Context & Continuity

The Irish Times, 5.27.10: Arcadia

You might not believe this, but I don't actually blog every review of every Tom Stoppard play that on the boards everywhere in the world.  Well, not quite. 

Sometimes, though, a review captures the meaning and spirit of the play and I can't resist passing along the good words.  Such is the cast with this review of Arcadia in The Irish Times. 

Only Tom Stoppard could find the emotional core of his 1993 drama within a lament for the destruction of the ancient library of Alexandria. As the 19th-century child prodigy Thomasina rues the loss of innumerable Athenian holdings (“How can we sleep for grief?”), her tutor’s response comes close to encapsulating the invigorating appeal of Tom Stoppard’s extraordinary play.

“We shed as we pick up,” Septimus consoles, “like travellers who must carry everything in our arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.” In Stoppard’s demanding and hugely rewarding drama of ideas, the characters who shed and those that pick up both inhabit a Derbyshire country estate, separated by two different centuries.  [more]

Times, 4.25.10: Toby Stephens Stars in a Tom Stoppard classic

This summer, the Livermore Shakespeare Festival presents Romeo and Juliet and, as previously mentioned on this feed, Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing.  Interestingly, The Real Thing is in revival at The Old Vic.  Here's a snippet from the Times review:

This is a quality revival of one of Stoppard’s finest, full of art, love and wit. It’s also full of humour, a less showy and kindlier thing, which ought to be etymologically related to “human” and “humane”, but sadly isn’t. There’s a sharp eye for foibles and failings, and a generous, forgiving sense of the human race as a community of lovable losers.  [more]

I can scarcely wait to see how it is staged in Livermore this summer.  The festival is becoming known for a striking sense of design.  Last summer, A Midsummer's Night Dream was staged as steampunk and it was striking and original and added much to the play.     

I've volunteered my cricket ball and bat to the production. 

Tom Stoppard "Polishes" Russel Crowe's Robin Hood

This just in from the Stoppard wire:

According to Showbiz 411, Tom Stoppard put a bright polish on the Robin Hood flick now in the theaters.  Ok.  So I was going to see it because Cate Blachett is in it.  Now, I have additional motivation.  

[more]

And this from L magazine:

Apportioning credit and blame in a big-budget studio development is a fool's game, but I think we can say with a fair degree of certainty that "I awoke this morning with a tumescent glow" was all Stoppard.

Times, 5.14.10: Great moments in theatre: Arcadia

On April 13, 1993, at the Lyttelton Tom Stoppard’s complex comedy proved that the playwright had mind, wit and heart

<..>

When the prepublicity for Tom Stoppard’s new play first went out, some of us thought that even his fizzing brainbox might have set itself too daunting a task. How could he pack subjects as different as landscape gardening and adultery, Romantic poetry and iterated algorithms, academic research and the end of the world, into a comedy that the man on the Clapham omnibus might understand and even enjoy? Well, Arcadia did at times leave you feeling that it had been jointly created by Oscar Wilde and the founding fathers of chaos theory — but I found myself urging that bus passenger to hijack the vehicle and drive it to the National box office.

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The Independent, 5.17.10: New Tom Stoppard play shines light on torture in the name of freedom

Latest work by Britain's leading dramatist targets rights abuses of 'War on Terror'

Stoppard's scene deals with torture, or "Pizza" as Nighy's character, an arrogant military figure in charge of a shady black site prison, insists on calling it.

<...>

For Stoppard, who has had a long association with human rights groups, describing a list of torture techniques with a seemingly harmless acronym such as "P.I.Z.Z.A." seemed like the kind of thing militaries and governments do nowadays.

"It just seemed plausible," he says, after rehearsals have come to an end. "There's no [Pizza] list as far as I'm aware. But of course there are lists, regulations and no-go areas in the way people under arrest are treated, whether it's military or civilian. One of the things which is constantly going on – and one doesn't know how bad or how widespread it all is – is that the regulations are bent and flexible."

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Oh dear.  The cast!  The play!  How I wish I could see this.

First Amendment Quote of the Day...

"If your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon than theatre."

The Paris Review, 1988: The Interview w/ Mr. Stoppard

I can't imagine how I never came across this before, but I've discovered that The Paris Review did one of their "how-I-do-it" interviews with Mr. Stoppard.  This is from back in the Winter 1988 as Hapgood was about to be staged.  That's about six years after The Real Thing. 

