Losing a Family in History

Leopoldstadt 

by Tom Stoppard

Here’s a couple waving goodbye from the train, but who are they? No idea! That’s why they’re waving goodbye. It’s like a second death, to lose your name in a family album.”   ― Tom Stoppard, Leopoldstadt

This play is both a historical and philosophical drama as well as a highly personal challenge from Stoppard, who didn't discover that he was Jewish until his 50s when a distant cousin got in touch with him. The author appears to make up for lost time with Leopoldstadt, a first-rate, epic, and impassioned declaration of his own origins. He asserts that forgetting one's forefathers is tragic in and of itself. To lose your name in a family album, as one character puts it, "is like a second death."

It is yet another play by Tom Stoppard that impressed me with its erudition and singular structure. But there was an undercurrent of emotion that built over the length of reading the play that overwhelmed me by the final scene. So many of the family members had succumbed to tragic ends over the course of the family history that there was a  nostalgia of lives lived that was was dressed in the end with widows' weeds of death.

Missing the Moment

Further Notes on 
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
by Tom Stoppard

“Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.” 

― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead




As the Third and Final Act of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead opens the two courtiers are in "pitch darkness" with the sound of the sea in the background.  Once again they have a moment of Beckett-like dialogue.  Questioning their senses they parry back and forth about their own existence and knowledge of such, Guil says, "You can feel, can't you?", and Ros replies "Ah! There's life in me yet!" (p 97)  
With the further confirmation by Ros giving Guil a pinch they have settled in and soon realize they are on a ship.  On the ship (headed for England) they have a letter.  But once again there is some doubt and suddenly they are not sure that they have the letter.  Just when the confusion is at its height Guil says,  “This is all getting rather undisciplined. . . .  The boat, the night, the sense of isolation and uncertainty . . . all these induce a loosening of the concentration.  We must not lose control.  Tighten up.  Now.  Either you have lost the letter or you didn't have it to lose in the first place, in which case the King never gave it to you, in which case he gave it to me, in which case I would have put it into my inside top pocket, in which case (calmly producing the letter) . . .  it will be . . .  here.  (They smile at each other.)  We mustn't drop off like that again.” (p 107)

Unfortunately by that point they had “lost the tension”.  They had lost the tension that All humans have to keep on living, you see they,  Ros and Guil, have “travelled too far,” and their “momentum has taken over", and will carry them on to England and their death.  I mention this episode because it concludes the action that began early in the first act.  Action which has for the whole play been on the edge of reality beyond time.  For “Time has stopped dead,” as Guil pointed out in the first act. (p16)
  
The pair of courtiers are  also on the edge of reality in the same sense that the Tragedians are acting out roles.  They comment that you should  “Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”   The continuing interjection of the traveling actors led by their “Player” reminds the reader  of the similarity between the “actions” of Ros and Guil  and the pretense of the actors.  This also culminates in the final act of the play when the Tragedians emerge just after Ros and Guil receive their official notice of death.  The Player who leads the actors responds to Guil's plea of “Who are we?”
“Player:  You are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  That's enough.
Guil:  No---it is not enough.  To be told so little—to such and end—and still, finally, to be denied an explanation----
Player:  In our experience, most things end in death.” (pp 122-23)
Guil proceeds to stab the Player with a knife, but the Player, after falling down feinting death, proceeds to get up and lecture them on the many different kinds of death offered by his troupe.

You see, this is merely a stage play, but is it any different than reality?  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern realize too late that “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no.  But somehow we missed it."   Thus the play ends not only with their deaths but also with the deaths of Hamlet and the others from Shakespeare's original play, leaving the reader with the question whether it is merely fiction . . . drama for our entertainment . . . or is it real life?  

