Review: John Guare on Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard, or The Secret Room (Part One)

Hermione Lee, who had captured the lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather in revelatory detail, has chosen playwright Tom Stoppard as her next subject.

Or rather he chose her. In The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard has the Oscar Wilde of his own making declare, “I took charge of my own myth.” Stoppard, who had derided biographies, asked the great Professor Lee of Oxford to write his life. She accepted.

Stoppard is one of those rare playwrights like Shaw, Brecht, Pirandello, Pinter whose very name becomes an adjective summoning up the world they’ve created on stage. Shakespearean! I remember in 1984 in the middle of the second act of The Real Thing, a woman behind me exclaiming, “I feel so witty!” Everyone within earshot knew what she meant.

What tack would Lee take in this biography of her first living subject and first male? She had said in a 2013 Paris Review interview that she is “very interested in that idea of secrets. Edith Wharton says … a woman’s life is like a great house full of rooms, and you never get to the secret room.” Will she reveal a secret room in one today’s most lauded and produced playwrights?

I prepared for the bio by rereading Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead for the first time since 1967, when I saw Stoppard’s triumphant Broadway debut, coming to New York garlanded with praise from London by way of the Edinburgh festival.

My god, It’s still overwhelmingly new and startlingly original. That dazzling opening. The coin toss.

ROS Heads.

Again.

Heads

Again

Heads

Again

Heads

GUIL. (flipping a coin) There is an art to the building up of suspense.

ROS. Heads.

The outrageous run of luck as Guildenstern (or is it Rosencrantz?) calls “Heads!,” is it eighty-nine times? The sheer gusto and confidence that irradiates the three acts. Stoppard’s powers of invention astonish as he spins out a simple situation—two courtiers stranded in a play—for three pyrotechnical acts. Had I ever seen anything like it? In whose footsteps was he following? From what well had the miracle that was R&G so effortlessly sprung? Of course Beckett’s two tramps inspired the two courtiers, but the spirit of the play, its eloquence, its plotting, its concerns were entirely new.

I asked three friends, all Stoppard aficionados, what they thought the origins of R&G might be. One fan said None. It burst on the world with no antecedents. Another cited Pirandello after Beckett. A third thought A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, with its Ordinary Man commenting on the action, had liberated Stoppard. The movie version removed Bolt’s Ordinary Man just as Olivier had excised R&G out of his film of Hamlet. Stoppard, the voice of the faces on the cutting room floor?

Lee tells Virginia Woolf’s life in a kaleidoscopic fashion. She tells Stoppard’s in a straightforward chronology, beginning in 1942 with the storybook flight of the Sträussler family from the Nazis, heading from Czechoslovakia to Singapore where the father is killed, the wrong ship takes the mother and her two young sons not to Australia but to India, where she manages a shoe store and young Tomas finds paradise.

When Tomas is eight, she marries a British major, moves her two boys to England with a new name. Tomas Sträussler assumes a new identity as Tom Stoppard, quickly becoming an echt cricket-playing English schoolboy. The past is rarely acknowledged. And why would you want to? As Cecil Rhodes had it: “You are an Englishman. That means you have drawn first prize in the lottery of life.”

Like a future Rosencrantz (or was it Guildenstern?) the coin for young Stoppard keeps coming up “heads.”

His formal education comes to a surprising halt when he opts, barely aged seventeen, not to go to university. An impatient leap into life? Taking a job for a local Bristol newspaper as motoring editor even though he couldn’t drive a car.

The job morphs into an autodidact’s dream—an education interviewing everyone from tiddlywinks makers “pushing back the frontiers of knowledge” to John Steinbeck. His stamina in producing so many pieces requires the invention of multiple bylines. The highlight of a quick trip to America is meeting Mel Brooks. He reviews plays and movies at a time when the Bristol Old Vic is the hot young theater outside London. He sees his pal, Peter O’Toole, pre-Lawrence of Arabia, with a different nose and darker hair, play Hamlet a dozen times.

The decade in Bristol is the stuff of bildungsroman. For its finale, he sets off on the 117 miles to London to become a playwright because plays have much more white space in them and take up fewer pages than the one novel he has written.

He gets an agent (whom he will never leave), who wonders during a chat what would happen if Hamlet’s R&G were sent from Elsinore to the court of King Lear. Tom explores the intriguing conceit but quickly drops references to Lear.

Tom wins a five-month writing fellowship in Berlin working under the mentorship of James Saunders, who had written a play called Next Time I’ll Sing to You that had gathered considerable interest in 1962, concerning two actors, Dust and Meff, who are trapped in a play.

