Tom Stoppard, 88, an acclaimed author of some three dozen plays, had an extraordinary body of work, and lived an unusual life:
Although he was viewed as one of the greatest English-language playwrights of his generation, his first language was not English.
Although he was an erudite intellectual and the most cerebral of playwrights, he dropped out of school as a teenager, never attending college.
Although he was deeply involved with human rights issues and incorporated them into his plays,he said in 1979 that he considered himself a conservative in politics, literature, education and theater.
Although he was best-known as a playwright, he also worked as a newspaper reporter, a drama critic, a novelist, a translator, and an Oscar-winning screenwriter (“Shakespeare In Love,” “Brazil.”)
From the obituary in the NY Times:
“Few writers for the stage — or the page, for that matter — have exhibited the rhetorical dazzle of Mr. Stoppard, or been as dauntless in plumbing the depths of intellect for conflict and drama. Beginning in 1966 with his witty twist on “Hamlet” — “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” — he soon earned a reputation as the most cerebral of contemporary English-language playwrights, venturing into vast fields of scholarly inquiry — theology, political theory, the relationship of mind and body, the nature of creativity, the purpose of art — and spreading his work across the centuries and continents.”
Below, links to and excerpts from my reviews of the productions of his plays over the past decade or so, as well as a chronology of his 19 Broadway productions, from 1967 to 2023.
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From 2022:
Leopoldstadt Review. Tom Stoppard on the Jews of Vienna
“Leopoldstadt,” a play by Tom Stoppard inspired by the death of his own extended family in the Holocaust, begins with a family tree projected onto the scrim of the stage at Broadway’s Longacre Theater. It diagrams the four generations the play will present in a single grand apartment in Vienna over fifty-six years, starting on Christmas Day, 1899 with a dozen busy members of the prosperous and largely assimilated family.
The diagram flashes by quickly… too quickly, since it’s not easy to keep track of each individual family member in that first scene and in most of the four that follow, set in 1900, 1924, 1938 and 1955. But that feels like much the point of having a huge cast. “Leopoldstadt” – bustling with characters, bristling with debate, packed full of facts — is less a collection of distinct portraits or plot points than a rich tapestry of twentieth century Jewish life, and then the frayed threads of Jewish loss.
As in his previous work, Stoppard’s nineteenth play on Broadway offers dialogue that doubles as intellectual and political discourse. The usual effect of his approach is to make his scripts as rewarding to read on the page as to see acted out on the stage (if not more so.) But “Leopoldstadt” has little of Stoppard’s trademark cleverness in wordplay and none of his playfulness in structure. It is a straightforward if sprawling epic about a dark history that also winds up both intimate and ultimately moving. It’s hard not to see it as the 85-year-old playwright’s attempt at a personal reckoning….
from 2018:
Travesties Review: Silly and Serious History and Art via Tom Stoppard
In the first scene of Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties,” the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, the Irish novelist James Joyce, and the Romanian avant-garde artist Tristan Tzara are all sitting in a library in Zurich, Switzerland in 1917, when Tzara takes a manuscript he’s just finished writing, cuts it with a pair of scissors into small strips of paper, and sticks the pieces of paper into his hat. Then he empties his hat onto the table and reads some of the pieces.
It’s exactly the sort of thing that Tzara, one of the early twentieth century founders of the Dada “anti-art” movement, would do. It’s also more or less the same approach that Stoppard takes in his brilliant, clever and mind-boggling collage of a play.
Luckily, the first Broadway revival of Stoppard’s 1974 play turns this challenging exercise in virtuosity into an often-hilarious entertainment, with lively direction by Patrick Marber and a spot-on eight-member cast led by the terrific Tom Hollander. This production of “Travesties,” which originated at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory and is running at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theater through June 17th, ultimately can even provide some enlightenment, if you let it…
In “Indian Ink,” Tom Stoppard’s complex, challenging, beautifully acted and sometimes fascinating play about an Englishwoman in pre-independence India, Stoppard does something that surely not even the most intellectual of playwrights has ever achieved before on a New York stage – a living footnote.
“You mustn’t expect me to be Intelligence from Abroad,” Flora Crewe recites from the letter she is writing home to her sister about her trip in 1930. “You obviously know much more about the Salt March than I do.”
Just then Professor Eldon Pike pops up to explain:
“Gandhi’s ‘March to Sea’ to protest the Salt Tax began at Ahmedabad on March 12th,” Pike tells us. “He reached the sea on the day this letter was written.”
This is Stoppard being theatrically playful again. Fear not, the footnotes don’t last the whole show – although there may be times you wish they did….
