If you’re glad I’ll be Frank by Tom Stoppard- An Analysis

Tom Stoppard’s play (1969) has short concise scenes making the play itself fast paced. It is set in dull, everyday situations and focuses on the mundane and lonely aspects, the speaking clock and the telephone services,

‘UMP-dial the Test score

SUN- dial the weather

POP- dial a pop’

Yet this focus on pettiness is instantly lost in Gladys’ monologue,

‘They think that time is something they invented…

So that they’d know

how long they lasted,

And pretend that it matters’

Her monologue adopts an air of sadness and despair,

‘Dizziness spirals up between

my stomach and my head

corkscrewing out the stopper

But I’m empty anyway

I was emptied long ago’

Gladys’s lilting melancholic monologues make a great contrast with Frank’s anxious, almost farcical search to find his wife, the speaking clock. Then almost as if the hysteria is catching, Gladys’ monologues change from serene and wistful to nervous and nonsensical,

‘Gentlemen, the jig is up-I have given you tears…

And now the First Lord!-

Don’t lose your heads while all about you on the burning deck…

Oh-Frank! Help me!...

The play becomes more farcical as it seems that Gladys is kept being the speaking clock against her will,

‘Then they’ll have to let me go

They’ll have to

Because Frank knows I’m here’

At the end of the play Frank’s quest seems futile as we are told that the speaking clock is a machine not his wife, something that the audience could accept as it seems the most logical explanation.

However, the play does not end logically, and the audience again question reality as it is comfirmed that Gladys is the speaking clock, surely a metaphor for society being trapped, rigid with no freedom to move, grow and certainly not to stop time.