Rosencadia: (Re)Writing a Career

For better or worse, the name Tom Stoppard has become synonymous with theatre in modern Britain. Perhaps this is because he has been writing generation-making plays since the term ‘modern Britain’ assumed its present meaning (he is now 87), or perhaps because his immense work has often existed, despite its popularity, on the fringe of contemporary styles of theatre-making.

For example, in the midst of the Woodfall period of UK filmmaking and the ‘kitchen sink’ movement in theatre, Stoppard debuted his one-act tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear which was, by all accounts, as clever and similarly divisive as its expanded incarnation, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (R&G), performed by the Oxford Theatre Group at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1966. 

The success story of R&G is the closest thing that UK theatre has to a nobody-to-somebody Hollywood Dream story, wherein the play — after being mercilessly panned by cowlike festival critics — was given a glowing review in The Observer and made its London debut the following year. It is the kind of story that gives the melting pot of mediocrity that is the largest performing arts festival in the world its romance — the dream lives on in passing fancies like these, whether or not they are attainable to anyone.

Summarising R&G is — like most Stoppard plays — almost impossible. The three things to note about this legendary piece of writing are as follows. 1) It is the epitome of what we would call ‘referentiality’ (to other texts, to itself, etc.) and what critic-speak dubs ‘metafiction’ — it takes place “in the wings” of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as two of the high tragedy’s minor characters reckon with inevitability. 2) R&G is often compared to Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett; Stoppard was evidently influenced by Beckett’s dry, dark wit and the modern condition of ‘waiting’. 3) The play was controversial for the same reason that Stoppard’s later plays would be rejected by theatres like the Royal Court, namely its apparent apoliticism and lack of judgement upon characters, actions, and power. This criticism was levied against plays like Jumpers, which reflect Stoppard’s early conservatism, later abandoned for something which he believes to be the left-liberalism of his late style: The Coast of Utopia to the highly personal epic of the Austrian Jewish experience, Leopoldstadt. Despite its divisiveness as a nonpolitical absurdist play in a period of political severity and post-absurdism, R&G would define its genres from a unique perspective and foreground Stoppard’s later endeavours. It was also a massive success.

Stoppard has said that it takes years for him to finish a “big play”, by which he means the quality and depth of writing rather than its length. Up to five years can pass between “big plays” like Night and Day and The Real Thing, or between Hapgood and the masterpiece of his middle period, Arcadia. If his early style is defined by the formal experimentalism and linguistic back-and-forth of R&G, Stoppard’s post-absurdist flair, which veers focus away from self-consciousness, pastiche, and other postmodernist operators, is best highlighted in Arcadia. 

Again, it is a quintessential Stoppard play, so it is undeniably difficult to summarise in terms of content, but its themes are similarly also about death and inevitability, legacy, and knowledge; it’s a secret tragedy wrapped inside a comedy, as sardonic and farcical as it is devastating. Arcadia is less self-aware of its status as drama compared to R&G, but it makes up for its dismissal of irony in its prima facie sincerity, probably reflecting the maturity of a playwright coming of (middle-)age. But both plays, one progressive and exciting, the other nostalgic yet exciting nonetheless, are exemplars of fiction which cross the boundaries of genre, style, and substance, as emotional as they are cerebral, agonisingly brutal and compulsively funny. Both plays have endured richly, R&G having expanded in stature and influence, Arcadia having arisen to contemporary success and retained its reputation overall.

The mechanism of R&G was revolutionary in the 1960s — a play not within a play, but on the periphery a play — and the mechanism at the nucleus of Arcadia, which is best described as a comedy not of manners but of time, manipulates the stasis that defined R&G into a membrane for mystery and discovery. They are Stoppard at his best. These two plays are mutual masterpieces of dramatic writing which bookend two discrete units of Britain’s best-known living playwright. 

For better or worse, both plays will be performed in this month by the Mermaids Performing Arts Fund, Arcadia at the Byre Theatre on 25 and 26 March directed by the team who brought you Closer last semester (which includes myself), and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the StAge on 30 and 31 March by the team who brought you No Exit. Let Stoppard Week commence!

Image from Wikimedia Commons