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I found a copy of this unjustly forgotten play online. “How can you do what you’re doing when you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing?” … “You have a part to play and naturally you wish to know what is the part … and so do they, of course [the audience]. That’s what they’re sitting there so patiently for. They’re killing time till the great climax …”

Saunders had written, “If there is any theme that runs at all through my work, it’s the absurdity of finding logic in anything at all. There lies behind everything … a quality which we may call grief. It’s always there below the surface, just behind the façade.”

Lee will confer this quality on Stoppard.

Saunders’s abstract comedy gave him a model.

He moves back to London, drifts into a marriage with a Twiggylike woman who lives in the same rooming house. They have two boys. A group of young actors performs R&G at the Edinburgh Festival. The critical response attracts the vigilant eye of Kenneth Tynan, the literary manager of the Old Vic and the soon to be inaugurated National Theater. He convinces Olivier to do R&G as they can use sets and costumes from a recent production of Hamlet.

R&G triumphs. Stoppard has just turned thirty. A puzzled theatergoer asks him what R&G was about. He famously replies, “It’s about to make me a very rich man.” No esprit d’escalier for this young fellow. His older brother Peter is fortunately now an accountant ready to oversee the wealth.

He leaves wife #1—“a schizophrenic alcoholic”—and marries a family friend Miriam who has left her husband, raises his two sons by wife #1 with two additional boys by Miriam, whose fame as a doctor writing books about child-care will briefly eclipse his. Their combined wealth allows them a grand lifestyle. Lee describes the floor plan of their spacious house. I wonder about the secret room in her Wharton bio. Do men have a secret room?

Tynan described Stoppard’s second play, Jumpers, as a farce about the existence of God. (Yes, there is one.) It was a smash. Hurry up and come to America.

This is where I had my first dust-up with Lee. She writes at length about logical positivism and the conflict between God and morality in a way that made a friend say, “I put on my skis and schussed down the pages until something more to my liking caught my eye.”

Whether from miscasting or overproduction, Jumpers did not fare well in America in 1974. I read it. I saw it. I wasn’t equipped to take sides in an argument about logical positivism. Nor did I want to. The problem was mine.

Travesties, another success, comes to New York in 1975, telling of a moment in 1917 when James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and Tristan Tzara, father of dada, all lived in Zurich at the same time. Stoppard gets them all together. An amateur production of The Importance of Being Earnest also figures in the madness.

Except the production didn’t feel eccentric or dada enough—until the 2017 revival directed by the playwright Patrick Marber with Tom Hollander’s energetic surrender to the starring role. Stoppard tinkered with the script as was his wont, bringing the play’s anarchy much more to the fore.

By 1977, Stoppard figured prominently enough in the American consciousness that Neil Simon, in his new play Chapter Two, could drop Stoppard’s name to show the seriousness of the female lead playing an actor by auditioning her for a Stoppard play.

Lee next must confront a “blistering” profile of Stoppard that Ken Tynan—Stoppard’s champion—the man who introduced Stoppard to the work of fellow Czech playwright Vaclav Havel—publishes in the December 17, 1977, issue of The New Yorker.

She writes, “It was unfair—and unfriendly—of Tynan to use Havel as a stick with which to beat Stoppard.” Tynan contrasted the Czech playwright of “burning conviction,” “courageously enduring silencing and persecution,” with the “bounced Czech,” the emigré turned English dandy, “withdrawing with style from the chaos.” Tynan lambastes Travesties for preferring art for art’s sake over political action. He questions Stoppard for not exploring his mother’s flight from Czechoslovakia with her children nor his father’s death nor his Jewishness.

He characterizes Stoppard’s public persona as “cool, clever, glamorous, witty and self-preserving.” Tynan “rustled up some old cronies and rivals” to say how much Stoppard “likes to be liked” and is “emotionally guarded.” Tynan comments on Stoppard’s oft-remarked-upon resemblance to Mick Jagger. (In one photo Stoppard looks to me disconcertingly like Jeanne Moreau.)

Why would Tynan, his friends, turn on him? He’s wounded. His mother is wounded. He never asked his mother about his past because the past troubled her.

Lee becomes a mother hen defending her Czech, lamenting that “Tynan had misrepresented him.” But Stoppard’s tolerance allows him the grace to speak at Tynan’s memorial three years later, remarking how Tynan was “part of his luck.”

The plays come. The movie work. Night and Day with Maggie Smith. Defending press freedom.

Then the smash The Real Thing—not about science or philosophy or Shakespeare but divorce. It opened first in London but found its true life in New York in 1984 in a glittering incarnation starring the glamorous Jeremy Irons, directed by Broadway’s golden boy, Mike Nichols, a kindred spirit brought as a child from Germany to America to become, like Stoppard, an avatar of success … (Read Part Two of this post here!)

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John Guare is a playwright. His works include House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation. His most recent play was Nantucket Sleigh Ride at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center. He has written about Elaine Strich and Stephen Sondheim for Book Post.

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