Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his 1966 Shakespearean metatheatrical puzzle about tertiary characters struggling with their inexorable fates, became a staple of conversations about probability and amusing boredom (“Life is a gamble with terrible odds. If it were a bet, you wouldn’t take it”). It hit the theater like a comet. Even in an alternate reality in which Stoppard wrote only Rosencrantz, we would still be in the impact crater of that one masterpiece. Crucially, it demonstrated the scope and ambition of an intertextual postmodernism that might otherwise have remained an Edinburgh fringe-style joke: it has since given us everything from “and Juliet” To “Hamnet,” To “Desdemona: A Play about the Handkerchiefto his own “Shakespeare in Love.” Thanks to Rosencrantz – or Guildenstern? — our writers are always playing on their own bookshelves.
Stoppard was a brilliant, self-taught, uneducated man (like Harold Pinter and George Bernard Shaw before him), yet he became, oddly enough, the ideal playwright for the academic theater that followed him. In theory, Stoppard's play requires a certain level of knowledge from the audience, and the reading list has already been compiled. After all, many of us first encountered it in the classroom. Studying “Hamletgives “Rosenkrantz” the context it needs; reading Oscar Wilde opens Travesties; feeling that Latin grammar is fun will help you enjoy The Invention of Love; and “Arcadia” presupposes at least a passing acquaintance with Byron.
However, in practice, I have found that education actually works in the opposite direction. It is powerful because it catches us at a crucial moment in development. Long before I saw Agatha ChristieMousetrap“I played Cynthia in Stoppard’s parody of Christie’s work,” “A real inspector dog” (I got about half the jokes, although I noticed that the critic characters, despite being tormented by their playwright as pretentious oafs, got all the good lines.) In college, of course, I read Rosencrantz more times than I took up Shakespeare's original text, and now the two plays are forever fused with each other: I can't get through Hamlet without thinking about the plot machine behind the scenes, grinding out the title text. courtiers, night after night. For me, as for others, Stoppard offered a kind of path to the canon, inviting us to feel comfortable enough among the Great Authors to have our own opinions about them. It was inclusive elitism, an invitation to life to embrace unabashed, unstoppable thinking.
His work also beckoned to the foothills of science: for some time after Arcadia, we all considered ourselves experts in chaos theory; at a cast party in college after “Hapgood“, his comedy about a scientist quantumly entangled with British intelligence, we all confidently talked about light as a particle And wave. Were there other public intellectuals who worked with the same sense of infectious experience? I can't remember many. However, this popular science nonsense can be harmful. Stoppard's influence lies in the imitation of some of his gestures: I've seen too many plays that hope that an exposition of elementary physics (or a diagram of how bees organize themselves, or whatever) will elevate the work to the level of Arcadia. This Stoppardian love of inquiry can even become a hindrance in Stoppard's own work: the impulse to include a bit of lively mathematical explanation, such as the talk about cat's cradles in Leopoldstadt, can lead a writer astray.
Selfishly, The Real Thing is my favorite Stoppard play, not because of its clear portrayal of infidelity and loss, but because it feels like it was written by a writer who never stopped being a theater critic. In the sixties, Stoppard wrote reviews of Scene magazine under the pseudonym William Booth. In The Real Thing, a playwright named Henry Booth resists the oncoming tides of relativism, special entreaties and sentimentality, swearing that there is a point in distinguishing good plays from bad. Every critic I know can quote Henry's cricket bat speech from this play:
