Context & Continuity

I'll Post This for Two Reasons...

Reason #1:  Because Anna Wintour is one of my obsessions, her father falls into that sphere.

Reason#2:  I haven't posted anything about Tom Stoppard for about thirty minutes so I'm falling behind.  

Perhaps it's all mythical, but there story goes like this.  Young Mr. Stoppard was embarking on a career (short lived) in journalism and won an interview with one of the greatest publishers of the day, Charles Wintour.  He was the editor of the Evening Standard and Sunday Express.  --A considerable many who raised a considerable daughter. 

Anyway,...

Mr. Stoppard, fresh from a tour of duty as a reporter in Bristol, takes a seat across the desk from Mr. Wintour CBE and the conversation goes something like this: 

Stoppard began his career as a reporter in Bristol. On applying to the London Evening Standard, he was interviewed by the then editor, Charles Wintour, who says: "I gather you're interested in politics. Who is the Home Secretary?"

"Look," Stoppard replied, "I said I was interested. Not obsessed."

Antonia Frasier recounts conversation between her husband, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard

From Ms. Frasier's new memoir, But Must You Go?

There's a fascinating account of a dinner with Tom Stoppard where Pinter says that he doesn't plan his characters' lives and then asks his fellow dramatist: "Don't you find they take you over sometimes?", to which Stoppard firmly replies: "No." That says a lot. One reason that The Homecoming is a great play is that Pinter allows the character of Ruth, almost unconsciously, to take over and at the end achieve an ambivalent dominance. For all Stoppard's many virtues – such as a formidable intellect and a coruscating wit – he tends to keep his characters on a much tighter, almost Shavian leash.

Link to story.

Classy Behaviour?

As all my dear friends know, I cast a rather wide net as I fish for notices about Tom Stoppard.  I have discovered productions of Jumpers in far away provinces of Canada etc.  Today the net dragged in a clipping from The London Evening Standard, not exactly in the first tier of the London press, but nevertheless, it's published in London so it published a notice about one Miss Lucy Prebble (excellent name!) who has written a musical about ...  the decline and fall of Enron.  I kid you not.   Not only that, but it has sold out out its run in the Royal Court Theatre and it moving over to the West End's Noel Coward theatre and ... I'm breathless .... it will be opening on Broadway and is going to be made into a movie. 

Bethatasitmay, our favorite, Mr. Tom Stoppard must have had a fine seat in the orchestra for one of the performances.  (Perhaps he had forgotten to update his Netflicks wishlist.)  Anyway, the story goes that Ms. Lucy Prebble received a note from Mr. Stoppard.  Here's the relevant portion: 

When I'm introduced, people say,' – adopts bored tone – “Oh, hi” and then when they know what I wrote, they turn round and say,' – adopts voice of gushing excitement – “Oh, hi!”' The other day, she received a card of congratulation from Tom Stoppard. I jumped up and down when I got it. He didn't need to do that. It was classy behaviour.'

Now, let's snick a peek at Ms. Prebbles:

Okay.  It may have been "classy behaviour" on the part of Mr. Stoppard, but somehow, especially after seeing the snapshot long and tall drink of water, I'm not entirely convinced our Mr. Stoppard was solely impressed by her writing skills. 

Et in Arcadia ego

Honest to goodness, I'm going to have to pay much more attention to LA Theatre Works.  First, they release a very nice cd of The Real Thing.  Now, they are offering a stream to its production of Arcadia. 

If I were forced to draw a line through Mr. Stoppard's woriks, Arcadia would be on the top two thirds (along with R&G, Shakespeare in Love, The Coast of Utopia and a few others). 

I've never seen a production of Arcadia, but have read the script and am going to somehow budget some time to listen to the stream.  And if there's a way I can capture the stream and offer to you as a file, be confident I will.  In the meantime, here's a link to the first hour of the LA Theatreworks production.  

And here's the site's description of the play and the cast:

A crash course in mathematics, landscape gardening, literature, and chaos theory, courtesy of Tom Stoppard. Arcadia merges science with human concerns and ideals, examining the universe’s influence in our everyday lives and ultimate fates through the relationship between past and present, order and disorder and the certainty of knowledge. Set in an English country house in the years 1809-1812 and 1989, the play examines the lives of two modern scholars and the house's current residents with the lives of those who lived there 180 years earlier. The show includes an interview with Stoppard biographer Ira Nadel. Part one of a two-part broadcast.

Starring (in alphabetical order):

Kate Burton as Hannah Jarvis
Mark Capri as Ezra Chater
Jennifer Dundas as Thomasina Coverly
Gregory Itzin as Bernard Nightingale
David Manis as Captain Brice
Christopher Neame as Richard Noakes and Jellaby
Peter Paige as Valentine Coverly
Darren Richardson as Augustus Coverly
Kate Steele as Chloe Coverly
Serena Scott Thomas as Lady Croom
Douglas Weston as Septimus Hodge

Directed by John Rubinstein

Oh gosh, I just now found out they are also offering the play on three CDs.  Amazon doesn't carry it, but it is for sale on the LA Theatreworks site.  Finally, please take note that the production is directed by John Rubenstein who you probably remember from any of the bazillion shows he has appeared on.  

I'm in and will let you know when the CDs arrive. 

Stoppard on the BBC AM

Not much I can add to this except it's one of the precious few video clips I have on him. 

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Roger Rees On Stoppard and etc.

As I've written before here, it was one of the great blessings of my life to see the original productions of The Real Thing in both London and New York.  In New York, the lead was played by Jeremy Irons who was still floating in the rarefied air of fame blown up by Brideshead Revisited.  I think he did a terrific job but thought Roger Rees in the West End was the better of the two.  Here's a story from the Times about Roger Rees' return to the West End in a production of Waiting for Godot. 

“I should have stayed there and become a big something,” he says now. “But what I like to do is work a lot and so I came back.” Success did give him the chance to play Hamlet for the RSC. He was a big enough name to be cast as the alter ego of Tom Stoppard in the original production of The Real Thing. “I remember my mum and me taking a photograph of the Strand Theatre. It said, ‘Felicity Kendal and Roger Rees in The Real Thing’.” All these years later, it seems that he can’t quite believe that his name was once in lights in the West End.

Most of the article focuses on Rees' leaving of London and his "twenty year exile in the  in the US."  --I know i was quite pleased when he became a recurring character on The West Wing.  Anyway, here's a link to the article.

Oh, by the way, this came up during our Chanukah party yesterday.  Someone described a situation as "waiting for Godot," and I chimed up that Beckett was James Joyce's secretary.  Wowed the crowd with that one.  One of those thrilling moments for English Majors. 

The Real Thing, T/Audio Edition.

The Real Thing is one of my many favorite Tom Stoppard plays.  It won a special spot in my heart because I was able to see the original production in London and the original production on Broadway.  Jeremy Irons and Glen Close lead the cast on Broadway and Roger Rees and Felicity Kendall starred in the West End.  Both productions were life-changing experiences for me but the West End production seemed to me to be the a bit better because it just seemed to be the right place to see the play.  

The Real Thing was staged in Los Angeles about a year ago, and from that production, this audio disk has been created and published.  According to a review I read in Publishers Weekly, the only downfall of the production is that it's sometimes hard to tell who's who in the swirl of the dialog.  --I can see that.  I've ordered a copy and will let you know what I think of it. 

The Guardian, 10.25.9: The final twist in Nabokov's untold story

The teasing went both ways. In 1991, an American librarian published a literary critical essay, apparently by a Swiss professor, entitled "A first look at Nabokov's last novel", which was quickly exposed as a brilliant spoof. Others became entangled in the debate. "It's perfectly straightforward," said Tom Stoppard. "Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it." Novelist Edmund White, whose early work had been championed by Nabokov, was equally blunt. "If a writer really wants something destroyed," he told the Times, "he burns it." John Banville said that this situation was "a difficult and painful one". Conceding that The Original of Laura may turn out to be inferior, Banville decided that it should be saved from the flames. "A great writer is always worth reading," he said, "even at his worst."

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This is the first time I've posted anything from Physics Central...

Dr. Brad Carroll, a physics profession at Weber State University (Utah), has created an entire course in physics based on a reading of three plays by Tom Stoppard:

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
  
• Arcadia: A Play
  
• Hapgood: A Play

Bless his heart. 

