Stoppard, Tom 1937-
STOPPARD, Tom 1937-
(William Boot)
PERSONAL: Born Tomas Straussler, July 3, 1937, in Zlin (now Gottwaldov), Czechoslovakia; naturalized British citizen; son of Eugene Straussler (a physician) and Martha Stoppard; married Jose Ingle, 1965 (divorced, 1972); married Miriam Moore-Robinson (a physician), 1972 (divorced, 1992); children: (first marriage) Oliver, Barnaby; (second marriage) two sons. Education: Pocklington School, Yorkshire, A-levels, 1954.
ADDRESSES: Home—Chelsea Harbor, London, England. Agent—Peters, Fraser & Dunlop, The Chambers, 5th Floor, Chelsea Harbor, Lots Road, London SW10 0XF, England.
CAREER: Playwright, novelist, and radio and television script writer. Western Daily Press, Bristol, England, reporter and critic, 1958-60; Evening World, Bristol, reporter, 1958-60; freelance reporter, 1960-63. Director of play Born Yesterday, London, England, 1973; director of film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1991. Member of Royal National Theatre Board, 1989—.
MEMBER: Royal Society of Literature (fellow).
AWARDS, HONORS: Ford Foundation grant, 1964; John Whiting Award, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1967; London Evening Standard Drama Awards, 1967, for most promising playwright for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1972, for best play for Jumpers, 1974, for best comedy for Travesties, and 1983, for best play for The Real Thing; Prix Italia, 1968, for Albert's Bridge; Antoinette Perry Awards for best play, 1968, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1976, for Travesties, and 1984, for The Real Thing, and nomination, 1995, for Arcadia; New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, 1968, for best play for Rosencrantzand Guildenstern Are Dead, 1976, for best play Travesties, and 1984, for best foreign play The Real Thing; M.Lit., University of Bristol, 1976, Brunel University, 1979, University of Sussex, 1980; Commander, Order of the British Empire, 1978; Shakespeare Prize (Hamburg, Germany), 1979; Academy Award nomination, and Los Angeles Critics Circle Award for best original screenplay (with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown), both 1985, both for Brazil; Grand Prize, Venice Film Festival, 1990, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, 1997; Academy Award for best screenplay written directly for the screen, 1998, for Shakespeare in Love; inducted into Order of the Merit, 2000.
WRITINGS:
PLAYS
The Gamblers, produced in Bristol, England, 1965.
Tango (based on the play by Slawomir Mrozek; produced in London, England, 1966; produced on the West End, 1968), J. Cape (London, England), 1968.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (three-act; also see below; first produced at Edinburgh Festival, 1966; produced on the West End, 1967; produced on Broadway, 1967), Samuel French (New York, NY), 1967.
Enter a Free Man (based on his teleplay A Walk on the Water; also see below; first produced on the West End, 1968; produced off-Broadway, 1974), Faber (London, England), 1968.
The Real Inspector Hound (one-act; first produced on the West End, 1968; produced off-Broadway with After Magritte, 1972), Samuel French (New York, NY), 1968.
Albert's Bridge [and] If You're Glad I'll Be Frank (based on his radio plays; also see below), produced in Edinburgh, 1969, produced in New York, NY, 1987.
After Magritte (one-act; first produced in London, England, 1970; produced off-Broadway with The Real Inspector Hound, 1972), Faber (London, England), 1971.
Dogg's Our Pet (also see below; produced in London, England, 1971), published in Six of the Best, InterAction Imprint, 1976.
Jumpers (first produced on the West End, 1972; produced in Washington, DC, 1974; produced on Broadway, 1974), Grove (New York, NY), 1972, revised edition, Faber (London, England), 1986.
The House of Bernarda Alba (based on the play by Federico García Lorca), produced in London, England, 1973.
Travesties (produced on the West End, 1974; produced on Broadway, 1974), Grove (New York, NY), 1975.
Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (produced in London, England, 1976; produced on Broadway, 1977), Grove (New York, NY), 1976.
Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, music by Andre Previn, first produced in London, England, 1977, produced on the West End, 1978, produced in New York, NY, 1979.
Night and Day (produced on the West End, 1978; produced on Broadway, 1979), Grove (New York, NY), 1979, revised edition, Samuel French (New York, NY), 1980.
Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth (double-bill of oneact plays; Dogg's Hamlet based on his play Dogg's Our Pet; produced in New York, NY, 1979), Faber (London, England), 1979.
Undiscovered Country (adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's Das Weite Land; produced on the West End, 1979; produced in Hartford, CT, 1981), Faber (London, England), 1980.
On the Razzle (adapted from Johann Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich Machen; produced on the West End, 1981; produced in Los Angeles, CA, 1985), Faber (London, England), 1981.
The Real Thing (produced on the West End, 1982; produced on Broadway, 1984), Faber (London, England), 1982, revised edition, 1983.
Rough Crossing (adaptation of Ferenc Molnar's The Play's the Thing; produced in London, England, 1984; produced in New York, NY, 1990), Faber (London, England), 1985.
Dalliance (adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's Liebelei), produced in London, England, 1986.
