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 her 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, Arthur Schnitzler, Anton Chekhov). 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 [Austrian; 1862-1931]; 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.]

'All’s Well That Ends Well' Production Notes, Part 2

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward’s “All’s Well That Ends Well Production Notes,” drawn from his production journal, continues below with Part 2.  If you haven’t read Part 1, posted on Wednesday. 26 November, I strongly recommend going back and picking that up before starting Part 2.

[The conclusion of Kirk’s account of his work on this Saint James Players production picks up right where the first part left off—with Kirk returning from his family vacation in North Carolina in mid-July and rejoining the cast and production team in rehearsal for Shakespeare’s All’s Well, already in progress.]

Back from the beach, I watched the next rehearsal, a run-through, and read lines for the missing actors – actually there were as many missing as there were present, which made the rehearsal uninspiring and also meant that occasionally we had to skip scenes because none of the actors in them were present, or only one.

I felt that Colleen had done a fine job of basic blocking, and she had a couple of ideas (the opening parade; a wedding performed as background; a funny bit with the children and a drum) that were spectacular.

We agreed that I’d take the acting scenes for the next few rehearsals, while she worked on the peripheral framing of the play. I was itching to do just that, without knowing whether any of my ideas would work – they seemed to me to be funny but crazy.

Colleen liked my suggestion that I tell the cast, when I was working on scenes, that we were “playing,” and that Colleen would review them to see what we would keep.  We hoped this would keep the actors from wondering which director to listen to.

So Colleen didn’t come to the first rehearsal on 20 July after my vacation. I worked on nine scenes, many of them short and transitional, trying to find “angles” for them that would interest the cast and provide some vitality. It was fun directing scenes again; I hadn’t directed in a while. I ran out of energy with about twenty minutes to go in the rehearsal, and we basically pushed across the finish line.

Rehearsal the following night was cancelled – too many people who were scheduled to be out, and one with a sick child. Colleen and I used the time to talk through costumes, which turned out to be less complicated than we had feared. We decided to go with basic black clothes, enhanced by accessories that we hoped would be emblematic and maybe funny.

Continuing to work on scenes in the next rehearsals, I learned something about myself as a director: when I start to run out of energy I talk too much. Time to stop, so I ended one rehearsal about 10 minutes early. The next rehearsal ended at 8:30 for the same reason.

But on each night we worked through all the scenes we’d planned to. Colleen worked one scene where she had a definite idea on how it should go. So it was a productive period.

Looking ahead to August, though, I saw an impressive number of schedule conflicts – sometimes half the cast Run-throughs were almost impossible. The best we could think of was identify the scenes that most needed work, identify the scenes it was possible to do, and match them up.

Actually at the next rehearsal we had a good percentage of the cast present, and since we had announced that the rehearsal would be a run-through, I told the cast the rehearsal objective for the evening would be continuity.

I had them think through the script in their seats, asking them to narrate to themselves the sequence of events in the play.  This is difficult because there are so many short scenes and I knew Colleen and I had a hard enough time keeping track of them.

Then on Sunday, 3 August, we ran the play from beginning to end, telling the actors they could act or not, work with the script or not, whatever they wanted, as long as they were where they should be when they were supposed to be there.

I think it’s important for each rehearsal to have an explicit goal, especially in early rehearsals, so the actors don’t try to do too much at once. On this night there was some excellent acting, particularly by the two leads. But there wasn’t any pressure for them to do that – it happened as a by-product of reduced stress.

We had few people for the next two rehearsals and only worked for about an hour each night. Colleen solidified a tricky piece of staging, and I worked with two actors, aiming to add more variety and movement to a few scenes and speeches. I hoped that the actors would retain the work.

I was particularly happy with one small blocking change I made, where a tiny “cross” by one actor and a “counter” by the other (one takes a couple of steps in one direction, the other adjusts a little in the other direction set up the rest of the scene with clarity and zest. Little things!

It struck me that in this production the play had two elements, an envelope and its contents. The contents were the scenes. The envelope was the apparatus around them – the children bringing out costume pieces, the location signs, the music, and so on. Colleen specialized on the envelope.

The actor playing the King had been on vacation for several weeks. When he returned we devoted the next rehearsal to his scenes. He had worked on his lines while away and the rehearsal went well until we reached the last scene of the play, which wasn’t blocked at all. Colleen and I had each assumed the other had staged it!

