Tom Stoppard Remembered, Part 1

 

[Tom Stoppard (1937-2025) is one of my favorite playwrights.  Ever since I first saw one of his plays, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in 1969 or 1970, I have loved his work.  His death on 29 November was a shock. 

[I first experienced Stoppard’s work while I was in the army and stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  I attended several plays at the five-year-old Actors Theatre of Louisville, just 45 minutes north of the army base, where I was posted from December 1969 to February 1970.

[The third play I saw at ATL knocked me out because I’d never before seen anything like it: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  The deconstruction of Hamlet, the verbal play, the twisty logic, the philosophical underpinning, the fundamental question of how we know what we (think we) know, all made my mind spin and my mouth gape.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern immediately became one of my top favorite plays. 

[I’ve seen many of Stoppard’s plays since then.  I did one of my first acting-class scenes from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  Later, I played Moon in The Real Inspector Hound and I used a speech from Jumpers as an audition piece for a number of years.  

[I returned to graduate school in 1984, and for a class in theatrical structure, I wrote the course paper on R&G; it’s posted on Rick On Theater as “Theatrical Structure“ (15 and 18 February 2011).  I haven’t caught all of Stoppard’s plays, but many of them have been part of my theater experience.] 

“SIR TOM STOPPARD OBITUARY:
PLAYFUL AND PROLIFIC PLAYWRIGHT”

[The obituary notice for Tom Stoppard in The Times (London) ran without a byline on 29 November 2025.  It’s posted online at Sir Tom Stoppard obituary: playful and prolific playwright. (Readers will note that the typography and spelling in this posting, because it is from a British newspaper, follows a different standard than we usually see here the U.S.)]

A popular and exotic figure, Stoppard was known for his dandyish appearance as well as his wit and eloquence

With his Jim Morrison mane and Mick Jagger pout, Tom Stoppard looked more like a brooding rock star than one of Britain’s most critically acclaimed and commercially popular playwrights.

Although he came to prominence at a time of excitement in the theatre when John Osborne [1929-94], Arnold Wesker [1932-2016] and Harold Pinter [1930-2008] were producing some of their best work, and the generation of David Hare [b. 1947] and David Edgar [b. 1948] was emerging, his writing and his concerns were utterly distinctive and personal. And just as every cultured person more or less knows what is meant by Pinteresque, so the adjective Stoppardian entered the language as a shorthand for wit, linguistic cleverness and dazzling eloquence.

Incorporating multiple timelines and visual humour, his work was generally optimistic and good-natured at a time when others were investigating squalor, degradation, silence and anomie. “I want to demonstrate that I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours,” he explained.

He rarely aimed for realism, least of all the gritty kind. His theatre is a place of carnival, where the extraordinary happens and ideas are taken to absurd logical extremes, and he had a wonderful ability to combine disparate elements beneath a dazzling surface. In his early career he was criticised, after the immense success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead [premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966; London, 1967; Broadway debut, 1967] and Jumpers [1972], for failing to portray people convincingly and for the lack of social conscience. His reply was that much of his dialogue was “simply stuff which I’ve ping-ponged between me and myself”.

“I write fiction because it’s a way of making statements I can disown,” he said, “and I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”

Accordingly, his younger years were amusing and productive, but as he grew older part of him was determined to write about darker matters, and to investigate what he really thought and felt. He was genuinely interested in the life of his times, but in its intellectual rather than its social manifestations.

For his own part Stoppard affected indifference to his high reputation. In 2010, when asked what he thought Stoppardian meant, he said “another hapless, feckless, fatuous episode in my life, brought on by my own forgetfulness or incompetence”.

He was born Tomas Straussler [Sträussler; his family was among the many Czechs of German descent] in 1937, the younger son of Eugen, a doctor employed by Bata shoes, and Martha in Zlin in Czechoslovakia. The exotic way he rolled his Rs as he spoke hinted at his Bohemian origins. The family moved to Singapore two years later to escape the threat of Nazism [Germany occupied Czechoslovakia on 16 March 1938], only to find themselves in danger again, in 1942, from the Japanese invasion [8-15 February 1942]. His mother took him and his brother Petr to India [a British colony until 1947] while his father stayed behind, only to be killed in a Japanese bombing raid. Martha rarely spoke of any of these events and it was only years later that Stoppard discovered that his family was Jewish and that most of his relatives, including his four grandparents, had perished in the death camps — a discovery he would reckon with in his play Leopoldstadt [2020].

After the war, his mother married a British army officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard — who, according to Tom, “believed with Cecil Rhodes that to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life’’ — and returned to England with her two sons, who took their stepfather’s name. Tom went to boarding schools in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, the latter of which, Pocklington, he hated.

He left school at 17 to become a reporter for the Western Daily Press [Bristol]. Four years later he moved to the Bristol Evening World, where he stayed until 1960. It was during this period that he worked, he claimed, as the only motoring correspondent who could not drive. “I used to review the upholstery,” he said. He was also a second-string theatre critic.

He continued to work as a freelance journalist until 1963, when his first play, A Walk on the Water, was produced on television. He then devoted himself to full-time writing, which meant living in some poverty — though not without flamboyance — until, in 1967, his fortunes were transformed by the popularity of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The play’s premiere had been given by an Oxford University drama group at the Edinburgh Fringe the previous year, and after a favourable review it was snapped up by Kenneth Tynan for the National Theatre at the Old Vic, where it stayed in repertory for four years. It was also seen on Broadway and in translation around the world.

The task of translation must have been made harder by the piece’s dependence upon recognition of Shakespeare’s lines. The play is a kind of backstage Hamlet, in which the leading players become bit parts and the minor characters take the key roles, finding, as in the tragedy, that their world has been turned inside out. A further clever conceit is Stoppard’s identification of Samuel Beckett’s [1906-89] Waiting for Godot [French premiere: 1953, Paris; English language: 1955, London; U.S. premiere: January 1956, Miami; Broadway: April 1956] as a Hamlet for the 20th century. The dialogue of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is a comic take on that of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, which had been the theatrical revelation of the previous decade; and just as these anti-heroes are assimilated by Stoppard, so are the enigmatic Prince and the elusive Mr Godot.

Beckett never saw or read Stoppard’s play, but the next best thing was a friendly telegram from another playwright, Pinter. It was signed “PINTA” and Stoppard recalled: “I thought that in some curious way it was connected with the Milk Marketing Board.”