(Translator) Vaclav Havel, Largo Desolato, Faber (London, England), 1987.
Hapgood (produced in New York, NY, 1988), Faber (London, England), 1988.
Artist Descending a Staircase (based on his radio play [also see below]; produced on the West End, 1988; produced on Broadway, 1989), Faber, 1990.
Arcadia, produced in London, England, 1994; produced on Broadway, 1995.
The Coast of Utopia (trilogy of plays), produced at the Royal National Theater, London, England, 2002.
Salvage: The Coast of Utopia Trilogy, Grove (New York, NY), 2003.
Shipwreck: The Coast of Utopia Trilogy, Grove (New York, NY), 2003.
Voyage: The Coast of Utopia Trilogy, Grove (New York, NY), 2003.
Also author of Home and Dry and Riley.
SCREENPLAYS
(With Thomas Wiseman) The Romantic English-woman, New World Pictures, 1975.
Despair (adapted from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov), New Line Cinema, 1978.
The Human Factor (adapted from the novel by Graham Greene), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 1980.
(With Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown) Brazil, Universal, 1985.
Empire of the Sun (adapted from the novel by J. G. Ballard), Warner Bros., 1987.
The Russia House (adapted from the novel by John le Carre), MGM/United Artists, 1989.
(And director) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (adapted from his play), Cinecom, 1991, published as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: The Film, Faber (London, England), 1991.
Billy Bathgate (adapted from the novel by E. L. Doctorow), Touchstone Pictures, 1991.
(With Marc Norman) Shakespeare in Love, Miramax, 1998.
FOR TELEVISION
A Walk on the Water, ITV Television, 1963, broadcast as The Preservation of George Riley, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC-TV), 1964.
A Separate Peace (BBC-TV, 1966), Samuel French (New York, NY), 1977.
Teeth, BBC-TV, 1967.
Another Moon Called Earth, BBC-TV, 1967.
Neutral Ground, Thames Television, 1968.
The Engagement (based on his radio play The Dissolution of Dominic Boot; also see below), NBCTV, 1970.
One Pair of Eyes, BBC-TV, 1972.
(With Clive Exton) Eleventh House, BBC-TV, 1975.
(With Clive Exton) Boundaries, BBC-TV, 1975.
Three Men in a Boat (based on the novel by Jerome K. Jerome), BBC-TV, 1975.
Professional Foul, BBC-TV, 1977, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS-TV), 1978.
Squaring the Circle: Poland, 1980-81 (BBC-TV, 1985), Faber (London, England), 1985.
RADIO PLAYS
The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, BBC-Radio, 1964.
"M" Is for Moon among Other Things, BBC-Radio, 1964.
If You're Glad I'll Be Frank (BBC-Radio, 1966), Faber (London, England), 1969.
Albert's Bridge, BBC-Radio, 1967.
Albert's Bridge [and] If You're Glad I'll Be Frank: Two Plays for Radio, Faber (London, England), 1969.
The Real Inspector Hound [and] After Magritte, Grove (New York, NY), 1970.
Where Are They Now?, BBC-Radio, 1970.
Artist Descending a Staircase, BBC-Radio, 1972.
Artist Descending a Staircase [and] Where Are They Now?: Two Plays for Radio, Faber (London, England), 1973.
Albert's Bridge, and Other Plays, Grove (New York, NY), 1977.
Every Good Boy Deserves Favor [and] Professional Foul, Grove (New York, NY), 1978.
The Dog It Was That Died, BBC-Radio, 1982.
The Dog It Was That Died, and Other Plays (contains Teeth, Another Moon Called Earth, Neutral Ground, A Separate Peace, "M" Is for Moon among Other Things, and The Dissolution of Dominic Boot), Faber (London, England), 1983.
Four Plays for Radio, Faber (London, England), 1984.
Dalliance [and] Undiscovered Country, Faber (London, England), 1986.
Stoppard: The Radio Plays 1964-1983, Faber (London, England), 1991.
In the Native State (BBC-Radio, 1991), revised edition published as Indian Ink, Faber (Boston, MA), 1995.
Also author of episodes of radio serials The Dales, 1964, and A Student's Diary, 1965.
OTHER
Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon (novel), Anthony Blond, 1966, Knopf (New York, NY), 1968.
(With Paul Delaney), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1994.
(With Mel Gussow) Conversations with Stoppard, Limelight (New York, NY), 1995.
(With Charles Rosen, Jonathan Miller, Garry Wills, and Geoffrey O'Brien) Doing It: Five Performing Arts, New York Review of Books (New York, NY), 2001.
(Translator from the Russian), Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, Faber (London, England), 2001.
Contributor of short stories to Introduction 2, 1964. Reviewer, sometimes under pseudonym William Boot, for Scene, 1962.
WORK IN PROGRESS: An original screenplay; negotiating to adapt Philip Pullman's award-winning trilogy His Dark Materials for New Line Cinema.
