Luckily for me and the rest of you who have, without a doubt, both read, viewed, and possibly even studied many of Stoppard's works, Christine will be presenting on the playwright this Wednesday at our meeting at the Hastings-on-Hudson Public Library. Doors will open at 12:30pm; performance will begin promptly at 1pm.
Until Wednesday! Jacquie
 |
| English Playwrights above: Simon Gray, David Rudkin, Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn, Trevor Griffiths, Peter Shaffer and Tom Stoppard; by Al Hirschfeld in NY Times 7/10/77 Minutes It was an uncommonly warm day, 60° F the February day we met. We gathered on the terrace outside the Hastings Library’s Orr room. We chatted, nibbled on cookies, enjoyed the view of the Hudson and the Palisades, discussed whether we could stay outside for the meeting and remain unmasked. The sun was bright, the terrace warmer than the ambient air. We reluctantly agreed, though, we’d get cold sitting still. We masked up and went inside. The door remained open. President Constance was absent (ill with a nasty GI bug); VP Joanna rang the bell, calling 10 members to order. Recording Secretary Christine passed on reading the minutes from the last meeting; she said she’d be talking a lot about Tom Stoppard. She didn’t know what our limit might be, hearing her talk. She didn’t want to test it. Our treasurer, Lori, was absent; no treasurer’s report. We spent no money since last meeting, so whatever it was on February 1, it’s the same. Christine’s fascination with Tom Stoppard began with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a performance she saw in prep school, with her English teacher and several other students. Afterwards, she and her friend Becky walked Boston’s Back Bay, questioning each other like the two soldiers of Hamlet. She explained that no special effort was needed to dress like Stoppard; he was notoriously casual, and his hair has remained shaggy and hardly combed to this day (he has thinning hair but he’s not bald). Christine’s usually bound hair was let loose (but neither shaggy nor uncombed); she wore a long scarf, pants and a jacket, studiously mismatched. For biographical information, she relied on Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee. We entered quickly into Stoppard’s work, with an exchange between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. A snappy reading was done by Jacquie and Joanna. An excerpt: Ros: What’s the matter with you today? Guil: When? Ros: What? Guil: Are you deaf? Ros: Am I dead? Guil: Yes or no? Ros: Is there a choice? Guil: Is there a God? Tom Stoppard was born Thomáš Sträussler in 1937, in Zlín, Moravia, Czechoslovakia to Martha and Eugen Sträussler. His parents were assimilated Jews; Eugen, a physician, was employed by the B’ata shoe factory. The owners were socially conscious; they provided many employee benefits, including unusual, for the time, a 5-day work week. In 1939, they transferred many of their Jewish employees to branches outside of Europe when Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia was imminent. The Sträusslers went to Singapore, and fled there soon after to escape the invading Japanese. Dr Sträussler enlisted as a volunteer in the British Army; he died in 1942. Mrs Sträussler, Thomáš and a younger brother, Petr, fled to India. Their mother enrolled them in an American school in Darjeeling. She married Major Kenneth Stoppard in 1945; the two sons took his family name and anglicized their given names. All moved back to England in 1946; he and his brother were enrolled in school there. Stoppard believed that his transformation into an English school boy was a life altering stroke of good fortune. Stoppard left school at 17, began working as a journalist. He enjoyed the work, although later regretted not going to university. He did an extraordinary amount of research for his plays, perhaps as compensation. In the early 50’s, he began writing radio plays for the BBC. In 1957, he saw Waiting for Godot. His reaction: the play “kept you amused, absorbed, occasionally puzzled and seemed to do so without really having any cards to play.” In 1958, the Bristol Evening Standard offered him a position as feature writer, humor columnist and second drama critic. In 1960, he wrote his first stage play, A Walk on the Water which was successfully received, but it was the Old Vic’s 1966 staging of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which made his reputation. Stoppard wrote more radio plays, more stage plays, and for television. He wrote screenplays, the best known are Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Shakespeare in Love, for which he won an Oscar. He was immensely productive, enjoyed his growing income. He entertained, he bought a large and charming old house in Dorset, the Rectory. He married three times, divorced twice, had 4 children (2 sons each with first and second wives). He was generous to friends in need. His current wife is Sabrina Guinness, once romantically linked to King Charles III and a member of the wealthy and prominent Guinness family. Christine noted Stoppard was “a voracious reader and researcher, and the evidence is in all his plays, dealing with subjects such a mathematics (Fermat’s last Theorem), landscape design, English poetry, brain studies, the Velvet Revolution, rock’n’roll, A E Housman, 19th century Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries and more.” The success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was followed by Jumpers, in 1972 (concerning moral philosophy and gymnasts). Stoppard was able to draw parallels among the least likely subjects. In 1974, Travesties was produced; although one of Christine’s favorites, time prevented her from giving us anything more than this tantalizing description: “Travesties combines Stoppard’s defense of artistic standards with a satiric dismantling of the revolutionary mindset. Two kinds of revolutionaries, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and the even more absurd Vladimir Lenin, were in Zürich during the war. Travesties is an inquiry into the slippery nature of memory and a withering comic attack on both Tzara’s and Lenin’s value systems.” Stoppard was politically conservative, he was a supporter of Margaret Thatcher. He was the old-fashioned kind of conservative, one with a heart and ethics. He was knighted in 1997. In the 1980’s, Stoppard translated several Czech plays. He befriended the Czech playwright Václav Havel, who later became president of Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution (1989). In 1982, Stoppard wrote The Real Thing, creating a role, Anne, for his romantic partner at the time, the actress Felicity Kendall. The male lead, Henry, a middle-aged playwright, philosophizes about writing in a way that suggests Stoppard is speaking directly through him. In the 1990’s, Stoppard had two successes with Arcadia (1993) and The Invention of Love (1997). The early 2000s brought two more plays: The Coast of Utopia, a 9-hour play performed in 3 parts, at 3 different times – the characters were Russian intellectuals speaking endlessly. Rock ’ n’ Roll (2006) moves between Czechoslovakia, from 1968 to 1989, and Cambridge. Stoppard confronted his family’s Jewish roots in his work late in his career. His mother had kept her Jewish identity secret; he was aware that his father’s family was Jewish. He learned that all four of his grandparents were Jewish from Czech cousins in 1993. His grandparents, as well as many of the extended family, died in concentration camps. This tragedy informs his last play, Leopoldstadt (2020). The fate of an assimilated Jewish family, prosperous, living in Vienna in 1893, is traced up until 1955. They descend, from full citizenship in the Austro-Hungarian empire, to the status of subhumans in the Nazi regime. Few survived, most died. Stoppard has suggested that would be his last play, but it is hard to believe a writer of his talent and energy could stop. Respectfully submitted, Frances Greenberg, substituting for Christine Lehner |
