Tom Stoppard and Me

The one thing left on my bucket list is to write a Stoppardian play. That would mean a comedy with characters whose dialogue would mix their personal stories with some intellectual controversy in a collage of images and allusions to literary or scientific sources. An unkind critic said a Stoppardian play uses complexity of form to disguise a simplicity of thought.

I tried, but never got beyond the brainstorming stage. It's probably a mistake to start with the form and not with a subject of interest. Anyway, he died today, so he'll never see my homage, should I ever write it.

Regardless, I loved what I read and I liked what I saw.

Bruce Davison, actor on stage and screen, starred in the Duke Players' production of Stoppard's Travesties for which I was props manager. Davison was Duke's artist-in-residence that year, around 1980. I was honored when the actor inserted "Scott Smoot" into a list of names during a performance.

The earth moved for me the first time I saw a play of his that I could understand. It was a one-act take-off on Agatha Christie's plays that he called The Real Inspector Hound. Mid-way, the phone rings and just keeps ringing. A theatre critic who has commented on the first half of the play gets annoyed and climbs up onto the stage to silence the phone. From that point on, every line and stage movement is practically a repeat of the first half of the play, only it all means something new with this different character.

Stoppard performed a similar feat in his screenplay for Russia House, which opens with a story told by Sean Connery, heard three times, verbatim. Each time we hear the words, we're seeing a different angle on the story that changes its meaning completely.

I was delighted, and in awe. I felt the ground drop away, and I was in free-fall. I'm always grateful for that experience.

I got that same feeling from Arcadia, a much more substantial and emotional (and joyful!) play. I admit that other live performances were rarely as strong as the ones I imagined while I read and marked cross-references, puns, and epigrams. A Broadway production of Jumpers, a play I'd read with delight, was especially disappointing. I missed so much that I had caught on the page.

That's more or less my experience with other Stoppard plays. Below are links to my blogposts about Stoppard's works:

• Stoppard's The Hard Problem: Dramatizing Thought
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Still Kicking How do we gain when Stoppard crosses Hamlet with Waiting for Godot? Let me count the ways!
• The Invention of Stoppard Stoppard's favorite of his own works was The Invention of Love. I saw it on Broadway and I read it closely. Stoppard eluded me, but I do think my essay about the show hits on something great: the playwright known for verbal virtuosity achieves his greatest emotional effect in the silence between just two words.
• I read today (Stoppard's death) that he thought Arcadia was his best play. Me, too. I wrote about it in Math and Tenderness.
• I tried to appreciate Stoppard's suite of plays called The Coast of Utopia about the intellectual developments of the 19th century that led Russia to totalitarianism. I didn't succeed. Or maybe, Stoppard didn't. You Had to be There.

I may some day post notes I wrote longhand on Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, The Real Thing, Travesties, and Night and Day.

When I studied at Oxford in the summer of 1980, the lords of British theatre were Stoppard, his buddy Pinter, and their less-revered-but-more-popular colleague Peter Shaffer. I wrote about the other two when they died:

Playwright Sees God: Remembering Peter Shaffer https://smootpage.blogspot.com/2016/06/remembering-playwright-peter-shaffer.html

A Moment of Silence for Harold Pinterhttps://smootpage.blogspot.com/2008/12/moment-of-silence-for-harold-pinter.html