Inexorable Theatricality

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 
by Tom Stoppard

"Ros: What is your line?
Player:  Tragedy, sir.  Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, denouements both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels including the suggestive.  We transport you into a world of intrigue and illusion . . .clowns, if you like, murderers--we can do you ghosts and battles, on the skirmish level, heroes, villains, tormented lovers--set pieces in the poetic vein;  we can do you rapiers or rape or both, by all means, faithless wives and ravished virgins--flagrante delicto at a price, but that comes under realism for which there are special terms.  Getting warm, am I?" (p 23)


Tom Stoppard has been writing plays for more than a half century. Some that I have had the opportunity to read or see in performance include Arcadia, Travesties, The Invention of Love, Night and Day,  and his great trilogy The Coast of Utopia.  But before all of these he burst onto the world theater scene with a dramatic masterpiece titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Both a tragicomedy and a parody of sorts, it focuses on the two courtiers, Ros & Guil (for short), whose existence we owe to William Shakespeare and his tragedy Hamlet. Stoppard's play exists behind the scenes of Shakespeare's play as we follow the two courtiers on their predicted way to death.

As the play opens we meet Ros and Guil in "a place without any visible character". Guil is tossing coins and Ros is calling heads, which is unusual only in that the coin keeps coming up heads and apparently has been for some time. This leads them to a brief discussion of the law averages and the law of diminishing returns. One wonders, they wonder, about the nature of reality and time. Has it "stopped dead"? Can they remember what just happened not too long ago. Guil asks:

"'What is the fist thing after all the things you've forgotten?'
Ros: Oh I see. (Pause.) I've forgotten the question.
Guil: Are you happy?
Ros: What?
Guil: Content? At ease?
Ros: I suppose so." (p 16-17)

Guil speculates that they must be operating under supernatural forces and proceeds to provide a lengthy scientific commentary that is as much designed to ward off fear as it is to convince Ros of Guil's point. But instead of reassuring Ros it leads into a discussion of death and what it is like to be dead. Guil's reassurance to Ros: "But you are not dead." is lost among their speculations. Their tenuous connection with reality is quickly established and with the imminent entrance of a group of theatrical players, "The Tragedians", this theme will be expanded through metaphor and wordplay to the point that the whole play appears as a dream, or more likely a nightmare ending in death.

The nature of their existence as characters reminds one of Godot's Vladimir and Estragon. Indeed, the absurdity of their condition and even some of their dialogue demands such comparison. Stoppard’s play goes beyond the hopelessness of Vladimir and Estragon’s absurd condition and provides much more comic entertainment. The two are shown whiling away their time on the fringes of the “major play”, whose echoes they are eager to absorb but whose significance remains enigmatic. Hence, despite all their efforts to “act”, when the crucial moment comes and it rests upon them to warn Hamlet, they fail. They thus fall short of having the text “rewritten” in their favor, and prepare their own untimely, yet (inter)textually predestined, deaths.
The theme of appearance versus reality is sustained by a profound metadramatic discussion on art versus real life. This begins with the entrance of the Tragedians and their playful invitation for Ros and Guil to be not only spectators but, if they are willing to pay a slightly higher price, participants in the performance of a tragedy--performed for their sole benefit. While they do not join the players the question of appearance versus reality which was suggested even earlier continues to vex the two courtiers. Throughout the play their are comic moments, usually redounding from word play. One moment was reminiscent of an Abbot and Costello routine with Ros and Guil going back and forth with confusion over "what" and "why" (p 68).

The play’s enormous theatricality is afforded by the playful handling of Hamlet as well as the abundant use of (comic) reasoning. We even find Guil mimicking Hamlet with the comment, "Words, words. They're all we have to go on."(p 41) But one wonders what value the words are when the existence of the characters is as fragile as it seems in this play. By foregrounding epistemological uncertainty as ethically relevant, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead announces one of the abiding preoccupations of Stoppard's own future writing. It also entertains the happy reader with a delightfully intellectually stimulating play.


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The Coast of Utopia, II

Shipwreck
by Tom Stoppard


"Bakunin: The mistake is to put ideas before action. Act first ! The ideas will follow, and if not -- well it's progress. 
Herzen: Belinsky -- save me from this madness !"