[The Milk Marketing Board was a producer-run product marketing board, established to control milk production and distribution in the United Kingdom 1933. It guaranteed a minimum price for milk producers until it was dissolved in 2002.

[The only explanation I can find for Stoppard’s quip about “PINTA” for Pinter’s name is a reference to the Milk Marketing Board’s memorable advertising campaigns in the 1950s and onwards.  Slogans included “full of natural goodness,” “is your man getting enough?,” and “milk’s gotta lotta bottle.”  Another slogan of the era was “drinka pinta milka day.”]

In 1968 A Walk on the Water was recycled for the stage as Enter a Free Man, a minor piece, and The Real Inspector Hound opened at the Criterion Theatre in the West End. Inspector Hound is an ingenious satire on the traditional murder mystery, in which two theatre critics become entangled. Stoppard pokes fond fun at the mechanics of the genre, as when Mrs Drudge answers a phone she happens to be dusting with the ultra-informative words: “Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring.”

Three years later, the one-act After Magritte showed Stoppard’s talents for wordplay and for brilliantly surreal but infallibly logical plotting. These were to reach their height in 1972 in Jumpers, a play about a moral philosopher wrestling to demonstrate that there are objective values while his wife, a musical comedy star, suffers a breakdown and his university becomes a sort of intellectual gymnasium.

At one point, for entirely evident reasons, the philosopher answers the door to a policeman while covered in shaving foam and holding a tortoise, with the words: “I’m sorry, I was expecting a psychiatrist.”

Jumpers was a huge success, being at once entertaining and cerebral. In Stoppard’s rollicking style it addresses a profound question and the author’s sympathies are clearly with the flailing philosopher, but the treatment itself is facetious even when Stoppard is deploring the unseriousness of trendy academia. Like most of his pieces it is something of an exercise. Very often, Stoppard’s lines are designed for a palpable but momentary effect: in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, for instance, Rosencrantz idly muses on the growth of the fingernails after death solely as a cue for the convulsingly theatrical line: “The toenails, on the other hand, never grow at all.”

Between major plays, Stoppard wrote one-acters, scripts for radio and television (including a version of Three Men in a Boat, starring Michael Palin [BBC, 1975]), film scripts (including Graham Greene’s The Human Factor [1979] and JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun [1987]), and translations and adaptations (Federico Garcia Lorca [Spanish; 1898-1936], Arthur Schnitzler [Austrian; 1862-1931], Anton Chekhov [Russian; 1860-1904]). He also contributed anonymously to Steven Spielberg scripts, which were sent to him privately. Some of these seemed to be chips from the workshop, but all contained memorably hilarious lines.

His next stage play was Travesties (1975), in which [Vladimir] Lenin [1870-1924], the Dadaist Tristan Tzara [1896-1963] and James Joyce [1882-1941] meet in Zurich during the First World War and become involved in a production of [Oscar Wilde’s] The Importance of Being Earnest. Again, Stoppard was spurred or enabled to write by a classic work, already familiar to his audience, around which he played his variations and cerebral games.

Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979) also used this technique, spinning ideas (this time out of [Ludwig] Wittgenstein [1889-1951; Austro-British philosopher], about the nature of language) around an immediately recognisable framework. When he attempted something freestanding, as in Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (1976) or Night and Day (1978), the results were less happy. In 1980 he admitted that some of the excitement of the theatre had worn thin, saying: “When I started, I wrote a play because I wanted to be a playwright. Now I write plays because I am a playwright.” He was by now one of the most successful in the world, and in 1979 he became “lord” of Iver Grove, a Palladian-style house in Buckinghamshire.

In that year he also wrote Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a play with full on-stage orchestra, with music by André Previn [1929-2019]. This remarkable hybrid concerned the plight of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, and featured a sane man put in a mental hospital for saying that sane men were being put in mental hospitals. This was the kind of ramifying conundrum on which Stoppard had always thrived, but now the comedy was poignant because the pressing truth was so tragic.

Stoppard had now exhausted the vein of travesty, and his significant output slowed considerably, with perhaps a really good new play emerging each decade. One answer to his dependency problem was to adapt little-known foreign work. Undiscovered Country (1979) was from Arthur Schnitzler; On the Razzle (1981), at the National Theatre with Felicity Kendal playing the lead, was a sublimely funny, fast-moving version of a comedy by Johann Nestroy [Austrian; 1801-62]. Rough Crossing, at the National in 1984, was adapted from Ferenc Molnar [Hungarian; 1878-1952], and concerned the writing of a Broadway musical set on a ship by a composer and its two stars as they are sailing to New York. This was Stoppard’s “sine qua nonchalance” at its best.

His most substantial plays of the 1980s and 1990s were The Real Thing, Arcadia and The Invention of Love. The title of The Real Thing (1982) referred to the sincerity or otherwise of art and love, but also contained a defence of language used well which may be taken as an attack on the use of blunt propaganda in the theatre by some of Stoppard’s more radical contemporaries.

Whether the play itself was the real thing or merely a tale of adultery among theatre folk, with Stoppard’s fizzing language disguising some fairly trite comparisons, is hard to say.

Reality took a bow shortly afterwards when Stoppard and his leading lady, Kendal, left their respective spouses for each other. He would later describe her as his muse. She starred successively in On the Razzle, Jumpers, Hapgood [1988], Arcadia and Indian Ink [1995] (which drew on her early years in India) at the National or in the West End.

Arcadia (1993) was classic Stoppard: a story of love and literature, philosophy and coincidence. Ranging from the age of Byron [English poet George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, 1788-1824] to that of chaos theory, it combined the suspense of The Aspern Papers [a novella by Henry James (1843-1916), originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888; two film adaptations on 2010 and 2018] with the excitement of the most speculative modern science. “It’s the best possible time to be alive,” declares one character in the present, “when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” Like his characters, Stoppard was dancing for joy at what lesser minds would find a frightening prospect. For him, the infinite permutations of life were a cause for celebration.

The Invention of Love (1997) was a far more sombre piece: a profile of AE Housman [1859-1936; English classical scholar and poet] as a classicist who has perhaps failed to seize the day. Once again, Stoppard had done his research, and transformed it into something much more remarkable than a critical biography. Set on the banks of the Isis and the Styx, the play had coincidental appearances in Stoppard’s most elastic manner by Oscar Wilde [1854-1900; Irish author, poet and playwright], Benjamin Jowett [1817-93; English writer and classical scholar] and Frank Harris [1856-1931; Irish-American editor, writer, journalist, and publisher]; yet the staging was unrelievedly drab. There was pathos and an impassioned speech about the importance of truth, and the run was a sell-out, but audiences probably left the theatre knowing more than they cared to about the editing of Latin poetry.