The Hard Problem Review: Tom Stoppard Explores Consciousness and Challenges Ours
The hard problem in Tom Stoppard’s latest erudite play, his first full-length work in nearly a decade, is the challenge facing those who study the brain: How do scientists account for the mind – for consciousness or morality? But there’s also a hard problem for theatergoers who attend (study?) a Tom Stoppard play: How do you take in the playwright’s impressive intellect, dazzling verbosity, and intricate plots without being intimidated or confused by it all?
Luckily, one of these problems has an easy solution… my trick for appreciating “The Hard Problem”…is to read the script. “The Hard Problem,” as in many of Stoppard’s plays, works as well as dramatic literature as it does as a theatrical event….
From 2014:
The Real Thing Review: Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal Make Their Broadway Debuts
….The play winds up centering on the relationship between Henry [Ewan McGregor] and Annie [Maggie Gyllenhaal], and what Henry learns about real love. Henry, a pedantic wordsmith, starts off believing that real love can’t be captured on stage or in words. “Loving and being loved is unliterary. It’s happiness expressed in banality and lust.” But his reaction to Annie’s “real life” infidelities…evolve, until the playwright (both Henry and Stoppard) finds the words…and the feelings.,,,
From 2011
Arcadia Review. Sex, Metaphysics And The Single Girl.
She seems like a young innocent when she asks her tutor what “carnal embrace“ is, and “Arcadia” gets its first laugh when the tutor replies, protectively, “carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.”
That is how “Arcadia” begins. By the time it ends,with two couples waltzing in the same room two centuries apart, we have learned, slowly, that Thomasina is something more than just a 19th century schoolgirl – she is a genius – and that “Arcadia” is more than just another one of Tom Stoppard’s clever, densely layered comedies.
Yes, the play offers wit on the level of Oscar Wilde; there are thought-provoking reflections on cosmology that might please Stephen Hawking; the whole thing is sprinkled with playful allusions to sex. But, unlike much of Stoppard’s work, “Arcadia” also — gently, indirectly — ultimately presents a touching story, both sweet and sorrowful…
Stoppard’s Broadway productions
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (Oct 16, 1967 – Oct 19, 1968)
The tragicomedy tells the tale of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of side-characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Jumpers (Apr 22, 1974 – Jun 01, 1974)
A satire of academia, set in an alternative reality where British astronauts landed on the mood, and “Radical Liberals” have overtaken the British government.
Travesties (Oct 30, 1975 – Mar 13, 1976)
Dirty Linen & New-Found-Land (Jan 11, 1977 – May 28, 1977)
centers on a Select Committee of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, who have come together to discuss a political sex scandal in the tabloids.
Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (Oct 03, 1979 – Oct 28, 1979)
In the first, three schoolchildren rehearse a performance of Hamlet in English, which is to them a foreign language; in the second, a performance of Macbeth is being watched by a secret police officer who suspects the actors of subversion.
Night and Day (Nov 27, 1979 – Feb 16, 1980)
a satire of British news media, set in them maginary African country of Kambawi, and centers on themes of colonization, language, and alternate realities.
The Real Thing (Jan 05, 1984 – May 12, 1985)
Artist Descending a Staircase (Nov 30, 1989 – Dec 31, 1989)
A comedic exploration of the purpose and meaning of art, the play is centered around a murder mystery, involving an artist who dies from falling down the stairs.
The Real Inspector Hound and The Fifteen Minute Hamlet (Aug 13, 1992 – Oct 04, 1992)
The Real Inspector Hound is about two theatre critics who are watching a setup of a country house murder mystery, in the style of a whodunit. They become involved in the action The Fifteen Minute Hamlet is just that..
Arcadia (Mar 30, 1995 – Aug 27, 1995)
The Real Thing (Apr 17, 2000 – Aug 13, 2000)
The Invention of Love (Mar 29, 2001 – Jun 30, 2001)
The life of poet A. E. Housman,
Jumpers (Apr 25, 2004 – Jul 11, 2004)
The Coast of Utopia: Part 1 Voyage. Part 2 Shipwreck. Part 3 Salvage.
philosophical debates in pre-revolution Russia between 1833 and 1866
Rock ‘n’ Roll (Nov 04, 2007 – Mar 09, 2008)
The play is set from 1968 to 1990 in two different locations, Prague, where a rock ‘n’ roll band comes to symbolise resistance to the Communist regime, and Cambridge where the verities of love and death are shaping the lives of three generations in the family of a Marxist philosopher.
Arcadia (Mar 17, 2011 – Jun 19, 2011)
The Real Thing (Oct 30, 2014 – Jan 04, 2015)
Travesties (Apr 24, 2018 – Jun 17, 2018)
Leopoldstadt (Oct 02, 2022 – Jul 02, 2023)
