Quote of the Day (Tom Stoppard, on Life, ‘A Gamble’)

“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.” —Czech-born English playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard (1937-2025), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)

Quote of the Day (Tom Stoppard, on Nature and Each Moment)

“Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment.”—Czech-born British playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard, Shipwreck: The Coast of Utopia, Vol. 2 (2002)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘101 Dalmatians,’ With Cruella De Vil Delivering a Perfect Vow of Revenge—and Pun)

Cruella De Vil [played by Glenn Close]: “You... BEASTS! But I'm not beaten yet. You've won the battle, but I'm about to win the wardrobe.”— 101 Dalmatians (1996), screenplay by John Hughes (adapted from the 1961 Disney animated film and the novel by Dodie Smith), directed by Stephen Herek

I first became aware of this quotation while reading Maureen Dowd’s New York Times interview with playwright Tom Stoppard back in September.

However, while Ms. Dowd notes, correctly, that Stoppard did some script-doctoring on 102 Dalmatians at the behest of Glenn Close, I think she identified the wrong quote for the movie. This quote that she (and I!) enjoy so much came from the 1996 Hughes version, rather than the 2000 sequel with a screenplay by Kristen Buckley, Brian Regan, Bob Tzudiker, and Noni White.

(Hughes was not associated with the 2000 project, whereas, as producer in 1996, I doubt that he would have allowed anyone tinkering with his script.)

Theater Review: Fall Roundup at NY’s Roundabout

Don’t let anyone tell you differently: Putting together a schedule for a theatrical season can be murderously difficult. Just look at the Roundabout Theatre Co. Without a standing repertory company, it must reinvent itself with virtually every production. Getting the right actors when they’re available is a crapshoot. And, while every company with any kind of ambition wants bragging rights to developing and mounting a successful new play, what do you do when audiences don’t cotton to it? 

Even when you go for what seems the tried and true, things have a way of blowing up in your face.

Which brings me to the Roundabout’s fall season. I had no real desire to see Cabaret again after the landmark 1998 revival starring Natasha Richardson—the prospect of seeing Alan Cumming, in his star-making turn as the MC, held no real interest for me. My fear—that this production would not differ much from that earlier show—proved correct. The one hope I had—Emma Stone as Sally Bowles—proved premature, as the film star was only able to take over a role originally meant for her until well after Michelle Williams had given it a try.

The other offerings have been a mixed bag, too. With a top-notch cast working with a virtually foolproof script, You Can’t Take It With You would, in a more just world, go on indefinitely at the Longacre Theatre. But, with audiences at only 58.91% of capacity, it placed among a group of underachieving box-office “underdogs” for the week just before Thanksgiving. At this point, it is set to close February 22, but don’t be surprised if it’s gone sooner.

There are a couple of excellent reasons why this uproarious screwball farce won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1936, and why it still brings down the house with laughter in its current revival. First, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart were not just playwrights, but also directors who knew how to juice up a work that might have unaccountably gone flagging, resulting in a comedy as durably constructed as that other marvel of 1930s engineering, the Hoover Dam. Second, the rise of multiple media channels has only whetted Americans’ interest in grand eccentrics like this play’s Sycamore family and those who come into their orbit. Third, nearly 80 years after its premiere, in another age of economic unease at home and storm clouds abroad, the comedy still proves a tonic for the lowest of spirits.

James Earl Jones, in an unexpected comic turn, is first among equals here as Grandpa Martin Vanderhof, a businessman who stopped going to the office years ago—and stopped paying income taxes, too. Perhaps the next best-known cast member, Rose Byrne, had the unenviable task of playing the ingénue, Alice Sycamore—the only normal member of her household. (Since I saw the play, Ms. Byrne was succeeded in the role by Anna Chlumsky.)

Alice dreads the idea of her prospective in-laws, the Kirbys (the father owns the factory where she works), visiting the family she loves. You would, too, if you had a father whose basement experiments involve rockets operating only by chance; a mother who started a novel because a typewriter was delivered to the house by mistake; a sister of nonexistent dancing skill who continues to perform jettes around the house; and two Russian emigres—a dance instructor and a former grand duchess-turned-Manhattan waitress—with astonishingly demonstrative personalities.

Although, in terms of lines, a number of parts in the play would normally be deemed small, they are so outsized in eccentricity that the supporting actors have their moments to shine just as much as Jones. Particularly outstanding are Elizabeth Ashley as the grand duchess, Annaleigh Ashford as Essie the would-be ballerina, Reg Rogers as her hilarious dance teacher Boris, and Kristine Nielsen (as fine here as in Christopher Durang’s contemporary Chekhov reimagining Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike) as “playwright” mom Penny Sycamore.

