Tom Stoppard

by Kirk Woodward

[On 22 October, I posted “Tom Stoppard & Leopoldstadt” on Rick On Theater.  It’s an assemblage of different pieces about the playwright, including a short biographical sketch.  As an introduction to the post, I gave a little background of my initiation to Stoppard’s work.  Here’s an edited version of that introduction:

[Tom Stoppard is one of my favorite playwrights; since I first encountered his work some fifty-odd years ago, I have reveled in his wordplay and his convoluted logic and intellectualism.  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.

[Louisville, as it happens, is the hometown of Kirk Woodward, my college classmate and the author of the report on Hermione Lee’s new biography of the dramatist.

[I saw three plays at ATL, the third of which 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 haven’t caught all of them, but many of the plays listed below have been part of my theater experience.]

Tom Stoppard: A Life. Lee, Hermione. 2022. Vintage Books, New York. 872 pp.

I saw the play Leopoldstadt on Broadway in New York City on December 1, 2022, and it has stuck in my mind ever since. I went to see it because a family friend, Brandon Uranowitz (b. 1986), a three-time nominee for the Tony Award, plays two prominent roles in the play. I was not disappointed; his performance is stunning.

But so is the entire play, and it has been on my mind ever since. In scope and in impact, it is powerful. It was written by Tom Stoppard (b. 1937). I have always thought of him as one of the younger generation of playwrights; it came as something of a shock to realize that he is now 85. Clearly I needed to learn more about him, so I bought Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee.

The most striking aspect of the book description above may be the 872 pages. If you’ve had an ambition to meet Tom Stoppard, you might want to read this book instead. It would take you about as long as it would to fly to England, and by the end of the book you’d feel you’d known him personally.

Hermione Lee (b. 1948), noted for biographies of the novelists Willa Cather (published in 1989) and Virginia Woolf (published in 1996), was asked by Stoppard to write this biography, which follows an earlier one with the same title by Ira Bruce Nadel (b. 1943), published in 2002 and credited by Lee as “thoroughly researched [and] detailed.”

Those words certainly apply to Lee’s book. Stoppard invited her to write it; he told friends to cooperate with her, and he made a staggering amount of documentation available to her. The result is highly readable – a triumph for the author, and a tribute to the enormous activity with which Stoppard has filled his life. I found it difficult to read anything else until I had finished it.

Lee peppers her book with references to Stoppard’s skeptical attitude toward biography. She writes:

There have been moments when he clearly regretted setting this book in motion, and would have preferred me not to be asking personal questions about him of his friends, or reading his archive, or asking him about his past. For all that he is a public and highly visible personage, he is also a reserved, shy and embarrassable private man, protective of himself and of his family. Sometimes he has been baffled by the whole process and by the questions I’ve asked him. This can’t be any use to you, can it? he has often asked, in mid-conversation.

Lee’s biography is “critical” in the sense that it takes a thorough look at Stoppard’s writing. It is hardly critical of him as a person, although it acknowledges contradictory and sometimes difficult elements of his personality:

One young playwright, who adores him but has witnessed him in critical mode, added to his adjectives [describing Stoppard]: “And a tiny bit evil.” One grand old woman of the world, an old friend of his, said to me: “Beware of the charm.” A theatre director noted that he used his politeness to get what he wanted from people. A woman who has often worked with him notes that he is not influenced by anyone when he wants something his way. “Solitary” and “private” are frequent adjectives. Many people who know him have said they don’t feel they know him well. They don’t know who his close friends are and they aren’t even sure if he has any.

I quote this passage at length because it’s pretty much the worst anybody has to say about him. Lee often puts the best construction on his behavior; on the other hand, in the strenuous world of the theater few people are saints, and Stoppard’s dealings with people appear to be honest and aboveboard.

Certainly Lee gives him the benefit of the doubt when she can. Of his breakup with the splendid performer Felicity Kendal (b. 1946), for example, Lee writes that

Though she keeps the private story of their life to herself, she speaks of him to this day with fondness, humour and respect. If there was pain and sadness, it was well managed, and outweighed by affection and loyalty. It is one of the striking features of his life that he has stayed friends with his ex-partners.

