Tom Stoppard's intention is always to entertain, first and foremost. Though his plays are intellectually and philosophically rigorous, they're also good stories told with voluble wit. Sometimes he takes too easy a road to difficult issues in science and history, and...
[more]Tom Stoppard's intention is always to entertain, first and foremost. Though his plays are intellectually and philosophically rigorous, they're also good stories told with voluble wit. Sometimes he takes too easy a road to difficult issues in science and history, and for this he has been criticized by the academy. Robert Brustein of the Yale Repertory huffs, "As a dramatist, Stoppard is a dandy. His plays toy with difficult subjects, but they are essentially not very serious." You can bite your thumb at the aristocratic "rrrolled rrr" in that comment. Stoppard gets the last word. And the last laugh.
He didn't start out with aspirations to be a dramatist. "I believed my reputation would be made by the novel. I believed the play would be of little consequence," he said in 1977. In 1968 he published both the novel "Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon" and the play "Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead." To his surprise, it was the latter that became immortal. Like Beckett but ten times more palatable, "Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead" set new standards for comedy. It predicted the very silly but philosophical humor that Monty Python's Flying Circus would bring to television a few years later, and actually bears much in common with the playwright that inspired it, Shakespeare, who also "toyed" with "difficult subjects."
Stoppard has been ingenious in using limitation to build his repertoire. It always helps his work retain, as he puts it, "that essential touch of reality that assures a scientist is earning his keep." Like a scientist, Stoppard begins with an arithmetical problem of craft and lets it tell the story (and science itself has been a favorite subject). "Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead" establishes the play's premise with its title, then unfolds and refolds the drama like a squeezebox -- tight, logical, and hysterically funny. Likewise, "Artist Descending a Staircase" (which takes its title from Duchamp) builds a gripping mystery out of a surreal series of sounds. These plays are like building blocks stacked into brainy yet precarious towers.
Stoppard's roots in journalism (he left the profession after six years when he realized he had yet to publish any creative work) come through in the curious confluence of fiction, fact, and mystery he works into his plays. Characters and narratives wade through the swamps of history and present in the same way that journalists must -- gathering messy, soggy bits of information and sussing out a story. In fact, Stoppard "studied" journalism in lieu of university study. From his position outside the hallowed halls of academia, he produces smart, irreverent plays that might just make some factions of that academy, well, jealous.
[show less]