The scene has all the major characters and a lot of activity in it. I had worked out on paper some blocking for the scene, which is fairly complex, weeks ago, but for some reason I assumed that Colleen had staged it while I was on vacation, and she had assumed I’d handle it.

So I went ahead and blocked it now, and we got it done, although this made the rehearsal run half an hour later than we had wanted (9:30 PM instead of 9 PM).

Our next rehearsal, a run through, was the last for two weeks because of a holiday weekend (Saturday, 30 August–Monday, 1 September 2025) – no sense trying to get people to rehearse on Labor Day! Colleen and I gave notes afterward, the first time we’d been able to do that, and the rehearsal felt productive. I have to say, this show was work!

Colleen and I sat down one evening and ordered from Amazon the costume items we needed and were happy with the results.

We prepared the following “director’s note” for the program:

If you haven’t seen “All’s Well” before, you’re not alone – few people have! There’s no record of its production in Shakespeare’s time; its initial appearance is in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. That script could be a first draft! The directors of this production have edited it to one act and about 70 minutes, but we think it’s a fair representation of the play. Its theme is Shakespeare’s great interest, love, but this time it’s love of every kind but ordinary romantic love. Our heroine is in love, and as you’ll see, she has quite a problem to solve. We think the play is wonderfully funny and have tried to bring that aspect out. The cast is a delight and we’re excited to share this Shakespeare rarity with you!

After a two-week layoff for the Labor Day weekend, and with memorized lines due, the next rehearsal was awful. Sticking to the principle of one purpose per rehearsal, I told the cast the rehearsal was entirely about lines and not to worry about anything else. In most cases the actors had done a good, if often incomplete, job of memorization. Not much else was good, though, and I had to remind myself that I had told them that would be okay.

I had thought we’d be able to get through the whole play; in fact we barely got halfway and continued from there the next night, which went much better. The cast seemed more attuned to the play; the level of memorization of lines wasn’t bad; a few scenes genuinely clicked, with the actors relating well to each other.

We distributed the costume accessories we had ordered, such as sashes, medals, hats and crowns, and even fake moustaches for the children in one scene, and the cast seemed to enjoy them. Colleen reworked a bit of the last scene and improved it.

Meanwhile it appeared after all that I would be the one to play the role of Lafeu on the next to last performance, so I had to learn the lines. I used a portable tape recorder (primitive technology, I know, but convenient), taped all the scenes I was in (five altogether), and started listening to it every chance I got.

Then I discovered an improvement to that method. After each line of my own on the recording, I left a space for me to repeat the line – just like learning a foreign language. No sooner had I started on that method than the assistant pastor of the church volunteered to play Lafeu for the one performance. So I discovered a useful memorization method and was off the hook.

Denise, our trained opera singer in the cast, who was playing Lafeu, told me another interesting method of line memorization that she used. She learned her lines word by word – literally one word at a time. She’d memorize one word, and when she had that one down she’d memorize the next, and now and then she’d review the whole speech. Slow, but possibly effective. I intend to try that approach sometime.

Two rehearsals to go before the final week of rehearsals, 21-25 September. At the first we had several absences that made it difficult to organize scene work. Colleen used the performance space (the church sanctuary) with the four children, and I took everybody else upstairs, told them we were going to “play,” and led exercises on monologues and scenes based on training procedures I’d seen used by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Working together, our actors ran through the material once, then paraphrased it, then did it in the original text making a physical move for every noun or pronoun, then once more to see if anything had changed. In every case it had – the work was fresher, more fun, with better communication

After the rehearsal I asked one of the actors how she thought it had gone, and she said it was good but “I didn’t like it at first” As an actor I don’t enjoy this sort of work either, although I’ve taught “theater games” for years. In a production of a play I want to work with other actors to develop a role, and that’s all.

But the need for “games” arises when the language of the play approaches the “poetic.” American actors, raised on modern plays, approach them through the emotions, and American acting training is based on that assumption.

For example, Lee Strasberg (1901-1982) of the Actors Studio taught actors to reach into their own emotions for experiences they could then apply to basically realistic plays.

On the other hand, it’s generally necessary for actors to approach poetic drama – for example, the plays of Shakespeare – through the language, or they’ll have little idea what is going on in the play.

English actors traditionally have been trained in this approach, which helps explain why American actors often think of British acting as dry and even mechanical – the English are accustomed to approaching the play through its language.

I described this idea to the actors at the following rehearsal. We also talked about the fascinating fact that although the actors know what will happen in the whole play, the characters have no idea, and we tried to apply that insight to our script.