The facts, as far as they can be known, seem likely to be true (although it took time for Stoppard and his first wife to reestablish an equilibrium after their divorce), but it certainly is not tabloid-style journalism.

Two other aspects of Lee’s writing to note: she occasionally uses British slang that might not be familiar to Americans (but, after all, she’s British); and if she uses the word “he” without a clear antecedent, as she frequently does, it refers to Stoppard.

I have seen little of Stoppard’s work and read little more; Lee’s book convinced me that I have missed a great deal in two ways: she convinces me that his work has great value, and that there is a huge amount of it. Stoppard seems to have been a non-stop (if I may put it that way) writer.

His plays are certainly his best-known output, and he has said that he’s “a theater writer who does other things.” Indeed he does – essays, letters, journals, speeches, media appearances, radio and TV dramas, nearly everything except social media (which he avoids).

I was astounded by the number of movies he’s been associated with, whether he was credited or not: examples include Brazil (1985), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989, in my opinion the best of that series), The Russia House (1990), Shakespeare in Love (1998, his project from inception and a Best Picture Oscar and Golden Globe Award winner for him and his co-author Marc Norman), and Star Wars Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005). By any account, that’s a wide variety of films, and it’s just a sampling.

But, as Lee says, “Stoppard was, after all, a playwright, not a historian, a biographer, an essayist or a philosopher – though he feeds off all those genres.” “Feed off” he does – he is an astonishing researcher. Lee says

His process was always the same. He read and read till he had taken on more than he could handle. Then he plunged in and made it up as he went along. There had to be a point where he stopped beating himself up for not knowing X, Y, and Z, and began writing without knowing X, Y, and Z. It was a lesson he had found hard to learn.

What does he research? The answer is “just about anything,” which can include topics from history, science, philosophy, mathematics, religion. His play Travesties (1974) is a good example.

The initial idea came from a not then published novel which mentioned that Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state (1870-1924); the psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961); the novelist James Joyce (1882-1941); and Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), an influential literary figure of his time and an important figure in the Dadaist and Symbolist movements, were all in Zurich, Switzerland, at the same time in 1916.

If the name of Tzara is unfamiliar, in a way that’s the point: Stoppard has exhaustively researched the period, its events, characters, and themes, and created a celebrated play out of a mix of elements some of which are almost certainly not common knowledge. This has given him a reputation as a playwright more interested in the intellect than in human behavior – an opinion that can be challenged, as we will see below.

Still, although Lee doesn’t make the following point, it seems to me easy to see Stoppard as a playwright descended, not directly, from another playwright often accused of over-intellectualism, namely George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).

There are resemblances: both Shaw and Stoppard came to England from other countries (Shaw from Ireland, Stoppard from Czechoslovakia); both began their careers in journalism; both wrote prolifically and startled their audiences by the emphasis they put on intellectual activity.

And both were involved in social movements of their times. Shaw had numerous theories on how economies and governments should be organized – he was among other things a fervent Socialist. Stoppard has focused on freedom of expression, particularly in nations like Czechoslovakia when the U.S.S.R. controlled Eastern Europe.

Both in fact could be labeled as playwrights of a “theater of ideas,” but that label would get us almost nowhere. There are ideas of all sorts; the question is what they mean to people who use ideas as a way of explaining themselves, the world, and what’s important to them.

Stoppard is certainly known for esoteric choices of material in his plays. Lee makes a good case, however, that human relationships are at the core of the plays, and that “all this material had to be turned into a drama that would make people laugh and weep, as well as think.”

She describes how Stoppard’s son Ed, viewing his work, came to ”see that the actors needed to find the key to it – as often in his father’s plays – through the emotions, not the ‘cerebral’ side.” When asked how the actors should approach his play Rock ’n’ Roll (2006), a play about the role music played in the opposition to the Communist government in Czechoslovakia, Tom Stoppard said, “Tell them it’s a love story.”

