Tom Stoppard’s Radical Invitation
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” his 1966 Shakespearian meta-theatrical puzzle, about tertiary characters grappling with their inexorable fate, mainstreamed conversations about probability and droll ennui (“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it”). It hit the theatre like a comet. Even in an alternate reality in which Stoppard wrote only “Rosencrantz,” we’d still be in the impact crater of that one masterpiece. Crucially, he demonstrated the reach and ambition of an intertextual postmodernism that might otherwise have remained an Edinburgh Fringe-style in-joke: it has since given us everything from “& Juliet” to “Hamnet,” to “Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief” to his own “Shakespeare in Love.” Thanks to “Rosencrantz”—or is it Guildenstern?—our writers are forever at play among their own bookshelves.
Stoppard was a brilliant autodidact, with no college degree (just like Harold Pinter and George Bernard Shaw before him), and yet he has become, oddly, the ideal playwright for the academicized theatre that followed. In theory, a Stoppard play demands a certain level of knowledge from its audience, a reading list already completed. Many of us encountered him first in class, after all. Studying “Hamlet” gives “Rosencrantz” its necessary context; reading Oscar Wilde unlocks “Travesties”; a sense that Latin grammar is hilarious will help you enjoy “The Invention of Love”; and “Arcadia” assumes at least a passing familiarity with Byron.
In practice, though, I found the education actually works in the opposite direction. He’s influential because he catches us at a crucial developmental moment. Long before I had seen Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap,” I played Cynthia in Stoppard’s parody of Christie’s œuvre, “The Real Inspector Hound.” (I understood about half of the jokes, though I did notice that the critic characters, while being savaged by their playwright as pretentious boobs, got all the good lines.) In college, I certainly read “Rosencrantz” more times than I tackled the original Shakespeare text, and now the two plays have grown permanently into each other: I can’t experience “Hamlet” without thinking about the plot machinery in the wings, grinding up the titular courtiers, night after night. For me, and I think for others, too, Stoppard offered a kind of on-ramp into the canon, offering to make us comfortable enough among the Great Authors to have our own thoughts about them. His was an inclusive élitism, an invitation into a life of unabashed, unstoppable thinking.
His work was also a beckoning to the foothills of science: for a while after “Arcadia,” we all fancied ourselves experts in chaos theory; at the college cast party after “Hapgood,” his comedy about a scientist quantumly entangled with British intelligence, we all talked confidently about light as a particle and a wave. Were there other public intellectuals working with this same sense of contagious expertise? I can’t think of many. This pop-science stuff can be pernicious, though. Stoppard’s influence is connected to the imitability of some of his gestures: I have seen too many plays that hope a gloss on elementary physics (or a diagram about how bees organize themselves, or whatever) will elevate the work to “Arcadia” ’s level. This Stoppardian fondness for research can be a hindrance, even in Stoppard’s own work: the impulse to include a bit of brisk mathematical exposition, like the talk about cat’s cradles in “Leopoldstadt,” could lead the writer astray.
Selfishly, “The Real Thing” is my favorite of Stoppard’s plays, not because of the keen portrait of infidelity and loss but because it seems to be written by the version of the writer who never stopped being a theatre critic. In the nineteen-sixties, Stoppard wrote reviews for Scene magazine under the pen name William Boot. In “The Real Thing,” a playwright named Henry Boot resists the encroaching tides of relativism and special pleading and sentimentality, swearing that there’s a value in distinguishing between good plays and bad. Every critic I know can quote Henry’s cricket-bat speech from that play:
