Our era’s main and mega, superstar playwright—Sir Tom Stoppard—shuffled off his mortal coil too soon, even if it did happen after he attained the ripe old age of 88.
But given how often that dude got photographed with a burning cigarette dangling from hand or lips, I’m actually rather gob-smacked he lasted so long.
Coffin-nails (“You get a lot to like with a Marlboro… Filter, flavor, pack or box!”) weren’t the only items that stayed on fire in Stoppard’s vicinity. His oh-so-dry wit appeared both highly incandescent and utterly inextinguishable. He always seemed on a quest for a keener observation, a deeper cultural or historical analysis, a fresh bon mot, a new play to scribble or film script to doctor. In brief, this man got swept along by a perpetual flood tide of creativity.
An irresistible urge to weave daisy chains of avant-garde verbiage must’ve been a key force that kept Stoppard galivanting on down that endless row of overflowing and smoldering ashtrays…
SEMINAL EVENT FOR MY SEMINARY DAZE
I first sought to dip my thin and flimsy tin cup under a spewing geyser of Stoppard’s genius at the tender age of 17. (Mine, not his.) The play that had just pinned him to the literary map, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” had won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award (following its Olivier and its Tony). The original New York cast had been hired to reprise their triumph at the Coconut Grove Playhouse—a suburban arts mecca just south of downtown Miami, FL.
Back then, I was a few years into training to become a Roman Catholic priest. Someone awarded our seminary a handful of ducats for his play (henceforth, I’ll refer to “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” as just, “Rosencrantz”). I was one of the few students who opted to attend—in the company of a coven of local priests.
Probably the most illuminating moment of that night on the town for me came right at the play’s end, when a priest sitting nearby exclaimed, “Now, what the dickens was that all about?”
And I felt a blend of consternation and pity. I refrained from blurting out the first answer that sprang to mind. However, the gist of it was: “You’re a medievalist. And this happens to be a show on modernity.”
The moment also clarified that I had a fork in my path that I’d soon approach, and would need to choose which direction I wished to travel in time. (And I’ll bet you can guess the one that I chose.)
TOPSY TURVY STEALS THE SHOW
Stoppard’s play was a stylistic inversion. Or, essentially, a thought experiment. As, for instance, “Moby Dick” would be, if the epic tale happened to be told from that huge white whale’s point-of-view. And yet, Stoppard went much further. He skipped past ALL the main characters in a classic story. It was as though—were he to rework “Moby Dick”— the author proceeded to ignore Moby the Leviathan, Captain Ahab, Ishmael and even the harpooner Queequeg, in favor of focusing on the concerns of the whaling ship’s anonymous carpenter.
In “Rosencrantz,” Stoppard’s fresh take on “Hamlet,” he whisked past every marquee name on Shakespeare’s character list to make two very minor guys (functioning almost as extras or mobile blobs of plot spackle) his primary stars. These would be the eponymous courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—a pair of former school chums of the melancholy prince.
Stoppard’s insight here leans on the dour fact that by far most humans expend their lives on minor roles. Relatively few get to ladder up to exalted royal status via birth, fate, luck, wealth, or (rarest of all) a convincing demo of uncommon excellence. And thus, “Rosencrantz” becomes a story of Everyman. The plot focuses on two very average guys who struggle to make sense of machinations of the mighty—in which they’ve grown ensnared due to zero volition or fault of their own.
In many ways, “Rosencrantz” is a lineal descendant of Beckett’s absurdist drama, “Waiting for Godot,” produced some 25 years earlier. The principals in “Godot,” Vladimir and Estragon, are thematic kissin’ cousins to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But I’d say one key difference is that Stoppard’s play is a great deal funnier that Beckett’s; he can wring more humor out of fewer words than just about any author who ever came before him.
Another difference is that in “Godot,” nothing really happens, and that’s both the source of its plot tension (what little there is) and its point. “Godot” is existential to the point of nihilism. In “Rosencrantz,” big stuff happens, but not to the main characters—until finally, it does. They’re j-u-s-t starting to figure out what’s truly going on before it proceeds to eat them alive.
DÉJÀ VU WITH A TWIST
After I discovered Stoppard had flown permanently away for the great Library in the Sky (with cappuccinos and crullers served on demand by angelic attendees with donut halos), it made me wish to circle back ‘round to the “Rosencrantz” play that had so greatly impressed me in my youth. Would that show hold up, nowadays? Would it still seem that ab-fab literary treat I so fondly remembered?
Unfortunately, no current productions of that play could be discerned on the boards anywhere within my region. And yet, fortunately, a few Stoppard obits happened to mention that he’d directed his own movie version of “Rosencrantz” in 1990. And, given his sublimely then-robust rep in drama circles, he’d drawn top-tier actors like Gary Oldman and Tim Roth into this project.
