Tom Stoppard's Ordinary Magic

“The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives…”

And so a genius is dead. Tom Stoppard was the most accomplished English playwright since George Bernard Shaw. He had more memorable wit, ideas, and drama in every page than most writers manage in a lifetime. He revived the artful art, the conscious artifice of theatre, drawing into his circle of dramatic magic all the oppositional forces of the modern stage and summoning from them something greater than had been imagined possible. He was the true impresario, able to enchant with words that seemed so plain and expected, one was always truly shocked at how unexpected he made them. He could do everything from absurdism to glee, from the philosophical to the zany.

Stoppard’s genius was to make a confluence of the highbrow and the lowbrow. Jumpers is a satire of academic philosophy, written in the sort of dialogue critics inevitably call dazzlingly clever; but it contains a set of gymnasts, who make human pyramids on stage, and, at one point, the philosopher opens the door with half his face covered in shaving cream with a tortoise under his arm and a bow and arrow in his hand.

Such moments are the essence of farce, which demands the question: “how did we get here?”

Stoppard’s art is full of such moments, sometimes involving half-shaved philosophers and tortoises, sometimes moments of great beauty such as the head-spinning twists of Arcadia or the Joycean magic of Travesties, and sometimes with periods of true philosophy, as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

In these moments, the confluence of high and low is revealed as the essential structure of Stoppard’s work. We can never quite say what is farcical and what is serious. In Stoppard, as in Shakespeare, the web of our life is of a mingled yarn. The web of theatre is mingled too.

Tom Stoppard, Radio Times, 13th January 1972

Although his career perhaps owed most to his discovery of Hamlet when he was a young man in Bristol, and went to see the play day after day, it was fundamental to his development that Stoppard came to the theatre in a time of great diversity. There was agit-prop (the left-wing political theatre of agitation and propaganda), kitchen sink realism of the Angry Young Men like John Osborne, the Whitehall farces of Brian Rix (the sort of plays in which young women end up on stage in their knickers; this is the genre of which Noises Off is both homage and exemplar), the experiments of Beckett, the new satire of Beyond the Fringe, and the not-quite low comedies of Alan Bennett and Alan Ayckbourn.

Amid this diversity, Stoppard was a Shavian writer. Like the last great English playwright before him, George Bernard Shaw, Stoppard stages ideas full of emotion: “I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself”, as he told Kenneth Tynan. In this spirit, he enjoyed avoiding ideological and philosophical commitments by making jokes. When asked what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was about he replied that it was about to make him a lot of money. He used to reply, when asked where he got his ideas from: “Harrods.”

This went against the grain of the English theatre, which was committed to making political commentary. Tynan quotes Stoppard’s novel Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (only worth reading for completionists): “I distrust attitudes because they claim to have appropriated the whole truth and pose as absolutes. And I distrust the opposite attitude for the same reason.”

It was by blending this Shavian habit with the high and the low and the farcical and the ideological aspects of the mid-century theatre that Stoppard created his highly original, synthetic mode of theatre. This has led some critics to assume that his work is all on the surface, that it is all puns and word play: but that is to misunderstand the method for the meaning.

As Stoppard told The Paris Review:

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness. I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s filmscripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.

In his early short work—plays like The Real Inspector Hound, Dirty Linen, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth & After Magritte—there is a lot of experimentation in the line of Beckett; in one drama, he tries to invent a new language that he teaches to the audience as the play goes on. In these plays, the breakthrough of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, in which he dealt with philosophical ideas in a purely artistic manner, becomes the basis for experiments in plot, structure, and the limits of what dramatic language can achieve. He is constantly meta-theatrical.

These plays were written during his most intoxicating period, alongside Jumpers and Travesties. What makes them original is not merely the turn of phrase—a quality now greatly overrated among too many critics—but the whole synthesis of structure, plot, character, mode, dialogue: the quality of being not high nor low but both at once and therefore not quite either.

Bill Nighy and Felicity Kendal in Arcadia, https://x.com/NationalTheatre/status/1217093982183882752

Stoppard’s meta-theatrical artifice is the means by which he captures the sense of debate as drama, not merely drama as debate. He once told an interviewer “Writers who are stylists are often writers who dislike ideas.” His style is designed to allow ideas to live in the reality of the play.

This is why his writing is able not just to tolerate cliché, but to make it fit smoothly and meaningfully within the aesthetic integrity of his play. As he told an interviewer:

I’d write a page and a half, six or seven times, the same page and a half, and then I began not avoiding cliché, and I began to think about Martin Amis’s “war against cliché.” I got sidetracked.

I began to think that he was completely wrong about that because one of the things one uses is familiarity, it’s actually a useful thing to have in one’s locker.

Once you are dedicated to the Shavian method of “arguing with yourself” then familiarity becomes a useful, challenging means of expression, not an inevitable failure.

It is all too tempting to see Stoppard as a partisan for certain of his characters. He is often thought to be expressing his own opinion directly in the famous scene in The Real Thing when Henry compares a well-made play to a well-made cricket bat. Likewise, critics sometimes latch him to the words he gave Joyce in Travesties:

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify—capriciously—their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities.

But this is too blunt. The idea that “if there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art” is not quite what Stoppard dramatizes.

His plays are full of moments of intimacy, affection, insight, terror, profundity, joy, and play which are part of the oblivion of all our lives. His artifice is not consciously trying to make something survive, so much as it is trying to show us how much is lost. This is the lesson of Arcadia, a play about the fusion of the sciences and humanities, but also a play full of overwhelming emotion—the last scene of which can never stop haunting those who have seen it.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.

When Wilde says to Housman at the end of The Invention of Love, “You didn’t mention your poems. How can you be unhappy when you know you wrote them? They are all that will matter.”, he is expressing an idea Stoppard takes seriously, but not an idea his plays endorse at the expense of other ideas.

Jeremy Irons and Glen Close in The Real Thing

Stoppard is not a concluding ideologue, not a pusher of polemics—in this, at least, he is not Shavian. Instead, he loves everything that the theatre can do and he wishes to make as much use of all of it as possible, to show us what is possible, to show us all the wonders of the world. “I’m delighted…” says Henry at the end of The Real Thing, “isn’t love wonderful.”

It is a great Stoppardian moment, when the dullest cliché of them all becomes a moment of great intensity—and we see ordinary life dramatized with all the force that Stoppard can bring to bear on philosophy, art, Zurich, Joyce, the biggest questions of the world. He knew that we live, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, offstage of history. He knew that the real thing, in art as in life, could be mighty or it could be small.

From Jumpers to The Coast of Utopia, nothing was beneath his genius. His polyphonic voice, full of life and expression, made him the great modern dramatist of the mingled yarn of history, science, politics, art, and love.