The playwright Tom Stoppard was in town recently, to see previews of his 1974 play, “Travesties.” The drama is set in Zurich in 1917; central to the action are James Joyce, the poet and Dada founder Tristan Tzara, and Vladimir Lenin—all of whom landed in Zurich during the First World War—and a contemporaneous production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” The revival, directed by Patrick Marber, originated in London last year; it opens on Broadway on April 24th. “Travesties” is narrated by Henry Carr, a real person who worked for the British consulate in Zurich during the war. One of the recurring tropes of the play—one of ten or so things that Stoppard investigates—is what to do about the news. “Anything of interest?” Carr asks, each morning, when his manservant brings in the newspapers—a line that a New York audience greeted last week with exhausted laughter.
Stoppard, who looks younger than his eighty years and carries with him what Marber calls “his kingly bonhomie,” was dressed in an Oxford shirt and a tweed jacket and pants. He paused over the breakfast menu at the Bowery Hotel, then said to the waiter, “Two eggs any style, please.” He turned to me. “That’s a good thing to order! Then you wait and see what happens—it confuses them.” It was a Stoppardian moment: wordplay plugged into a lit switchboard. “We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style,” says The Player, in Stoppard’s “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, has done his best to defy that. Writing in this magazine in 1976, in a review of the original production of “Travesties,” the critic Kenneth Tynan cited Stoppard’s ability to write English with a kind of “hypnotized brilliance.”
When the eggs arrived (soft-boiled, each in a separate egg cup), Stoppard took a bite and said, “It’s the job of the artist, to exploit connections.” And then, smiling: “You see, I speak on behalf of the world of the artist without hesitation!” He continued, “People don’t realize that the part of the playwright is finding something for people to talk about. If you are writing about a historical episode, or two characters in ‘Hamlet,’ you have a structure for free.”
When Henry Carr first addresses the audience, he’s an old man in a dressing gown, recalling dazzled days; in the main matter of the play, he is a young man, who played Algernon (“not Ernest, the other one,” as he says in “Travesties”) in a production of “The Importance of Being Earnest” arranged by Joyce, in Zurich, for the English Players, a theatrical company. (Carr ended up suing Joyce for the price of the trousers that he bought to wear in the play, and earned himself a fleeting mention in “Ulysses” for his trouble.) When Stoppard wrote the play, he was closer in age to young Henry. Now, almost fifty years later, I asked if seeing “Travesties” was like looking through the other end of a telescope. “If I’m involved in a production, it always feels in the foreground again,” Stoppard said. He went on, “Patrick made suggestions so radical I personally wouldn’t have thought of making them, but I’m grateful. For example, he said, ‘It’s a great shame that Lenin doesn’t put in an appearance in the first act!’ And I said, ‘Hard luck, he doesn’t,’ and we left it there. Unlike with a new play, when I’m in rehearsal all the time, in a revival, especially with someone like Patrick, I go away and come back. So the next time I fetched up at the rehearsal there was Lenin in Act I, and he was playing a lute!”
Patrick Marber first encountered Stoppard’s work at fourteen, when a group of older boys put on a school production of “Travesties.” Marber recalls, “It was 1978, and I thought, I have to see more of this!” Later, at Oxford, he wrote about Stoppard. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was a disciple, but I was a fan—I think it was my destiny, to fall in love with ‘Travesties.’ I felt that whatever was going on there on the stage was more important than any life off the stage. It’s one of the most radical plays ever written. I’m very moved by it. It’s a Dada play, a Joycean play, and an English play. It’s a great play. The seeds of ‘Arcadia’ are in ‘Travesties’—the idea of simultaneous time.”
The London production last year débuted at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a hundred-and-eighty-seat theatre on Southwark Street, and then moved to the Apollo Theatre, in the West End. All the while, Stoppard says, the play was being polished and refined. Marber came on board after Stoppard called him to ask about another potential director. Marber said, “I told him I liked the director, but, if it didn’t work out, could I put my hat in the ring? At first, I had no idea how to go about it, but Tom’s done his work—I trust the play, I don’t redirect it. We did some fidgets. There are new lines, and the actors love it—they get to première a new Stoppard line!”