Over the next break between rehearsals, Colleen, one of our performers, and I tried to drum up business at a “sidewalk sale” on the church’s street. We were able to pass out more postcards for the show than I’d expected. Some people took them readily; some tried not to look me in the eye, perhaps because I was wearing a sort of Viking helmet with two big horns – a Shakespearian look, you know.

“Production week,” 21-25 September, leading up to opening night, began on a Sunday night after the usual week’s layover, and I told the cast that we didn’t expect full performances, we just hoped to get the show back in focus. Good thing – there were parts that went smoothly, but the beginning and the end were a mess, and lines were erratic all the way through.

I was “on book” prompting, and Colleen took notes. We agreed that there was no cause to panic, although deep inside I suspect we were both panicking – I found myself recalling many other shows in which, at one point or another, I had vowed never to direct again. But it was a useful night . . . I was pretty sure.

The next night we’d gotten the sound going and the costumes and props were handled pretty well. The run-through matched the previous night’s pattern of starting slowly and gathering momentum as it went along.

It struck me that each actor in the play had a different style of acting. Putting them all together – who knew? Hopefully it would be fun, but at this stage I couldn’t tell. Line memorization was still sketchy this night – lots of stopping and starting – and Colleen and I decided not to offer prompting of lines the next night . . . .

Which worked fine. There was still some stumbling and ad-libbing, but the story was clear and mostly interesting, although focus weakened again at the end. I had a page full of notes and hoped that people listened to them. I will say, it definitely felt like we were seeing signs of hope.

Another rehearsal, the 24th, more progress. The play, with a couple of exceptions, moved swiftly from scene to scene, and I thought it likely that the audience would respond to that.  The whole presentation ran an hour, faster than we had figured.

We started that particular run-through late because the church had double-booked the space until 7:30, and we used that time in another room to work on the last scene. It definitely improved. Dress rehearsal on the 25th was even better – about three major glitches but all easily avoidable.

And then, finally . . . opening night, Friday, the 26th, was a joy. An audience of about 35 saw a fast-moving play that told its story clearly and well and featured some excellent present-moment acting, which I define as the actors seeming genuinely to be talking and listening to each other, rather than just saying words – which makes the work fresher and more fun. Colleen and I were thrilled. I said to her, “There’s a possibility we actually know how to direct.”

With some friends after the performance, I was asked, “Is Bertram [the central male character] really as horrible a person as he seems to be in the play?” I told them that was exactly what Shakespeare had written. My friend Martha Day pointed out that if Shakespeare had weakened Bertram’s “badness” in any way, there wouldn’t have been any play – the whole story is that of a woman who loves a man who has absolutely no use for her at all.

The second performance, the following night, would have shaken my confidence if what happened hadn’t been predictable. Although some performances were solid, much of the show was just a little “off,” and one actor forgot chunks of his speeches. Colleen went backstage during the performance – something I don’t believe I’ve ever done as a director, but she was right to do it – and calmed him down.

The next performance, the Sunday matinee, before the show I said to the cast:

There were some really good things last night, but as you know we had some problems. I think the reason is that we were trying to answer the wrong question. We were asking, “How do we repeat what we did last night?” That’s never the right question. We can never repeat a performance. We can only move forward. The question we want to ask ourselves today is, “How do we tell our story this time?” If we do that everything will be all right.

“Tell a story” is more and more my idea of what a play does. I don’t know if what I said had anything to do with the performance, but it was fine. The story was told clearly, the play moved speedily from one scene to the next, and the audience – our biggest so far, seventy-five people – seemed to enjoy it.

I should add a note about our sound effects, because I was in charge of them. There were only three, at the beginning, middle, and end of the show, all music cues. I ran them from my cell phone over speakers. And I messed them up in just about every way I could. I neglected to test the equipment before a show not once but twice, and each time there were problems. Once I forgot to plug the amplifier in. Twice I was just plain late. A fine showing from the director! Mr. Professional . . . I hate tech.

After a several day layoff, many of us met the following Thursday to work with the actor who was going to play the role of Lafeu the next night. He was in a tough spot because actors often accomplish a great deal of their line memorization through rehearsal, and he only had this one. We agreed that he would use his script in performance and not worry about it.

The nicest moment came after rehearsal when Colleen, who was going to be travelling, said goodbye to the cast. Their affection for her and their gratitude for her work was lovely to see.

