In the first few moments of Milan Kundera’s play Jacques and His Master—which had its American premiere this season at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge under the directorship of Susan Sontag— two men in eighteenth-century garb walk out onstage. One of them, on catching sight of the audience, gapes in uncomfortable surprise. “Sir,” whispers the servant, gesturing toward the audience, “Why are they staring at us?” And the master, who seems to be made no less uncomfortable by the circumstances, offers some sound theatrical advice: “Pretend there’s no one there,” he says.
It is a cute opening and, if the American Repertory Theatre had not cluttered up the actors’ entrance by having them haul onstage a lot of unnecessary and distracting props, it might have been as effective as the self-consciously theatrical opening usually is in the many contemporary plays that use it. Unfortunately, it was precisely the wrong opening for this particular play.
Jacques le fataliste has the distinction of being possibly the only novel more wayward and rambunctious than Tristram Shandy.
Jacques and His Master is loosely based on or, at any rate, inspired by Denis Diderot’s eighteenth-century novel Jacques le fataliste. The Diderot novel is one that is particularly dear to Kundera’s heart and he has, on more than one occasion, discussed it thoughtfully as an important anomaly in the