Stoppard describes his approach to writing plays in similar non-scientific terms – he researches like crazy, then plunges into writing the play. “If you can steel yourself just to blunder off into the dark, and keep alert to the way it might go, then God will come to your aid.” (He is not conventionally religious, which makes his choice of words particularly interesting here.)

Shaw, like Stoppard, was accused of writing plays that are “all talk.” Their styles, though, are different; Shaw tends to focus on one subject per play (on which he is thoroughly informed, at least in his own opinion), while Stoppard enjoys creating a mix.

Writing his play Saint Joan (1923), Shaw read most of the major accounts of Joan’s of Arc’s life (c. 1412-1431), and carefully studied (and used) the transcripts of her trial. That amount of research was sufficient for his purposes. Had Stoppard written the play, one can imagine his bringing in astronomy, quantum physics, and numerology as well. If he had, no one would have been surprised.

But although abstract thought may take a role in Stoppard’s work, there is a definite personal side to it, as Lee makes clear – a fact never more evident than in Leopoldstadt (first performed in London in 2020, where it won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Play that year). The story behind the story is fairly well known by now: Stoppard’s family was Jewish, but he was only dimly conscious of that fact until the 1990’s (see “Tom Stoppard & Leopoldstadt” – especially “Brief Biography”).

His family were Czech Jews, and when the Nazis arrived, some escaped, most did not; all his grandparents died in concentration camps. Stoppard situates the play’s story in Vienna rather than in Prague, but he dramatizes the same drift in Austria from casually insulting anti-Semitism to the brutal onslaught of the Germans, with the same results as his family experienced.

The last of the five scenes in the play shows a character very much like Stoppard – urbane, British in manner and outlook – coming face to face with the facts of his heritage. The scene is sobering and affecting. The preceding scene, in which the Nazis invade the family residence, is terrifying and I still have not gotten over it.

There is a great deal more to Lee’s book than I have described here, of course, including fascinating details like his expectations of actors (frequently, what he insists on is good diction) and his way of working with directors (open to their suggestions, but stubborn about what he wants).

Is Stoppard a great playwright? Asked the question, he replied with animation that it was too soon to tell. One thing is certain: Stoppard has greatly expanded the assumed limits of what a play can successfully do, by bringing in elements of the complexity of life that previously had not found much of a place in theater.

He has done this with both imagination and intelligence, not sacrificing the importance of plot and the complexity of human relationships. His plays answer the question, “Should theater entertain or educate?” by demonstrating that life is complex – more complex than the question itself.

*  *  *  *

[I was listening to the local CBS news on 21 November last, and its occasional “Broadway and Beyond” segment was on Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt.  Brandon Uranowitz, who plays a Stoppard-like character in the autobiographically inspired play, was featured in an interview with the correspondent Dick Brennan.  Uranowitz, who was the principal spokesperson on the segment (other than Brennan) spoke about the play and anti-Semitism—past and present.  (As Kirk notes above, Uranowitz is a “family friend.”  The video is available at “Leopoldstadt” star Brandon Uranowitz reflects on new Broadway play's important and timely story - CBS New York (cbsnews.com)).]

“‘LEOPOLDSTADT’ STAR BRANDON URANOWITZ REFLECTS ON
NEW BROADWAY PLAY’S IMPORTANT AND TIMELY STORY”
by Dick Brennan 

NEW YORK -- The new Broadway play “Leopoldstadt” shows the horror and heartbreak an extended Jewish family faces when the Nazis occupy Austria during World War II.

Actor Brandon Uranowitz sat down with CBS2’s Dick Brennan to talk about the rise of antisemitism on stage and what’s happening today.

It is a searing family drama of love, tragedy and human suffering sprawled over decades. The play follows an Austrian-Jewish family through the joy and prosperity of the turn of the 20th century and then into the darkness of Kristallnacht [“The Night of Broken Glass,” 9-10 November 1938] and the scourge of Nazism.