The Friday night performance of the following weekend, 3 October, was a pretty good show, and since I knew several of the factors involved – the cast hadn't done the play in five days so they were out of practice with the language, and someone was reading one of the roles as a substitute – the cast had a right to be pleased with themselves.

Our “ringer” paraphrased one line in a way that has made me laugh a great deal since. His line was, “Helena, that's dead: such a ring as this, I saw upon her finger.” What he said, in a furor of exuberance, was, “That ring! I saw it on Helena’s dead finger!”

I think one thing in favor of our production was that almost no one is familiar with the play, so they were wondering what happens in it. (I did meet one man who went home and read it when he saw the poster.) Anyway, I was happy . . . and relieved . . . and tired. Colleen, as I mentioned, had flown the coop, traveling to a wedding in Maine. Two is definitely better than one, if it's the right two.

The final performance on Saturday night, 4 October, was alive and lively, an excellent ending. Facts and figures: we performed for about 250 people (“houses” of around 35, 55, 75, 55, and 35 over the five performances), and took in $1,466 in contributions, well over our expenses, which didn’t reach a thousand dollars.

As my friend Dan Landon, who worked for the Shubert Organization, says, “One dollar over the ‘nut’ – it’s a hit!” (The “nut” is expenses.) We were a hit!

Looking back, I was happy with our production. It didn’t do everything we wanted it to do – its style was neither purely ’30’s slapstick, Monty Python, or graphic novel, but we did borrow from all three.

We also didn’t emphasize some themes that are present in the script – the role of Heaven in the story (the play has a deeply spiritual side), the theme of Honor that Auden emphasizes, and many of the bawdy sexual references.

But we told the story of the play in an entertaining way. I believe that those who weren’t familiar with the play before they saw it (a category that included virtually the entire audience) left with a solid grounding in the play. The show moved fast, with one scene finishing while the next was coming onstage.

Having two directors could be a problem, I’m sure, but Colleen and I were proud of the way we worked together. One thing we were able to do was to bounce ideas off each other. I believe we both tried to reach for the best decision each time, rather than insisting on our own ideas. I’d cheerfully do it again.

At the cast party one of the actors said to me, “I like working with you – you’re so easy-going.” I thanked him politely and thought to myself, “You should have seen what it was like inside me.” No two directing jobs are the same, ever. Colleen and I compared ourselves to ducks, calm above the water and paddling furiously underneath. But that’s part of the fun.

[The first recorded production of William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well didn’t occur until 1741 in London, 125 years after the Bard’s death.  The last New York City mounting was in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park from 6 June to 30 July 2011 by the Public Theater for Shakespeare in the Park.  It was on Broadway only once at the Martin Beck Theatre (renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in 2003) from 13 April to 15 May 1983 in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by RSC artistic director (1968 to 1986) Trevor Nunn.]

[The Saint James Players’ production of All's Well, codirected by Kirk Woodward and Colleen Brambilla, took place on 26, 27, and 28 September, and 3 and 4 October 2025.  Performances were held at Saint James Episcopal Church, 581 Valley Road in Upper Montclair, New Jersey.] 

[Near the end of this installment of Kirk’s All’s Well journal, he recounts: “At the cast party one of the actors said to me, ‘I like working with you – you’re so easy-going.’  I thanked him politely and thought to myself, ‘You should have seen what it was like inside me.’”

[One time—and only one time—I had an almost identical experience.  (The complete tale is related in “The Importance of Being Earnest and the Big Bluff” in “Short Takes: Theater War Stories“ [6 December 2010].)

[After I finished my acting MFA, I meticulously avoided trying to direct.  My two brief experiences in the director’s chair had convinced me that it wasn’t for me.  Eventually, however, I found myself accumulating stage experiences I wanted to apply on the other side of the footlights.

[I’d been working for an Off-Off-Broadway company for about a year or so, and I eventually asked the artistic director to let me direct something there.  One evening, he called to tell me that the cast of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a couple of weeks into rehearsals, had fired its own director!  They’d become frustrated with him because he hadn’t blocked the show, hadn’t given them any character notes, and, despite fervent requests, hadn’t made any cuts in the script.

[The artistic director asked if I’d consider taking over the production. I agreed to accept the job, my first professional directing gig.  In addition to not wanting to upset the cast any more—they acknowledged that they were floundering—and not wanting them to see that I didn’t know what I was doing, I consciously chose actions to appear more secure and authoritative than I really was.  

