Taken together, “Hapgood” and “Areadia” make up Stoppard’s crash course in the seminal ideas of the century. “Hapgood” uses the world of quantum physics as a metaphor for the world of espionage, with its triple-crosses and duplicitous identities. In “Arcadia” he brilliantly entwines past and present in a double helix of emotion and thought. in the setting of a great English country estate, Stoppard shifts between the early 19th and late 20th centuries, examining basic oppositions within the Western mind: classic-romantic, free will-determinism, love-lust. science-art, orderchaos. His 1809 teenage heroine, Thomasina Coverly, a mathematics prodigy, discovers what would be known as chaos theory some 170 years later. Her intuitive leap is Stoppard’s charming way of signaling the shift from the classical. ordered universe of Newton to the emotional anarchies of the Romantic era. Offstage, the poet Byron makes his contribution to the dalliances and duels that enliven the household. These events are linked to the modern era, where young scholars Hannah Jarvis and Ben Nightingale do a screwball-comedy mating dance as they compete to uncover what happened on the estate a century and a half ago.
Stoppard’s unique genius is to humanize ideas -logical positivism in “Jumpers,” dadaism in “Travesties”–to show how they are part of our flesh and bone, our passion and pathos. “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter,” says Hannah, speaking for Stoppard. His craving to know is poured into the plays; in person he never breaks his cool diffidence. “I’m quite sheepish about being ’the playwright who writes about science’,” he says. “As a dramatist I’m aware of its metaphorical power. And that makes me want to understand more.”
Cool, too, is his reaction to critics who complain about these plays. “Virtually incomprehensible,” was English critic Michael Coveney’s verdict on ‘Arcadia." “There’s no one like Tom Stoppard for making you feel both spoiled and inadequate as an audience.” Yet ‘Arcadia" runs and runs in London and “Hapgood” had to extend its New York run twice. “It’s my experienced say this gently-that audiences seem to have a lot less trouble than certain critics,” says Stoppard. In the age of toothless sound bites and attention-span interruptus, Stoppard does ask you to turn on your brain. Diana Rigg, who starred in the 1972 “Jumpers,” which mixed logical positivism with gymnastics, striptease, murder and moon landing, said, “Tom expects his audiences to lean forward in their seats and take note of absolutely everything.”
It’s ironic that some critics have used the phrase “university wit” to put down Stoppard for frivolity and shallowness. Stoppard never attended any university. When he lectured last year at the invitation of the California Institute of Technology, he mocked his own “belated” learning, acquired through omnivorous reading. “At the age of forty-something I was exclaiming, ‘My gosh, this is amazing! How interesting!’ about stuff which anybody who had stuck with physics through high school was wearily familiar with.” But what’s important is the insight that he gave the Caltech audience that “science and art are nowadays beyond being like each other. Sometimes they seem to be each other.” The scientific stuff in “Arcadia” isn’t just trappings. Before the play opened in London the cast and the director, Trevor Nunn (who is staging the play in New York), had to attend a five-day “seminar” to acquaint themselves with the ideas that drive the play intellectually and emotionally. “In London,” says Stoppard, “we actually had a scientist talking to us, Robert May, a biologist who works in chaos theory. In New York, I unfortunately had to take that role myself I had to put myself through a crash course to remind myself of what I knew.”
Stoppard understands that the new formulations of science and thought are changing art because they are changing the shape of reality. Critics have always been divided about him: for some he’s a flashy dilettante, for others he has created a new kind of moral comedy in which his Nabokovian, Joycean gift for language fires words like bullets at deception and falsehood. Other critics have questioned Stoppard’s turning away from social problems. “I have no quarrel with that,” says Stoppard. “It’s simply a difference of temperament. If an artist wants to grapple with these things, then he must do so. But when I hear an artist making those claims, I recoil. W.H. Auden said that his poems didn’t save one Jew. I think art does a great deal; it can affect the moral sensibilities of a society. But it does so in a subterranean way.”
A superb entertainer, Stoppard sees no conflict between that and true seriousness. “Art has a purpose which doesn’t get as much attention as it ought to. The primary reason for its existence is as recreation.” But Stoppard’s idea of recreation is not Hollywood’s. “Arcadia” is part detective story, part sex comedy, part classic farce, part intellectual thriller, part historical drama, part poignant tragedy.
His rejection of the political function of theater may be tied to the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia. His family fled first the Nazis, to Singapore, then the Japanese. A self-described “bounced Czech,” Stoppard visited the Soviet Union for Amnesty International in 1977 and returned to Czechoslovakia to meet with Vaclav Havel, whom he calls ,‘my mirror image." In plays like “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour” and “Cahoot’s Macbeth” he dealt with the Kafkaesque absurdity of Soviet repression. Now that is gone.
So he writes his kind of play, prismatic comedy in which language celebrates the certainty that there are no certainties. Twice divorced, with four sons, he lives alone in a Chelsea flat, near Felicity Kendal, the star of many of his plays, with whom he has a long-term relationship. After the games and scams of “Hapgood,” the play ends with the title character, code-named Mother, happily watching her son playing rugby. “Miriam, my second wife, used to chase up and down the touchline watching our sons play,” says Stoppard. And “Arcadia” ends with two waltzes interlacing in two centuries. Stoppard’s thirst to know affirms that love is the deepest form of knowing.
