Tom Stoppard is dead?
Surely someone mixed up the plot. Yes, he was 88, but the Czech-born British playwright, the real heir to Oscar Wilde of the 20th century, would never have made things so banal.
“A serious blow to logic” is how a character describes the death of a philosophy professor in Stoppard's 1972 play Jumpers. But then, as this polymath continues, “truth for us philosophers, Mr. Crouch, is always an intermediate judgment… Unlike detective novels, life does not guarantee a resolution; and if it comes, how can you know whether you should believe it?
Few people were more agnostically alive than Stoppard, who loved the finer things in life and earned them generously with his inexhaustible wit. A man of consummate courtesy, who lived like a country squire, he was a sportsman (his game was cricket) and a connoisseur of ideas, which he approached with the agility and energy of a cricketer.
Stoppard made his presence known in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an absurdist romp that views Hamlet from the keyhole perspective of two courtiers vying for position in the new regime. Samuel Beckett's influence was unmistakable in the combination of music hall madness and existential ruthlessness that characterized a string of early plays that combined the Theater of the Absurd with a heightened version of Shavian farce.
Simplicity was not Stoppard's style. Featuring feuding philosophy professors, a retired singer and a choir of acrobats, the Fellini-styled Jumpers is set within a murder mystery that owes a debt to Joe Orton's astute social satire. Travesties, Stoppard's 1974 play, hinges on the coincidence that James Joyce, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Lenin found themselves in Zurich during the First World War, a cultural accident that paved the way for a dizzying alternative history in which art confronts politics. (Art, unsurprisingly, wins.)
Wordplay, aphorisms and witticisms were Stoppard's calling card. Not since The Importance of Being Earnest, which Stoppard revered as a mathematician reveres the world's most elegant proof, has the English stage experienced such high conversation. Yet he acquired a reputation as a dandy, a clever humorist and an intelligent showman, apparently apolitical and seemingly without conviction.
He would undoubtedly take this last accusation as a compliment. He was proud that his mind was not tainted by confidence. But he was aware of criticism of his work as intellectually brilliant but emotionally fragile. Virtuosity in language and dramatic structure was his great strength. But it is also, perhaps, a weakness—a weakness for which many lesser writers would undoubtedly sell their souls.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Travesties were indeed masterful manipulations of plot and language. They were also breaths of fresh air, winning a Tony Award for Best Play and establishing Stoppard as a transatlantic force. It would have been entirely natural for him to continue in this vein, but his work took a more personal turn in The Real Thing, a play about a playwright who learns to write about love and to perceive and appreciate its complex reality.
New York Times theater critic Frank Rich called “The Real Thing” “not only Mr. Stoppard's most moving play, but the most uplifting play about love and marriage that anyone has written in years.” The 1984 Broadway premiere starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close and directed by Mike Nichols won Tony Awards for Lead Acting, Nichols' Directing, Best Play for Christina Baranski, and Best Play. This was Stoppard's third such award and not the last.
But the criticism didn't end there. (Is it any wonder that in the 1968 one-act film The Real Dog Inspector, Stoppard imagined a scenario in which a critic is killed by the play he is reviewing?) Stoppard's intelligence, the source of his fame and prestige, intimidated some and repulsed others. Not everyone goes to the theater to admire verbal pyrotechnics or cheeky jokes. The dazzling brilliance of his plays made theatergoers still squint to see if there was any sincerity in his works.
Stoppard moved freely through a variety of dramatic modes. (It was this ability that made him such a valuable screenwriter and screenwriter, earning him not only wealth but also an overall Oscar for his script for Shakespeare in Love.) But he had no interest in writing character studies. The domestic drama, with its psychological insights and sentimental decisions, repulsed him. But he was also unattracted by the issue-laden work of his more politically minded post-war British playwright colleagues, that new generation of playwrights unleashed by John Osborne's Look Back in Anger.
A born artist with no ideology to sell or bourgeois morality to propagate, he gravitated toward theater as the most exciting form of debate. What he called “the successful expression of ideas” mattered more to him than academic scores. Language was a theatrical resource that could do more than just win an argument.
The comedy of ideas eventually became self-serious. Stoppard was determined to restore the fun without detracting from its essence.
His astounding erudition led him to go where few playwrights before him dared to go. But he was too much of a sensualist to seclude himself in the archives of the British Museum.
When I interview Stoppard, at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, during a rehearsal for his play Hard Problem, told me that he believes he has never spent more than half an hour researching. However, he admitted: “I have spent many, many days of my life reading for pleasure, to learn something.
How else could he have created The Shore of Utopia, a three-play work dedicated to 19th-century Russian intellectuals, romantics and revolutionaries amid decades of geopolitical turmoil? The marathon epic earned Stoppard his fourth Tony Award for Best Play.
Arcadia, perhaps his crowning achievement, is perhaps less expansive but just as intellectually ambitious. It is also perhaps his most lyrically impressive work.
A literary biographical mystery play set in an English estate in two different time zones (one in the era of Lord Byron, the other in the era of modern academic detectives), Arcadia owes a debt to A. S. Byatt's Possession. (In her mammoth biography, Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Leigh reports that “Byatt said Stoppard told her he had 'stolen' the plot from her.”) But the way Stoppard uses such sophisticated mathematical concepts as fractal geometry to explore concepts of order and chaos, in which characters hypothesize about the patterns of time, is Stoppardian through and through.
Stoppard's late works are his most personal. “Rock and roll” which he dedicated to Václav Havel, explores the rebellious, Dionysian power of popular music, an eternal source of inspiration for him, in a play set partly in Prague during the communist era. “Leopoldstadt” It is a work in which the playwright attempts, from an artistic point of view, to come to grips with the story he belatedly learned about what happened to his Jewish family during and after Hitler's rise to power.
The Invention of Love is one of those plays by Stoppard that leaves the critic feeling both delighted and dissatisfied, a paradoxical state, but what can one expect from a play in which the poet, classicist and closeted homosexual A. E. Houseman becomes the main character of the theater?
Not a single Stoppard play can be fully appreciated in one theatrical appearance. The dramaturgy is too complex, the intellect is too quick, and the language too dazzling to be instantly appreciated. I fear that the plays are too vast for today's scaled-down dramatic productions. But Stoppard left behind a theatrical treasure that will captivate audiences for generations with its intellectual exuberance, uncanny eloquence and omnivorous delight.