Stoppard’s care for English had something in common with Housman’s care for Latin. It was not his first language — he had spoken only Czech until he was taught English at school in India at the age of five — and he seemed to interrogate language rather than merely use it. Of all his interests, ranging from cricket to mathematics, the tricks of language was the most absorbing.

Between stage work, Stoppard continued writing for the cinema and won an Oscar for the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, a witty and entertaining piece in which the young Will (Joseph Fiennes) falls for Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow), the daughter of a wealthy merchant.

Stoppard shared the writing credit with an American screenwriter, Marc Norman [b. 1941], who had the idea for the film in the 1980s. Norman’s draft screenplay failed to impress and Stoppard was brought in to improve it.

In 2002 came his most ambitious stage work to date, The Coast of Utopia, a sprawling trilogy about Russia’s 19th-century romantic exiles, Alexander Herzen [1812-70; Russian writer and thinker], Ivan Turgenev [1818-83; Russian writer, poet, and playwright] and Mikhail Bakunin [1814-76; Russian revolutionary anarchist], and their intellectual and personal preoccupations. Directed by Trevor Nunn [b. 1940] at the National, it had a mixed reception, with even favourable critics finding it uneven and flawed. Revived five years later at the Lincoln Center in New York, it enjoyed a decent run and won seven Tony awards.

In 2006 the Royal Court asked Stoppard for a play to mark the 50th anniversary of the English Stage Company. As Stoppard had no previous connection with the theatre, he was a controversial choice, but Rock ‘n’ Roll was good enough to win the opposition over. Partly it was about a Czech rock group’s ability to challenge an autocratic regime through its music, but it was also a wider discourse on liberty, in Britain as much as in communist eastern Europe.

He spent three years, more or less, working on the well-received TV adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End [2012] but then he seemed to slip back into writer’s block until 2015 when he produced The Hard Problem, his first script in nine years. The Guardian’s critic thought it suffered from “information overload”, while the Telegraph deemed it a “major disappointment”. If he was upset he hid it well behind a façade of levity. When asked whether he found it difficult to talk about work in progress, he said: “Not at all. I’m normally so thrilled to have had an idea at all I tell everyone, even people who have no interest in hearing.”

Four years later it was announced that he had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community in Vienna from 1899 onwards, which he described as his most personal play. It culminates in 1955 with an Anglicised schoolboy who is confronted with a family tree showing all his relatives who were butchered in Europe.

Stoppard’s only novel was Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), which he claimed to have written in two days.

He won innumerable theatrical awards, and was appointed CBE [Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire] in 1978, knighted in 1997 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 2000. He gave a number of academic lectures, but they were amusements and insights into his own practice rather than revelations about other writers.

His first wife (1965-72) was Jose Ingle, a nurse, and his second (1972-92) was Miriam Moore-Robinson, the agony aunt, broadcaster and anti-smoking campaigner (Stoppard was a dedicated smoker). There were two sons by each marriage. Oliver is a postman in Norfolk, having abandoned a doctorate in physics for a simpler life; Barnaby runs a restaurant in London; Ed is a successful Shakespearean actor and Will manages his wife, the celebrated violinist Linzi Stoppard. It was while married to Dr Miriam Stoppard, as she was better known, that he embarked on his affair with Kendal. That ended in 1998 and, 16 years later, he married the television producer and heiress Sabrina Guinness, a one-time It girl who had dated Prince Charles [now King Charles III]. They lived in Dorset.

Stoppard always claimed that he wasn’t engaged enough politically to be able to know where to place himself, on the left or right, yet he and Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013; Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 1979-90] had a soft spot for each other and he once attended a literary dinner held in her honour. Of his politics he said he felt a bit sheepish. It did not stop him becoming one of the founders of the political magazine Standpoint in 2008 [ceased publication in 2021], just as his own lack of formal university education did not stop him becoming a visiting professor in theatre at Oxford in 2017.

He couldn’t wait to be out of education aged 17. “It was years and years before I felt I missed out on something,” he said. “I began to have certain kinds of regret about it. There are probably aspects of the autodidact’s life that compensate. The thing you have to understand is that, as a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas.”

A sense of insecurity and a tendency towards self-deprecation may explain his unwillingness to help posterity by keeping a diary, or indeed most of his papers. “I keep some letters,” he said. “I have a couple from Laurence Olivier [1907-89; English actor and director] and one from John Steinbeck [1902-68; American writer], but the rest of my life I destroy as I go along.”

And perhaps insecurity, or at least a nervousness about being exposed as an intellectual impostor, may also account for what he called his cheap side, his love of cheap gags: “The days of the digital watch are numbered,” as one of his characters says, or “if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.”

His sense of humour even extended to his own obituary. Asked in later life what he imagined the first line of his would be, he replied: “Tom Stoppard, the father of Ed Stoppard, has died.”

*  *  *  *
“THE GIFT TOM STOPPARD GAVE TO ME
— AND TO ALL WHO ADORE HIM”
by Talya Zax

[Tayla Zax’s article was posted on the Forward (New York City) website on 29 November 2025, the day of the playwright’s death.]

The great British Jewish playwright asked profound questions about what it means to live a significant life

In 2022, during a reporting trip to London, I had tea with a source who confessed to me that her mother’s central interest was the work of Tom Stoppard. It was more than an interest, really: “He was the main thing in her life,” she said.

There are artists you admire, and then there are artists you flat-out adore. Particularly cerebral types, like Stoppard, risk falling into the first category: They may generate great thoughts, but those great thoughts have a great chance of leaving you cold. That wasn’t the case for Stoppard, who died Saturday at 88, and was a thinker worth adoring. His best work achieved a rare balance: Audiences left his most affecting plays with both a fresh perspective on the world, and a feeling of great warmth toward it.

I felt that myself, after seeing a much-heralded revival of Stoppard’s Travesties on Broadway in 2018. It’s quite a highbrow play, about the brief intersection, in Switzerland during World War I, of the lives and work of James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, founder of Dadaism. It made me laugh until I cried. And the gloss Stoppard bestowed on this obscure episode of history followed me out of the theater, giving a brief sheen to everything and everyone I saw. I felt as though I floated back to Brooklyn, and as if the Q train might be full of personalities I’d never guess were important until years afterward.

Much of Stoppard’s work revolved around the question of what it really means to live an important life — one that is not just full, but has some kind of identifiable impact on others. The main character of Travesties isn’t Joyce, Lenin or Tzara; he’s an endearingly self-satisfied British diplomat, Henry Carr, who briefly found himself in the same circles as those luminaries. As the play opens, decades later, he’s trying to conjure up a memoir about his time in the presence of the greats, with the implication that he deserves to be considered among their ranks.

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the play that made Stoppard into a star at age 29, the two title characters grapple with their inability to in any way change the course of a narrative — that of Hamlet — that they know will lead to their deaths. In Shakespeare in Love, the film that won Stoppard an Oscar in 1998, he and his coauthor Marc Norman imagined the king of English playwrights as a young man full of talent but still struggling toward greatness, in need of an overwhelming emotional shock to propel him into complete ownership of his gifts.

There are the 19th-century Russian revolutionaries of the ambitious trilogy The Coast of Utopia; the intellectuals seeking to redefine the world and its history in Arcadia; the striving academics of The Hard Problem; the newly emancipated Viennese Jews of Leopoldstadt, the play Stoppard wrote that most profoundly invoked his heritage. Over and over, variations of the same question emerge. What does it mean to live completely and well, as an individual and a member of society?

“If there is any meaning in any of it” — “it” being the brutal course of history, its neverending cycles of destruction — ”it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities,” Joyce declares in Travesties. Later, Carr echoes him — a surprise, as the two hold very little respect for one another. When told that the only relevant function of art is “social criticism,” he protests.

“A great deal of what we call art,” he says, “has no such function, and yet in some way it gratifies a hunger that is common to princes and peasants.”

Not everyone wants to be an artist, and, as Carr reflects at the end of Travesties, it’s a sure thing that not everyone can be. But in the wake of Stoppard’s death, I’ve found myself thinking about the mother of my one-time source, so enraptured by what Stoppard created that her own child saw his work as the most profound passion of her life.

It’s easy to say that kind of effect made Stoppard’s life important. But the quieter story, I think, is that it made that devoted fan’s life important, too. Because she loved Stoppard, she saw herself as more firmly secured in her own existence; she saw herself as having a purpose and place.

To help someone experience their own significance — to gratify the common hunger that afflicts us all — is a great gift. And Stoppard gave it to many, including to me.

[Talya Zax is a culture critic, journalist, and editor based in Brooklyn.  She’s the Forward’s opinion editor.  In addition to Forward, her criticism and reporting has appeared in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the website Literary Hub.]

*  *  *  *
“HIS WORDS WERE ABLAZE WITH ENERGY AND URGENCY”
by Ben Brantley 

[While the New York Times published Stoppard’s obituary, “Dramatist Whose Wit Put a New Spin on Shakespeare, and Love” by Bruce Weber, in its print edition on 1 December (“Tom Stoppard, Award-Winning Playwright of Witty Drama, Dies at 88” online), it ran several companion pieces that day and the next.  On that same day, in “The Arts” (sec. C),  Elizabeth Vincentelli published “Tom Stoppard’s Imprint Is Enduring on Film” (“Movies Written by Tom Stoppard to Stream”). 

[The next day, in the arts section, the Times ran Marc Tracy’s “Final Play Confronts a Revelation” (“When Tom Stoppard Confronted His Background in His Final Play”) and Eric Grode’s “Skilled in Screenwriting as Well as Stagecraft” (“Tom Stoppard Wrote Dialogue for Indiana Jones and Obi-Wan Kenobi”), another piece on Stoppard’s screenwriting.

[In that same arts section, Ben Brantley had “His Words Were Ablaze With Energy and Urgency” (“The Language of Tom Stoppard, Ablaze With Energy and Urgency,“ posted on 29 November 2025 and updated on 30 November).  It’s former Times drama reviewer Brantley’s analysis of Stoppard’s stage language.]

Tom Stoppard embraced big questions and wrestled language into bold shapes.

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.

[Ben Brantley was the chief theater reviewer of the New York Times for more than 20 years.  He wrote more than 2,500 reviews over 27 years beginning in 1993, filing regularly from London as well as New York.  He retired from regular reviewing in 2020.

[I often disagreed with Brantley’s assessments of plays we both saw.  There was more than one occasion when I wondered if he had even seen the same play that I had.  But reading his sense of Stoppard’s dramaturgy, I can’t help but feel we received this playwright the same way.

[“Tom Stoppard Remembered” is being posted in two parts, with Part 1 above.  The second part, which consists of a single essay by the playwright, himself, from 1999, will be posted on Sunday, 7 December.  I invite ROTters to come back to this site then for the completion of this short series in honor of the renowned British dramatist.]

'The Trip to Bountiful' (2005)

[At the end of his New York Times review of the current revival of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on West 43rd Street, Ben Brantley mused about the 2005 staging by the Signature Theatre Company which starred Lois Smith as Carrie Watts.  Brantley had reviewed that production, too, and I saw it and wrote a short report on the performance.  Both Brantley’s and my responses to that revival were quite different from his assessment of the Broadway production which opened on Tuesday, 23 April (and is scheduled to close on 7 July), and I thought it would be interesting to look back at my account, written four days after I saw the performance, of the earlier presentation.  Of that production, Brantley recalled in the Times on 24 April: “The 2005 Signature Theater revival of ‘Bountiful,’ starring Lois Smith, left me drenched in tears.”

[Bountiful started its life as an hour-long teleplay. Foote originally wrote it for Fred Coe, producer of NBC’s Goodyear TV Playhouse, an anthology series alternatively titled the Philco TV Playhouse (because the sponsor varied).  It aired on NBC on 1 March 1953 with a cast headed by the legendary Lillian Gish.  (Foote’s first choice for the lead actress, though, was Shirley Booth, later TV’s Hazel from 1961 to 1966 who’d just won an Oscar for 1952’s Come Back, Little Sheba.  She turned down the role because she said she wasn’t ready, at 46, to play an old woman.  Gish was 60.)  Also in the TV cast were Eileen Heckart (Jessie Mae), John Beal (Ludie), Eva Marie Saint (Thelma).

[A few months later, the Broadway début of The Trip to Bountiful opened in a Theatre Guild production at Henry Miller’s Theatre on 3 November 1953 and ran for 39 performances before closing on 5 December.  Carrie was again played by Gish and Jo Van Fleet (who’d had a small part on television) was Jessie Mae under the direction of Vincent J. Donehue (who also staged the TV version).  Van Fleet won a featured actress Tony and Eva Marie Saint got a Theatre World Award for her performance as Thelma.  Signature’s Trip to Bountiful, which launched the theater’s two-season 15th anniversary celebration, opened at the Peter Norton Space on 4 December 2005, after starting previews on 15 November, and closed on 11 March 2006.  The revival was staged by actor Harris Yulin and costarred Foote’s daughter (and frequent interpreter), Hallie Foote, as the daughter-in-law, Jessie Mae.  The sets were designed by E. David Cosier, the lights by John McKernon, the costumes by Martin Pakledinaz, and the sound by Brett R. Jarvis and Loren Toolajian (who teamed to compose the original music as well).  The production won 2006 Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Revival, Outstanding Director (Yulin), Outstanding Lead Actress (Smith), and Outstanding Featured Actress (Hallie Foote); the 2006 Obie Award for Outstanding Performance (Smith); the 2006 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play (Smith); and 2006 Drama Desk Awards for Best Actress (Smith) and Lifetime Achievement (Horton Foote).]

The Signature Theatre’s Trip to Bountiful, which I saw at the Peter Norton Space on 42nd Street near 11th Avenue on Friday, 9 December 2005, was quite excellent all around, and Lois Smith’s performance was superb.  I’ll describe it in a moment, but first, let me relate a true New York theater moment I had.

After the show, I made a pit stop in the men’s room.  When I came out, a line had formed and about three people from the door, I spotted Edward Albee.  Now, that alone is a New York theater moment—like the time I saw Colleen Dewhurst sitting alone, smoking in the upstairs lobby of the Uris Theatre (now the George Gershwin) during the intermission of Sweeney Todd.  But there’s more. 

As I was walking past the line, I heard the guy in front of Albee, whom I didn’t recognize at all, saying to him, “Someday I hope to do Virginia Woolf justice.”  Well, my initial instinct was to make a comment like “I kinda thought somebody already had” as I passed by, but I decided to keep my mouth shut.  So I did. 

I have no idea who the guy talking to Albee was.   Was he a director or a play reader or what?  No idea.  (It’s more fun to imagine . . . .  If the guy was a director, maybe he didn’t know that Albee himself had staged a Broadway revival back in 1976 with Dewhurst and Ben Gazzara.  I imagine the playwright feels he’d already “done Virginia Woolf justice,” don’t you?)  The man looked youngish—say mid-30s or so—and I wasn’t even sure that Albee knew him.  I don’t know if Albee’s like Woody Allen and doesn’t like to be approached in public, but he looked a little uncomfortable.  Since I was just passing by on my way out, I may have caught only a momentary reaction and be misinterpreting the whole scene.  Albee didn’t say anything, in any case.

(Actually, that wasn’t the only New York theater moment I had that evening.  As I was walking my dog, Thespis, before I left for midtown, a large gaggle of young people passed me on my block.  They looked like they were in high school, but I’m betting it’s college: I live near NYU and the New School, both of which have residence halls or classroom buildings within a two-block radius of my apartment.  Anyway, just as they were going past, one guy in the middle of the bunch asked out loud, “What do you know about Ionesco?”  A little guy in front—he really did look like he wasn’t out of high school yet—turned around and announced, “Ionesco?  I love Ionesco!”  At which point, he walked backwards right into a woman trying to make her way down the sidewalk.  If it had been Samuel Beckett, they’d have fallen into a heap on the pavement.  But they didn’t.  Just a brief pinball effect.)

And now, the play: 

Readers know, I imagine, that I have long come to distrust Ben Brantley’s opinions in the New York Times.  I truly think he lives in a bubble of his own imagination.  He nailed this one, however.  (Even a stopped clock . . . .)  Diana, my theater companion, remarked that this play of Foote’s comes close to Tennessee Williams, though I don’t feel the lyricism of Williams’s writing.  Foote’s words are far more literal and realistic, but there is a kind of mysterious force at work in Bountiful that may have disappeared in Foote’s later, more prosaic treatments of his Texas homeland.  [I wrote this, of course, long before I saw Signature’s magnificent production of Foote’s three-part Orphans’ Home Cycle.  ~Rick]  In any case, the 1953 play (made into a film starring Geraldine Page in 1985) is tender and poignant—perhaps a little too sentimental for today’s cynical world, but clearly heartfelt and genuine.  (I’m not sure, but Bountiful may have been Foote’s first play—or his first to achieve significant attention.)  I’ve never seen it before (not even the film), so I may be wrong, but my sense is that its success depends greatly on how the actress playing Carrie approaches the role—and, of course, how well she handles it.  If she’s too mawkish or spacey or eccentric—a possibility—the play takes on a strident tone, as if we’re being forced to sympathize with a truly difficult person—like we’re being manipulated.  If the actress gets the idea right but can’t pull it off with subtlety and honesty, we just won’t believe it.  Lois Smith, as Brantley said, is a marvel on both counts.  Her sense of being imprisoned in the Houston apartment and besieged by her insensitive and selfish daughter-in-law (Hallie Foote, the author’s daughter), is palpable, but not overstated.  This is not Blanche Dubois grown into old age—Smith’s Carrie is just an old woman with a bad heart who’s made some sad choices in life and now just wants to go back to the place where she was happy, probably to die.  The fact that Jessie Mae, the daughter-in-law, pretty much treats her as an unwanted house pet—Jessie Mae won’t let Carrie sing hymns in the house because they get on her nerves—only makes this all the more credible.  Carrie’s not eccentric or crazy—which is what Jessie Mae calls her, the only thing she does that actually makes her husband, Ludie (Devon Abner), angry—just a little sentimental in her old age, and suffering from terminal cabin fever. 

Carrie has a history of running away, trying to get to Bountiful, whenever she’s left unwatched and alone in the cramped two-room apartment—she sleeps in the living/dining room—in Houston, and this infuriates Jessie Mae, who confiscates Carrie’s pension checks as much to keep her tied to the apartment as to pay for her own visits to the beauty parlor and her Cokes at the drugstore.  (Ludie has just gotten a real job after a long unemployment due to an unspecified illness.  Jessie Mae not only doesn’t work, but doesn’t seem to do much housekeeping, either; Carrie does the dusting and cooking, it seems—despite her bad heart.)  I actually rooted for her to break loose, and when Jessie Mae reveals that a pension check, due that morning, seems to be missing from the mail, you just know that Carrie has glommed onto it and is holding it in reserve for a break-out.  When Jessie Mae decides to take a chance and leave Carrie at home while she meets a friend at the drugstore for a Coke—she can’t get a beauty parlor appointment until 4 p.m., and she just can’t sit around all that time—I root again that Carrie’ll get away this time, just as she does, in fact.  As Smith plays her, Carrie just deserves to get back to Bountiful once before she dies.  (It may be a bit contrived that, first, the bus doesn’t go to Bountiful—you can’t get there from here!—and, second, it turns out that the town has in fact simply died when the last inhabitant, Carrie’s girlhood friend, whom she had hoped to stay with, died a few days before.  Contrived, but perfectly apt: the dream she has, after all, is also a chimera.) 

The fact that Carrie charms everyone she meets, except for her daughter-in-law, from Thelma (Meghan Andrews), a young woman traveling on the same bus, to the ticket clerk (Frank Girardeau) at the town nearest Bountiful where she gets off to the sheriff (Jim Demarse) who’s been ordered to hold her until Ludie arrives to take her back to the big city (the sheriff ultimately drives her out to her old farm in Bountiful and stays with her until Ludie comes) is only proof that Carrie’s really just a dear lost soul.  Smith captures this absolutely perfectly.  There’s not an eccentric, peculiar, or idiosyncratic element in her performance—it’s just solid and real.  She’s not even especially sad or pathetic; she’s just a little driven.  Once she gets “home,” you can see that she’s satisfied her itch, even though she knows she can’t stay, even to die.  She’ll go back to Houston with Ludie and Jessie Mae and obey all the rules her daughter-in-law lays out—because she’s been home and seen the sky and the soil and the birds.  That’s all she ever wanted—and now she’s content.  Ludie may have learned something, too, by coming home—he remembers everything Carrie had been telling him about his boyhood there, even though he pretended not to have.  But Jessie Mae hasn’t, and you can guess that she’s in for some surprises back in Houston.  (Ludie had been contemplating asking his boss for a raise at work that morning, and we learn that the boss was pleased to give it to him.  I took this as a suggestion that he’s getting back his self-confidence, and something of the spine he must have inherited from Carrie.)

Hallie Foote does what I take to be a good job on Jessie Mae.  It seemed to me she was written as an unchanging single note, and Foote manages to pull off the once or twice she appreciates Carrie without making it seem contrived (by Horton Foote) or begrudging (by Jessie Mae).  As selfish as she is, this suggests that there’s a human being back there, though it’s not much.  If Foote’s portrayal is one-dimensional, I think it’s the play’s fault more than the actresses (or director Harris Yulin’s).  Ludie, too, is appropriately meek and submissive.  Not abject: there’s some indication here also that he’s not only what we see here.  I don’t know Devon Abner, the actor who played the role (he seems to be mostly a writer for stage and screen), but I don’t think that the character’s one-dimensionality is his fault, either.  (This is why I say that the success of the play depends so much on the actress playing Carrie.  Even the best director couldn’t do much with the other roles, and the script is the script.  Not that Yulin did anything wrong at all.)

E. David Cosier’s set (lit by John McKernon) was kind of nice, too.  It sort of reminded me of a pop-up book in a way.  Bountiful is a long one-act (an hour and 50 minutes without intermission), so each scene is like a new page of the story in a sense.  Each time the scene shifted, the old set moved off and the new set moved on, courtesy of electrical motors with low-tech assist (that is, stage hands or actors moving set pieces on dollies).  It isn’t in the least innovative, but it worked, and, as I said, it was like each time you turned the page, a new scene popped up.  (Well, okay—popped in.  Let’s not quibble over prepositions.)  I never felt I was being made to sit too long, though, and I have at other, shorter shows.

I guess the summation is that while The Trip to Bountiful isn’t ever going to be earth-shaking theater (it’s more like William Inge than Tennessee Williams, I think), it’s lovely, truthful, and, in this production, nicely done.  After so much bad theater over the last couple of seasons—bad plays or bad productions or both—this was more than a pleasure.  And Lois Smith, whom I only know from TV (mostly) and film, was a true delight.  She’s too young for the role to have been written for her (she’d only have been about 23 when the play was written)—but if Horton Foote had come around to see this performance, I suspect he’d have wondered if he hadn’t been clairvoyant half a century ago.

*  *  *  *

The press response, with one glaring exception, was nearly ecstatic, particularly about Lois Smith’s portrayal of Carrie Watts.  In 2005, I didn’t do the review survey that I customarily do now, so I’ll recap the critical reception here.  The only wholly negative review was Bob Kent’s in Variety, which noted that “the new revival of ‘Trip to Bountiful’ at Signature Theatre Company is regrettably flat and underwhelming.”  Kent acknowledged, “At times this production nails exactly the right bemused observational tone” but continued that “director Harris Yulin’s production remains stubbornly average.”  The Variety review-writer did observe, “By herself, Smith nearly makes this a worthwhile ‘Trip,’ but concluded that “it feels more like a faintly tiresome holiday gathering.”  No one else I read agreed, it seems.

Since I started this revived report with Ben Brantley’s 2013 Times review (and alluded to his earlier one above), I’ll continue with his notice of the 2005 STC restaging, which he called “beautifully mounted.”  Yulin’s direction, said the Timesman, “finds the emotional authenticity” of Foote’s script that makes it “seem newborn.”  Praising all the elements of the physical production, Brantley made special mention of the set design: “What follows the opening scenes has an almost mystical seamlessness, as Mr. Cosier's sets float on and off the stage.”  (By the way, Brantley’s remarks in his review of the 2013 Broadway revival about being brought to tears were rendered thus in 2005: “[T]his production . . . finds the emotional authenticity in a 1953 drama often remembered as a tear-jerking chestnut.  This is not to say that you should attend the show without an ample supply of handkerchiefs.”)  In New York’s Daily News, Howard Kissel wrote, “The production . . . is pure joy.”  Having compared Foote’s dramaturgy to Chekhov’s, Kissel added that Bountiful “has been given a radiant revival by the Signature Theater Company” in which, “under Harris Yulin’s skilled direction, every moment resonates deeply.”  Calling the production “genuinely moving,” Sam Thielman of Long Island’s Newsday especially complimented Cosier, who’s “set shifts quickly into various instantly recognizable configurations.”  Dubbing the STC revival of Bountiful “touching,” the New York Post’s Frank Scheck declared, “Foote’s play is a marvel of economy, one in which numerous important themes are conveyed through the simplest of situations and dialogue” which “Director Harris Yulin has staged . . .  expertly.”  After observing that “there are stretches of obvious exposition and a melodramatic monologue or two,” David Sheward of Back Stage summed the revival up by pronouncing it “a journey well worth taking.”  Sean O’Donnell of Show Business asserted, “Director Harris Yulin successfully weaves a quiet tapestry of nostalgic yearning in a production that is nothing short of breathtaking” and that the performance “resonates long after the curtain has fallen.” In Time Out New York, Robert Simonson affirmed simply, “Yulin, Smith and company have achieved something of quiet excellence.”