The second in his Coast of Utopia trilogy, Shipwreck is a tale of the diaspora with the revolutionary idealist Michael Bakunin paired with the more tempered yet complex advocate of freedom, Alexander Herzen. Swirling around these men are other revolutionaries along with their friends, family, lovers and the complications that go along with such a diverse group.
Stoppard tries to hold the characters together as they move through a maze of vignettes. The play, like the first in the trilogy Voyage, is arranged into scenes that are mostly in chronological order moving from place to place as Herzen and Bakunin move throughout Europe. In doing so characters as diverse as Turgenev, Herwegh, Belinsky, and even Karl Marx appear on the scene. Neither Herzen nor Bakunin can return to Russia and one of the funniest scenes occurs when Herzen is in Nice (November 1851) and the Russian Consul brings him an order from Czar Nicholas I that he must return to Russia. The Consul's discomfort and attempts to persuade Herzen to accede to the Czar's request are progressively more and more ridiculous and hilarious.
But as in  Shakespearean tragedies the humor is used for comic relief.  Philosophy shares the center stage with family tragedy.  In Bakunin's case he is following what he sees as the "new religion" of Hegel and the ideal expressed in the phrase "what is real is rational".  Herzen seems to provide moderation while Belinsky tilts in various directions before deciding to oppose the Russian reality.  The propinquity of friends and family move them in new and disastrous directions as human nature takes its course.
Unlike the dreamlike quality of Voyage, Shipwreck is about the reality of their lives. Instead of finding the utopia they have been dreaming about, they discover that revolutions come with harsh penalties, and not much changes after all. In essence, this play is also about growing up. The characters began in Voyage as young men and women with hopes for the future. Their struggles were those of passionate youths hoping to make a difference. In Shipwreck, they have grown up and are now fighting to put their hopes into action. They learn the hard way that life does not always turn out the way we wish. They must face harsh realities and even death. There is a somewhat manic, frantic pace to many of the scenes in Shipwreck that underscores the characters' desperation as they yearn for political change while striving to hold onto some semblance of normalcy in their personal lives.

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The Coast of Utopia, I

Voyage 
by Tom Stoppard

"When philosophers start talking like architects, get out while you can, chaos is coming. When they start laying down rules for beauty, blood in the streets is from that moment inevitable. When reason and measurement are made authorities for the perfect society, seek sanctuary among the cannibals ..."

Why does one go on a voyage? Sometimes you voyage to return to a place where you had previously visited, but you may choose to voyage to a completely new place, adventure in the unknown and perhaps into the future. This play is about the latter type of voyage. It is about young idealists centered around the polarizing and exciting figure of Michael Bakunin. It is about his family, their domestic relationships, and his friends. Stoppard presents these characters and develops situations that demonstrate Russia in the wake of the Decembrists.

The opening scene is a dinner scene with the Bakunin family, four daughters, mother, and at the head of the table father Alexander.  He boasts of his daughters' learning and nostalgically remembers his own youthful Rousseau-based liberalism with the ghosts of the Bastille.  The return from Moscow of son Michael is the first clash demonstrating the impact of change and new ideas on tradition presented in scenes of the young idealists, including Bakunin, Belinsky, Stankevich, and Herzen, with their elders, teachers, acting in the shadow of the minions of Tsar Nicholas I.
The young idealists discuss new ideas like "transcendental idealism" and question the nature of "objective reality". The world of ideas, represented by German philosophers like Kant, Hegel and Schelling, is changing rapidly leaving Russia "Stuck between dried up old French reasoning and the new German idealism which explains everything." The philosophical response of Michael Bakunin is that "Hegel shows that objective reality cannot be ignored," while Belinsky's approach is artistic invoking Pushkin. For Belinsky "The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist . . ."
Belinsky's approach seems closer to that of Stoppard himself. His play, for all of its intense intellectual dialogue, is multifaceted with domestic relations among the Bakunin women mirroring the changes being discussed by the young idealistic philosophers. We gradually see the budding of the intelligentsia whose ideas would be the tinder for the coming fires of revolution, first in the rest of Europe and only later in Russia. The drama of Voyage leads the reader on a journey that raises questions on almost every page. One answer to the central questions of the play is presented by Belinsky as the play nears its end:
"Don't you bother with reading, Katya, words just lead you on. They arrange themselves every which way with no can to carry for the promises they can't keep, and off you go! "The objective world is the still unconscious poetry of the soul." What do these words mean? "The spiritual communion of beautiful souls attaining harmony with the Absolute." What do they mean? . . . Nothing, and I understood them perfectly!"