SIDELIGHTS: Tom Stoppard's plays revolutionized modern theatre with their uniquely comic combinations of verbal intricacy, complex structure, and philosophical themes. With such award-winning works as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, and The Real Thing to his credit, Stoppard compares with "the masters of the comic tradition," Joan Fitzpatrick Dean wrote in Tom Stoppard: Comedy As a Moral Matrix. "Like the best comic dramatists, his gift for language and physical comedy fuses with an active perception of the excesses, eccentricities, and foibles of man." "Stoppard is that peculiar anomaly—a serious comic writer born in an age of tragicomedy and a renewed interest in theatrical realism," Enoch Brater summarized in Essays on Contemporary British Drama. "Such deviation from dramatic norms . . . marks his original signature on the contemporary English stage," the critic continued, for his "'high comedy of ideas' is a refreshing exception to the rule. Offering us 'a funny play,' Stoppard's world 'makes coherent, in terms of theatre, a fairly complicated intellectual argument.' That the argument is worth making, that it is constantly developing and sharpening its focus, and that it always seeks to engage an audience in a continuing dialogue, are the special characteristics of Stoppard's dramatic achievement. They are also the features which dignify and ultimately transform the comic tradition to which his work belongs."
"Stoppard's virtuosity was immediately apparent" in his first major dramatic work, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Mel Gussow of the New York Times asserted. The play revisits Shakespeare's Hamlet through the eyes of the two players whose task of delivering Hamlet's death sentence prompts their own execution instead. Vaguely aware of the scheming at Elsinore and their own irrelevance to it, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern meander through the drama playing games of language and chance until, circumscribed by Shakespeare's script, they cease to exist. "In focusing on Shakespeare's minor characters Stoppard does not fill out their lives but rather extends their thinness," Anne Wright observed in her Dictionary of Literary Biography essay. By turning Hamlet "inside out" in this way, the play is "simultaneously frivolous in conception but dead serious in execution," Brater stated, and it addressed issues of existentialism reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's drama Waiting for Godot. The result, the critic added, "is not only a relaxed view of Hamlet, but a new kind of comic writing halfway between parody and travesty."
Also notable is the play's innovative use of language and Shakespeare's actual text. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is interwoven with references to Hamlet as well as containing actual lines of the bard's verse; in addition, Stoppard packs the drama with "intricate word plays, colliding contradictions and verbal and visual puns," as Gussow described it. This "stylistic counterpoint of Shakespeare's poetry and rhetoric with the colloquial idiom of the linguistic games and music-hall patter" proves very effective, Wright commented. "Stoppard's lines pant with inner panic," a Time reviewer noted, as the title characters, according to Village Voice's Michael Smith, ultimately "talk themselves out of existence." The play became one of Stoppard's most popular and acclaimed works; twenty years after its premiere, Gussow concluded, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern "remains an acrobatic display of linguistic pyrotechnics as well as a provocative existential comedy about life in limbo."
"With its dazzling feel for the duplicities and delights of language and its sense that modern consciousness is a gummed-up kaleidoscope that needs to be given a severe shake," Jack Kroll of Newsweek contended, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern established "the characteristic Stoppard effect." Stoppard's 1972 play Jumpers is a similar "montage of themes and techniques," said Wright, "by turns a whodunit, a farce of marital infidelity, and a philosophical inquiry." The inquiry is performed by George Moore, a professor of moral philosophy whose wife, Dottie, is suspected of both adultery and murder. The play is among Stoppard's most visually elaborate works, with a troupe of gymnastic philosophers, two lunar astronauts fighting over the only return berth to Earth, and sight gags such as an unfortunate accident involving George's pet hare and tortoise. The play also alternates between George's intellectual lectures and Dottie's music-hall numbers, creating further uncertainties. "The play ends with the murder unsolved, both the adultery and the existence of God unproved, one of the astronauts killed by the other, and another gymnast—the Archbishop of Canterbury—shot," Wright outlined.
"In Jumpers, much of the action and humor hinges on linguistic ambiguities and confusions," G. B. Crump wrote in Contemporary Literature. "These confusions mirror larger ambiguities present in the reality represented in the drama." As Brater elaborated, the play "never fixes moral philosophy and musical comedy in any stable order, hierarchy, or progression." The consequence, C. W. E. Bigsby related in Contemporary Dramatists, is that "the relativity of truth, man's apparent need to divert himself from painful realities, the failure of language to do more than parody conviction, the inability of the rational mind to adequately explain man to himself—all these coalesce in a play which unites the very best of Stoppard's characteristics as a play-wright—a mastery of language, a clear sense of style and rhythm, and a wit which has both a verbal and visual dimension."
A Times Literary Supplement reviewer, however, believed that in Jumpers Stoppard's complex language overwhelms the drama: "Good intentions are swamped by words that get nowhere. No actor speaking this highly intellectual and convoluted jargon can talk and move at the same time. To be heard and understood, the actor must stand still and the stage around him must freeze." Thus, the critic continued, "the stage loses its scenic power, the word its resonance, and therefore, the playfulness of the 'play' is muted." In contrast, other critics found the playwright's linguistic intricacies suited to his sophisticated humor and ideas. Victor L. Cahn, for instance, stated in his Beyond Absurdity: The Plays of Tom Stoppard that Stoppard's "emphasis on variety of language" demonstrated his "belief in man's ability to communicate. He manages at the same time to make his language amusing, yet richly woven with ideas." "Stoppard is one of those rare writers who can move easily between treating language as an object in itself and making it totally transparent to meaning," Kroll likewise reported. In addition, this verbal ability allows Stoppard to successfully draw from and merge with the work of other writers; as Susan Rusinko claimed in World Literature Today, "His inventive puns, parodies, and pastiches brilliantly serve the cause of theatricality to the point that the original disappears with the wave of the word magician's wand."
