Playwright Tom Stoppard: Conservative Genius

In 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:

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.

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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In 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:

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.