Here's an extract from the story:

What kinds of students usually take the class?
It's usually not the physics students who are in there, which I'm happy about.  They're going to be showing off that they already know this stuff. We've had English majors, theater majors, philosophy, manufacturing technology, just every part of the spectrum as far as disciplines. 

Here's the link to the rest of the story.  And because you've my special friend, here's a link to the outline for the course:  Download HONSYL09

Dear Copy Editor @ t/ Miami Herald...

Because I have OCD that manifests itself in stalking my Literary Heroes, I couldn't help but notice the review The Miami Herald ran in today's edition of Mr. Stoppard's latest play, Rock 'n Roll.  The headline was fair:

Rock 'n Roll Delivers Tension, Tenderness. 

That struck me as vague enough to come from someone composing the page without the benefit of really reading the review.   A rather wide net that could catch most anything in the copy below. 

But then you decided to write a sub-head (damn that white space).

Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, an intellectually challenging yet undeniably engrossing play, opens at Mosaic Theatre in Plantation.

What grabbed me right away, of course, is the word "yet."  It seems to me you're trying to connect two concepts that don't normally go together, much like when we learned to play with magnets that we could never match N to N or S to S.  So, now I'm interested:  If something is "intellectually challenging" what does normally follow?  A fogged over expression as the neck relaxes and the head rolls back into the seat just before real stupor sets in?  

Oh, my Miami comrades, have we come to this?   And if we play the sentence from back to front?  What usually precedes "undeniably engrossing" in Miami?   Perhaps I should check the Neilson's for Florida.  Let's see.....    Yes.  It was the re-run of CSI.  

But I'm going to have to drag in the reviewer after all, Ms. Christine Dolen, because she suggests that theater goers should arrive early so they have time to study the setting of the play and laid out for them in the program.  Yes, indeed, the events of Prague in 1968 is wrapped in misty incomprehension for those who missed that whole Communism thing.  But Ms. Dolen's efforts were rewarded.  Notice how she appreciates the performance:

But Stoppard, director Richard Jay Simon, a sublime cast and design team tell a compelling story, one full of wit, insight and theatricality.

... and theatricality.   Well, that's certainly fortunate for an audience sitting in a theater and not the dog track next door. 

The Review

@ t/ Intersection of Jerry Hall and Tom Stoppard...

From The Guardian, 8.16.9:

The words of Jerry Hall, model and actress, 53

On the man who has most stimulated her mind

Tom Stoppard ... Alain de Botton ... No, Henry Kissinger.

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Even More on Stoppard

For the burgeoning file, All Things Stoppardian, here's an interview from all the way back in January from the London Evening Standard.

Tom Stoppard: My passion

Stoppard's wholehearted embrace of Englishness has become as much a part of his established persona as his autodidactic intellectual brilliance. He left Pocklington school at 17 to work as a reporter and drama critic for the Western Daily Press in Bristol, but after his first stellar stage success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 1967, he bought into the whole package. Cricket, watercolours, country houses, first editions of Dickens, the lot. As his eminence grew — not just in theatre, radio and television but increasingly as an adapter and polisher of screenplays — there was the CBE, the knighthood, the Order of Merit.

His Englishness seems a sort of decorous carapace. It prevented any autobiographical detail from seeping into his early work, and prevents him ever discussing his two marriages, or his relationship in the Nineties with his sometime muse Felicity Kendal. It even, apparently, shielded him from self-examination or deferred grief when he learned, after his mother's death, that he is wholly Jewish and lost all four grandparents and three aunts in the Nazi death camps.

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The Hurffington Post, 8/4/9: Tom Stoppard and Laura, Euna and Atwar

"Journalists of your generation," said British playwright Tom Stoppard yesterday to a roomful of students gathered at the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change, "very often and quite rightly are considering things you'd like to change in the world -- if possible, by Tuesday. You could hardly do worse than write a play about them. I've always felt that journalism, and I include very definitely television journalism, has far more immediate leverage."

Yesterday a call to action by a Tony and Academy-award-winning playwright. Today, our attention here in Austria turned to North Korea to watch the drama of the pardoning of two television journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had been sentenced to 12 years at hard labor for entering North Korea illegally.

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