I felt a certain stream in common in those first plays: the word play, the ongoing comic exploration of language philosophy so prominent at Cambridge and Oxford, and its relationship with the satire of the 60s--Beyond the Fringe, That Was The Week That Was, the Goon Show and Peter Sellers, Richard Lester and the Beatles, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and later Monty Python and Douglas Adams. These were exciting me and my writing in the 60s as well, but I knew them only from their artifacts. Tom Stoppard knew many of the people involved--he even wrote for a magazine run by Peter Cook. (Of course they all had further roots in English Music Hall (or American vaudeville), the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy (and the appropriate British double acts.) These influences show up in Stoppard's work as well.)
Even the collision of Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett in R&G Are Dead was also familiar--in a way, that describes much of my college experience.
Later plays continued the elegance of language, the high and low humor, the unapologetic focus on ideas in philosophy, science, literature and history, with increasing inventiveness if in quieter ways. And it wasn't all fun and games--for instance, he returned several times, from an early play to one of his last, to the question of what is the nature of the good.
Our lives have been quite different, of course. But that unbeknownst to me, it appears he was also a left-handed and right-eared night owl, with even less digital tech than I have, is now a little eerie.
Over the years I valued Stoppard's musings in and outside his plays, especially as a writer. Like his very helpful description of the art in writing as controlling the flow of information. He was a realist with a deep sense of vocation, who said "One's duty is to write as well as you possibly can, and to write whatever it is that you are now in a fit state to write." That's a kind of classical conception that seems increasingly fragile.
A few years ago as he was giving a tour of his home library to a guest and his film crew, he remarked: "I'm deeply romantic about literature as a devotion." I identify with that as well, though it also seems a fading feeling in following generations.
Stoppard often insisted that reading his plays was fairly fruitless, not only because the published plays are notorious for having been changed already by the publication date, but because of the nature of them as "description of a future event." That event is the production, the performance. It's a complicated subject. There are playwrights, like Shakespeare and especially Chekov, that provide a full reading experience with their texts alone, which performance sometimes does not match. A good deal of Stoppard does repay reading, but it's also true a lot can be missed. Not just the many sight gags (they can be at least imagined) but nuances and even narrative moments that are hard to pick up or to be given their proper weight by reading only.
Unfortunately, I've seen only a few of his plays performed: I did manage to see The Real Thing in its original Broadway production (directed by Mike Nichols), regional theatre productions of The Invention of Love and On the Razzle, as well as college productions of Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound and R&G (and I've seen Stoppard's award-winning movie based on that play several times.)
But he also has work preserved in the movies: for example, his contributions to the hallucinatory Brazil, the Spielberg production of Empire of the Sun, and his voice in the Indiana Jones film with Sean Connery as Indy's father. (Stoppard also wrote the screenplay for John Le Carre's The Russia House, starring Connery.) Of course he is most famous for his Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, which despite co-writer credit is mostly his work.
Perhaps his most sustained work for television was the British miniseries based on the related Ford Maddox Ford novels collected under the title Parade's End. I admire both the script and the novels greatly.
Besides some TV plays and even a few radio plays done early in his career on YouTube, and more available from the BBC, there's a late radio play on YouTube called Darkside, a remarkably short play that incorporates all of Pink Floyd's classic album, Dark Side of the Moon. (This play also concerns the struggle to define the good.) For those curious about Stoppard, this is not a bad place to start.
Stoppard wrote outrageous comedies and quieter if equally unusual dramas, often incorporating history and playing with concepts of time. But all his plays had laughs. The laugh, he told an actor in one of them, "is the sound of comprehension."
He loved the process of theatre, working with producers, directors, actors, designers, all through rehearsals in major productions, often rewriting on request. That meant the play was still alive. He wrote for small casts and large ones, in one-acts, and in a trilogy (The Coast of Utopia) that took nearly nine hours to perform. In New York, it was the hottest ticket in town. What was its sensational subject? Mid-nineteenth century intellectuals of pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia. Each of those plays ran separately and consecutively during the week, but all three were performed back to back on Saturdays. I was in New York briefly during the run and heard the buzz, but the tickets--especially for Saturdays--were sold out far in advance, even if I could somehow afford to buy one.
Before I started my chronological exploration this month I watched a lot of interviews from recent years, particularly about his last play, Leopoldstadt, a summary work in more ways than one, reflecting aspects of his own life and its previously unknown context--namely that many older members of his Czech Jewish family died in the Holocaust. The play follows a similar family from the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s. Performances left people in tears, including on more than one occasion, Stoppard himself. He was 83 when it was first staged in London, 85 when it came to New York. In interviews he expressed an eagerness to be writing another play, but also admitted that after this play, it was hard to know where to go after that crowning work.
Stoppard died in November, at the age of 88. "Death is not anything," Guildenstern says towards the end of R&G. "It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back..." He was by all accounts a very sociable man (his large annual parties were legendary), who (he admitted) felt most comfortable alone. He was a loving husband and father and friend, known for his kindness--and he owned that the kindness was deliberate, a commitment. A lot of people are missing him. He's not coming back. Throughout his life Stoppard quoted another playwright's line to the effect that the obscure current underlying all of life is grief.
His work lives on, and so in this way he lives for me. Stoppard realized his plays would be produced and read for an indeterminant time after his death, but beyond that he felt such speculation was idle. Who knows what will survive and speak, if anything, especially in the increasingly uncertain future.
Stoppard was committed to writing for the theatre, which of all writing is most obviously experienced in somebody's present. But his reservations duly noted, the same is true of reading his plays, his words. The writing that is read is also experienced in the present, whenever (and wherever) that present happens to be.
Stoppard's verbal eloquence wasn't restricted to jokes, ironies and epigrams. In particular I think of the profound and profoundly moving eloquence that appears at the end of play Shipwrecked, the middle play of his Coast of Utopia trilogy. To me it is as enduring as any lines of any playwright in my lifetime.
Alexander Herzen has just suffered the sudden death of his young son. Michael Bakunin attempts to comfort his by saying, "Little Kolya, his life cut so short! Who is this Moloch...?" Herzen replies:
