TOM STOPPARD GREW FROM A MAN OF NO CONVICTION: AN APPRECIATION

In his later plays Tom Stoppard almost always included a character who turns from a life of frivolous tomfoolery, of one sort or another, coming face to face with evil in the world, and recognizing his responsibility to become the change he wishes to see. That was in fact the trajectory of Stoppard’s writings themselves. He went from being a writer who avoided writing about politics--someone who said his favorite line in literature was “I’m a man of no convictions—at least, I think I am”--to being someone who wrote a nine-hour trilogy of plays on the origins of Russian socialism, and for whom almost every new play for two decades ended up carrying some kind of political theme. I loved this change in Stoppard as much as I’d loved what he’d written before the transformation. To hyperbolize as one does in the face of a loss, Stoppard’s writings were in a small way the spur for such an intellectual awakening in me as well. As young theater kids, my brother and I were interested in a wide variety of subjects—politics, history, literature, theater, film—but like a lot of humanities kids were not particularly awake to the joys of other subjects, like math and science. (It’s a cliché of journalists to say that the reason one chooses that field is to avoid math.) When we encountered Stoppard’s plays, particularly his best, Arcadia, we saw that our beloved art form could tell stories that heretofore it had not, finding literature in chaos theory, the “hard problem” of consciousness, mathematics, physics. He also made other subjects fascinating and entertaining in a way many have tried to imitate but none have equaled. His death over Thanksgiving weekend was as hard a blow for me as any celebrity death ever has been. To say he was my favorite playwright seems too tiny a tribute. He changed my relationship to the world. His personal evolution, his dramaturgy and my own intellectual maturation are versions of the same story.

In his first decade or more of writing plays, Stoppard was almost fiercely apolitical. As a long profile by Kenneth Tynan in The New Yorker pointed out in 1977, there was then a “split in English drama” between ”heated, embattled, socially committed playwrights, like John Osborne, John Arden, and Arnold Wesker, who had come out fighting in the late fifties” and “cool, apolitical stylists, like Harold Pinter, the late Joe Orton, Christopher Hampton … Alan Ayckbourn … Simon Gray … and Stoppard.” The article quoted Stoppard from an interview in the London weekly Time Out as saying “I used to feel out on a limb, because when I started to write you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that ... The Importance of Being Earnest is important, but it says nothing about anything.” Stoppard’s plays in those days were brilliant, stuffed to the brim with explorations of philosophy (Jumpers), literary figures like Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, historic figures like Lenin, artistic figures like Tristan Tzara (Travesties) and the trappings of existentialism (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, though he denied its conscious influence). But they were not political, and he was also accused of lacking a certain emotion. Again, Kenneth Tynan:

“Not long ago, I asked Stoppard what he thought of Marlowe’s charge that his plays failed to convey genuine emotion. He reflected for a while and then replied, ‘That criticism is always being presented to me as if it were a membrane that I must somehow break through in order to grow up. Well, I don’t see any special virtue in making my private emotions the quarry for the statue I’m carving. I can do that kind of writing, but it tends to go off, like fruit. I don’t like it very much even when it works. I think that sort of truth-telling writing is as big a lie as the deliberate fantasies I construct. It’s based on the fallacy of naturalism. There’s a direct line of descent from the naturalistic theatre which leads you straight down to the dregs of bad theatre, bad thinking, and bad feeling. At the other end of the scale, I dislike Abstract Expressionism even more than I dislike naturalism. But you asked me about expressing emotion. Let me put the best possible light on my inhibitions and say that I’m waiting until I can do it well.’ 

In the late 1970s after the Tynan interview, however, Stoppard appeared to come to a kind of reckoning in both content and style. Himself a refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, he wrote several plays about that country's Communist Party and its abuses of human rights. These plays included Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Cahoot’s Macbeth and Dogg’s Hamlet and Professional Foul. The latter features the reformed man structure I’ve described above. In the play, an ethics professor refuses to smuggle the contraband writings of a Czech dissident (modeled in part on Vaclav Havel, of whom Stoppard is both a friend and a fan) on the grounds that smuggling is unethical. Ultimately, he decides the reverse is true. He stops treating philosophical ideas as pliable fictions and takes political action based on what Stoppard believes to be patently obvious moral absolutes. Meanwhile there were changes on the stylistic front. With The Real Thing in 1984 critics heralded a breakthrough in writing believable characters with what they considered real emotions. Retaining the dazzling wit of his earlier plays but writing essentially naturalistically in terms of character development, Stoppard told the story of a fictionalized version of his own marital travails with emotion and humor.

Nine years later he combined the emotional impact of The Real Thing with the thematic razzle dazzle of his earlier works and wrote what I still consider to be the single best play of the modern era, Arcadia. In a format that was much imitated, the play alternates between aristocrats in an English countryside estate who contemplate Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry, among many other subjects, and academics who are researching those aristocrats in the 20^th Century while discussing Byronic poetry, Chaos theory, Enlightenment versus Romantic gardening, and of course love and sex. No one has ever packed so much into one play.