A curious thing happened in the fall with the two Tom Stoppard plays produced by the Roundabout. In its cast size (15 actors) and its widely varying settings (1930s India and 1980s India and England), Indian Ink would normally fit best into the company’s flagship venue, the 740-seat American Airlines Theatre.

But that space was reserved for what is probably the most popular (and accessible) work of the English playwright’s career, The Real Thing, even though the latter calls for fewer actors, smaller production demands and less ambition. So Indian Ink (which closed in early December) was staged in the 424-seat Laura Pels Theatre, where the Roundabout tends to put on its smaller, more experimental fare.

What you had, then, was the type of canvass used to explore Anglo-Indian relations by novelists E.M. Forster (A Passage to India) and Paul Scott (The Raj Quartet), except that, through the teeming intellectual ambitions of Stoppard, this drama takes in even more than that. It shouldn’t cohere. The fact that it does owes less to Stoppard’s usual theater of ideas, and more to the tactile hold on the imagination that India continues to exert on him, 70 years after he lived there briefly as a child.

Rosemary Harris, whom I’ve been lucky enough to see onstage (in the Roundabout’s 2002 production of Edward Albee’s All Over) and on film (Spider-Man 1, 2 and 3 and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead) is her typically wondrous self as Eleanor Swan, gingerly trying to enhance her beloved older sister’s critical reputation decades after her death, even as she navigates the tricky access demands of biographers.

But the real discovery here, at least for many U.S. playgoers who might only know her for her appearance in the film Atonement, was Romola Garia as Eleanor’s sister, the (fictional) bohemian poet Flora Crewe. She was absolutely fearless in playing this desperately ill woman who, in 1930s India, burns with desire to experience what may well be the last stop on her life’s journey. She was particularly impressive in her scenes with Firdous Bamji (playing Indian painter Nirad Das), switching from imperious, aloof—and, in her urging to penetrate to the truth of what Das sees, challenging and encouraging.

The Real Thing, which closed a week ago, came into New York with high expectations, because of its two prior New York productions (including the 1984 original directed by Mike Nichols) and its top-flight cast. Critics were not generally kind to the show, perhaps because the results couldn’t match the importance this play has taken on as perhaps the centerpiece of Stoppard’s long, much-honored career.

I was inclined to see this carping as misplaced. The most intriguing bit of casting was Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon (a Roundabout board member, and star of such previous shows as Distracted and The Women), who had played the teenage daughter of playwright Henry in the original show. This time, she fit the bill as Henry’s first, acerbic wife, Charlotte, an actress appearing in his current play. Maggie Gyllenhaal, employing a not-always-convincing British accent in her Broadway debut, came off less well as Annie, the friend with whom he has an affair, then marries.

The role of Henry, a playwright of flashing wit and intelligence, with a deep, abiding interest in popular music such as The Crystals’ 1963 pop hit “Da Doo Ron Ron,” bears more than a little resemblance to Stoppard. Ewan McGregor captured Henry’s darting verbal dexterity (particularly in the play’s famous long “cricket bat” speech, likening good writing to a bit well hit) well enough. But Henry’s’s jealousy and anguish in the second act, when he suspects Annie of committing adultery again, eluded his grasp.

Quote of the Day (Tom Stoppard, on Murder and Criticism)

"Nobody would kill a man and then pan his book. I mean, not in that order.”—Tom Stoppard, Arcadia: A Play (1993)

Quote of the Day (Tom Stoppard, on the Theater)

“I’ve always been very pragmatic about the theatre. I don’t see the point of avoiding the bedrock reality that you’ve got a few hundred people listening and watching and being critical of what they’re listening to, and watching. They haven’t come to do you any favours. There may be passionate protective Chekhovians who have come for the unmediated, undiluted true word, but I don’t feel like that at all – theatre is a mediated art form, it has a storyteller, or several. The text loses its virginity simply by being staged, it’s no longer the abstract ideal version, it’s an event.”—Tom Stoppard quoted in Jan Dalley, “Arcadia Revisited,” The Financial Times, May 16, 2009

Theater Review: "Rock 'n' Roll," by Tom Stoppard

Reviewing Rock 'n' Roll—which just closed this past weekend at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater in New York—The New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote, "Anyone who still believes Mr. Stoppard is a strictly cerebral dramatist need only check out this rich consideration of love, revolution and loud music."

Well, not quite. After The Real Thing, Sir Tom Stoppard (pictured) really doesn't have to prove his credentials as an artist of heart and soul anymore than Stephen Sondheim should.

Nor is being "cerebral" or "intellectual" a problem. The issue is whether the playwright finds a seamless form to match the play's vaunting ambition –or, at least, to propel it forward with irresistible energy.

A Theatrical Stew Filled With Art, Love, Words…and Revolution

My verdict is mixed. With Rock 'n' Roll, Stoppard has created a flawed but often stirring reconsideration of his usual obsessions: art, love and the power of words, for good or evil.

