11 - The comedy of Eros

Summary

In his 1967 review of the New York production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Robert Brustein dismissed its author as a mere “university wit” who achieved his success by offering audiences “a form of Beckett without tears.” That specific criticism has continued to dog the plays of Tom Stoppard throughout his now lengthy and distinguished career. The major argument with Stoppard’s theatre has always been that it is far too cerebral, too emotionally barren: all head and no heart. “That particular duality has become a bit of a cliché about me,” Stoppard concedes. And it is a cliché that gets repeated in almost every profile of the dramatist ever written: thus his plays are perceived, one journalist states, as “avoid[ing[ emotion”; another describes them as often appearing “cold, frigid, impossibly remote”;4 a third comments that, to many spectators, “a dynamo and not a heart lay beneath his work’s surface, … and it pumped a kind of icy adrenaline, not blood.” “If I filed my cuttings,” Stoppard has wryly noted, “I would no doubt have a pretty thick too-clever-by-half envelope.”

This critical tide was stemmed to some degree by the appearance of The Real Thing in 1982, which surprised audiences in much the same way that the publication of A. E. Housman’s collection of romantic verse A Shropshire Lad reputedly surprised Housman’s own family; in Stoppard’s recent play about Housman, The Invention of Love, one of Housman’s sisters is said to have exclaimed, “Alfred has a heart!” Suddenly, it seemed, Stoppard too had a “heart” – except, of course, that it was hardly sudden. Stoppard’s early plays were indeed clever (perhaps even, in some instances, too clever by three-quarters), but there was always an emotional pulse beating steadily beneath all that surface erudition and irony. What “suddenly” changed with The Real Thing was that this self-confessed “very private sort of person”8 was no longer afraid to wear his heart openly on his sleeve in a play dealing specifically with the emotionally charged topic of love.