Tom Stoppard poses with the award for Best Play for Leopoldstadt at the 76th Annual Tony Awards in New York City, in June, 2023. Stoppard died last week at 88.Amr Alfiky/Reuters
“If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?”
In his 1993 masterpiece Arcadia, Tom Stoppard had teenage mathematician Thomasina Coverly riddle out the rudiments of chaos theory in a Derbyshire country estate at the start of the 19th century.
The Czech-born playwright’s natural life, which began in the chaos of war and genocide and ended in an Arcadian English country house at age 88 last week, would fascinate Thomasina; it was so perfectly patterned it feels like an equation lay just under the surface.
Fitting for a writer known for bridging art and science, Stoppard’s trajectory on this Earth had both a mathematical elegance and a dramatic arc that would have satisfied Aristotle, complete with anagnorisis – a crystallizing moment of recognition near the end.
Tom Stoppard arrives at the 62nd Annual Tony Awards held at Radio City Music Hall in June, 2008, in New York City.Bryan Bedder/Getty Images
His stage career practically had a classic five-act structure.
Indeed, Stoppard won exactly five Tony Awards for best play – three more than anyone else, including Arthur Miller and Edward Albee – with each nicely spaced out in a different decade and reflecting a distinct period of work.
These came in 1968 (for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead); in 1978 (for Travesties); in 1983 (for The Real Thing); in 2007 (for The Coast of Utopia); and in 2023 (for Leopoldstadt).
No other playwright kept their finger on the pulse of commercial theatre in London and New York longer. Though the underlying audience appeal of his comedies of ideas remained roughly the same: Tickle the funny bone and flatter the intellect.
For that early work dubbed RIP R&G for short – a cross of Waiting for Godot with Hamlet – Stoppard was initially pegged a practitioner of the theatre of the absurd.
But he was an optimist at heart and quickly dropped the tragi- from his comedy.
Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.Stoo Metz - www.stoo.ca/Mirvish
His penchant for entertainingly mixing high and low started to come together in 1972’s Jumpers – in which the mental gymnastics of philosophy were complemented with literal acrobatics.
In that comedy, he made clear his contrast with Samuel Beckett by riffing on Godot’s line about humanity giving “birth astride of a grave.” Stoppard’s version: “At the graveside the undertaker doffs his top hat and impregnates the prettiest mourner. Wham, bam, thank you Sam.”
(Sex drive was always present in Stoppard’s work – and, as his biographer Hermione Lee suggests, the financial demands of children and ex-wives were part of what drove him to write popular plays – and, later, a screenwriting/script-doctoring sideline that included Oscar winner Shakespeare in Love and, uncredited, Revenge of the Sith.)
The comedy of ideas period peaked, with panache and pastiche, in Travesties – a zany comedy revisiting the rich intellectual and artistic ferment of 1917 Zurich (James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Lenin) through the eyes and addled brain of a minor consular official named Henry Carr.
The dig against Stoppard after that smashing success became that he was all head and no heart.
But then came The Real Thing, a meta-theatrical Thatcherite treatise on love and adultery, one of many moving plays to prove that wrong.
It had a significant Canadian commercial production at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre in 1985, directed by Guy Sprung and starring R.H. Thompson and Kate Trotter; the show’s success led to the theatre’s owner Ed Mirvish hiring its producers, Brian Sewell and Ernie Schwarz, to help create Mirvish Productions.
Despite box-office popularity across the English-speaking world, though, Stoppard’s performance history in Canada is spotty.
Damon McLeod, Diana Donnelly, Kate Besworth, and Gray Powell in Arcadia.Supplied
Arcadia has been much produced, including a Shaw Festival production directed by Eda Holmes that transferred to Mirvish Productions – which will dim the lights in Stoppard’s honour at all four of its venues on Thursday.
But The Coast of Utopia – the Russian-set trilogy that is the culmination of Stoppard’s fascination with how the 19th century paved the way for the 20th – has never been done professionally here.
A minor artistic tragedy of the pandemic is that Leopoldstadt, Stoppard’s final Tony winner, hasn’t either. Set to have its North American premiere in Toronto in 2022 from Mirvish Productions, a resurgence of COVID-19 shut it down in rehearsals.
Leopoldstadt channels Stoppard’s late-life Aristotelian recognition that he wasn’t a “bounced Czech” as he had longed joked.
No, he was Tomas Straussler, a Jewish child refugee whose mother fled with him from the German occupation and, after her husband died, eventually married the English stepfather who gave her children the name Stoppard; all four of his grandparents perished in the Holocaust.
Using a cast of 38, Leopoldstadt followed a Jewish family in Vienna from 1899 to 1955 – and, while it’s still a script interested in higher mathematics, the tragedy of ideas’ power came from depicting simple subtraction and ending with just three characters.
Stoppard chastises a younger version of himself in that play for blithely boasting of a “charmed life” in England.
But it’s hard not to believe there was something charmed about his richly lived artistic life. Wham, bam, thank you, Tom.