Jacques and His Servant is a dramatic variation on the famous eighteenth-century novel by Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist. The original, Jacques the Fatalist, is arguably the most radical and one of the most subversive books in the history of western literature. The theater has not had the equal of Jacques in subversiveness, or in disregard for classical form, although some of the plays of Beckett (Endgame, for instance, or Waiting for Godot or Happy Days) might qualify, and so might Alfred Jarry's blasphemous Ubu Roi.
Kundera's play is a variation on the original, not an adaptation of it. As the author notes in his introductory essay, an adaptation reduces its original, where a variation takes inspiration from it. Thus this play does not replicate the novel; it takes flight from it, the best form of homage. Jacques's is the anti-unity story par excellence: there is neither unity of place nor time nor narrative thrust, and the characters depicted in it, though real enough for the play's purpose, are neither realistic nor in any way sentimental. They talk about ideas as much as about feelings, and the narrative stream is constantly interrupted by digressions, interruptions and side-stories. Jacques is the least prudish of novels: this play carries that tradition forward: the dialogue is often bawdy, at times outright scurrilous. It is interesting: reading the dialogue in Diderot's novel, one is amused but not shocked but reading similar dialogue in Kundera's play, and knowing it is meant to be read aloud for an audience of others, the words shock in their bluntness and their earthiness. Jacques's repeated bragging about how he has cuckolded his best friend, for instance, and his master's acceptance of Jacques's boasting, seems raw even in the light of today's relaxed mores. It's not that we don't do these things, but we don't talk about them as dispassionately as Jacques and his master do.
Plot is pretty much irrelevant to this play, as it was to the novel it came from. As much as there is a story line, it isn't linear but it relates three separate instances of lechery, which turn out to be variations on the same theme. The subtexts are philosophical and literary, and resolutely intellectual -anti-emotional: first, that what happens (= is written) in the world, happens (this is fatalism); second, that we constantly relive (= re-edit) our lives, so life's meaning and import changes with time.
The play ends with the master asking Jacques to tell him where they should head next. Jacques objects: how can he lead the way if neither of them knows where they are going. The master insists and Jacques says, "all right then ... forward." The master asks which direction is forward. "Let me tell you a great secret," says Jacques, "One of mankind's oldest tricks. Forward is anywhere." And that is Kundera's (and Diderot's as well) last bit of wisdom for his audience as the master and Jacques stumble off the stage.
*****
(I have loved Kundera since I first read his Laughable Loves. Of all the writers I have read, he is most like Diderot, my favorite Enlightenment writer and thinker and one of my heroes. I've felt for a long time that Kundera deserves a Nobel Prize: his writing is amazing.
(I read this play again because I hoped to convince the artistic director of the Prospect Theater Project that it was a good candidate for a Readers' Theater production this coming year. I had bought and read it when it first came out in English in 1985. In the twenty, almost twenty-five years since then, my memory had simplified the script into a two-character venture, with lots of dialogue but little action to take into account, like the closet drama of the late Roman Empire. But when I read the play over again, I found it has lots of action and even with doubling parts, it requires five actors, two women and three men, to mount a production. The openness about sexual matters and tolerance of libertinism it displays might also raise flags on a local stage. So much for Readers' Theater! But I still think it bears consideration as a staged play.
(A historical note: Kundera's play, which has been produced in several countries and had a long run in Paris, was premiered in America at the American Repertory Theater, under Susan Sontag's direction.)
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