Playwright Tom Stoppard was in town recently, to view his 1974 play, “Travesties.” The drama is set in Zurich in 1917; the main action of James Joyce, poet and founder of Dadaism Tristan Tzara, and Vladimir Lenin—they all landed in Zurich during the First World War—and the simultaneous production of Oscar Wilde’s “the importance of being earnest.” The revival of Patrick Marber, formed last year in London; it opens on Broadway on April 24. “Drag Queens” tells the story of Henry Carr, a man who worked for the British Consulate in Zurich during the war. One of the recurring tropes of the play is one of the ten things Stoppard investigates—what to do news. “Anything interesting?” Carr asks every morning when his servant brings in the Newspapers—the line that the new York audience met last week with exhausted laughter.
Stoppard, who looks younger than his eighty years and brings what Marber calls “his Royal bonhomie,” was dressed in an Oxford shirt and a tweed jacket and trousers. He stopped on the menu Breakfast in a cheap hotel, then said to the waiter: “two eggs in any style, please.” He turned to me. “It’s good to order! Then you have to wait and see what happens—it confuses them”. It was a moment Stoppardian: Scrabble is connected to the switchboard lit. “We are not affiliated with the language in obscurity what it lacks in style,” says the player, “Stoppard Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead”. Over the last fifty years, Stoppard—who spoke only Czech until he was three—more than any other playwright alive, doing all it can to challenge. Writing in this journal in 1976, in a review of the original production of “parody,” critic Kenneth Tynan brought Stoppard’s ability to write in English with some “hypnotized Shine”.
When I arrived egg (boiled, each in a separate Cup of the egg), Stoppard took a bite and said, “it is the job of the artist to take advantage of connections.” And then, smiling: “You see, I speak on behalf of the artist without hesitation!” He continued: “people don’t understand that part of the playwright finds something for people to talk to. If you are writing about a historical episode or two characters in ‘hamlet’ you have structure free.”
When Henry Carr first addresses the audience, he is an old man in a robe, Recalling snow days; the main question to play, he’s a young man who played Algernon (“not Ernest, the other one”, as he says in “drag Queens”) in a production of “the importance of being earnest”, organized by Joyce in Zurich For English players, a theatrical company. (Carr finished Joyce sues for the price the pants that he bought to wear in the game, and earned himself a fleeting mention in “Ulysses” for his trouble.) When Stoppard wrote the play, he was closer in age to the young Henry. Now, almost fifty years later, I asked if I could see, “Travesti” was like looking through the other end of the telescope. “If I am involved in the production, it always feels again in the foreground,” said Stoppard. He went on, “Patrick made the proposals so radical, I do not personally have thought to do them, but I’m grateful. For example, he said, ‘it’s a great shame that Lenin did not appear in the first act!’ And I said, ‘no luck, he won’t, and we left him there. Unlike new games, when I’m in rehearsal all the time, in awakening, especially with someone like Patrick, I go away and come back. So the next time I brought to rehearsal, there was Lenin in the first act, and he played the lute!”
Patrick Marber first encountered Stoppard’s work in fourteen years, when a group of senior boys to wear school “Travesty.” Marber says: “it was 1978, and I thought I have to see this!” Later, at Oxford, he wrote of Stoppard. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I was a student, but I was a fan—I think it was my destiny to fall in love with drag Queens.’ I felt that everything that happened on stage was more important than any life from the scene. This is one of the most radical plays ever written. I am very touched by it. It’s the Dada play, Joycean play on English play. It’s a great play. Seeds ‘Arcady’ at the ‘Travesty’—the idea of simultaneous time.”
The London production last year debuted at the Menier chocolate factory, one HUNDRED and eighty-seater theatre on Southwark Street, and then moved to the Apollo theatre in the West end. All the time, Stoppard said, the game was polished and refined. Marber went on Board after Stoppard called him to ask about another potential Director. Marber says: “I told him that I liked the Director, but if that doesn’t work, I could put my hat in the ring? First, I had no idea how to go about it, but that did the trick—I trust to play, I don’t redirect it. We did some fidgets. There is a new line, and the actors love it—they get to premiere a new line of Stoppard!”