From the interview:

As I was doing it I watched a documentary about Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA—the double helix. There was only one way all the information they had could fit but they couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt the same. So the answer to your question is that the rehearsals are going well and enjoyably, but that I’m very busy with my pencil.

Here's a direct link to the .pdf 

The Guardian: Tom Stoppard: 'I'm the crank in the bus queue'

Mark Lawson has written a very satisfying article about Mr. Stoppard in anticipation of the London revival of The Real Thing.  Should it be of interest to you, you can see what will surely be an inspired production of the very same play in Livermore, California.   (And you can read more about that here.)

Here are just a couple of teaser quotes from Mr. Lawson's story which I highly recommend you read here.

He also does uncredited script-doctoring on Hollywood movies, "about once a year": most recently he worked on Paul Greengrass's The Bourne Ultimatum. "The second reason for doing it is that you get to work with people you admire. The first reason, of course, is that it's overpaid."

What he craves is a new play. By his age (72), Beckett and Pinter were content with one-acts and fragments; Stoppard is still aiming for two acts and three hours, interval drinks and last-train tickets. Inspiration, though, is intermittent and mercurial. 

The Real Thing occupies a pivotal position in Stoppard's output. It was the work that converted those who had found the plays in the first phase of his career – Rosencrantz, Jumpers, Travesties – too coldly intellectual in their spinning-off from literary, philosophical or political history. Stoppard was congratulated on his first drama of the heart rather than the head, although a few admirers regretted this shift in emphasis.

Amazingly, just today I realized I have two different audio productions of The Real Thing.   I've written before about the production by the Los Angeles Theatre Works, but then, while I was combing and grooming my files, I found a different production by the BBC.  ...More to come on this. 

My Estimation of Brandis Withers....

Following the players: FTP’s traveling ‘Guildenstern’ amuses

by Kayla Dos Santos

March 12, 2010

Clever stage direction and stellar acting made the Free Play Theatre Cooperative’s production “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” an enjoyable experience. However, Tom Stoppard’s uneven and muddled script left the audience feeling dissatisfied.

....

Unfortunately, the play faltered when, at turns, it became serious. This was not from poor acting, but from the script’s abrupt shifts in tone. The main characters would be laughing one minute and hyperventilating from grief and fear the next. There seemed to be no real transitions, thus creating the issue that the audience did not know whether to empathize with their grief or to laugh at it.

The play also suffered from attempting to juggle too many themes: death, reality, fate, the acting experience—all set against the backdrop of “Hamlet.” While separately the themes were interesting and led to enlightening philosophical discussions between the main characters, especially concerning the nature of and acceptance of death, taken all together the themes were a confusing mess.

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Soldier , Mr. Stoppard.   Soldier on.  I wouldn't let Ms Dos Santos cause you to be dispiritied

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. 

[more].

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."

[more]

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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Lunch w/ Sir Tom Stoppard

   

Dinner with the FT: Sir Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard cannot meet me for lunch; he is in the first week of rehearsals for the new London production of his 1993 play Arcadia. The following week, he can’t meet me for lunch because he is not in the rehearsals for the new London production of Arcadia. This makes perfect sense: lunch eats into a writer’s day. One does not achieve Stoppard’s prodigious output by breaking the flow, and at 71 the playwright seems not to be thinking of slowing down.

So, in his courteous way, he suggests instead an early evening dinner, at an Italian restaurant two minutes from the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square. When I arrive, early, he is already there, sitting in front of a Campari and soda that he does not drink, casually dressed in muted colours.

...

“So that’ll be 12 months of being away from home a huge amount, and” – suddenly very intense now, and yet again anticipating the next question – “it’s got to stop, Jan, because I’ve got to write a play. Thing is, I haven’t got an idea for a play. Part of the problem is that there are all these vast subjects thrusting themselves at anybody who presumes to deal with – I don’t, but perhaps it’s time I did – to deal with big contemporary issues. So you think, ‘right, should I do climate change, or should I do torture, or Afghanistan ... ?’”

This does not sound like the playwright once quoted as saying he wanted his work to be “entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness” – but that was before his involvement in human rights became more intense, with visits to eastern Europe and a growing friendship with Vaclav Havel.

“It’s not really obligation, but I do feel a desire to [tackle this sort of subject] – one of the interesting issues of the last two or three years has been the privacy law, for example. But for that kind of play I amass a lot of reading research, of which I use about five per cent – it’s very inefficient. So there’s an equal but very different attraction, which is to write a play that has nothing to do with anything except itself, it’s just about this family, this woman, something.

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