The final scene is set again at the family estate, a final farewell for old Alexander Bakunin. The stage directions even point out the old man's age again ("aged seventy six"), one more reminder to emphasize the end is nigh. Immediately his wife warns "You'll catch your death !". Oh yes, and he's watching the sunset. An age is over, and new times are coming, the voyage begun.  "The words just lead you on" and in the end you remain in a state of wonder, still seeking The Coast of Utopia.


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Life with Harold

Must You Go?: My Life With 
Harold Pinter 

by Antonia Fraser

"What happened was this: we both felt awful at breakfast, Harold from coughing without intermission all night, me from listening to him.  I went up to the Eyrie and assembled notes re the Gunpowder Plot.  Then I chatted to a friend about Dublin.  About eleven thirty, Linda came in and said the odd words: 'Could you clear the line?  Harold has something urgent he wants to tell you.'  Somewhat crustily I did so.  Now it was Harold who was engaged: I thought he might clear his line.  Finally he buzzed me: 'I seem to have won the Nobel Prize.'"
Seldom have I read a book so filled with literary references. They are on every page and, while Antonia Fraser's memoir of her life with Harold Pinter is lightweight, it is intellectually charged with interesting bits of flotsam and jetsam from the literary world of a couple who were immersed in literary lives and lights.
It was while at a social gathering in 1975 that Ms. Fraser walked up to Pinter, before leaving, to say that she liked his play, “The Birthday Party.” The two barely knew each other. He looked back at her with what she calls “amazing, extremely bright black eyes” and said, “Must you go?” He called her his destiny and wrote her love poems, some of them later collected in a volume called “Six Poems for A” (2007). She loved his bristling mind, his “awesome baritone” and the way his “black curly hair and pointed ears” made him look “like a satyr.” They remained happily together (marrying in 1980) for 33 years, through his Nobel Prize in 2005 and until his death from cancer, at 78, in December 2008.
There are many anecdotes that intrigue the reader in this delightful memoir. One of my favorite moments follows:
"Dinner with tom and Miriam Stoppard. The latter tackles Harold about the swearing in No Man's Land: 'This must be something in you, Harold, waiting to get out.' Harold: 'But I don't plan my characters' lives.' Then to Tom: 'Don't you find they take over sometimes?' Tom: 'No.'"
It seems that their life is filled with such moments and, when the literary references wane, there are the political highlights that bring alive the times (a span of three decades) with intrusions of bits about the IRA or left and right-wing political goings-on.
Pinter’s life force — he was mostly anything, it seems, but Pinteresque — comes through clearly here. Ms. Fraser details his love for cricket, tennis and bridge. He threw himself around recklessly on dance floors and swam “with a great splashing like a dog retrieving a ball.” The result is a wonderful read for anyone interested in the life of the epitome of a literary couple.


Must You Go? by Antonia Fraser. Doubleday, New York. 2010.

  Travesties

by Tom Stoppard

Travesties is not really a play at all but an intellectual vaudeville, frothier and more stuffed with factual arcana and philosophical inquiry than even Stoppard's Jumpers, to which it bears a certain stylistic resemblance. Its strength is not in its narrative (there isn't much) or characters (they're conceits), but in Mr. Stoppard's literate gags and glittering cerebral syntax, which finds or creates correspondences in the most hilarious places.


Stoppard's comedy is rooted in history here, although the roots don't go too deep. While World War I raged across Europe, a remarkable collection of uninterested or conscientiously objecting figures assembled in Zurich, in the still center of the storm: a brooding Russian named Lenin; the Romanian-born poet Tristan Tzara, who was fomenting revolution of a different kind, doodling up the texts that would define (rather vaguely) the Dada movement in art; and James Joyce, embarking on a magnum opus that would shake the literary world to its foundations, Ulysses.


Mr. Stoppard's imagination was arrested by this odd footnote in European history, and in "Travesties" he created a mad tea party with all three in attendance, presided over, in memory, by Carr, a minor consular official who lived in Zurich during the same period. Carr came to know Joyce when the Irish writer founded a theatrical troupe that staged a single performance of Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest, with Carr as Algernon Moncrieff.