Marber thought for a moment, then said, “Where I pushed harder was on the places in the play where Carr is losing his memory. I remember we had a discussion about the set. To Tom, a door’s a door, not a cabinet. And I wanted to make a virtue of Henry not knowing where things are, as they are in a mangled memory.” Marber, who is fifty, is a playwright as well as a director. (He’s the author of, among other plays, “Closer,” which opened in 1999 and was made into a 2004 film directed by Mike Nichols.) He said, “It’s something close to us all. My own father’s losing his memory. I don’t remember names.” I asked about Lenin. Marber laughed. “Yes, now Tom likes the bit when Lenin appears dressed as Shakespeare. It hasn’t been noted often enough how much Lenin looks like Shakespeare when you put him in a ruff! But Tom has a great sense of what’s him and what’s not him. He’ll say, ‘No, no, no.’ And then he’ll say, ‘Yes.’ ”
Stoppard was born Tomáš Straussler, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, in 1937. His parents, Martha Beckova and Eugen Straussler, who was a physician affiliated with the Bata shoe company, were members of the Jewish community. In March of 1939, when the Germans invaded, the family fled to Singapore, where Tomáš Bat’a, whose business had expanded worldwide, had arranged for Eugen Straussler to take up a position. In 1941, during the Japanese occupation of Singapore, Stoppard’s mother took him and his younger brother Petr 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 came to England, where Tomáš, by then called Tom Stoppard, matriculated at the Dolphin School, in Nottinghamshire. Later, he attended the Pocklington School, in Yorkshire. His mother did not discuss the past; it was only in the nineteen-nineties that he learned that all four of his grandparents had died in concentration camps.
Stoppard left school at seventeen, and worked as a journalist, and then as a drama critic. (His pseudonym was William Boot, after the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel “Scoop.”) While reporting for newspapers, he began writing plays for radio and the stage. In 1963, Stoppard’s first play, “A Walk on Water,” was staged in Hamburg. In l967, after premièring at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” opened at the Old Vic in a National Theatre production. Stoppard’s plays are—mostly, and among other things—about shifting identities, and about what happens when something seen out of the corner of an eye, or across time, moves to the center of the stage, and then slips away: an imaginary hermit in “Arcadia,” from 1993; the figure of Syd Barrett, the founder of Pink Floyd, in “Rock ’n’ Roll,” from 2006. In “The Invention of Love,” the elderly poet A. E. Housman, like Henry Carr in “Travesties,” comments on his younger self. I asked Stoppard about the world of his plays, in which different perspectives unfold inside each other, like reversible prisms. Stoppard said, “I have almost no sense of working from a program or an agenda. Rather, it’s a relation one has—there’s a sense I can work in any form I like and go in any direction. Obviously, the plays are more unlike each other than like each other, but people who take pleasure in finding connections will have no trouble finding them.”
We were sitting in a corner of the restaurant, but the bright light from the street glanced off the window and made a square on the table. This fall, Stoppard’s 2015 play, “The Hard Problem,” which is about the nature of consciousness—some of the action takes place at a brain-research center—will open at Lincoln Center. Is he working on something new? “I’ll risk saying I hope to go back to England when ‘Travesties’ opens and get into a play,” Stoppard said. “I started a play 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 relationships between the characters. I wasn’t at square one, I was in arrears! I pretend to have external pressure to produce a play, but I don’t—the pressure is really just for myself.”
Patrick Marber told me, “ ‘Travesties’ is set in 1917, is set in the midst of a crisis. It’s a hundred years later, and we’re in crisis, though not the same crisis! But Tom isn’t interested in ‘relevance.’ ” The first Stoppard play I saw was the New York production of “The Real Thing,” which is, in part, about people who try to behave well but end up behaving badly. It was 1982, I had just graduated from college, and I loitered on the edge of a set in which people said clever things, or tried to; when I walked out of the theatre, the first thing I thought was, No, they don’t, and the second was, People don’t behave like that. I was only on the verge of learning that, indeed, they do.
At the Bowery, I was writing down what Stoppard said, and he waited to go on until I looked up from the page. “There are things I feel I can write about, and I feel there is a play in them; the problem is I see clearly that one gets caught between having too complete a sense of what one is writing—that’s actually bad for what you’re doing—and, on the other, not knowing enough. The sine qua non is to be insulated, rather than isolated. You need to be in the bubble. Five days would be good. Five weeks would be better. But I am distracted in eighteen kinds of ways, the way one is.” He paused. “Lately, I’ve gone back to Hemingway, a bit. I’ve started looking at a shelf I have of old literary journals: The Dial, the Transatlantic Review, Transition. It’s moving to me to see the first appearance of a story that 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 periodicals, but he doesn’t have a computer, and he spends no time at all online. He says, “I read a great deal. Not having a computer wasn’t a decision. I just didn’t catch up. I have to ask Sabrina to do everything a normal person does for themselves!”
We talked for a bit about the morning’s usual wallop of news. He then said, “I really haven’t gotten beyond the headlines. I don’t actively want to write about Brexit, but a play about Englishness would have to be about Brexit.” “Travesties” is set in 1917, and I asked Stoppard why the characters don’t talk much about the First World War. “Don’t they? Well, it’s not really a play about that,” he said. “The play is a kind of luxury, in which you pretend that James Joyce was there in Zurich at the same time as Lenin and Tristan Tzara. It’s a kind of intellectual entertainment.” He paused. “It’s something I wanted to write about at the time. That’s not altered. It feels alive. In a subtle way, one is watching and listening as if it is a laboratory experiment. If you wanted to write about World War I, you could do it better!”