Stopping With Stoppard

 In a prior post, I announced my intention to read--and mostly to re-read--as much of Tom Stoppard's work as I could.  From late December into early April, that's what I did (along with other reading, of course): all the original stage plays, all but two or three of his translations, most of the TV and radio plays, though just one screenplay--his Oscar winning Shakespeare in Love.  Along the way I re-read Hermione Lee's biography and several collections of Stoppard interviews, in tandem with the plays discussed in each.  

All I have left in my possession un-re-read is the book of scripts for the miniseries of Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End.  I read it several years ago after seeing the miniseries, then reading and essentially discovering the brilliance of the Ford novels collected under that title (which tell a continuous story.) My first impression of the scripts was that Stoppard incorporated all the best lines.

These days I read mostly for the experience of reading; that is, inhabiting the moment.  But I did come away with some impressions.  Stoppard famously dismissed the reading of his plays, insisting that they could only be enjoyed by seeing them on the stage.  In later years he modified that view when he came to understand that some people in fact did enjoy reading them.  But the additional factor of course is the absence of opportunities to see them.  Regional and community theatres in the U.S. regularly produce only a few (mostly Rosencranz and Gildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia and perhaps The Real Thing), mostly because they are deemed the most accessible and certainly because they have relatively small casts and are less dependent on elaborate staging than, say, Jumpers or even Travesties.  Most of us have only the written words. They are often brilliant, and so reading his work is rewarding.

But he was partly right about casually reading rather than seeing his plays--you do tend to miss a lot.  There are the verbal gymnastics and jokes, but even their effectiveness often depends on performance.  Even the radio plays are more than only dialogue--sound effects play a large part in several.  

The BBC does offer most of the plays, at least in radio versions, though only from them.  There are a few easily available online--notably the television plays  Professional Foul and Squaring the Circle, the radio plays In the Native State, a television version of the stage play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and what is probably Stoppard's last radio play, Darkside, which incorporates the entire Pink Floyd album, the classic Dark Side of the Moon.  I watched and listened to all of these in those months.

The play scripts did tend to change, at least slightly, with each major production, so my very early editions don't entirely reflect the now standard versions.  I did re-read a few as collected in what so far is the only series of collected plays--I expect a more definitive series will eventually be published.  I did find myself enjoying The Real Thing more in the collected volume, though perhaps that had more to do with the typeface and the book itself.

Apart from the radio plays, to me the best pure reading experiences were Indian Ink, and the radio play from which it was derived: In the Native State.  I certainly enjoyed reading the three plays of The Coast of Utopia more the second time, as I could follow the characters and action better.  But except for Indian Ink, Stoppard was right--seeing them makes a difference.  

For I did see The Real Thing in its original production on Broadway (with Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close, as above) and a university theatre production of  R&G, which informed the reading experience.  Curiously, I also saw a production of Arcadia, which did not, other than in the general way of knowing the outline of the plot and the narrative technique.  I simply don't recall the performances.  Arcadia, Stoppard believed, was the closest he came to a perfect play.  It does read well, while suggesting a superior theatrical experience.

The best reading experience was of his screenplay for Shakespeare In Love. Every line of it is sparkling and resonant (and despite sharing the Oscar with Marc Norman, every line of it is Stoppard.)  I can't discount of course that I've seen the movie a number of times, so the voices match with the actors.  ( I've also had multiple viewings of the feature film of "Rosencranz" that Stoppard directed--I have both on DVD--but he re-wrote it for the screen. Still the major speeches which are also in the play sing off the pages in the voices of Gary Oldman, Tim Roth and Richard Dreyfus.  The movie is very entertaining.) 

The one Stoppard play I hadn't read before was his last, Leopoldstadt.  It is involving and moving on the page, suggesting the impressive theatrical experience extolled in reviews.  I would love to see it but its large cast makes it forbidding to mount, except perhaps in an ambitious university production.  But I think my theatre-going days are over, so I'll have to be content with reading it, and re-reading.