It is in part based on the life of Tom Stoppard, one of the most successful playwrights in Broadway history, and features a giant cast [38 actors] portraying a family tree that withers under the burden of hatred and oppression.

“I think if you’ve never experienced what it’s like to be oppressed or be marginalized, it can be very difficult to step into the shoes of someone who has,” Uranowitz said.

Uranowitz takes on two roles, Ludwig and Nathan, over a five-decade period from 1899 to 1955.

“There’s a very terrifying parallel between that apartment and this theater, and everything that’s happening outside of it,” he said.

Today’s headlines prove that antisemitism never really goes away.

“‘Leopoldstadt’ is sort of bringing to life the kind of Holocaust education in a pop culture sense,” said Scott Richman, regional director for the Anti-Defamation League.

Richman says the play sends an important signal to society at precisely the right time.

“I’m really glad that a show like this, which has a message about the Holocaust and where hate can lead . . . is a very important message,” he said.

Generally what awaits Uranowitz outside the theater is adoration from people who may have experienced what they just saw or who’ve had family who did, and he says they become an important part of the play itself.

“Any time I’m rehearsing a play, it always comes up that like, well, we’ve gone as far as we can, until we introduce the last character, which is the audience. And it does feed their performance, it uplifts their performance, and it validates their performance,” Uranowitz said.

“If there was some one thing, one theme . . . that is a message of this play and that perhaps might resonate beyond the doors here. . .” Brennan said.

“For me, the biggest thing about the play is memory and remembering,” Uranowitz said. “I think my biggest hope for this play is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum or it doesn’t exist in an echo chamber. I don’t want the themes of this play, to just be presented to people who already understand them and know them.”

Uranowitz is a three-time Tony nominee who has worked in film and TV, including “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” so what keeps him returning to the theater?

“Theater to me is just, it’s my life blood because there’s nothing else like it in the world. And you know, when you do film and TV, you sort of jump into the middle of a scene, you jump into the middle of an ‘act,’ and in theater, you start at the beginning and you go through the middle and you go to the end, and you experience something in real time with people and then it’s done. And there’s something ethereal about it. And yes, we do it eight times a week, yes, it’s repetitive, I guess, but every single performance is entirely unique because everyone here [in the audience] is different. What we’re bringing into the theater every day is different and that informs how we talk and listen and react. Theater to me is the greatest thing on Earth because there’s nothing else like it, and we all experience this one thing together and then it disappears,” he said.

“Leopoldstadt” is running at the Longacre Theatre through March 2023.

[Dick Brennan joined CBS2 (WCBS, channel 2 in New York City) in 2012 as an anchor and reporter. In addition, he anchors on the digital channel CBS News New York, which is also seen on the News at Nine on WCBS’s Long Island sister station WLNY-TV (channel 55 in Riverhead, Suffolk County, New York).

[Brandon Uranowitz, a stage and screen actor, is from Livingston, New Jersey, and turned 36 last July.  Growing up in West Orange, New Jersey, he began performing at age six.  By the mid-’90s, he was appearing professionally in regional and Off-Broadway New York City productions.

[Uranowitz graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2008 with a degree in theater arts and made his Broadway debut in the 2011 jukebox musical Baby It’s You! (pop and rock hits of the 1960s), which ran for 33 previews and 148 regular performances.

[He’s best known for his roles as Adam Hochberg in the musical An American in Paris (2014-15; see reports on ROT by me and Kirk Woodward, posted respectively on 2 August 2015 and 13 November 2015) and Mendel Weisenbachfeld in the 2016 Broadway revival of Falsettos (see Kirk’s report on 5 January 2017).

[A three-time Tony Award nominee, Uranowitz received nominations for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for those performances in addition to a 2019 nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in Burn This.  His other Broadway credits include Prince of Broadway (2017) and The Band’s Visit (2018). 

[I first saw Uranowitz on stage in Washington, D.C., doing Arnold in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (see “Torch Song Trilogy,” 5 October 2013.)  He was nominated for the Helen Hayes Award—the D.C.-area regional counterpart of the Tony—for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Resident Play.]