[I decided, first, not to tell them that I’d never directed pros before, then to make very specific decisions about text cuts (that was the straw that caused the rebellion) and tell them exactly what was in, what was out, and what we could discuss.  I made some specific blocking decisions, worked out some physical business to insert, and made some very specific character notes.

[I deliberately selected these actions so that I’d seem to be in charge and on top of the situation (even though I wasn’t).  It was all a choreographed act I figured would carry us into the rehearsals far enough until the work itself became a focus.

[One thing that worked in my favor that I couldn’t have known was that the cast was so desperate for some guidance and direction that they glommed onto my efforts like Velcro!  The bluff worked, but mostly because the cast was really ready for it.

[Here’s the bit that parallels Kirk’s anecdote: after the play opened, and we had our opening night party, several of the cast, drunk by then, very forcefully said they’d work with me anytime again and that I was a real “actors’ director.”  That’s when I told them that this had been my first professional gig.  They were shocked—and I was delighted!]

 

'All’s Well That Ends Well' Production Notes, Part 1

by Kirk Woodward 

[Kirk Woodward, a prolific guest blogger on Rick On Theater, lives in Little Falls in Passaic County, New Jersey, north of Montclair in neighboring Essex County, in the environs of which, much of his theater work is staged.  Among the many small theater groups in and around Montclair is the Saint James Players.  Kirk’s previous post concerning SJP was “A Directing Experience” (13 and 16 October 2023).

[SJP mounts one main production a year, usually a Shakespeare play (though the production described in “A Directing Experience” was Sophocles’ Antigone, a Greek tragedy and SJP’s first—and, so far, only—non-Shakespearean production).  Associated with Upper Montclair’s Saint James Episcopal Church, SJP is an amateur and semi-professional community troupe.

[This year’s production, returning to the tradition of presenting a Shakespeare play, was All’s Well That Ends Well, a “problem play” (which Kirk defines below) and a comedy.  It was mounted earlier this fall with Kirk codirecting alongside his longtime friend, Colleen Brambilla.  Kirk kept a journal of the work on All’s Well, which he’s submitted for publication on Rick On Theater, as he’s done several times in the past.]

In March 2025, as the Saint James Players (SJP) of Upper Montclair, New Jersey, began to plan for its annual production of a play by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sharon Quinn, who had directed the previous year’s production of his play Love’s Labours Lost (possibly written in the mid-1590s; presented by SJP: 13-15 and 20-21 September 2024), suggested a production of his play All’s Well That Ends Well (abbreviated as AWW or All’s Well).

I had been intending to propose a different project – a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (probably written between 1596 and 1598) in which the controversial character of Shylock was replaced by another character, eliminating the “religious” issue from the play. But a close friend had just warned me against this idea.

I suspected that she was correct. Not all ideas are good ones. (I still haven’t completely given up on it, though.) I was interested in Sharon’s idea, but she didn’t want to direct again this year unless she had to, and I suggested that I direct the play with my longtime friend Colleen Brambilla (see “Notes from a Sometime Actor” [27 December 2019]), a skilled choreographer and director.

We proposed the idea to the SJP board and the board liked it. I made a cutting of the play, since the SJP requests that when possible its productions be one act and no more than 90 minutes long. This approach might not be appropriate for all Shakespeare’s plays, but it seemed feasible this time.

The cutting was not difficult, partly because a great deal of the original play is comedy that is unlikely to come across to the audience. I adopted the principle that anything that needed a footnote in order to be understood today had to go. I tried to maintain the storyline and not leave the secondary characters with too little to do.

The play itself is problematic, beginning with its dates. Scholars estimate that it might have been written sometime between 1598 and 1608 – a wide range. I see a few things in it that seem to me to date it after 1606, one of them being the use of the word ‘equivocate,’ which came into usage that year in connection with the notorious Gunpowder Plot to blow up the king and Parliament.

There is no report of any production of the play in Shakespeare’s time. It initially appears in the First Folio (the 1623 published collection of Shakespeare’s plays). Compared to more familiar plays of Shakespeare’s, it has been produced little since (see note in the afterword below).

Reading – and, we assumed, seeing – it can be a complex experience. All’s Well is frequently called a “problem play,” defined by Wikipedia as “a play that poses complex ethical dilemmas that require more than typically simple solutions.”

This is well said. For a comedy AWW is peculiar. Comedies typically end in romance; AWW does not, because as far as the reader can tell, although it concludes with a marriage, during the entire play the groom has had no use at all for the bride, and it’s not clear that he ever will.