I practically rubbed my chubby lil’ mitts together in eager anticipation as I ordered the DVD. Right after that disc came in the mail, I cranked it up.
And promptly found out that his movie version sucked. Not entirely, no. I’d say the third and fourth fifth of the thing were reasonably brilliant and entertaining. However, every other portion seemed sadly and wantonly flawed. I’ll enumerate some of its major faults.
- The opening “theme music” consists of a mournfully howling dog that won’t shut up, and the opening scene is of two riders clomping along a road in a bleak landscape for far too long. It’s a boring, off-putting debut of the story, not at all welcoming, intriguing, or even all that informative for a viewer.
- In the original play that I saw, tight pacing of line delivery underscored not only the wit of the playwright, but that of his characters. In the movie, the lines are spaced out to the point that the luster of the lines drains off, while the characters who pronounce them begin to sound like total morons.
- The beauty of a good theatrical production is it occurs in a compact box that through stagecraft can suggest a near infinity of time and/or space. Whereas a film can more easily provide you with a near-tangible illusion of same, yet does so via different means. Stoppard botches his shift in media through excess use of literally-portrayed space and time, which produces excessive drag on his story. He only recovers after he narrows the film’s frame back down to what might be confined under a real theatrical arch, then picks up the pace.
- Theaters are designed to channel distinct sound to each and every seat in the venue. That problem has been addressed by architects, using principles understood and steadily improved ever since amphitheaters were constructed by ancient Greeks and Romans. However, sound solutions for all modern films must be devised by pro sound engineers using electronics. Fail to employ such new tools correctly, and you create a barely audible mush. Stoppard—perhaps a bit at sea with film technology— wound up ladling a ton of mush into his production.
- The problem above was compounded by Stoppard’s neglect in directing Roth and Oldman to speak clearly and distinctly. Instead, those actors opted to mumble to each other, not project to an audience (or a boom mic). I don’t know if they imagined this amounted to a superior technique for film (à la Altman or Brando), something that would lure an audience to “lean in.” However, the shabby result ought to have been caught by the director in his dailies and then swiftly corrected in re-shoots. Or, at minimum, solved via sound-booth recordings, lip-synched to the visuals.
- In the original play, his two main characters come across as fairly bright, even if overwhelmed by circumstances. Which makes sense, since if they’re old chums of Lord Hamlet—no dummy, he—they’d at minimum need to be clever, if not wise. In the play I saw, when their conversation tended to badinage and repartee, it sounded intentional and ironic. However, in the film, Stoppard, hams up their roles by inserting too many slapstick stunts that suggest their dominant traits actually consist of frivolity and stupidity. This renders his characters lightweight, more vulnerable, less likable, and the outcome more predictable. Thus, dramatic tension is bled off, wholesale. They turn so hapless and helpless, it’s difficult for a viewer to conjure a jot of caring for their fate. Death begins to seem more like a serving of just desserts.
BUT TO ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE
On the other hand, actor Richard Dreyfuss shines in his role as The Player, to a degree that prompts me to consider it his finest effort. He comes a l-o-n-g way from that over-earnest, bumbling figure in “American Graffiti” (1973) and “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” (1974). In “Rosencrantz,” he’s the dominating leader of a troupe of traveling actors who thrive by their wits, and he chews up the scenery, consuming it all with relish and panache… then blasting out another line with better accent, attitude, timing and diction than anyone else.
Since Dreyfuss scores the most remarkable performance (in my sorta humble view), he’s the number one reason for anyone to take the trouble to locate and watch the film.
The second-best thing (as I mentioned) happens in the third and fourth fifth, when Stoppard yanks out all the stops on his theater-craft and finally deploys the strengths of film to present scenes in a faster, more layered and realized fashion than could ever be accomplished on a physical stage. He presents a puppet show, inside a dumb show, inside a play, inside his film, all of it adroitly stacked together like so many dramatic nesting dolls.
That part is visionary, bold, wildly creative, and it works. If he’d performed that type of magic throughout the entire movie, the project would’ve improved by an astronomic degree. And yet, it might also have sent audiences staggering out into the night as if struggling to recover from an overdose of LSD.
Although Stoppard worked on many other films, both before and after “Rosencrantz,” I think it’s quite telling that, in terms of receiving calls to direct more films, he never scored an invite to that part of the party again. Nevertheless, producers continued to ask him to do what he did best: write. He scripted over a dozen original films, such as the famed “Shakespeare in Love” (for which he won an Oscar) and doctored scripts for numberless others, including masterpieces like, “Brazil,” “Empire of the Sun” and “Schindler’s List.”