Stoppard makes use of another dramatic adaptation in his second Tony Award-winner, Travesties. The play takes as its starting point the historical fact that Zurich in 1917 was inhabited by three revolutionaries: the communist leader Lenin, modernist writer James Joyce, and dadaist poet-critic Tristan Tzara. Their interactions are related through the recollections of Henry Carr, a minor British official who meets Lenin at the local library and the others during a production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. In a manner similar to that of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard used plot line and characterization from Wilde's play to parallel and emphasize events and characters in his own work; the play "races forward on Mr. Stoppard's verbal roller coaster, leaving one dizzy yet exhilarated by its sudden semantic twists, turns, dips, and loops," Wilborn Hampton remarked in the New York Times. The result, Wright asserted, is "a virtuoso piece, a 'travesty' of the style of each of its masters, including Joycean narrative and dadaist verse as well as Wildean wit. The parody extends to the discourse appropriate to Lenin, as the play incorporates lectures and polemical sequences."
"Multilayered, complex, intellectually astringent," Alan Rich declared in New York, "Stoppard's play bats about a remarkable number of important ideas," especially those concerning art, revolutionary politics, and the relationship between the two. Brater explained that "in terms of dramatic form [the play] is the culmination of Stoppard's attempt to 'marry' the play of ideas to comedy and farce. But in terms of theme the play demonstrates the author's increasing political consciousness." The critic continued: "In questioning the compatibility of the revolutionary and artistic temperaments, Stoppard for the first time makes politics a central issue in his work." But the playwright was able to deepen his examinations of more "serious" issues without sacrificing entertainment value or humor, as Alan Rich concluded: "The external brilliances in Travesties, its manic virtuosity of language, its diabolical manipulation of time and notion, cannot elude any visitor to Tom Stoppard's verbal prank. . . . It is thinking-man's theater that makes it a privilege to think."
Stoppard's political concerns come to the fore in Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, a piece for actors and orchestra set to the music of Andre Previn. Set in a prison hospital inhabited by lunatics and dissidents, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor "has the witty dialogue and clever plot that we associate with Stoppard's plays, and a sense of social concern that we didn't," Los Angeles Times critic Dan Sullivan recounted. Stoppard brings the musicians into the action of the play through the character of a madman who believes he conducts an imaginary orchestra; not only does the group respond to his direction, but one of the violinists doubles as his psychiatrist. The play's use of "irony, mixed identities, outrageous conceits (not to mention a full-scale symphony orchestra)," observed Washington Post contributor Michael Billington, distinguished it as "the work of a dazzling high-wire performer." In addition, the critic noted, Every GoodBoy is "a profoundly moral play about the brainwashing of political dissidents in Soviet mental hospitals."
John Simon, writing in New York, faulted the play for being "too clever by half," and added that the concept of a play for full orchestra seems forced and contrived. But Gussow posited that "the full orchestra and the enormous stage give the play a richness and even an opulence that embellishes the author's comic point of view." He continued: "So much of the comedy comes from the contrast between the small reality—two men in a tiny cell—and the enormity of the delusion." "Nothing if not imaginative, Stoppard's plot makes the orchestra an active, provocative participant in the story," Richard Christiansen wrote in the Chicago Tribune. Nevertheless, the critic advised, the play also stands "on its own as a moving and eloquent work, an occasional piece of quick wit and deep thoughtfulness."
With Night and Day Stoppard broaches another "public issue: the role of the press in what is commonly called the Western World," as James Lardner described it in the Washington Post. Set in an African nation beset by revolution, Night and Day looks at issues of censorship, politics, colonialism, and journalistic ethics through the character of a young, idealistic reporter. "There are theatergoers who will not sit still for a play that encompasses an intellectual debate, no matter how gracefully rendered," Lardner theorized. Indeed, some observers criticized the play for emphasizing ideas over characters; New York Times reviewer Walter Kerr, for instance, said that "virtually no effort is made during the evening to link up thought and events, arguments and action. The debate really takes place in a void." In contrast, Judith Martin believed that in Night and Day "it even seems as if the good lines were written for the play, rather than the play's having been written to display unrelated good cracks," as she wrote in the Washington Post Weekend. "This is a taut drama, dealing intelligently and with a degree of moral passion with a range of difficult issues," Wright concluded. "Moreover, despite its clear plea for freedom of speech and action, the play does not oversimplify the issues: Night and Day presents a genuine dramatic debate which confronts divergent and often contradictory attitudes."
