Tom Stoppard’s Radical Call | The New Yorker

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, his 1966 Shakespearean theatrical mystery about third-rate characters grappling with their inexorable fate, and pervasive conversations about probability and comic boredom (“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it”). He hit the stage like a comet. Even in the alternate reality in which Stoppard only wrote Rosencrantz, we would still be in the hole resulting from that masterpiece. Crucially, it demonstrated the scope and ambition of an intertextual postmodernism that might otherwise have remained an Edinburgh Fringe-style joke: it has since given us everything from "Juliet" to"Hamnet", to"Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief" to"Shakespeare in Love" Thanks to “Rosencrantz” – or is it Guildenstern? Our writers are always playing between their bookshelves.

Stoppard was a brilliant self-educator, with no university degree (just like Harold Pinter and George Bernard Shaw before him), and yet he became, oddly enough, the quintessential playwright for the academic theater that followed. In theory, Stoppard’s play requires a certain level of knowledge from its audience, an already completed reading list. Many of us first encountered it in class, after all. Studying Hamlet gives Rosencrantz its necessary context; Reading Oscar Wilde opens the doors to “paradoxes”; Feeling that Latin grammar is funny will help you enjoy “The Invention of Love”; “Arcadia” assumes at least a passing acquaintance with Byron.

But in practice, I’ve found that education works in the opposite direction. It is poignant because it catches our attention at a crucial developmental moment. Long before I saw Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap,” I played Cynthia in Stoppard’s parody of Christie’s works, “The Real Inspector Hound.” (I got about half the jokes, though I did notice that the critical characters, despite being brutally attacked by their playwright as pretentious tits, got all the good lines.) In college, I certainly read “Rosencrantz” more times than I read Shakespeare’s original, and now the two plays have grown permanently into each other: I can’t experience “Hamlet” without thinking about the machinery of the plot in the wings, grinding up the titular courtiers, the next night. Night. For me, and I think for others as well, Stoppard offered a kind of on-ramp into the canon, offering us to rest sufficiently among the great authors to have our own ideas about them. His style was all-encompassing elitism, a call to a life of bold, unstoppable thinking.

His work was also a nod to the foothills of science: for a while after Arcadia, we all fancied ourselves experts in chaos theory; At a college staff party after “Hapgood,” a comedy about a scientist quantum entangled with British intelligence, we all talked confidently about light as a particle. and wave. Were there other intellectuals working with the same infectious sense of expertise? I can’t think of much. However, these things related to popular science can be harmful. Stoppard’s influence is linked to the imitation of some of his gestures: I’ve seen a lot of plays that hope that touching on elementary physics (or a diagram of how bees organize themselves, or something else) will elevate the work to the level of an “Arcadia.” This Stoppardian penchant for research can be a hindrance, even in Stoppard’s own work: the urge to include a bit of quick mathematical exposition, such as talk of cat’s cots in Leopoldstadt, can lead a writer astray.

Selfishly, “The Real Thing” is my favorite of Stoppard’s plays, not because of its subtle portrait of betrayal and loss, but because it seems to be written by the version of a writer who never stopped being a theater critic. In the 1960s, Stoppard wrote reviews of scene magazine under the pseudonym William Boot. In “The Real Thing”, he is called a playwright Henry Butt resists the creeping currents of relativism, private pleading, and sentimentalism, and swears that there is value in distinguishing between good plays and bad ones. Every critic I know can quote Henry’s cricketing speech from that play:

this [cricket bat] Here, what looks like a wooden racket, is actually several specific pieces of wood that have been skillfully put together in a specific way so that everything pops, like a dance floor. It is intended for hitting cricket balls. If you do it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is hit it like hitting the top of a strong bottle, and make a sound like a trout taking a fly. . . (He clicks his tongue to make the noise.) What we’re trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we come up with an idea and knock it around a bit, it just might be. . . He travels . . .