SOCIOLOGICAL CINEMA SESSION 4

18 November, 2015

PROFESSIONAL FOUL

Professional Foul is a television play written by British playwright Tom Stoppard. It was broadcast on 21 September 1977 in BBC 2's Play of the Week series.

Characters:

Anderson, McKendrick, Chetwyn, Stone

Pavel Hollar

Broadbent, Crisp; Grayson, Chamberlain

Mrs Hollar, Sacha Hollar,

Captain

Chairman

Discuss what you know about

Tom Stoppard

21 September

the year 1977 or 1970s in then Czechoslovakia

Ethics is a very complicated business.

Can you explain these concepts/words? 1) bad manners 2) catastrophe theory 3) discourtesy4) fiction5) individual rights6) moral dilemma 7) persecute8) philosophical assumptions of social science9) principles10) professional foul11) test situations12) yob

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Match definitions a - j to concepts 1 - 12 a) A belief or statement which is false, but is often held to be true because it is

convenient/practical/useful to do sob) A rude, noisy, and aggressive youth.c) A rule or belief governing one’s behaviourd) A situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more

alternatives; a conflict in which you have to choose between two or more actions and have moral reasons for choosing each action.

e) An isolated condition under which ‘the test object’ displays a specific behaviour that needs to be tested

f) In football, an action in which a player deliberately does something that is not allowed by the rules in order to stop the other team from getting an advantage

g) In mathematics, a set of methods used to study and classify the ways in which a system can undergo sudden large changes in behaviour as one or more of the variables that control it are changed continuously. It is generally considered a branch of geometry because the variables and resultant behaviours are usefully depicted as curves or surfaces, and the formal development of the theory is credited chiefly to the French topologist René Thom…. More speculatively, its ideas have been applied by social scientists to a variety of situations, such as the sudden eruption of mob violence.

h) Lack of polite or well-bred social behaviour

i) Rude and inconsiderate behaviourj) Subject (someone) to hostility and ill-treatment, especially because of their race or

political or religious beliefs.k) These were best described by the 17th- and 18th-century political theorists—such

men as John Locke in England, Montesquieu in France, and Jefferson and others in the United States. They are the rights to life, liberty, privacy, the security of the individual, freedom of speech and press, freedom of worship, the right to own property, freedom from slavery, freedom from torture and unusual punishment, and similar rights as spelled out in the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. Basic to individual rights is the concept of government as a shield against encroachment upon the person. Little is demanded from government but the right to be left alone. Government is not asked for anything except vigilance in safeguarding the rights of its citizens.

What has been left out?

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Discuss briefly the following statements : (could be done prior and/or post screening)

Full human potential cannot be reached if individuality is suppressed by society.

The ethics of the state can only be the ethics of the individual writ large. [= signified, expressed, or embodied with greater magnitude]

Smuggling can never be ethical.

A dangerous line has been crossed, if, in the name of group rights, the principle of equality before the law is openly breached.

Childhood vaccination should be mandatory.

Answer the following questions: 1) What – ethically – rather dubious things were happening in Czechoslovakia in 1977?2) What ulterior motives for coming could have had English participants of Colloqium

Philosophicum held in Prague that year? 3) What your comment would be about the two pairs of photographs?

4) Do you think language is always used to reveal the truth?5) Say what you know about university of Cambridge.6) Have you ever heard of Stoke-on-Trent? If so, in what connection?7) What assumption can you make about the set of pictures on the opposite page?8) What does the expression “left wing” refer to?

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Catastrophe theory explained by McKendrick:

McKendrick: It’s like reversed gear – no – it’s like a breaking point. The mistake people make is, they think moral principle is indefinitely extendible, that it holds good for any situation, a straight line cutting across the graph of our actual situation. ‘Morality’ down there, running parallel with ‘Immorality’ up here – and never the twain shall meet. They think that what a principle means.

Anderson: And isn’t it?

McKendrick: No. The two lines are on the same plane –they are the edges of the same plane – it’s in three dimensions, you see, and if you twist the plane in a certain way, into what we call a catastrophe curve, you get a model of sort of behaviour we find in the real world. There is a point – the catastrophe point – where your progress along one line of behaviour jumps into the opposite line; the principle reverse itself at the point where rational man would abandon it.

Chatwyn: Then it’s not a principle.

McKendrick: There aren’t any principles in your sense. There are only a lot of principled people trying to behave as if there were.

Anderson: That’s the same thing, surely.

McKendrick: You’re a worse case than Chatwyn and his primitive Greeks. At least he has the excuse of believing in goodness and beauty. You know they are fictions but you’re so hung up on them you want to treat them as if they were God-given absolutes.

Anderson: I don’t see how else they would have any practical value –

McKendrick: So you end up using moral principle as your excuse for acting against a moral interest. It’s sort of funk –

Anderson: you make your points altogether too easily, McKendrick. What need have you of moral courage when your principles reverse themselves so conveniently?

…

Anderson: I’m sorry… you’re right up to a certain point. There would be no moral dilemmas if moral principles worked in straight lines and never crossed each other. One meets test situations which have troubled much cleverer men than us.

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Topological Abduction of Europe - Homage to Rene Thom

Salvador Dali

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Post-screening discussion

What are your immediate impressions?

If you close your eyes which scene/s from the play can you see? What words can you hear?

What surprised you?

What amused you?

What did you like?

What did you dislike?

How would you describe Professor Anderson?

Why do you think football is part of the play?

How many professional fouls were committed in the play?

How would you describe/characterise the main theme of the play?

Are there any sociological aspects of the reality/realities shown in the play?

What has changed and is no longer relevant to our country?

In what sense is the play still relevant?

According to what you have heard or read, do you think the play successfully reflects the events and social reality of its time? If so, in what ways?

Does the play reflect on universal human concerns and problems? And, if so, how?

What does the play have to say, if anything, on the relationship between the individual, his society?

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Tom Stoppard was born "Tom Straussler" in Zlin, Czechoslovakia on July 3, 1937. His family moved to Singapore in 1939 to escape the Nazis. Then, shortly before the Japanese invasion of Singapore in 1941, young Tom fled to Darjeeling, India with his mother and brother. His father, however, Eugene Straussler, remained behind and was killed during the invasion. In 1946, the family emigrated to England after Tom's mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British army.

http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc46.html

In the early 1990s, with the fall of communism, Stoppard found out that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish and had died in Terezin, Auschwitz and other camps, along with three of his mother's sisters. In 1998, following the deaths of his parents he returned to Zlín for the first time in over 50 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Stoppard

Professional Foul

The play was written to coincide with Amnesty International's "Prisoners of Conscience Year" and is dedicated to Czech playwright and then political activist Václav Havel whom Stoppard has cited as an influence on his writing. The date of publication and broadcast is also significant in that 1977 was the year in which the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia presented the government with a formal protest against its violations of the Helsinki Accords.

http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/Professional_Foul

The play is available at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTt09jaz-PQ&feature=player_embedded

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