Indeed, Stoppard's plays frequently demonstrated a "delight in contradiction and paradox," according to New York Times contributor Benedict Nightingale, with "rebuttal constantly following argument, counter rebuttal following rebuttal, and no conclusion." Gussow explained in the New York Times: Stoppard "has always taken pride in his ability to refute himself endlessly, a practice especially well suited to dialogue. His interest is less in offering a judgment than in making light of other people's pretensions." A play such as Jumpers, for instance, takes various alternatives, "brings them together and lets them fight it out," London Times critic Irving Wardle summarized. The purpose of this war, stated Brater, is to confront the audience "with the recognizable dilemma of the man who, having read much, can't be sure of anything. The more possibilities Stoppard's marginal man allows for, the less he understands." Stoppard commented on the lack of firm conclusions in his work to Samuel G. Freedman in the New York Times: "If one had arrived at a definite answer, there wouldn't be a play to write about. . . . Most interesting questions . . . cannot be simply resolved." "Only a writer who cares deeply about convictions would dare to write plays to call his own convictions and those of others to account," Carl E. Rollyson, Jr. suggested in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook. Throughout his career, the critic continued, Stoppard "has been willing to test his principles and his lack of principles more directly and personally even as he has taken on profoundly difficult historical and political subjects that many artists of his stature would shy away from."
In the double-bill Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, for example, Stoppard "brilliantly harnessed his linguistic ingenuity to his passion for the cause of artistic freedom," Gerald M. Berkowitz noted in Theatre Journal. In the first half, Dogg's Hamlet, a group of schoolboys contort the English language by giving entirely new meanings to familiar words; their interactions with puzzled outsiders culminate in an abbreviated performance of Hamlet. The second play, Cahoot's Macbeth, presents an underground performance of Shakespeare that is interrupted by government censors; only by switching to "Dogg," the language of the first play, do the actors avoid arrest. Critics were split over the effectiveness of this double-bill; Chicago Tribune writer Sid Smith, for instance, found that the second play "promises more than it delivers, certainly more than a rehash of the first play's comedy." Berkowitz, however, thought that "Stoppard knows what he's doing," for instead of reducing "this serious play to the farcical level of the first," the switch to Dogg reinforced his message, which "strikes us with tremendous power: repressive societies fear artistic expression because it is a 'language' they don't share and thus can't control." As a result, the critic concluded, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth "may well be . . . [Stoppard's] most important play so far, and a harbinger of major works to come."
Berkowitz's words were prophetic, for in 1982 Stoppard premiered one of his most highly acclaimed dramas, The Real Thing. While the playwright returned to a favorite form, that of the play-within-a-play, his subject—"an imaginatively and uniquely theatrical exploration of the pain and the power of love," as Christiansen characterized it—surprised many critics. The opening reveals a man confronting his wife with evidence of her adultery; it soon becomes clear, however, that this encounter is only a scene in a play. "Reality" is much more complex, for the actors in the first scene are being betrayed by their spouses—the playwright and his mistress Annie, another actress. Henry is the successful author of witty, cerebral dramas of infidelity, but his own struggles with love, especially those in his sometimes-troubled marriage to Annie, prove more difficult and painful. Annie's romantic involvement with a young actor and professional involvement with the young revolutionary Brodie cause Henry to not only question his assumptions about love, but his opinions about the significance of writing. While the meaning of the "real thing" might seem a commonplace theme for Stoppard to examine, "home truths can be banal," Sullivan observed. "All that an author can do is to write a non-banal play around them, and this Stoppard has done."
Augmenting Stoppard's examination of romance and writing is a structure which scatters scenes from Henry's play throughout the show, thus forcing the audience to decide what is "real" and what is "drama." "The ingenious patterning helps to put the real thing into the same perspective as the artificial thing," Ronald Hayman suggested in the Times Literary Supplement, explaining that the playwright is clever in selecting "theatre people as his subject and to perch the action so spectacularly between their theatrical lives and their private lives." Thus "some of the play's intricacies defy full appreciation on a single viewing," Washington Post writer David Richards maintained, for the text is "intrinsically playful even as it deals with the delicate and obscure covenants that link men and women." But Frank Rich regarded the interchanges between "reality" and "drama" as "mannered digressions designed mainly to add literary gilding to a conventional story." "But it's not cleverness for cleverness' sake," Richards countered. "Indeed, Stoppard is asking where theater leaves off and reality begins." Rollyson likewise asserted that this blurring of reality is Stoppard's intent: "Gradually their 'real' lives come to resemble their stage roles, but the point is that the theatricality of human lives is as 'real' as anything else about the nature of their existence."
The Real Thing "is an integrally designed piece whose content and form are inseparable," Frank Rich proposed. "The play is not only about how Henry learns to feel love, but also about how he learns to write about love." "Henry agonizes about being unable to write love scenes and complains that his credibility is hanging by a thread," Hayman elaborated, and the resulting dialogue "bristles wittily." Henry also learns, however, that the same words which provide him with his livelihood are insufficient to completely resolve real-life problems. Consequently, The Real Thing had a dramatic power created by "that tension between its glittering verbal surface and those dark, confused emotions beyond the reach of words," Richards wrote in another review. While the play "is every bit as clever as Travesties or Jumpers," the critic remarked in his first article, it also "recognizes the impotence of the intellect when confronted with the ambiguities of love." "Without blunting his wit," Catharine Hughes concluded in America, "Stoppard hints not of a new beginning—he does not require one—but a deepening of the talent that has been in evidence since New York audiences first encountered him in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."
