The playwright Tom Stoppard, who penned shows including Arcadia and Travesties and the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, died last week.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The world lost its most celebrated modern playwright over Thanksgiving weekend. Tom Stoppard made history. He won five Tony Awards – five – for best play on Broadway. He also wrote many movie screenplays, including “Shakespeare In Love” – my favorite. It was his comedy about another celebrated playwright who is both lovesick and facing a disastrous opening night.
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JOSEPH FIENNES: (As William Shakespeare) What do we do now?
GEOFFREY RUSH: (As Philip Henslowe) The show must – you know.
FIENNES: (As William Shakespeare) Go on.
KELLY: As I recall, that was they were missing a Juliet…
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: (Laughter).
KELLY: …In that performance. Tom Stoppard died at the age of 88, and to remember what made him so Stoppardian, we turn now to arts reporter Jeff Lunden. Hi, Jeff.
JEFF LUNDEN: Hi, Mary Louise.
KELLY: And NPR arts critic Bob Mondello. Hey, Bob.
MONDELLO: Hey. Good to be here.
KELLY: All right, a question – this is for both of you – first encounter, first memory of Tom Stoppard’s work.
MONDELLO: I was in high school, and a friend had tickets for this weird play by a guy who was only about 10 years older than I was. It was a prank on “Hamlet” called “Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead” that turned Hamlet’s college buddies into the heroes. While the royals were plotting and murdering, these guys, who only had a couple of lines in the original, were flipping coins – which always came up heads – and talking philosophy.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Rosencrantz) Heads.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As Guildenstern) One should think of the future.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Rosencrantz) It’s the normal thing.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As Guildenstern) To have one. One is, after all, having one all the time. Now and now and now.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Rosencrantz) It could go on forever.
MONDELLO: I remember at one point, one of them said out of nowhere, the colors red, blue and green are real. The color yellow is a mystical experience shared by everyone. My 17-year-old head exploded (laughter).
KELLY: Wow. My head is exploding now, thinking about that.
MONDELLO: I just love that.
KELLY: Jeff Lunden, can you top it?
LUNDEN: Yeah. Well, like Bob, I was a high school student when I first encountered Stoppard. My parents purchased tickets for his play “Jumpers” at the Kennedy Center, and I just didn’t know what hit me. The play somehow managed to merge philosophy with acrobatics – like, literal acrobatics. There was a troupe of tumblers. Most of it went way over my head, but I was intrigued.
But I really fell in love with Stoppard a couple years later when I saw “Travesties,” a play set in Zurich in 1917, when James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, the artist who founded Dadaism, lived there. Stoppard also makes reference to “The Importance Of Being Earnest.” It was funny, it was erudite, and again, it was highly theatrical. I’ll never forget a moment at the beginning where an old character speaks to us, then stands up, takes off his coat and – voila – becomes a young man.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As Bennett) There is a revolution in Russia, sir.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As Henry Carr) Really? What sort of revolution?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As Bennett) A social revolution, sir.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As Henry Carr) A social revolution? Unaccompanied women smoking at the opera – that sort of thing?
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: I want to go back to the word I used at the beginning – that he was Stoppardian. Is it possible with such a big – a vast body of work over so many years to put your finger on what made him and his work stand out? Bob.
MONDELLO: Well, I think he saw things in the world – things that most of us can’t put into words, and he found words for them. I think it was his play “Arcadia” where a character explaining the relationship between cause and effect says, you cannot stir things apart. And I thought, oh, yeah, I see that. I mean, the characters are basically getting in really deep with questions of math and physics. And I can barely balance a checkbook and certainly don’t know anything about physics…
KELLY: (Laughter).
MONDELLO: …But I do get that you can stir things together but not apart. He just – he managed to make it concrete.
KELLY: Ah.
MONDELLO: He made it real.
KELLY: Wow.
LUNDEN: Yeah. And his plays made you smarter. You know, most of them combined ideas that didn’t seem to go together, like “Arcadia” which merges chaos theory with English landscape gardening and historians getting everything wrong. It was directed by Trevor Nunn, who did many first productions of Stoppard’s plays. When I spoke with him about “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” another Stoppard mashup, he told me…
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TREVOR NUNN: Tom himself once said to me that he decides that there’s something he wants to write a play about, and then a little while later he decides there’s something else that he wants to write a play about. And then he sets these two plays going and allows them to collide. He allows them to smash into each other.
MONDELLO: He was called cerebral, but if you see his plays and read them, there’s clearly heart there too.
KELLY: Right. Well, speaking of cerebral, he has all these wonderful and very highbrow plays. He also went super low brow. He did Hollywood. He did big blockbuster movies.
MONDELLO: Oh, yeah. I mean, Steven Spielberg said he touched nearly every line of “Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade.” He was brought in to sort of rewrite. And that’s the one where Sean Connery played Indy’s…
KELLY: Sorry. He rewrote “Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade”?
MONDELLO: Yes. That’s the one that Sean Connery played Indy’s dad, and Indy felt like he was babysitting the old man all the way through. But when they were on the beach at one point being dive-bombed by a Nazi plane, Connery saved the day by flapping his umbrella at some seagulls so they’d fly up and smash the cockpit, crashing the plane.
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SEAN CONNERY: (As Henry Jones Sr.) I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne. Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky.
MONDELLO: I cannot imagine another Hollywood screenwriter coming up with that line.
KELLY: No.
MONDELLO: I just can’t.
KELLY: No. Nor can I. Let me bring us up to Tom Stoppard’s final play, “Leopoldstadt.” It premiered in 2020 and is seen as the most autobiographical, perhaps, of his plays. He was clearly looking inward by that point. Jeff, you spoke to him about it. What did he tell you?
LUNDEN: Well, I think we should say first that he was born in what is now the Czech Republic. His family fled from the Nazis in 1938. And he only learned when he was 50 that he was born Jewish and that both sets of his grandparents had perished in the camps during World War II. And as a man in his 80s, he decided to take this topic on. He told me…
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TOM STOPPARD: A lot of this play, it doesn’t follow my biography, but it rhymes with it.
LUNDEN: (Laughter) The way it rhymes with his life is that it’s not set in the Czech Republic, but Vienna, Austria. And it looks at a Jewish family that had assimilated over the course of more than 50 years but can’t escape Nazism. And at the very end of the play, a young man based very much on Stoppard comes to Vienna, meets his surviving relatives and is excoriated for not knowing his own history. And despite “Leopoldstadt’s” being an invention, Stoppard said…
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STOPPARD: It has its own truth, and in a way, it’s an irrefutable truth.
KELLY: So lovely to hear his actual voice reflecting on all of this. My first memory that I knew I was grappling with a Tom Stoppard work was the movie we began with, “Shakespeare In Love,” which – I just had to go back and look. It came out in 1998 – 27 years ago. My major memory is of falling in love with both Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow playing the leads – both of them. I couldn’t tell you who I liked more. But also, I just remember thinking, wow, even in being a celebrated playwright, you want to take on William Shakespeare? You want to write for – like, a screenplay? Like, he pulled it off, and it was beautiful.
Bob Mondello, Jeff Lunden, thank you for helping us remember the great Tom Stoppard.
MONDELLO: It was a joy.
LUNDEN: Thank you so much.
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