Shakespeare as a dramatist characteristically examines the themes of his plays from multiple angles. My take on the play as we began work on it was that AWW, like the more familiar As You Like It (frequently abbreviated as AYLI, first registered in 1560), looks at the subject of love from varied perspectives, and that in this case Shakespeare has chosen particularly difficult viewpoints that do not easily resolve themselves.

I thought of AWW as the “underside” of AYLI. Many of the aspects of love in the play make us uncomfortable – unrequited love, self-love, love of status and influence, love of war and glory.

Helena, the principal character in the play, is in love with Bertram, a man above her station with absolutely no interest in her at all. He is however “on the prowl” for other women, and Helena uses this fact, among others, to try to win his favor. She is the active character in the play, and at the end she maneuvers her way to victory, but what has she won? And yet the play, at least technically, is a comedy!

With these things in mind we began preparing the production in April. As a director I’ve never felt I’ve done a particularly good job at preparing for a production, so I wanted to do better this time. I began by heeding the advice of my acting teacher, the late Elisabeth Dillon (see “‘Portrait of a Mentor’” by Alan Geller, posted on ROT on 30 July 2020) – she learned this from her teacher Herbert Berghof (1909-1990; see “Herbert Berghof, Acting Teacher” [1 June 2011]), I believe – that a director should read a play once through for each character in the play, “including the dog.”

Doing this, I began immediately to find nuances in the characters that I hadn’t seen before. For example, something that ought to be useful for us is the observation that many of the main characters seem impetuous, in a hurry.

This is useful because Colleen and I wanted to make sure we directed a comedy. Sharon originally suggested a “screwball comedy” like a number of films from the 1930’s. I pictured the play as a farce – very fast pace, rapid entrances and exits. Colleen suggested that it resemble a Monty Python episode. We thought it likely that it would end up all three.

I wrote my friend Steve Johnson:

I think the text we have is a draft, possibly a first draft. Not to say there weren’t later scripts, but as you know we don’t have any, and no records of production in Shakespeare’s time either; the First Folio is also the first indication it existed. There are a number of peculiarities in the script that to me say “I’ll fix that later – got to finish,” particularly the careless naming of the peripheral characters like First Lord and Steward, and the first indication of the disguise subplot – the widow tells Helena, “I’ve got a great idea, tell you later,” but a few scenes later Helena comes up with the idea and has to sell the widow on it.

 

I read Auden’s lecture on the play; for him it’s primarily about Honor, and that’s definitely correct. I also see it as the reverse side of “As You Like It,” with AYLI’s in-depth examination of love between two people who care for each other. AWW is about two people one of whom absolutely does not care for the other, and other kinds of love get a look too, such as straight-out lust, self-love, love of status, and so on . . . as though AYLI is a lovely piece of needlework and AWW is the stitching you see on the back of it.

 

(Poet and critic W. H. Auden [1907-1973] gave a series of lectures as a course at the New School for Social Research [now simply the New School] in New York City from 2 October 1946 to 14 May 1947. Auden never prepared them for publication as a book himself, but the volume was reconstructed and edited by literary critic Arthur Kirsch [b. 1932], now professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, using notes taken by Auden’s students at the time.  The lectures were published in 2000 by Princeton University Press.

 

(In the published Lectures, the discussions of each play are presented as separate chapters, entitled simply by the name of the play they discuss. [All’s Well is on pages 181-184.] During his original lectures, Auden grouped these as “problem plays” thematically.)

 

Colleen and I agreed not to try to “block” or stage the scenes in the show until we saw who was cast and how they handled the space and the entrances and exits we worked out (which of course were also tentative).

So in early April Colleen and I sat down for three hours and worked out the entrances and exits that the actors would make in the show (tentatively, again, depending on how they looked when we saw them on stage).

We got the job done, and I was happy with how well we worked together. It had been a while since I co-directed with anybody, and forty years or so since I co-directed with Colleen on the farce Chemin de Fer by Georges Feydeau (1862-1921), and on the musical Something’s Afoot (book, music, and lyrics by James McDonald, David Vos, and Robert Gerlach), which had opened on Broadway (not directed by us) in 1976.

My temperament is not basically collaborative; I tend to jump in and do a lot of things before my partner has a chance to get started. I decided not to do that this time, and as it turned out Colleen and I treated each other with respect, listening to each other’s ideas and agreeing on which were better.