Marber thought for a moment, then said, “where I pushed were stronger in the places in the play where Carr loses his memory. I remember we had a discussion about the set. In fact, door to door, not a locker. And I wanted to make a virtue Henry, not knowing where things are like they are in a twisted memory”. Marber, who was fifty, playwright, and Director. (He is the Author of, among other plays, “closer,” which opened in 1999 and was turned into a 2004 film of the Director Mike Nichols.) He said, “This is something close to us all. My father lost memory. I don’t remember the name.” I asked about Lenin. Marber laughed. “Yes, now Tom loves when Lenin appeared, dressed as Shakespeare. He noted how Lenin looks like Shakespeare when you put it in the ruff! But Tom has a great sense of what his and not his. He will say: ‘no, No’. And then he’ll say, “Yes.” ”
Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937. His parents, Martha Beckova and Eugen, Strausser, who was a physician associated with the Bata Shoe company, were members of the Jewish community. In March 1939, when the Germans invaded, the family moved to Singapore, where Tomas Bata and whose business is expanding around the world, arranged Straussler Eugen to take a position. In 1941, during the Japanese occupation of Singapore, Stoppard’s mother and his younger brother Peter to Australia and then to India. His father died in Singapore. In 1945, Martha Straussler married Kenneth Stoppard, a British army officer, and after the war the family moved to England, where Thomas is called Tom Stoppard, enrolled in school “Dolphin”, in Nottinghamshire. Later he attended school in Pocklington, Yorkshire. His mother not to talk about his past; it was only in the nineteen nineties, he learned that all four of his grandparents died in concentration camps.
Stoppard left school at seventeen and worked as a journalist and then as a critic of drama. (His alias was William boot, after the hero of the satirical novel by Evelyn in “scoop.”) While reporting for Newspapers, he began to write plays for radio and stage. In 1963, the first play Stoppard, “walk on water” was staged in Hamburg. In l967, after premièring at the Edinburgh festival, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead” opened at the old Vic in a National Theatre production. Stoppard plays mainly, and among other things—on the bias of the individual, and what happens when something saw the corner of his eye, or in time, moves to the center of the stage, and then slipping away: an imaginary hermit in Arcadia in 1993; the figure of Syd Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd, “rock n roll” in 2006. In “the invention of love,” an elderly poet A. E. Housman as Henry Carr in “Travesties,” – commented on his youth. I asked Stoppard about the world of his plays, in which different perspectives to develop within each other, as a reversible prism. Tom Stoppard said, “I Have practically no sense to work from the program or agenda. Rather, this relationship is—there is a sense that I can work in any form I like and go in any direction. Obviously plays a more unlike each other than like each other, but the people who get pleasure in finding connections will have trouble finding them.”
We sat in the corner of the restaurant, but the bright light from the street bounced off the window and made a square on the table. This fall 2015 to play Stoppard’s “hard problem”, what about the nature of consciousness—part of the action takes place in the brain-research center—opens in Lincoln center. He’s working on something new? “I would venture to say that I hope to return to England, when the ‘Travesties’ opens and to get into the game,” said Stoppard. “I started playing in January, and I wrote four pages. They were O. K. I had no idea what I was doing—I had no idea about the relationship between the characters. I’m not at square one, I was in debt! I pretend that there is an external pressure to produce the game, but I’m not on don the pressure really only for themselves.”
Patrick Marber told me, “ ‘drag Queen’ is set in 1917, in the midst of crisis. A hundred years later and we are in crisis, although not a crisis! But Tom is not interested in “relevance”. ” The first play Stoppard I saw the new York production of “the real thing”, which, in particular, about people who try to behave well but end up bad. It was in 1982, I just graduated from College and I were hanging around the shore where people said smart things, and tried; when I left the theatre, the first thing I thought, no, no, second, people don’t behave. I was just on the verge of learning that, indeed, they do.
At the Bowery, I record what he says Stoppard, and he waited until I raised my eyes from the page. “There are things that I feel unable to write, and I feel I have to play them, the problem is, I can clearly see that some caught between too a complete sense of what you write is really bad what you are doing—and, on the other, not knowing enough. A prerequisite must be insulated, not isolated. You must be in a bubble. Five days will be fine. Five weeks would be better. But I digress in eighteen different ways, one way”. He paused. “Recently, I returned to Hemingway’s, a little bit. I started looking on the shelf I have an old literary journals: the Dial, the Transatlantic Review, transition. It moves me to see the first appearance of a story I’ve known all my life, for fifty or sixty years.”
Stoppard lives with his wife, Sabrina Guinness whom he married in 2014 in Dorset. (Stoppard has four sons, two from each of his first two marriages.) He reads a dozen of periodicals, but he has no computer and he spends time on the Internet. He says: “I read a lot. Not having a computer, not the solution. I just don’t get it. I have to ask Sabrina to do things that a normal person makes for himself!”
We talked for a while about the usual morning beat news. Then he said, “I really didn’t get past the headlines. I actively don’t want to write about a British exit from the EU, but the feeling of Englishness would be to withdraw Britain from the EU.” “Travesty” is set in 1917, and I asked Stoppard why the characters don’t talk much about the first world war. “Isn’t it? Well, it’s not really a play about it,” he said. “The play is a kind of luxury in which you pretend that James Joyce was in Zurich at the same time as Lenin and Tristan Tzara. This kind of intelligent entertainment”. He paused. “That’s what I wanted to write about time. It has not changed. He feels alive. In a subtle way one looks and listens as if it were a laboratory experiment. If you wanted to write about world war I, you could do it better!”
Sourse: newyorker.com