Stoppard's Arcadia juxtaposes three different time periods on one stage—the years 1809 and 1812 as well as present day—and combines such topics as mathematics and chaos theory, landscape gardening, and Lord Byron. In addition, noted Anne Barton in the New York Review of Books, "Arcadia constantly engages the imaginary in a dialogue with the historically true." Several reviewers noted the need for playgoers to review the printed text before seeing the play, seeing the play twice, or utilizing both methods to yield a better understanding of the complex story. In terms of staging and theatrics, however, "Arcadia is muted by comparison with most of Stoppard's previous work," found Barton. Barton praised the effort, hailing it as "wonderfully inventive and funny, full of the epigrams, puns and verbal pyrotechnics characteristic of this dramatist." Joseph Hynes, commenting in the VirginiaQuarterly Review, praised Stoppard's effort as "the wittiest, most movingly paradoxical, English dramatic language of this half-century."
Produced in 2002, Stoppard's anticipated The Coast of Utopia is a nine-hour look at the lives of some of Russia's revolutionary and liberal minds from the nineteenth century. Though not particularly impressed by the plays as a whole, an American Theater critic wrote that Voyage can possibly stand on its own and "can be seen to possess the emotional and physical sweep of Chekhov and Gorky." The reviewer considered The Coast of Utopia a grand undertaking and wrote that Stoppard and the trilogy are "brave enough to hint the fact that we may never reach the promised land [Utopia]." Herb Greer, a theater critic for World and I, acknowledged that Stoppard's work usually contains "wonderfully civilized humor." Ultimately however, Stoppard over-researched and over-thought his characters in Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage.
Stoppard's personal insights into his work were captured in Conversations with Stoppard. Spanning a twenty-year period, these conversations are the result of interviews Stoppard had with theatre critic Mel Gussow and focus primarily on the development of and influences on his work. Bevya Rosten in the New York Times Book Review remarked, "Gussow offers a chance to engage with the witty and quirky mind of a unique artist." Susan Rushinko, commenting in World Literature Today, noted that "Stoppard's remarks about his writing habits and sources of ideas for his plays are as freewheeling and as fascinating as the debates in his plays." Rushinko also remarked on Stoppard's confession of his "early admiration for Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch" as well as his sources of names for his characters. However, Jane Montgomery, in the Times Literary Supplement, found Gussow somewhat lax in his interviewing methods. "Gussow's interrogation is not probing . . . nor is his search for Stoppard's inner balance particularly contingent. His prepared questions often appear stilted in context, and he seems to rely chiefly on Stoppard's own graceful loquacity to steer the conversation." "On one level," Montgomery continued, "this is informative and interesting. . . . But just how many of [Stoppard's] 'apparent impromptus' were 'worked out beforehand' is the kind of interesting question Gussow will not, or cannot, address."
Stoppard's talents extend beyond writing for the stage; he is also noted for several highly literate screenplay adaptations, such as Empire of the Sun, The Russia House, and his own Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He has also distinguished himself as the creator of original works for radio, and he is "one of the writers who use the medium most imaginatively," Hayman stated in the Times Literary Supplement, for Stoppard "enjoys doing what can't be done on any other medium." The playwright makes the most of the exclusively aural medium, for in works such as Albert's Bridge and If You're Glad I'll Be Frank "what is left to the imagination gives the comedy its impetus," Gussow observed. As Rollyson explained, this strategy worked well because Stoppard "is under no constraint to hew to the facts or to balance his facility with words against the action or visualization for the stage and screen." In addition, Stoppard told Paul Donovan of the Sunday Times Review, "If you are dependent only on what people can hear, you can jerk things around in time and space, draw parallels and spin loops." The result, Rollyson concluded, is that "Stoppard has always worked well in radio and has produced for it some of his most innovative probings of human psychology."
Stoppard's use of various dramatic techniques, intricately worked into innovative forms, contributes greatly to the vitality of his plays. "He is a skilled craftsman," Wright said, "handling with great dexterity and precision plots of extreme ingenuity and intricacy. The plays are steeped in theatrical convention and stock comic situations, with mistaken identity, verbal misunderstandings, innuendo, and farcical incongruity." The playwright's use of traditional dramatic elements, contended Dean, reveals his "penchant for and skill in parodying popular dramatic genres. Like most contemporary playwrights, he has not contented himself with the confines of representational drama but has broken out of those constraints by revivifying the soliloquy, aside, song, and interior monologue." Despite his "free" use of various dramatic forms, Stoppard is able to superimpose an overall structure on his plays, Cahn declared: "Amid all the clutter and episodic action, a structure emerges, a tribute to the organizing powers of the playwright's rationality and his expectations of the audience's ability to grasp that structure." As the author related to Kroll, "Theater is an event, not a text. I respond to spectacle. Ambushing the audience is what theater is all about."
