Rough Crossing

About Rough Crossing

found in translation:
Ferenc MolnÁr and Tom Stoppard

 

God Save the Queen

In the 1910s and 1920s, he was one of the most popular playwrights in New York.

His rollicking farces and wrenching melodramas were adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Preston Sturges, and Arthur Miller. His productions featured luminaries like Eva Le Gallienne and Charles Laughton, and his films were star vehicles for Sophia Loren, Deanna Durbin, and James Cagney, to name just a few. Though today few of us know his name, Ferenc Molnár remains one of America’s best loved, and least known, writers.

Born in Budapest in 1878, Molnár served as a foreign correspondent during World War I, then began writing novels (most famously, the coming-of-age tale The Paul Street Boys) as well as drama and short stories. His writing, admired by theatre giants Brecht and Pirandello, fused wit and farce with urban and naturalistic themes, reflecting the increasingly cosmopolitan atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Budapest.

But his urbane sensibility also gave Molnár an appeal reaching far beyond Hungary’s borders. His most famous contribution to American culture is the 1909 play Liliom—which, in the hands of Rodgers and Hammerstein, became the 1945 hit musical Carousel. Arthur Miller adapted The Guardsman, a 1910 Molnár work, into a radio play which was later made into a film of the same name. The film version of Molnár’s The Swan marked the last screen appearance by Grace Kelly, filmed the same year she became Princess Grace of Monaco. Billy Wilder (incidentally, also an Eastern European import) brought Molnár’s One, Two, Three to the silver screen, while P. G. Wodehouse translated The Play at the Castle as The Play’s the Thing thirty years before Tom Stoppard reworked it into Rough Crossing.

Molnár fled Hungary in 1937 to escape Nazi persecution and died an unwilling ex-pat in New York in 1952. Though Molnár was never happy living as an American, Anglophone enthusiasm for his work continued unabated—a testament to the deep intelligence and delight in stagecraft that lie below the glimmering surfaces of his comic works. As he once wrote, simply, “I have never left a theater in all my life with the feeling that I have wasted the evening.”

Tom Stoppard is widely renowned for applying his omnivorous intellect and razor wit to philosophical, even existential, ends.

In plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia, and Travesties, he tackles some of the weightiest topics of all time: physics and philosophy, the relationship between art and life, and the perennial complexities of love. Outsized figures populate his stages—James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and Tristan Tzara, to name a few—and his plots parse epoch-defining ideas, from the roots of political radicalism to the fate of the modern avant-garde.

But not all of Stoppard’s works are bound for the coasts of Utopia—some of them, like Rough Crossing, are pure pleasure cruises. Rough Crossing is “freely adapted” (Stoppard’s words) from a 1926 Hungarian comedy by the immensely popular Ferenc Molnár. In fact, one of Stoppard’s ongoing dramatic projects has been the introduction of comedy from his native Eastern Europe (he was born in the former Czechoslovakia in 1937) to the English-speaking world.

One of his best-known comedies, 1981’s On the Razzle—a romantic farce brimming with wordplay, crossed plot-lines, and false identities—is an adaptation of nineteenth-century Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich machen (roughly translated, “He’ll Have Himself a Good Time”). That adaptation, as it happens, is only one stop on that play’s transatlantic journey: in addition to On the Razzle, the 1842 Nestroy work served as source material for Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker and, from there, for the musical Hello, Dolly!.

Stoppard has also explored some of Eastern Europe’s least-traveled comic terrain: both Undiscovered Country, a 1979 play of melodrama and manners, and Dalliance, a romantic drama from 1986, are adaptations of earlier works by Austrian playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler. Schnitzler, whose sexually explicit writing incited scandal (and inspired the admiration of Freud) in pre-World War II Vienna, shared Stoppard’s obsessions with language, philosophy, and love’s deep complications.

In bringing these plays—written by notoriously challenging playwrights and in notoriously complex languages—from east to west, Stoppard has done far more than literal translation. His adaptations are works of cross-cultural alchemy, infusing Eastern European comedies with the kind of sparkling language, satirical verve, and erudite ironies that are as native to London as Shakespeare or Shaw.

And now Rough Crossing—which displays Stoppard’s talents as a show-stopping juggler of plots, themes, and characters—docks in New Haven to add, in the spirit of Stoppard himself, yet another layer of cultural translation to its continuing theatrical voyage.

—MIRIAM FELTON-DANSKY
Production Dramaturg