Stoppard is from the George Bernard Shaw school of playwrighting: tackle any subject, whip it into a thematic stew more likely to leave a tangy taste than to be digested fully, and stage the proceedings for however long he thinks fit, hoping that intelligence and provocative wit will carry all before it.

Fortunately, he has been blessed with a British cast who leapt at the chance to give life to his often long, complex speeches – Brian Cox as Marxist professor Max Morrow; Rufus Sewall as Jan, the Czech exchange student and rock ‘n’ roll aficionado, caught up in his country’s aborted “Prague Spring” before the Soviet tanks rolled; Stephen Kunkel as Jan’s friend Ferdinand; and several actors in multiple roles, most notably Sinead Cusack as Max’s wife Eleanor and an older version of his daughter Esme.

And, in Trevor Nunn, he has a director ready to try any bit of stagecraft to prevent Stoppard’s talky tendency from slowing the pace: multimedia displays, revolving sets that whisk the audience between locales (England and Czechoslovakia) and times (from 1967 to the fall of Communism), and a soundtrack that’s positively rapturous for a baby boomer (though flashing the title of songs, their performers, songwriters and recording dates might be a tad too much information).

First, my difficulties with the play:

1) Too much British lingo for an American audience (will someone please tell me what an "FHB" is?)
2) Some plot elements are so badly integrated with the rest that they should have been cut as tangential (e.g., the material on Syd Barrett, the Pink Floyd founder who ended his days as a balding, mentally ill recluse and object of local curiosity in Cambridge);
3) You can't simply glance at the liner notes—you need to know every single line of it, and beforehand (I kept wondering about "Yugo"—why so many references to a foreign car?—until, at intermission, I noticed from the program that "Hugo" was the manager of the Plastic People of the Universe, the Czech rock 'n' roll group that became lionized by the dissident movement despite themselves).

The Body vs. The Spirit

Nevertheless, I'm glad that this play has attracted so much attention. I hope it will gain even more—perhaps, as unlikely as it may seem, in a film adaptation—for the light it sheds on the enormous state apparatus and shamefully silent intelligentsia required to sustain a totalitarian state. (Though the German film The Lives of Others is nowhere near Stoppard's equal in its intellectual firepower, it is far more dramatic and involving.)

My friend Linnea has read or seen eight--count 'em, nine--Stoppard plays. That achievement leaves me in awe. My exposure to the British playwright is nowhere near as extensive, and in much more diluted form, through his screenplays for The Russia House and Shakespeare in Love (which netted him a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, shared with co-scenarist Marc Norman) and in reading The Real Thing. Rock 'n' Roll was my first real exposure to Stoppard writing directly for the stage.

To be sure, some of the same instinct that fed the popularity of James Michener might also be behind Stoppard's cachet: the desire to feel educated and to learn new things (such as, in this play, the love poetry of Sappho). But surely Michener seldom if ever displayed Stoppard’s coruscating wit.

What particularly fascinates me about the play, however, is its engagement with matters spiritual.

Now, talking about spirituality is a sure way of emptying out a party among Britain's "chattering classes," not to mention New York's Upper West Side or entire floors of The New York Times building in midtown Manhattan.

I should also mention right away, before I hear voices protesting at my temerity, that Stoppard professes no particular faith. When he has expressed himself on the subject, his views are highly provisional, as when one of his characters admits in the early play Jumpers, “I don't claim to know that God exists ... And yet I tell you that, now and again... I know.”

Despite—perhaps because of—this tentativeness, Stoppard in Rock ‘n’ Roll goes where theatrical angels fear to tread: the mind-body dualism, or the possibility of a soul distinct from biological impulses.

You don't have to be a diehard Marxist like Max Morrow, the Cambridge professor of politics played down to every wiggle of intellectual self-deception by the marvelous Brian Cox, to discount the possibility of a soul—science is doing an increasingly good job of it. 

But in the play, Max's wife Eleanor, fighting a losing battle against cancer, lashes out at this notion of a mind that, to use her husband's formulation, might as well be a beer can: ''I am not my body,'' she cries out. ''My body is nothing without me.''

But, as I maintained in an earlier post, Roman Catholicism saw far earlier than rock 'n' roll or almost any intellectual movement that dialectical materialism in general and Communism in particular was a reductionist philosophy that mentally impoverished those under its sway.

And unlike free-market true believers, who loved to trumpet their notion of the "creative destruction" of capitalism, prelates and pontiffs, from Leo XIII to John Paul II, have labeled untrammeled capitalism for what it really is—destruction, period, without the creativity.