Part of Stoppard's "ambush" involves the way he shrewdly infuses his plays with sophisticated concepts. As Billington described, Stoppard "can take a complex idea, deck it out in fancy dress and send it skipping and gambolling in front of large numbers of people," for the playwright has "a matchless ability to weave into a serious debate boffo laughs and knockdown zingers." This combination has led some critics to attempt to classify his works as either humorous or philosophical. Stoppard himself, however, believes that questions concerning the comic intent of his works are superfluous. "All along I thought of myself as writing entertainments, like The Real Inspector Hound, and plays of ideas like Jumpers," he told Gussow. "The confusion arises because I treat plays of ideas in just about the same knockabout way as I treat the entertainments." He further explained to Washington Post interviewer Joseph McLellan: "The stuff I write tends to work itself out in comedy terms most of the time." But whatever degree of comedy or seriousness in Stoppard's approach, Nightingale concluded in the New York Times, he is consistent in the themes he examines: "All along he's confronted dauntingly large subjects, all along he's asked dauntingly intricate questions about them, and all along he's sought to touch the laugh glands as well as the intellect."
Various reviewers have attempted to analyze and define Stoppard's thematic concerns as he presents them within his plays. His ideas are often considered from an existentialist perspective and encompass such concepts as "the nature of perception, art, illusion and reality, the relativity of meaning, and the problematic status of truth," Wright declared. "Recurring themes include chance, choice, freedom, identity, memory, time, and death." Stoppard provided Tom Prideaux of Look with a simpler interpretation of his concerns: "One writes about human beings under stress—whether it is about losing one's trousers or being nailed to the cross." Cahn suggested, however, that Stoppard's works contains a "unifying element" by consistently demonstrating the playwright's "faith in man's mind." The critic elaborated: "He rejects the irrational, the reliance on emotion instead of intellect, the retreat from independent thought."
Stoppard's focus on human intellect and ideas has led some critics to fault his work as one-dimensional. Roger Scruton, for example, maintained in Encounter that "Stoppard is not a dramatist—he does not portray characters, who develop in relation to each other, and generate dialogue from their mutual constraints." "Stoppard has never been known for powerful characterizations," DeVries similarly conceded. "People in his plays have usually taken a back seat to the ideas they articulate." However, the critic added, this "simple trade-off . . . has worked because of the compelling intelligence of the ideas." The playwright himself admitted to Gussow in the New York Times: "I'm a playwright interested in ideas and forced to invent characters to express those ideas." Other observers, however, refute the notion that Stoppard's work is wanting in depth. "I, for one, have never been disturbed by a lack of feeling or emotion in his plays," Wilson noted, "though it is true that he has often pursued a philosophical conundrum or turn of phrase at the expense of his characters." And still others believe Stoppard's philosophical investigations are a means of exploring the humanity of his characters. As Nightingale noted in the New Statesman: "What other dramatist worries so earnestly yet entertainingly about the moral nature both of ourselves and of the dark bewildering universe we glumly inhabit?"
Because Stoppard's wit "can hold its own with Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw and Noel Coward," Edwin Wilson commented in the Wall Street Journal, he is able to take his "fascination with ideas . . . and make them exciting." "Stoppard's special distinction is his linguistic and conceptual virtuosity," Gussow asserted in the New York Times Magazine. "One has to look back to Shaw and Wilde to find an English playwright who could so enlist the language as his companion in creativity. Others might finish ahead in terms of tragic vision or emotional commitment, but as a wordsmith Stoppard is supreme." Dean, who allies Stoppard with "the wittiest if not greatest writers of the English language," explained that "Stoppard indulges himself as well as his audience in the sheer pleasure of experiencing the density and richness of which the language is capable. Moreover, his attention to language results not only in humor but also in precision. As a means of considering the difficulty of communication as well as a comic vehicle, language is assiduously explored and exploited by Stoppard."
"There is plenty to indicate that if Stoppard had done no more than employ the drama as a vehicle for moral messages he would still have been a force in the theatre," Clive James suggested in Encounter. But, the critic continued, "Stoppard's heady dramatic designs impress us not as deliberately sophisticated variations on the reality we know but as simplified models of a greater reality—the inhuman cosmos which contains the human world. . . . If his speculative scope recalls modern physics, his linguistic rigour recalls modern philosophy. It is a potent combination whatever its validity." "If his plays endure," Dean claimed, "Stoppard's unique accomplishment may prove to be the theatrical treatment of the intellectual and artistic follies of our age." "In the past Stoppard has given us a new kind of comedy to capture the drama of contemporary ideas," Brater similarly stated. "Judging from the quality of his new work, there is no reason to suspect that this serious writer masquerading as a comedian has run out of ammunition. For style in Stoppard has always been a question of substance as well as technique. What he has found in his theater," the critic concluded, "is not only a special way of saying something, but something, at least, that needed very much to be said."
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
BOOKS
Bigsby, Christopher, and William Edgar, editors, Writers and Their Work, Longman (London, England), 1976.
Bock, Hedwig, and Albert Wertheim, editors, Essays on Contemporary British Drama, Hüber (Munich, Germany), 1981.
Brustein, Robert, The Third Theatre, Knopf (New York, NY), 1969.
Cahn, Victor L., Beyond Absurdity: The Plays of Tom Stoppard, Fairleigh Dickinson University Presses (Rutherford, NJ), 1979.