The cyber press was pretty much in line with the paper-and-ink reviewers.  On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray wrote that “director Harris Yulin has lovingly interpreted Bountiful for the rich new Signature Theatre Company revival” and Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp said the “beautiful new production” was “a trip worth taking” that’s “remarkably timely.”  TheatreMania’s David Finkle reported that STC’s revival of Trip to Bountiful “is to be cherished” and that ”Harris Yulin has directed the play with compassion and tenderness.”  On nytheatre.com, Martin Denton described the production as “lovely, immensely satisfying, and . . . just about flawless,” a “fertile, generous, and lush a theatrical experience” that’s “about as perfect a production as one could wish for.”  Michael Dale of BroadwayWorld dubbed Signature’s revival “beautiful and tender,” having been “delicately directed with a selectively lazy touch by Harris Yulin.”  “Go and be enthralled,” he urged. 

It was the acting, though, that got most of the press attention, starting with TONY’s Simonson, who declared, “As for the rest of the ensemble, any aspiring actor seeking an object lesson on what can be made of a small role need look no further.  Even the nonspeaking actors shine—a tribute to the thoughtful, seamless rhythms Yulin has wrought.”  TheatreMania’s Finkle wrote that the production, especially the final scene, “is exquisitely acted by all” and, pronouncing the STC revival of Bountiful “acted with quiet skill by the best ensemble cast in town,” the Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout added, “I doubt you’ll ever see it acted better, especially by Ms. Smith.”  As befits an actor’s journal, Sheward asserted, “Director Harris Yulin has assembled an ensemble of sensitive performers who inhabit Foote’s frustrated souls,” in Back Stage and Brantley of the Times found that the “supporting cast . . . never strikes a false note.”  And though most of the cast was singled out for mention in all the notices, Newsday’s Thielman praised Hallie Foote, who “wisely underplays one of her father’s least likeable characters,” and Kissel correctly observed that the actress “manages to catch  the humor of the daughter-in-law without making her an easy villain.” 

“But the evening ultimately belongs to Smith,” reported the Post’s Scheck, adding that “the actress seems to sum up the entire human experience in her memorable performance.”  The Postman declared, “Lois Smith creates magic of her own” as “the veteran actress delivers a performance that is at once heartbreaking in its pathos and uplifting in its spirit.”  Newsman Kissel described Smith’s singular performance as “incandescent,” specifying that the actress “does not minimize how difficult Carrie can be, but she also captures the poignance of precarious old age.” Asserted Thielman, “Smith’s sweet, sad senility as Carrie Watts gives Horton Foote’s ‘The Trip to Bountiful’ the tang it needs,” adding that in the end, “Lois Smith brings a real sense of loss to her part, making it sting as she discovers, bit by bit, that Bountiful, Texas, is barely on the map anymore.”  Back Stager Sheward characterized Smith’s work as “luminous,” and WSJ’s Teachout praised her acting as “so beautifully straightforward that you feel as though you’re eavesdropping on her.”  “Luminescence,” which is what David Finkle said Smith brought to her performance, seemed to have been a leitmotif in the reviews, though BroadwayWorld’s Dale used a near-synonym when he wrote that Smith “sparkles as Carrie.”  The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold wrote that “Lois Smith proves herself . . . with a performance that manages to be simultaneously feisty and moonstruck,” concluding that “Smith makes her unfulfilled goal as transcendent as Don Quixote’s knight-errantry.”  Feingold ended his praise of Smith with a gratuitous jab at our then-ruling family: “To watch her mingling of crab and saint is to feel a little of the wonder that Texas used to mean before the fake cowboys of Kennebunkport invaded.”  (I just had to include that little dig!)  While Talkin’ Broadway’s Murray quibbled about Smith’s portrayal in contrast to Lillian Gish’s, Sommer called her performance “solid gold” on CurtainUp. 

In his review, the Times’s Brantley also called “that fine actress for all seasons” Lois Smith’s acting “luminous,” but he seemed possessed by her “cerulean stare.”  As if mesmerized, he confessed, “I had never before realized how blue and bottomless her gaze is.”  Later, Brantley observed the Smith’s eyes “brim with the expectation of a child on the morning of her birthday” and even compares the lighting of John McKernon and the music and sound design of Loren Toolajian and Brett R. Jarvis with “the glow in Ms. Smith's gaze.”

*  *  *  *

[There’d been speculation, including some in the press, that STC’s revival might have a Broadway run in its future.  James Houghton, the company’s artistic. director, sought a Broadway theater for a transfer of Bountiful after its run at the Norton Space but none was available.  Having already extended the revival at the Norton as long as possible, Houghton rejected a transfer to a larger Off-Broadway house because the expense was too great for the potential box office benefit.  As a result, a rep theater show that was both popular and well-received critically didn’t get a chance at a broader audience.

[The Signature Theatre Company’s 15th Anniversary Season was divided into two parts.  In 2005-06, the company staged plays by previous writers-in-residence: Foote’s Trip to Bountiful and John Guare’s Landscape of the Body.  In 2006-07, STC scheduled the delayed August Wilson season that had been postponed when the playwright died in October 2005.  Previously, STC presented its first Horton Foote season in 1994-95, including Talking Pictures, Night Seasons, The Young Man From Atlanta, and Laura Dennis.  But Foote is the only playwright to whom Signature has devoted two complete seasons, mounting that monumental three-part, nine-play autobiographical opus, The Orphans’ Home Cycle, in 2009-10.

[I got to see Lois Smith on stage again subsequent to this marvelous performance when I saw STC’s presentation of Tony Kushner’s The Illusion, a translation and adaptation from Pierre Corneille, in June 2011 (see my blog report posted on 1 July 2011).  Smith played the sorceress, Alcandre, usually a male role, in the final presentation of STC’s Kushner residency.  I got to see her briefly after the performance—playing opposite her as Pridamant was a former teacher of mine, David Margulies, so I waited by the stage door to say hello to him—and I got to tell Smith how much I liked her work in Bountiful and even in HBO’s True Blood on TV.]

