Jumpers (play)

A significant element of the play is George's unavailing efforts to define 'Good' and other philosophical abstractions in which he demonstrates his foolishness and lack of connection with the real world.

The British Moon landing parodies the 1910-1913 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole led by Robert Falcon Scott since the astronauts, rather than dying together, turn on one another in adversity.

[2] Directed again by Peter Wood, with choreography and staging by Dennis Nahat and original music by Claus Ogerman, it featured Brian Bedford and Jill Clayburgh.

[citation needed] In 1984, Nicholas Hytner directed a production at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, with Tom Courtenay as George, Julie Walters as Dotty and John Bennett as Archie.

[6] Benedict Nightingale lauded the play as achieving a combination of social criticism and metaphysics "with a theatrical extravagance that verges on the outrageous, [and] with a nice sense of individual character".

Despite describing the Court Theatre performance he attended as somewhat uninvolving, Christiansen argued that "Stoppard keeps [the play's] disparate forces laced together with bouncy wordplay and knockabout comedy".

[12] Theresa Montana Sabo said that "the action of the play dramatizes in many rich and funny ways the philosophical issues which George develops in his monologues and arguments".

[9] The Independent's Robert Hanks, discussing the play in 2003, said that some plot points anticipated a cabinet reshuffle by Tony Blair (which was described as revealing a thirst for radical constitutional reform[13]), and praised "the pathos of George's situation".

[16] Ben Brantley of The New York Times billed Jumpers as "a poignant acknowledgment of the limits of cleverness [...] Like George, 'Jumpers' can seem all too swept up in its own cerebral whimsy.

[22] Lizzie Loveridge wrote, "Whilst Jumpers is a comedy with the usual string of brilliant Stoppardian witticisms and clever observations, it is quite difficult to follow as an integrated whole.

[...] Reading the play as text is difficult in places because of the interjection of the numerous and bizarre stage directions which are hard to visualise when you haven't seen them and harder to interpret when you have.

The second act works at a better pace and gels as a piece of theatre though not as drama, since the issues raised in the first half, both human and abstract, remain unresolved".