12 - Tom Stoppard’s Brit/lit/crit

Summary

Stoppard’s use of the literary past - naming names, mixing and matching time and place and trope, and manhandling familiar quotations - runs the theatrical gamut from farce to parody to show(off)manship to somber intellectual inquiry. As successful productions of his plays have shown, especially when persuasively performed and articulated on the London stage, such territories are rarely, if ever, exclusive. Yet untangling the rich mixture of discourses, a heady allusive style that embraces quick wit, the surprising turn of phrase, and a bit more than a nodding acquaintance with relativity, quantum physics, and the provability (or lack thereof) of Fermat’s last theorem, has proved to be both a delight to his audiences and a challenge to dramatic criticism. In this chapter I would like to trace the development of Stoppard’s engaging “Brit/lit/crit” as well as consider its implications for the kind of audience that continues to be attracted to his plays.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard’s early and spectacular work, already shows the telltale signs of what would quickly become an idiosyncratic and highly eclectic dramatic voice. Let the world take note: Shakespeare’s Hamlet would never be quite the same again. When the Fringe was still the fringe, two minor characters took center stage and turned the English-speaking theatre’s most famous revenge tragedy upside down and inside out. Actors were suddenly hankering to play Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern (or is it the the other way around?), roles formerly assigned as consolation prizes for not making it big-time. Philosophically, of course, this retooling of Hamlet’s endgame offers its audience no such dumbing-down: death is no longer the “consummation devoutly to be wished,” but rather the price you pay for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, then realizing it too late, just when the curtain’s about to fall. To be is in this unenviable stage situation simply – and fatally – not to be, reckoning closed and story ended.