The "radio priest" Fr. Charles Coughlin brought shame to the American Catholic Church in the 1930s with anti-Semitic diatribes, but in the same years Fr. John Ryan—nicknamed "The Right Reverend New Dealer"—was providing intellectual ballast for an alternative to Communism, Fascism and rogue capitalism with a notion of a "living wage." Yet Ryan was only one figure putting out theological markers between Pope Leo's groundbreaking 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum and John Paul's unrelenting support for Solidarity.

Since the crumbling of the Iron Curtain, it’s become fashionable to state that today’s ideological struggles have lost the clarity of the old East-West struggle of the Cold War. But in those years, there were all too many people too timid to acknowledge these retrospective clear-cut differences. Even in a different time, with a different enemy, those people continue to hold sway.

At the Rock ‘n’ Roll performance I attended, at the December 30 matinee, only one audience member clapped for a ringing defense of Western values: "We apologize for what makes us great. We apologize for democracy….We apologize for our differences."

The resounding silence in the theater made me wonder if there isn't space anymore between rightwing nuts who countenance waterboarding and taunts about Barack "Hussein" Obama, and leftists so in love with multiculturalism that they won't condemn the Islamofascists who call for its extinction. 

(Herewith, the obligatory caveat that I’m talking about fundamentalists making Islam the sole religion of Mideast nations, rather than millions who have no quarrel with other faiths.)

Music to Save Your Mortal Soul

Back to Stoppard and his obsessions, starting with music. His passion for pop, especially rock 'n' roll, has been apparent for awhile. (If someone ever gets around to adapting The Real Thing to the big screen, Stoppard has already virtually mapped out the soundtrack, starting with the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Loving Feeling," which his protagonist Henry famously calls “possibly the most haunting, the most deeply moving noise ever produced by the human spirit”)

This time around, Stoppard locates the opposition to dialectical materialism in the saving power of rock 'n' roll ("Can music save your mortal soul?" sings Don McLean in "American Pie.") And it is true that in the case of Vaclav Havel and other Czech dissidents, rock 'n' roll was part of their fighting faith and samizdat.

Disdaining not just for rock ‘n’ roll but also the Sixties, Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Max Morrow would be horrified to think how much he sounds like American cultural warriors who decry a decade of rebellion and the music that served as its underpinning.

I confess to feeling a bit queasy myself over the baby boomer in the play’s dinner scene who cries triumphantly, “But we changed the world!” Couldn’t Stoppard have sounded a bit less self-congratulatory by acknowledging how the Dionysian energies of this generation and their music destroyed at the same time it liberated so many from social constraints?

Ravaging Time and Inconvenient Truth-Tellers

Much of what I found haunting about the play—undoubtedly owing to my own struggles in middle age—derives from Stoppard’s elegiac treatment of what he called in Vanity Fair “mutability and the governance of time.”

Hardly any of Stoppard’s characters here emerges unscathed from this process—not cancer-stricken Eleanor; not Max’s beloved Jan, bent and aged by more than a decade of work in a bakery for his political activity; not even Max, who, for all his inability to give up on his Marxist dreams, is left at the end with the recognition that his whole career rested on belief in a lie.

The natural initial wish—my own, certainly—is that someone other than the superficial journalist Nigel (say, the sweetly heroic Jan) might have delivered the all-too-accurate summary of the Cambridge don’s misplaced hopes and career. But Stoppard is not only refusing to make things easy for his audience, but even recognizing a fundamental fact of human nature and living in a politically fractious environment: none of us is perfect, and even the worst of us is sometimes graced with the insight to blurt out “an inconvenient truth.”

(It is, indeed, Nigel and his journalist-colleagues who so often make it inconvenient to accept the truth. In dealing with Jan as a source in Communist-dominated Czechoslovakia, Nigel continually looks for an “angle” involving dissidents, even where none may exist. And Nigel’s second wife is roundly denounced in the dinner scene for exploiting Syd Barrett’s physical decrepitude and mental collapse for her tabloid paper.)

Stoppard's play ends with the Rolling Stones' August 1990 Prague concert, staged here with the same musical exultation that greeted Leonard Bernstein in Berlin the prior year. For me, though, the idea of The Stones as the battering ram of rebellion is a bit rich.

Mick Jagger may have pumped his fists 40 years ago about being a "Street Fighting Man" and more recently issued the ironically titled "Sweet Neocon." But he and his bandmates have made their peace with Mammon as surely as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney—in the early 1970s, their Exile on Main Street was recorded in France when they were tax exiles from Great Britain. Since then, they have created and fed “Rolling Stones Inc.” by cutting sponsorship and rights deals with the likes of Anheuser-Busch, Microsoft, and Sprint.

I’ve been told that Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia caused a run on bookstores and libraries by theatergoers looking to read up on works alluded to on stage or in the liner notes. I have my issues with Rock ‘n’ Roll, but any play that makes you desire a total immersion in its intellectual and cultural milieu has much to recommend it.