“Revealing Glimpses Into Minds Most Mad”

By Ben Brantley

[In this article from the New York Times’s arts section (on 11 July 2011), Times theater reviewer Ben Brantley describes several portrayals of madness in the New York stage during the last season. My having been an aspiring actor, this kind of description always intrigues and interests me and ROT being ostensibly a theater blog, I figured it’s a good forum to rerun Brantley’s observations for the edification of both readers who are theater folk and those (poor, benighted) folk who aren’t. I hope you all agree and enjoy the chance to visit the article again. ~Rick]

“Madness in great ones must not unwatch’d go.” That well-turned observation was originally made about one Prince Hamlet, and doubtless it’s useful advice regarding future heads of state. But the dictum applies equally to those who tread the stage. Few things test the mettle of an actor—or separate the artists from the hacks—like the simulation of a whopping case of mental illness.

On one level, conveying the idea that you’re out of your mind is a piece of cake (three layers, heavily frosted, lots of candles), in the same way that portraying drunkenness is. You or I could do it. Widen the eyes as far as possible, gnash the teeth until they threaten to crack, shake like a leaf in a hurricane and—voilà—you’re a certifiable basket case for public consumption. (For drunkenness, substitute: slur the words, squint the eyes and lean to one side until you almost fall over.)

For centuries, this overwrought approach was widely considered great acting and frequently rewarded with prizes. (Just check the list of Oscar winners over the years.) Such performances, after all, are as dramatic as all get-out, the kind that frighten little children (or, worse, make them dissolve into giggles).

What they don’t do, as a general rule, is lure you into the mind of the afflicted character, or make you realize what a vague line divides the so-called sane from the insane. Audiences can rest comfortably as they watch such displays, thinking, “Well, that’s not me, is it?” What get beneath the skin are the interpretations that make you feel the seductiveness of an escape from reality (or into an alternative reality), in which madness starts to seem like a viable existential choice.

Such thoughts came to my (more or less sound) mind frequently during the past year, which offered plenty of examples of good actors losing it. (And no, I’m not back on the subject of Lindsay Lohan.) This summer alone has provided two sterling portraits of women in states of breakdown that were very different but both entirely persuasive: Joely Richardson’s take on a politician’s bipolar wife in Michael Weller’s “Side Effects” and Carey Mulligan’s interpretation of a young woman succumbing to schizophrenia during a family vacation in “Through a Glass Darkly,” Jenny Worton’s adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 movie. (Both plays recently ended their New York runs.).

Ms. Mulligan, who is only 26 and a movie star in the making, may well turn out to be one of the great actresses of the 21st century. She is an artist who combines extreme delicacy with matching clarity, so that even when she’s onstage (and you are many yards away from her), you feel as if you were watching her doing the emotional equivalent of needlepoint in close-up. I first saw her as Nina in “The Seagull” at the Royal Court Theater in London (and later on Broadway), where she managed the final breakdown scene with a credibility I have never witnessed elsewhere. (Let’s face it, it’s not easy repeating variations on the lines “I’m a seagull! No, I’m an actress!”)

In “Through a Glass Darkly,” her character, Karin, has recently been released from the hospital, where she was treated for delusions, and she has joined her husband, father and brother on an isolated island to recuperate. From the very beginning, you sensed this woman was torn between the conflicting calls of familial responsibility and a self-contained fantasy world. What was astonishing was how authentic Ms. Mulligan made the world of illusions seem to us.

Long before she erupted into what might be described as anything like derangement, we could sense from her movements — suddenly, slightly speeded up, then slowed to near-paralysis — that she listened to a different internal metronome than anyone around her. And you could read the sensory reality of her phantoms—you felt they had textures, voices and smells all their own—so legibly in her facial reactions that it almost seemed possible to follow Karin into her private universe. She brought to mind what the director Peter Hall said of Vanessa Redgrave after seeing her in “The Lady From the Sea” some 30 years ago: “You could see right through the skin to the emotions.”

Ms. Richardson, as it happens, is Ms. Redgrave’s daughter. As an actress she may be less conspicuously open than her mother or Ms. Mulligan, but she possesses a sharp and affecting lucidity of her own. Her character in “Side Effects,” Melinda Metz, is bipolar, and she doesn’t wear her illness all that visibly at first. But as she interacts with her staid, loving and frightened husband (a pitch-perfect Cotter Smith), Melinda, like Karin, seems to be moving to a rhythm that is subtly out of sync with that of the everyday world she inhabits. At times, her reversals of tempo and of mood are so abrupt and intense, they’re scary.

But they are also kind of exhilarating. And that’s the beauty of this performance. We understand why Melinda chooses not to take her medications (and lies about it). Off them, she may spiral into really high spirits that are dangerous to her husband’s career (not to mention the furniture). But unedited and unshackled, she is fully alive in a way Mr. Smith’s character never can be, and you know why he remains so attracted to as well as terrified by her. Any of us who experience irrational fluctuations of feeling from time to time will see a heightened mirror of ourselves in her, and we start to question what defines mental illness.

Sometimes, of course, a more classic scenery-chewing madman is just what the, uh, doctor ordered. In the title role of “Diary of a Madman,” adapted from Gogol for a production seen last winter at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the prodigiously gifted Geoffrey Rush played insanity as stark, raving stand-up comedy, to eerily entertaining effect.

At the other end of the spectrum was Edie Falco’s portrait of Bananas, the hallucination-prone, apartment-bound wife in this season’s Broadway revival of John Guare’s “House of Blue Leaves.” If Mr. Rush’s interpretation of madness might be said to have been in Technicolor, Ms. Falco’s was in MRI shades of gray, an exercise in somber, clinical exactitude. I’m not sure this interpretation always suited Mr. Guare’s whimsical writing, but it was certainly fascinating to watch. On the other hand, I was never entirely able to identify with her or Mr. Rush’s characters, as I could with Ms. Mulligan’s and Ms. Richardson’s.

Of course, there was at least one other outstanding portrait of madness in extremis in recent months, that of Derek Jacobi in the last acts of “King Lear,” also seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But Shakespeare’s use of madness—including the feigned madness of our friend Hamlet—occupies its own cosmic level in world literature. That’s a topic for another day.