Contemporary Dramatists, St. James Press (London, England), 1982.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 4, 1975, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 29, 1984, Volume 34, 1985, Volume 63, 1991, Volume 91, 1996.
Dean, Joan Fitzpatrick, Tom Stoppard: Comedy As a Moral Matrix, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1981.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 13: British Dramatists since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1982.
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1985, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.
Nadel, Ira, Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard, Methuen (London, England), 2002.
Schlueter, June, Dramatic Closure: Reading the End, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Rutherford, NJ), 1995.
Taylor, John Russell, The Second Wave: British Drama for the Seventies, Methuen (London, England), 1971.
PERIODICALS
America, February 18, 1984; January 29, 1994, p. 23.
American Theater, November, 2002, review of The Coast of Utopia, p. 40.
Atlantic, May, 1968.
Chicago Tribune, April 24, 1985; June 3, 1985; September 20, 1985; March 17, 1991.
Christian Science Monitor, April 25, 1974; November 6, 1975; December 6, 1982; January 11, 1984.
Commentary, December, 1967; June, 1974.
Commonweal, November 10, 1967.
Contemporary Literature, summer, 1979.
Drama, summer, 1968; fall, 1969; summer, 1972; winter, 1973; autumn, 1974.
Encounter, September, 1974; November, 1975; February, 1983.
Harper's Bazaar, March, 1995, p. 126.
Hudson Review, winter, 1967-68; summer, 1968.
Life, February 9, 1968.
Listener, April 11, 1968; April 18, 1968; June 20, 1974.
London, August, 1968; August-September, 1976.
Look, December 26, 1967; February 9, 1968.
Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1986; December 20, 1986; February 20, 1991.
Nation, November 6, 1967; May 11, 1974; May 18, 1974.
National Observer, October 23, 1967.
National Review, December 12, 1967; November 29, 1993, p. 71.
New Leader, September 21, 1992, p. 21.
New Republic, June 15, 1968; May 18, 1974; November 22, 1975; January 30, 1984.
New Statesman, June 14, 1974.
Newsweek, August 7, 1967; August 31, 1970; March 4, 1974; January 8, 1975; November 10, 1975; January 16, 1984; April 3, 1995, p. 64.
New York, March 11, 1974; May 13, 1974; August 26, 1974; November 17, 1975; August 13-20, 1979; July 26, 1993, p. 51; January 9, 1995, p. 36.
New Yorker, May 6, 1967; October 28, 1967; May 4, 1968; May 6, 1972; March 4, 1974; May 6, 1974; January 6, 1975; January 24, 1977.
New York Post, April 23, 1974; January 6, 1984.
New York Review of Books, June 8, 1995, p. 28.
New York Times, October 18, 1967; October 29, 1967; March 24, 1968; May 8, 1968; June 19, 1968; July 8, 1968; October 15, 1968; April 23, 1974; July 29, 1979; August 1, 1979; October 4, 1979; November 25, 1979; November 28, 1979; June 23, 1983; November 22, 1983; January 6, 1984; January 15, 1984; February 20, 1984; August 1, 1984; May 17, 1987; May 18, 1987; November 22, 1987; November 3, 1989; November 26, 1989; December 26, 1989; February 8, 1991.
New York Times Book Review, August 25, 1968; March 3, 1996, p. 19.
New York Times Magazine, January 1, 1984.
Observer (London, England), August 1, 1993.
Observer Review, April 16, 1967; December 17, 1967; June 23, 1968.
Playboy, May, 1968.
Plays and Players, July, 1970.
Publishers Weekly, February 12, 1996, p. 24.
Punch, April 19, 1967.
Reporter, November 16, 1967.
Saturday Review, August 26, 1972; January 8, 1977.
Show Business, April 25, 1974.
Spectator, June 22, 1974.
Stage, February 10, 1972.
Sunday Times Review, April 21, 1991.
Theatre Journal, March, 1980.
Time, October 27, 1967; August 9, 1968; March 11, 1974; May 6, 1974; June 20, 1983; August 24, 1992, p. 69; July 19, 1993, p. 60.
Times (London, England), November 18, 1982; April 3, 1985.
Times Literary Supplement, March 21, 1968; December 29, 1972; November 26, 1982; December 24, 1982; September 29, 1995, p. 23.
Times Saturday Review (London, England), June 29, 1991.
Transatlantic Review, summer, 1968.
Variety, November 22, p. 36.
Village Voice, May 4, 1967; October 26, 1967; May 2, 1974.
Virginia Quarterly Review, autumn, 1995, p. 642.
Vogue, November 15, 1967; April 15, 1968; December, 1994, p. 180.
Wall Street Journal, March 11, 1974; November 3, 1975; January 6, 1984.
Washington Post, May 11, 1969; June 25, 1969; July 9, 1969; August 29, 1978; November 26, 1978; January 12, 1984; May 23, 1985.
World and I, May, 2003, Herb Greer, review of The Coast of Utopia,, p. 228.
World Literature Today, winter, 1978; summer, 1986; spring, 1995, p. 369; winter, 1996, p. 193.*