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the complete review - TV script

Professional Foul

by
Tom Stoppard

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : clever idea, quite well done

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "(T)he play still manages to generate considerable and admirable narrative and ideological suspense. It's an ingeniously urgent piece of work. (...) The menace of a totalitarian society is conveyed with cunning economy in Stoppard's script" - Tom Shales, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       In Professional Foul Czech-born Stoppard returns to his homeland. The setting is 1977 -- the year of Charter -- and politics is front and center.
       The play centers around an international "Colloquium Philosophicum" (the description giving some idea of the rarefied scholarly air the attendees move about in) held in Prague, which a number of English academics attend. One of them is Cambridge professor Anderson, who is, in fact, far more interested in the England-Czechoslovakia World Cup qualifier that is to be played at the same time. He has a ticket for the match and plans to skip out of the conference to watch it.
       Anderson is to deliver a paper on ethics, but theory and praxis of course find themselves at odds soon enough. A former student of Anderson's shows up at his hotel room. Pavel Hollar returned to Czechoslovakia and got into trouble after the 1968 uprising: no more airy philosophy for him. Instead he now works as a cleaner (of lavatories and the like). But having heard his old teacher will be in town he quickly wrote his doctoral thesis -- on ethics, of course -- and wants Anderson to smuggle it out of the country.
       Anderson declines to do so: he feels it would be unethical, as though he were obligated to his criminal Czech hosts: "having accepted their hospitality I cannot in all conscience start smuggling ... you know ... it's just not ethical." Hollar accepts this, but asks that Anderson himself return the thesis to him the next day: Hollar doesn't dare carry it home because he might be searched and it might be confiscated (and it is, of course, his only copy).
       The base corruption of the regime is revealed to Anderson soon enough (Hollar's worst fears and more are quickly realized) and, perhaps worse, they cause him to miss the football game. It changes his view of things and of acts. The football match saw a "professional foul" -- a last desperate foul to prevent a goal -- and Anderson begins to understand the need for the occasional desperate and wrong act, for the better good (though in the case of the professional foul the Czechs converted the penalty too).
       Anderson delivers a different paper than originally intended at the colloquium -- which doesn't go over very big with his hosts. He also decides to try and help Hollar, committing a professional foul in the process, to the disappointment of at least one fellow philosopher.

       Professional Foul gives a good picture of the perverse and petty Czech-communist regime around 1977, and the difficulties of intellectual life there. It contrasts nicely with the holier than thou English academics, standing on ethical principles in a world perverted beyond all reason -- though it doesn't feel entirely realistic: some of these professors are too pathetic in their embrace only of the abstract, and from the first no one could expect anything but that Anderson would come to his senses. Still, there is some decent philosophic debate here -- and reality, in the form of the Czech regime and the English footballers, makes for an often striking contrast.
       Stoppard makes some nice points, and there is clever dialogue here (the philosophy, the football). Still, the play seems too close to events (Charter 77 and so one), and is too simple a take on them. Ethics, too, aren't as simple as Stoppard makes them out to be here. Stoppard doesn't seem to have the proper distance to really handle this material. It still is quite an effective piece, but not nearly as good as it might have been if he had more often eschewed the obvious.

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Links:

• Faber publicity page
• Grove publicity page
• IMDb page

• The Washington Post

• The complete review's Tom Stoppard page
• Tom Stoppard at the British Council
• An Overview of Tom Stoppard's Career at CurtainUp

• Arcadia
• The Coast of Utopia:
  • Part I - Voyage
  • Part II - Shipwreck
  • Part III - Salvage
• Enter a Free Man
• Every Good Boy Deserves Favour
• Hapgood
• The Invention of Love
• Jumpers
• Night and Day
• The Real Thing
• Rock 'n' Roll

• The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. Katherine E. Kelly
• Conversations with Stoppard (with Mel Gussow)
• Ira Nadel's Double Act (also: Tom Stoppard: A Life)
• John Fleming's Stoppard's Theatre

• See Index of Drama under review
• See Index of Screenplays

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About the Author:

       British dramatist Tom Stoppard, born in 1937, is author of such notable plays as Arcadia and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

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