WHAT WE MIGHT LEARN FROM A MAESTRO
The most inspirational aspect of Stoppard’s meteoric career, to me, is that he launched it as a lightly educated, teenaged dropout. If we ever had a mug shot entirely apropos to post next to a definition of the principle, “follow your bliss,” it’s his. As a 17-year-old, he took up journalism, with indifferent success until he was assigned to theater reviews.
Subsequently, there came a few nights spent at the Bristol Old Vic theater, wherein he caught a fiery, young Peter O’Toole in the key role of “Hamlet” and Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger.” Combined, those experiences seized his imagination and lit the fuse on a rocket that took off and did not cease to scatter a trail of bright sparks across the theatrical zenith for the next 60 years, resulting in some three dozen plays—all good, and some excellent.
Here are notions I gleaned from Stoppard’s brilliant career trajectory:
- Only that which truly excites you can be your real fuel.
- Curiosity won’t kill a cat as much as it quickens him.
- Persistence is at least as important as inspiration. Success might be a chimera, but one should never cease to chase it.
- Don’t stop exploring your possibilities, either. Although Stoppard harvested a bushel basket of laurels, he always refused to rest on ’em.
- Also, never fear to screw up. He didn’t. As hockey great Wayne Gretzky put it, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
In his early to mid-career years, Stoppard sometimes had to face criticism that his work was too “chilly” and cerebral. A contemporary (and competing) playwright once satirized him as a figure named, Miles Whittier. A critic challenged him to bring the relationships of the characters in his plays, “out of the ‘fridge.”
But doing that, of course, meant accessing and revealing his own deep and genuine feelings by investing them in his characters and so render their interactions more lifelike. And yet this, he did not seem inclined to do. He stated at one point, “I don’t see any special virtue in making my private emotions the quarry for the statue I’m carving.”
Although the critiques above were acknowledged as a valid take on his work, some saw the situation a tad differently. New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, in 2007, opined, “Anyone who looked hard enough could always see the fragile, hopeful heart beneath the cerebral glitter in Mr. Stoppard’s work.”
In any case, Stoppard did forge a genuine breakthrough in his ultimate work, “Leopoldstadt,” written in his early 80s. That play focused on the plight of a Jewish population in early 20th-century Austria, featuring a character named Leo, a young Britisher who has no memory of his past as a Jewish child in Vienna, yet starts to explore it. The drama reveals the perils of assimilating during a period of ascendant antisemitism.
[Note: The odd title of the play refers to the second municipal district of Vienna, which had a relatively high proportion of Jewish inhabitants—above 38%—prior to the Holocaust. At that time, it also carried a nickname, Mazzesinse, meaning, “Matzo Island.”]
What gives this work its realism and rather touching cachet is that Stoppard himself didn’t grasp that he was actually Jewish until he approached age 60, and he didn’t announce it publicly until 1999.
Here’s how that discovery occurred. He was born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1937. His parents, well-aware of a rising threat from Nazism, fled in 1939 to Singapore. From there, his mother, he and a brother made it to India, while his father, a doctor who tried to escape later, perished on a ship torpedoed by the Japanese. His mother married a British soldier named Ken Stoppard, and they moved to Nottingham, England after the war—where Tom got raised and schooled as a typical British kid of his day, while being given scant and negligible clues as to his true origins.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, a now-free citizen of Czech Republic who was a distant relative of the Sträusslers contacted Stoppard’s mother, then him, and they subsequently met in London. Whereupon it was revealed that three of his aunts had been murdered during the Nazi occupation, two at Auschwitz, and all four of his grandparents had been slaughtered amid that same brutal era.
This dismaying revelation was followed by further connections, the viewing of a photo album from his original family’s early days, and Stoppard’s eventual homecoming to Zlin. Here he met people who’d known and interacted with his relatives—including an older woman who recalled having a cut in her hand being stitched up by his father just before he fled the Nazis.
And those stitches would reappear as a theme, quite significantly, in “Leopoldstadt.” Stoppard’s final play went on to win an Olivier for Best New Play, and after opening on Broadway in 2022, it was nominated for six Tony Awards and won four, including for Best Play.
The import and meaning of this creative development by this well-seasoned author at such a late point in life is both impressive and apparent. Driven by forces that seemed to have harnessed him at least as much, if not more, than he them, he proceeded to take a giant risk—perhaps his largest, ever. And it paid off! In spades.
Consequently, it’s not very hard to imagine him finally lowering curtains, striking the set and switching off lights with a smile on his lips, eh?
I think he’d enjoy it if we let Stoppard’s beloved theatric guru, William Shakespeare, present us with some last words for this column.
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will…”
—Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, Line 10
