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when i think tom stoppardI first think of a minor moment in his 1982 play the real thing When the hero became concerned about the possibility that he might be asked to attend Desert Island DiscsHe did not like proper classical music, And guests who chose pop tended to choose something artistic, like Pink Floyd, But he knew that due to his disappointment he would ultimately choose “Um Um Um Um Um Um Um” by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders,
Its a very frozen moment – funny, self-deprecating, and in line with decades of popular culture.
But then all I can think of is the visual acrobatics (literally) in his play. jumpersThe first performance of which I saw in 1972, was a mesmerizing blend of linguistics, philosophy, circus skills and more. Diana Rigg She enters swinging on a papier-mâché moon wearing fishnets. jumpers Stoppard experimented with mathematical and scientific concepts, which became a pervasive theme of his plays. In it, the hero thought that an arrow fired towards the target would have to travel half the distance, and then the remaining half the distance and so on ad infinitum, “and St. Sebastian died of fear”.
There was also his still underrated and rarely seen TV drama professional dishonesty, which aired on the BBC in 1977 and took moral philosophy, international football and authoritarian politics to hilarious and hair-raising effect.
Stoppardian was soon to join the Pinteresque as an adjective denoting a unique form of theatre, in his case dazzlingly scholarly and astonishingly surreal. Whenever I met Sir Tom he was utterly charming and self-deprecating, like some of his characters. He looked like a rock star with his shaggy hair and Mick Jagger mouth. His eccentric humor was immediately apparent, but he saved his verbal (and sometimes literal) acrobatics for his plays, where he explored politics, science, love, Shakespeare and even rock’n’roll, sometimes all within the same work. There were crowds in those plays.
And, of course, one must think about his last play, Leopoldstadt In 2020, an intense exploration of a Viennese Jewish family and all their usual domestic romances and tribulations until they become caught up in the horrors of the encroaching Holocaust. It contained poignant echoes of Stoppard’s own recently discovered origins, which were the inspiration for the play. Traumatized by World War II and its antecedents, his mother did not tell Stoppard about his Jewish roots in Czechoslovakia before moving to England when he was a child, or that some of his relatives had died in the Holocaust. It was only when family members approached him in the later years of his life that he started writing. LeopoldstadtWhich was his swansong, and saw him take charge in the final scene.
Stoppard was one of a line of emigrants, perhaps beginning with Joseph Conrad, who brought to their adopted country an intellectual sensitivity and a deep love and fascination for its language.
In England he began his career, as I did some time later, in journalism in Bristol; And old colleagues there told me with some bewilderment how they remembered that he spent most of his time writing plays – of all things. He would have recognized the subversive, young reporter in his editor’s now famous anecdote in which he was asked who the Home Secretary was and Stoppard replied: “I said I was interested in politics, not obsessed with it.” One of his plays, night and day, It was about journalism, starring John Thaw as an archetypal eccentric old foreign correspondent who treacherously has a fling with an African dictator and runs away with the journalist-phobic Diana Rigg. The entire fertile Stoppard region.
Stoppard’s practical humor led to many memorable moments. When Steven Spielberg called him and asked him to write the script Empire of the Sun (which he eventually did), Stoppard initially rejected him, because he was writing a play for the BBC. “What!” Spielberg said in disbelief. “You’re giving up your chance to make a blockbuster movie for television!” Indeed, Stoppard replied, “I’m doing it for radio.”
And although Stoppard later denied it, I’m inclined to believe the theaterworld gossip of the time that when his friend Harold Pinter told him he wanted to change the name of the Comedy Theater to the Harold Pinter Theatre, Stoppard tersely commented: “You might do better to change your name to Harold Comedy.”
His verbal dexterity was usually too much for reporters who tried to ask him an awkward question. When asked about his relationship with actor Felicity Kendall, he replied: “These are the things one can decide whether to contribute or not. I have decided not to contribute. And that’s my contribution.”
Perhaps I felt a little sorry that his later, darker, more complex and challenging works lacked some of the obvious humor of his early years. But he was a playwright who could never remain still.
His plays are so numerous and so diverse that it is not possible to pay tribute to them all or make any linear connections. How can you compare their 1967 debut Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are deadA riotous imagination of what was going on behind the scenes with two minor characters Hamlet, Let’s say, with 1993 arcadiaExploring the relationship between order and disorder, past and present, certainty and uncertainty, through a fusion of time change and 19th century Romanticism and chaos theory in Stoppardian fashion. It was praised by the Royal Institution of Great Britain as one of the best science-related works ever written. I remember that too IndependentThe science editor at the time had written an article taking issue with some of the scientific arguments, and Stoppard, presumably and pleasantly a reader, approached him not to complain, but to be excited by the prospect of debate.
Stoppard himself was a romantic. When someone made the wrong and vulgar comment, and I believe on his wedding day, that his bride Sabrina Guinness was on the shelf, Stoppard beautifully responded that he, Stoppard, had been looking on the wrong shelf for a very long time. He was looking under biography; It should have been seen under poetry.
We may have lost that complex, charming, talented person. But plays that take startling leaps of wit, language, philosophy and imagination will always be with us. We will always have proof of why Stoppard dominated and defined British theater for almost 60 years.