A week or so later, Colleen told me she had thought of a formulation of the style of the play that would convey it quickly and clearly – we would do the play as a “graphic novel,” which would allow for strong picturization, non-realistic action when needed, and even “balloons” of words to illustrate what characters were thinking (which we ultimately did to indicate where scenes were taking place). This struck me as perfect, offering clear illustrations of what’s going on in the play, and plenty of opportunities for outlandish ideas or exaggerations.

I presented this idea at the company’s “announcement meeting.” Colleen couldn’t be there – 27 April, so I described the play we were doing, talked about its style, emphasized the important dates, and generally tried to stir up enthusiasm for the project.

Our auditions on 12 and 13 May were “cold readings,” where arrivals are given scenes to read. (If they’ve read the published play beforehand that’s even better, but of course the version we were doing was shorter than the published version.) We tried to find scenes for the principals and for the different types of characters in the play (young and old, energetic and passive, and so on).

A technical note: when I was growing up, a “side” was a script on which one actor’s lines were written, with blank spaces for the lines of the other actors in the scene. This was supposed to encourage performers to listen closely to each other, which you have to do if you don’t know what the other person is going to say.

I haven’t encountered “sides” of that kind in years and I don’t know if anyone uses them today. Our “sides” for auditions were just short scenes. I did add one innovation that I’ve always thought would be worth trying: at the top of each “side” I wrote out a short description of its context, hoping that this would at least start the auditioners out on the right track when they read the scene. (It did seem to.)

For actors waiting to audition, I also prepared a cast breakdown; a summary of production dates; and a list of numbers of the audition scenes so the papers didn’t get hopelessly scrambled.

And I made “audition sheets” to collect each actor’s contact information, conflicts on rehearsal dates, and any information they wanted us to know about themselves. I forgot to print the audition sheets out, went to auditions without them, and had to dash home, print them out, and bring them back.

We had a small group for the first auditions, eight actors, several unfamiliar to us. The second night was much the same, except that we had many more extremely talented women than we thought we could possibly find roles for in the play. This is a familiar situation in theater: plays written by men, with lots of men’s roles, and mostly women available to play them.

To be fair to Shakespeare, he had severe limitations on how many women’s roles he could write, since acting by women on stage was forbidden by cultural norms at that time. As far as we know, theater companies in his day would have a handful of male actors who specialized in women’s parts – boys, some of them apparently remarkably good performers, and they must have been skilled for Shakespeare to have written Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, and Helena, in our play, for them.

Nevertheless Shakespeare made as much of women’s roles as he could. In AWW the women are the doers, the ones with agency, much more farsighted than the men. In our production the play came across as a feminist statement. If Shakespeare had been able to write for a cast that included female actors, what else might he have been able to accomplish?

Colleen raised the possibility that Shakespeare had played women’s roles in his early days in theater. (In his day boys played the women’s roles until they grew out of them.) It’s a tantalizing thought.

We have no idea, of course; because there is no information available today on Shakespeare’s late teen and early adult years. But she raises an intriguing possibility. Might he have been equipped to write strong roles for women because he’d played them?

We sat down together and worked out the casting for the show, working slowly from the leading roles on. One event was unique in my experience: we weren’t positive that Lydia De Souza, who had greatly impressed us in auditions, would be interested in playing a role in the broad style we were hoping to use for the play. I suggested that we call her and ask. We did, she said she was excited by the idea, and we told her she was cast.

The next day I drafted an email offering people roles, sent it to Colleen for review, and sent it out. The first reply, which I received almost immediately, read, “No. I would love to work with you and Colleen again, but if I'm doing Shakespeare, I like to be able to speak a few times. . . [.] I'm sorry you thought I only deserved one scene.” This was a turn-down, and we moved on to our next choice.

Casting really is an awful process. I learned from this experience that directors don’t cast actors. They cast plays, as best they can. Life would be easier if actors (including myself, when I’m auditioning) could believe that.

After about a week we collected enough acceptances to assemble a cast, and I went to work on a rehearsal schedule. At this point it was May; the company’s policy is to rehearse on Sunday and Monday nights through the summer, moving to production week (the last week of rehearsals) with performances in late September.

It took about five concentrated hours to finish a draft of a schedule; I had to make a chart with every scene by number (all 27) on one axis and all the characters on the other, in order to be able to keep track of who was in each scene.

We made, and stuck to, several decisions about how the play would be staged. Performing in the front of the sanctuary of the church, we made no effort to conceal any of it (for example, the pulpit, the baptismal font, or the altar). We used no curtains, amplification, or lighting effects. The only “technical” element of the show was a set of speakers for three music cues, for the beginning of the play, a march, and the curtain call.

