word play, humor, and farce, the family scenes are much more dramedy and resemble similar stylistic approaches that Stoppard would embrace fully in 1982’s The Real Thing and after. This is sort of pleasantly surprising to me. He always had it in him to do dramedy, he just preferred mostly comedy during his early period.

I also note in this play a hint of the undercurrent of cyclical plots that Stoppard employed in his previous Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966) and his next The Real Inspector Hound (1968). In this there is the suggestion that the story continued after the curtain closes and that the characters in the play continue the same pattern of plot and behavior indefinitely. George Riley will always leave home in frustration, he will always threaten to never come back, he will always regale his pub retinue, he will always come home that night, and he will always be an unemployed, failed inventor.

In this particular cycle, George believes he has found a great new idea in reusable envelopes. He continues to put his family under pressure just as his daughter has begun searching for her own independence in the form of men. She wants to leave home but feels obligated to stay and support her family. Thus she continues to encourage and frustratingly ridicule George into finding a job or at least going on unemployment. This is the cause of much fighting and George’s desire to leave home for good. While George threatens to leave and Linda tries, the play concludes with everyone in the same position in which they had begun the story. Naturally and expectedly, the reusable envelope idea fails. However, the touching, final moments of the play show George promising to seek work the next morning, just as one of his latest inventions (in-door rain for the naturally watering of household plants) looks like it has worked … only to exhibit it’s fatal flaw: how do you turn it off if it doesn’t stop raining? A humorously cute ending to a very well-crafted dramedy.