In his delightfully engaging plays, Stoppard refutes leftish prejudices while making you laugh instead of wince.
In his delightfully engaging plays, Stoppard refutes leftish prejudices while making you laugh instead of wince.
I n Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing (1982), one of the greatest plays of the past half century, Henry, a gifted playwright, explains the craft of writing to a woman defending a clumsy left-wing political agitator who has shaped his dogmatic clichés into the form of a play. Henry, the author’s stand-in, notes that there is a big difference between screaming out slogans and creating art, and picks up a piece of sports equipment to illustrate the point. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Tom Stoppard’s indelible cricket-bat speech:
This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly . . . (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.) What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might . . . travel. (He clucks his tongue and picks up the script.) Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting, “Ouch!” with your hands stuck into your armpits. (indicating the cricket bat) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It’s better because it’s better. You don’t believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this and see how you get on. “You’re a strange boy, Billy, how old are you?” “Twenty, but I’ve lived more than you’ll ever live.” Ooh, ouch!
Stoppard is the greatest English playwright since Shakespeare, and more than half a century after he became famous across Europe and America with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), his work remains delightful, funny, engaging, and so full of youthful enthusiasm for the romp of ideas that it’s like a box of puppies. At the margins, without ever being shrill or declarative, Stoppard calmly refutes leftish prejudices, and when he has a point to get across, he makes you laugh instead of wince. Brodie, the angry working-class would-be playwright in The Real Thing who fancies himself a fierce rebuke to Thatcherism, has his progeny in any number of fashionable left-wing playwright-propagandists on both sides of the Atlantic today; their writing is so bad it stings. And yet the entire theatrical and critical establishment shouts out its thanks, either pretending to love the painful sensation or perhaps actually enjoying the smacking. Stoppard does better than reject turgid propaganda dressed up as art: He demolishes it with his wit. The Real Thing will be performed and beloved long after today’s generation of Pulitzer and Tony winners is forgotten.
Though even wrong-headed propaganda can sometimes inform great art, it’s an exalted pleasure to witness an artistic triumph that is inflected with the conservative sensibility. I don’t mean to suggest that Stoppard, who happily dined with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, makes an affirmative case for conservative tenets, but he does something nearly as important: He repeatedly throws cold water on leftish errors, notably in his career-long attack on communism and its apologists in the West, who included many of the cultural nomenklatura who surrounded him in London.
In Hermione Lee’s massive new biography Tom Stoppard: A Life, Stoppard is described by friends as a small-c conservative (and has described himself as a reactionary). Mainly the adjective refers to disposition rather than politics, and in his graying years Stoppard has reversed the usual drift of aging by moving left; he was an ardent opponent of Brexit, for instance, outlining a vision of immigration policy that amounts to “We have plenty of room, so let them all in.” Notably, however, little or nothing of gentry liberalism has ever made it into his plays, which refreshingly oppose the Left’s conceptual framing all the way up to his endearing philosophical inquiry The Hard Problem (2015), a vigorous rebuke of blind atheism via cognitive science.
Even in lesser-known works such as Night and Day (1979), a play about journalists covering civil war in post-colonial Africa that is informed by his own days as a cheerful hack in Bristol, Stoppard gently steers his Guardian-reading theatergoers, most of whom would love to find some excuse to shut down the Daily Mail and Rupert Murdoch, to remember why a free press matters. One clear-headed journo, Milne, explains that a rival, Dick Wagner, who typifies the cynicism of newspapermen of his time, “thinks the Globe is a million packets of journalism manufactured every week by businessmen using journalists for their labor.” But Milne says, “No, it’s not. A free press, free expression — it’s the last line of defense for all the other freedoms.” Dick wants journalism to be a closed shop — no union card, no press pass — and as Milne warns against such restrictions you can hear a distant portent of how the guild mentality might lead to de-platforming the New York Post or Donald Trump for disrupting preferred narratives. “What Dick wants is a right-thinking press — one that thinks like him,” Milne says. But “once you establish the machinery it’ll be there for someone else to use. Drum you out if you’re too left-wing, or not left-wing enough, or the wrong color, or something.”
Milne anticipates today’s moral panic over fake news with this marvelous one-liner: “No matter how imperfect things are, if you’ve got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.” As for the tabloid sensibility that has long been a source of agony to the bien pensants on either side of the Atlantic, “Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.” It’s conservative to lampoon progressive pieties without suggesting an affirmative solution because to be conservative is to understand that there are no solutions, merely tradeoffs. Nor can truth be determined by a self-selecting panel of elites. To underline just where Wagner the newspaperman’s sensibility leads, Stoppard gives his African warlord this gem: “Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr. Wagner? . . . I mean a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.”
An especially exemplary play is Travesties (1974), which combines Stoppard’s defense of artistic standards with a satiric dismantling of the revolutionary mindset. It was inspired by a real-life incident Stoppard read about in Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce. A 1917 production in Zürich of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest led to a lawsuit by one of the actors against Joyce, who was the play’s business manager and was writing Ulysses at the time. Joyce had the last laugh, mocking the man who sued him by name in Ulysses. Two kinds of revolutionaries, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and the even more absurd mass-murderer-in-waiting Vladimir Lenin, were also in Zürich during the war. Travesties is an exercise in Wildean farce, an inquiry into the slippery nature of memory and a withering comic attack on both Tzara’s and Lenin’s value systems. The two men were united by a nihilistic mania to eliminate everything that had come before and start over with new rules that men like them would dictate. Unlike Joyce, as Stoppard makes clear, Tzara had no talent, which is why he extolled talent-denying art. And Lenin had no workable political solutions, which is why he set about exterminating liberty and burying truth. “Leninism and Fascism are restatements of totalitarianism,” Stoppard said in an interview shortly after finishing the play. “The repression which for better or worse turned out to be Leninism in action after 1917 was very much worse than anything that had gone on in Tsarist Russia.” Such bold statements of truth were unwelcome in fashionable society, then as now.
In recent years interviewers have pressed Stoppard to turn his attention to Trump. He swats down such inquiries, saying he doesn’t think that way. Today few playwrights can resist the urge to write words to the melody of today’s headlines, and their work will age like bread, not wine. Stoppard engages with ideas and principles, but the drama comes first. “I burn with no causes,” he told Lee. “I am as square and traditional, let’s say as reactionary, a person as you could hope to meet because I operate on the premise that a theatre’s job is to prevent people leaving their seats before the entertainment is over.” Contra virtually everyone working in the theater today, Stoppard is “not impressed by art because it is political, I believe in art being good art or bad art, not relevant art or irrelevant art.” Yet Stoppard’s art was in many instances also excitingly relevant to the central question of his time, which was communism. I’ll discuss that in my next weekend piece.