This decision-making process illustrates something I’ve said many times: directing a play by Shakespeare isn’t the same as directing a typical play. It’s more like staging a musical – or a military campaign. A great deal of the work is strategy.

After creating a rehearsal schedule, I second-guessed myself, felt that the schedule was too loaded on the early rehearsals; second-guessed myself again, and finally felt it was all right. I sent it to Colleen, who approved it, and drafted this email on 15 May to accompany the email with the schedule:

Hi everyone,

 

Below and attached is a tentative rehearsal schedule for “All’s Well.” (It’s always tentative – things happen.) Because of major conflicts in early June, we will begin rehearsals with a read-through on Monday, June 23, followed by two nights of basic staging. From then on, scene work will alternate with full cast run-throughs. 

 

Since the play is only about 70 minutes long, even at run-through rehearsals we will be able to work scenes as well, as needed. We don’t want to waste anyone’s time, but pretty much everyone’s scenes are spread throughout the whole play.

 

The script we’re using has numbered scenes (1 through 27!). Because we will work on multiple scenes in many rehearsals, since the first thing we’ll stage is entrances and exits, when a director calls a scene number, you can go directly to the entrance point. Think of it as movie acting – scene by scene, not necessarily in order! 

 

Because of conflicts, it may be a while before some scenes get detailed work. Don’t worry, it’s planned for.

 

Comments welcome. Thank you!

 

Colleen and Kirk

Meanwhile, as I started to think about “blocking” the movements and events of the play, I wondered if we should be planning to “gag it up” with the play, putting in hopefully humorous stunts within the action.

I found myself thinking this way: “gags” are fine in the framework of the play if we want them, but where the characters in the play are concerned, humor must come from their personalities and not be arbitrary.

Colleen and I sat down, figured out the remaining casting questions, and got a lot further on our ideas for the production. We continued working on things we could pre-plan, agreeing that for this particular show, much would have to be decided as we went along.

My new motto as I worked through the script: “Physicalize!” This has not always been on the top of my list as a director (it is for Colleen), but I was learning.

One of our actors, in a major role, had health issues, and after much discussion I suggested to him that he might switch to a smaller role, and he accepted . . . and then declined the role because it was too small! See earlier maxim – directors don’t cast actors, they cast plays.

Around the same time we had also lost a male teenager in the cast and gained an older woman. Colleen and I met to try to distribute the supporting roles so everyone had a meaningful part in the play.

Then the woman playing Lafeu was cast in an off-Broadway production. We replaced her with another woman we know, an opera singer by training. She had never performed in a Shakespeare play but was willing to give it a go, but there was one performance (the second Friday) she couldn’t miss.

We offered to find someone else for that one performance if she’d take the part, and started looking. I suspected it would be me. We came close a couple of times and finally found someone.

The first rehearsal was a read through on 1 June. We had all but two cast members there (we knew those two had conflicts – the first of many throughout the rehearsal period). It felt great actually to begin work with the actors, and what a lovely group they were – Colleen and I were relieved and excited.

We read through the play (which took about an hour) and caught everyone up on line assignments, and Colleen walked them through the opening procession of the show, up the center aisle to the front, to give them a flavor of what the production would be like. We were relieved to see that the distribution of lines among the actors was fairly even – enough, we hoped, to let everyone feel the show was worth doing.

Meeting again, Colleen and I were uncertain how to proceed with blocking the movement in the play. We decided that at the next rehearsal we’d stage the entrances and exits, letting the actors move freely during the scenes themselves, and then we’d decide how to handle the rehearsal after that.

This was the first time I’d staged the entrances and exits of a play by themselves and before anything else. It made sense in this case because in our version there were a total of twenty-seven scenes in the play, with no two successive scenes in the same location.

We figured the cast would have a sense of security once they had the outline of the play in hand. I told the cast it was like giving them a glass jar and then we’d all fill in the contents.

The “entrances and exits” rehearsal was hard work, but the cast did seem to enjoy knowing what they were dealing with. We repeated this approach at the next rehearsal, at which I offered a few character suggestions.

Then I left on 5 July for two weeks of vacation in North Carolina. I experienced some stress at the beach because I realized that Colleen would be blocking the whole show, and would I know how to work usefully with what she got done, when I got back? 

As I watched the ocean from our rented vacation house I tried to think what “activities” (often called “exercises,” but I’m not fond of that word) might help the actors. But I needed to see her results before I could make any decisions.