Tom Stoppard (Norton)

 

 

From The Norton Anthology of English Literature 7th ed.:

 

TOM STOPPARD

b. 1937

Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia, emigrated to Singapore (where his father died), and came to England in 1946. On his mother's remarriage, he took his stepfather's name of Stoppard. Leaving Pocklington School in Yorkshire at seventeen, he became a journalist, wrote a novel, and in 1962 his two short plays, The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and M Is for Moon among Other Things, were broadcast on the radio. The British theater had been dominated for a decade by realistic "kitchen sink" dramas when Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) appeared and was hailed as a major theatrical event. Critics recognized a debt to Waiting for Godot, but where Samuel Beckett had focused on the hopelessness of his two abandoned characters, Stoppard celebrates the gaiety and perverse vitality that can be generated from despair. 

Stoppard frequently uses plays by other playwrights as launching pads for his own. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern step out of the shadows of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the plot of Stoppard's Travesties (1974) is entwined with that of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Past and present are again entwined, though not intertextually, in his masterpiece, Arcadia (1993), which explores the nature of Nature, Classical and Romantic theories of landscape gardening, literary history and historians, truth and time, and the disruptive influence of sex on human orbits—"the attraction which Newton left out." Stoppard's most recent plays have been Indian Ink (1993) and The Invention of Love (1997), which brings together in one galaxy A. E. Housman, Moses Jackson, Oscar Wilde, and a sparkling constellation of High Victorian worthies.

In a different but no less witty mode, The Real Inspector Hound (1968) parodies the classic country-house murder-mystery play. Stoppard's hilarious spoof parallels Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap. An extratheatrical dimension is added by the subplot satirizing the pomposities of theater critics. When the lives of Birdboot and Moon become entangled with those of the characters in the play they are supposedly reviewing, we are treated to a brilliant demonstration of one of Stoppard's recurrent themes, the indistinct frontier between Life and Art. He has said:

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

Stoppard shared an Oscar for the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love (1998) and has also written for radio and television, alternating—sometimes in the same work—between a serious handling of political themes and arabesques of exuberant fantasy. As he says, "I never quite know whether I want to be a serious artist or a siren."

 

Darkside Radio Play Trailer

 

—oOo—