This last, curious occurrence provides the narrative glue that holds together - just - a freewheeling romp through an encyclopedia's worth of artistic and intellectual concepts. Stoppard exploits this historical fact in large and small ways, making his entire play a parody of the plot and style of Wilde’s Earnest, and making a running joke out of one odd moment in the Carr-Joyce relationship. Unhappy with his recompense for playing Algernon, Carr apparently sued The English Players for the cost of the trousers he had purchased as part of his costume. Joyce then countersued Carr for the price of the complimentary tickets he had been given. When the dispute went to trial, the judge rendered a split decision; when Stoppard worked the moment into Travesties, by way of a frustrating dream Carr has, Joyce win hands down:
"…I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination, case practically won, admitted it all, the whole thing, the trousers, everything, and I flung at him — “And what did you do in the Great War?” “I wrote Ulysses,” he said. “What did you do?”
Bloody nerve."
Turning Wilde's subversive style on these proud subversives, to often hilarious effect, Mr. Stoppard allows his characters to intersect with actual or approximated scenes from Wilde's peerless comedy of manners. In the second act, for example, Lenin gives an inspirational oration to the masses that concludes with a swipe from Lady Bracknell: "To lose one revolution is unfortunate. To lose two would look like carelessness!"


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Tom Stoppard: Plays 5 : Arcadia, The Real Thing, 
Night & Day, Indian Ink, Hapgood 

by Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard's drama is complex and full of witty wordplay. It can be confusing, especially upon first reading or viewing, but all of that is just a part of what makes his work so beautiful and appealing to the reader or playgoer who, caught up in the wordplay and fireworks of the complexity, experiences the brilliant result. This collection has two, maybe three, of his best works - or at least my favorites. Like all great works of literature they are worth returning to; the levels of meaning continue to unfold a reveal the worth of each play.


Tom Stoppard: Plays 5 by Tom Stoppard. Faber and Faber, London. 1999



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Drama of Freedom

Night and Day

by Tom Stoppard

"I felt part of a privileged group, inside society and yet outside it, with a licence to scourge it and a duty to defend it, night and day, the street of adventure, the fourth estate." (Night and Day, Act 1)






Tom Stoppard's play. Night and Day, was first performed at the Phoenix Theatre, London, on November 8, 1978.  The current production by Remy Bumppo proves that this play has the staying power to speak to us today.  Directed with the vision of experience by James Bohnen, the whole ensemble was more than capable in presenting an outstanding two hours of drama.  I particularly enjoyed the strong performance of Linda Gillum in the complex role of Ruth.  


Stoppard always provides a wealth of witty word play, but in this case the production added the spark that is needed to take the words beyond mere caustic cerebral commentary and make them come alive with meaning for the audience.  This play, although more than thirty years old and based on the currents events of its day still was able to speak to issues today;  issues centering on the theme of freedom, both of the press, the world, and personal relations.  James Bohnen commented in Remy Bumppo's "Field Guide" of background information, the play "seems to center on three struggles about freedom: freedom of the press; freedom of a country; personal freedom (Ruth's struggle)."  Remy Bumppo has shown once again that they are more than capable of presenting "think" theater with meaning and value for an appreciative audience.

Heroes

Remy Bumppo Theatre Company's latest production is an intriguing play from France via London. On last Friday night I attended a preview performance of Heroes by Gerald Sibleyras and translated by Tom Stoppard.
This comedy directed by James Bohnen is a small play that touches on friendship and the passing of time through a series of comic and sometimes absurd scenes between three WWI veterans. Isolated on a terrace of a Veterans' home somewhere outside Paris, three men played by David Darlow, Mike Nussbaum and Roderick Peeples exchange their memories and opinions about life inside and outside of the home. In the background of each comic moment is the aura of the end of life although, ironically, it is the oldest, Henri, played by Mike Nussbaum who is the most adventurous with his daily constitution about the grounds and his comic escapade into the girls' school next door. Philippe, with his recurring black outs helps to remind us that death may come at any moment, but even as his blackouts end with a comic moment as he revives, we can't help but think that next time he may not return. The camaraderie among the friends and the bounty of absurd comic moments make this play a pleasure. Remy Bumppo has given us another thoughtful evening of theater.