On a sticky August day in London 23 years ago, I walked into the Royal National Theater with glazed eyes, a heavy tread and what felt like an unconquerable weariness. I was fresh — or rather stale — off a plane from New York, and before me lay nine-plus hours of people with unpronounceable names talking about Russian history.
A picture of me, unidentified, appeared in The Evening Standard the next day, sitting in the audience behind a reporter who was writing about how to survive the event in question: the marathon performance of Tom Stoppard’s trilogy about the ideas behind the Russian Revolution, “The Coast of Utopia,” which was officially opening that day. I looked close to dead.
That was taken before 11 a.m. If I had been photographed again that night, walking along the Thames 12 hours later, you would have seen an improbably energized man, who looked as if he’d just fallen in love. Wouldn’t you know it? Stoppard’s words had cured me of terminal jet lag.
I should have known that would be the case, of course. The language of Stoppard — the Czech-born British dramatist who has died at 88 — has always affected me like an intravenous cocktail of adrenaline and endorphins.
He may well have been the most prolix playwright in the English language since George Bernard Shaw, as he wrestled with subjects that were, if not arcane, then unusually academic by most standards. The play that made his name, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (1966), retold “Hamlet” from the point of view of two inescapably marginal characters in that tragedy. And his penultimate work, “The Hard Problem” (2015), debated the nature of consciousness itself.
Such topics were analyzed in a thick, continuous flow of theorizing given polysyllabic life that, examined dispassionately and out of context on the page, might indeed make the eyelids grow heavier. Dispassionate, however, is not how I ever felt watching a Stoppard play.
That’s because Stoppard invested words with an energy and an urgency that were less purely intellectual than they were existential. Not for nothing did his 1972 play “Jumpers” — about physics, metaphysics and the elusiveness of moral absolutes — feature a supporting cast of bouncing, bending gymnasts.
Words, for him, were confounding, exhilarating, form-shifting phenomena that we are all forever trying to wrestle into coherent shape. And actors in his plays over the years — John Wood, Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack, Diana Rigg, Tom Hollander, Jeremy Irons, Jennifer Ehle — allowed us to feel the tragicomic heat that emanated from such wrestling matches.
For words were what we — and particularly he — had to work with in giving order to the glorious, irreducible chaos that is life. He loved his words to the point of mania and yet fretted over their inadequacy, making the mere act of speech seem somehow both heroic and doomed. He caused words to explode like fireworks, dazzling us with their bright, multicolored patterns.
Stoppard also would not let us forget that such fireworks were ephemeral displays that faded against the night sky. But as he had his version of Oscar Wilde say in “The Invention of Love,” about the donnish poet A.E. Housman, “Better a fallen rocket, than never a burst of light.”
I fell in love with Stoppard’s work in late adolescence, when I was easily seduced by cloud-scraping cleverness and appalled by cheap sentimentality. (The one we discussed most feverishly in college was an English major’s teen dream: “Travesties,” which imagined an encounter, centered on an amateur production of Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” among James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Lenin.) I made the mistake, then, of subscribing to the common view that Stoppard was a cerebral being, who concerned himself more with matters of the mind than the heart.
Yet the more I saw of Stoppard’s work — and I reviewed more productions of his plays during my years as a critic than I can count — the more I realized how misguided this point of view was. And it wasn’t just the plays that were proclaimed as voyages into the more personal realms of semi-autobiography: the midcareer “The Real Thing” (1982), about an inhibited playwright who learns to get in touch with his feelings, and the magisterial “Leopoldstadt” (2020), his last complete play, in which he reckoned with the legacy of his Jewish roots and the Holocaust.
All of Stoppard’s plays, in performance, were likely to bring tears to my eyes, including the seemingly esoteric and hyper-intellectual “Travesties,” “Jumpers” and the time-traveling “Arcadia,” a sort of academic mystery play set in a past and present shadowed by an unseen Lord Byron.
That’s because of the inevitably thwarted but valiant and vital attempts of their characters to solve the mysteries that confront them and us daily. These embrace not only the really big questions — the hard problem of consciousness or the mechanical clockwork of the universe — but also the issues of simply how to be in a world that keeps changing its rules on us and of the impossibility of fully knowing another human being.
Yet if the great conundrums could never be solved, Stoppard never discounted the mystical beauty of the attempts to do so. When I heard Stoppard had died, the first image that materialized in my mind was of Cusack, playing a cancer-riddled classics professor in “Rock ’n’ Roll,” making an impassioned argument against materialism: “I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.”
I found this declaration comforting. The essence of Stoppard’s words will continue to blaze long after his death. Fireworks may be only for the moment, but they leave traces of light that are never quite extinguished in the memory.
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