Thursday, May 15, 2008
For the last four decades, the playwright has filled the theater world with clever wordplay, big ideas and palpable passion.
Nov 13, 2001 | I remember the night I fell in love with Tom Stoppard. He seduced me with shimmering language, ideas that revved my mind, and emotions that expanded my heart and left me breathless. Back in the spring of 1995, as I sat through a preview performance of his "Arcadia" in its U.S. premiere run at Lincoln Center, in New York, I was utterly his.
Who else could commingle chaos theory and carnal embraces -- his characters positing that sexual attraction may be the one variable Newton left out and contemplating the "action of bodies in heat" -- with such dexterity?
He waltzed through time with enviable ease, guiding characters and parallel ideas with a sure hand. The audience sat rapt, working hard to keep up -- afraid to miss a key idea in the fast play of words. Yet "Arcadia's" Septimus offers comfort: "We shed as we pick up," he says of our collective desire to learn and understand, "like travelers who carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind."
Stoppard provided no answers, but rather posed question upon question, allowing his characters to hold each one up to the light and watch the insights glance off its facets. "It's wanting to know that makes us matter," "Arcadia's" Hannah says of life's unanswerable quandaries. "Otherwise we go out the way we came in."
I emerged at the end not at all the way I'd come in. Whole chunks of the audience walked out mid-play, not yet told by critics how to react and frustrated by its challenges. But others picked up the ideas that Stoppard had shed.
New York Times theater critic Vincent Canby said "Arcadia" was "like a dream of levitation: you're instantaneously aloft, soaring, banking, doing loop-the-loops and then, when you think you're about to plummet to earth, swooping to a gentle touchdown of not easily described sweetness and sorrow."
And while some reviewers complained about the play's abundance of words and flashiness of ideas (a frequent criticism of Stoppard), San Francisco Examiner critic Robert Hurwitt gushed, "If ideas were flesh and all conception carnal, Tom Stoppard would be the sexiest writer of the modern stage."
"Arcadia," in which Stoppard allowed himself to mine human emotions more deeply than ever before, was but one highlight in the playwright's long career writing for the theater, film and TV. For the last four decades, Stoppard has filled the theater world with clever wordplay, big ideas and palpable passion.
Thus far, he has turned out some 22 plays -- including the Tony-Award winning "The Real Thing," and "Travesties"; 10 adaptations and translations of works by Anton Chekhov, Federico García Lorca and Vaclav Havel; myriad television and radio plays; and a novel, "Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon." His screenplays include "Brazil," co-written with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown; "Empire of the Sun," based on the J.G. Ballard novel; and "Shakespeare in Love," the Oscar-winning screenplay written with Marc Norman.
Whether on stage, screen or simply page, Stoppard questions everything from the nature of love to the nature of the universe, from the compulsion to act to the compulsion to act out, from the impulse to create to the impulse to procreate. And while absolutes are scant in Stoppard's work, interrogatives and insights abound. "What a fine persecution -- to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened," observes Guildenstern in Stoppard's 1966 breakthrough effort "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."
Stoppard's work invariably demands much from its audiences -- head, heart, libido -- and credits them with the capacity to learn. They must come prepared to laugh and to ponder the gravest of thoughts. If they do, they will find themselves not just intrigued and enlightened, but also moved and enlivened, with all their switches flicked on and buzzing.
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