But Stoppard kept trying, and the streak of plays he wrote in the 1990s and 2000s is among the most impressive in the hundreds-year-old history of the art form. Indian Ink like Arcadia questioned the accuracy of biography, this time in post-colonial India. The Invention of Love, which might be my second favorite, has been called Stoppard’s only “gay play.” It presented the 19^th Century poet AE Housman in love with a male classmate as Oscar Wilde changes the times and the word homosexual is coined. The word is a monstrosity, one character complains: Half of it is Latin and the other half is Greek! 

In 2003 I flew to London to see Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy of plays about 19th Century Russian history, and wrote about the experience for a magazine. I saw all three three-hour plays in one day, an 11-hour commitment that ran from 11 am to 10 pm. This is part of the summary I wrote:

“The [Chekhovian Russian] estate Stoppard shows us is owned by the family of Michael Bakunin, a student who will become an anarchist revolutionary and who, for us, is a one-man dramatization of Russia’s philosophical progression toward Marxism. Bakunin is obsessed with Schelling’s notion that the inner life is real, and all external life is illusion: a great excuse for a life of poetry while the czar crushes all challenges to the status quo of Slavic slavery. But Bakunin can’t avoid the impact of this exterior reality, so it’s forget Schelling, “Fichte is the man!” And then, just as all of Michael’s friends have started reading Fichte, “Hegel is the man!” Hegel, of course, will become “the man” not only to Bakunin but also to Marx. The German’s view of history as a deterministic march of progress will become the foundation of Marx’s world-changing prediction of capitalism’s doom, and Bakunin will be one of thousands of European leftists to find faith in a future proletariat revolution.”

The thrust of my piece was to trace Stoppard’s journey from being an avowedly apolitical playwright who described himself as a “small c” conservative who even, temporarily, endorsed Margaret Thatcher, to writing the trilogy in which, as I put it, “the heroes are all socialists and the chief question is one dear to the sort of leftists Sir Tom once alienated: Why is it we never made it to the utopia envisioned by the socialists of yesteryear?”

Four years after that Rock ‘n’ Roll repeated a similar dynamic to the Bakunin story. A Czech PhD student and rock music fan begins the play unwilling to take risks for the repressive situation in communist Czechoslovakia, until the story of one of his favorite rock bands brings the facts of the country’s plight into sharper relief. He compares the views in Czechoslovakia with those of a professor who teaches Marxist theory, and who holds up Soviet politics as an ideal. Meanwhile the play saturates us in rock and roll music, Sapphic poetry, the politics of Vaclav Havel and debates over materialist philosophy.

In his penultimate play in 2015, The Hard Problem, Stoppard features another epiphany, this time not political but moral. The show returns to the broad philosophical questions he explored in Jumpers in 1972, but this time from a scientific framework. A college student is studying “the Hard problem” of consciousness—how can you prove it exists? What is its nature? Where does goodness come from? But ultimately her belief that science can prove the goodness of humans is destroyed. Goodness, like consciousness and because it is related to consciousness, remains a hard problem. Once again the play is full of dazzling intellectual juxtapositions.

In his final masterpiece, 2020's Leopoldstadt, the inevitable character forced to grapple with the political world in a new way is a kind of self-portrait. Like Stoppard, he is a Jew who has not known he is a Jew for most of his life, consequently freed from having to grapple with the worst parts of being a Jew. He meets a relative who has lost most of his family to the Holocaust and is smacked in the face by how indifferent he has been. 

My brother and I met Stoppard, sort of, at a book signing after a panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania. The two of us drove some 700 miles with two college friends to see him at a symposium on Arcadia. We saw him on two panels, in discussion with academics and a director from the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and laughed as his witty rebuttal to a professor who suggested that Stoppard’s work was postmodern, and that postmodernist literature was excrement. (“What do you say to those who feel postmodernism takes things from multiple sources, digests them, and then excretes them in a different form?”) I wish I remembered what Stoppard said in reply.

We discovered Stoppard in college, first by seeing a mediocre production of one of Stoppard’s less amazing plays, Albert’s Bridge. Then we were blown away by reading The Real Thing. My brother acted the lead roles in Travesties and The Real Inspector Hound. And then shortly thereafter he saw Arcadia in London. These plays made him want to be a dramaturg, researching the history and intellectual content in plays like Stoppard's. He also wrote plays that accomplished some of the sparkling combinations of intellectual references and comic themes. Stoppard’s plays made both of us read more voraciously, both about the subjects of his shows and about everything else. He made the world’s fascinating subjects more fascinating, encouraging his fans to see the connections between all sorts of things. And he did so with a wit that is unparalleled in playwrighting. He was at heart a showman. There will never be another playwright like him. He was also, like his characters, a person who underwent a transformation. The “reformed man” is not just a fictional trope. He didn’t just write about a moral awakening, he modeled it for his viewers.