. . . With the Words of Stoppard

In the summer of 1965, when I was a little more than a fledgling director myself, I was asked to “enlighten” a group of up-and-coming British writers buoyed up by Ford Foundation grants at a retreat in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin best remembered as the site of the Wannsee Conference, at which Hitler’s “final solution” was casually ratified.

It was here that I first met Tom Stoppard, and my most vivid memory of him is when, in conversation with other members of his group (which included Piers Paul Read, Derek Marlowe and Peter Bergman), he blithely and unself-consciously referred to himself and his cohorts as “the coming men.” How refreshingly conceited, I thought to myself, to already know with certainty that one was “a coming man” and to be able to label oneself as such. But Tom was correct. He “came on” very rapidly after that.

Toward the end of the seminar, each writer had to present an excerpt from some work in progress, and I was expected informally to adjudicate. Tom’s excerpt, the weirdest of the lot, concerned two minor characters from “Hamlet” who spent a lot of time tossing coins in the air and receiving visits from a hoary old self-denigrating gent called King Lear.

It struck me as an unsalvageable piece of academic twaddle, and I remember thinking that Stoppard, whom I knew as a sometime reviewer in London, would probably be more gainfully employed knocking out copy on Fleet Street. Two years later, rejigged and refined, Lear deleted and a slate of new material inserted, the play emerged on the stage of the National Theatre as “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”

It was like an idiot child making such a miraculous transformation that he was now ready to take up his duties as Dean of Linguistic Philosophy at Oxford or Cambridge. As I lacerated my palms expressing my enthusiasm, I had a disturbing little flashback to the tiny Berlin stage where I had seen the play gestate and, downgrading my powers of perception by several notches, marveled at the transmutations of which art was capable.

Since then, Stoppard has been second only to Pinter in the British Parthenon, and his resourcefulness has already been confirmed with half a dozen major successes.

His nemesis has always been an overreaching cleverness--a kind of ebullient literacy that toys with and occasionally illuminates deeper subjects. For many, he is more captivating as a juggler of words than ideas; indeed, one often feels the intellectual implications are spin-offs from an overdeveloped linguistic facility.

It is this dazzling verbal ambidextrousness that one remembers from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Thematically, the plight of two existentially confused, non-activist characters waiting for the stimuli of outside events is too heavily indebted to Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”

In “Jumpers,” showing how the profoundest thinkers can be blind to common-sense reality, he deftly juggles a number of abstract ideas in one hand and a set of pop icons in the other. In “Travesties”--in many ways his richest and ripest play--the brilliant undergraduate farceur tends to monopolize the evening. Its scenes of literary pastiche soar even as its Leninesque dissertations on revolution lumber.

What is always arresting in Stoppard is that outside-looking-in perspective that enables significant events--such as the Russian revolution, the rise of Dada and the travails of James Joyce (in “Travesties”) or the central action of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”)--to be glimpsed, as it were, through the wrong end of the telescope.

Paradoxically, Stoppard is most airborne when carrying the heaviest freight--and the consequence of this paradox is that his deepest concerns often appear trivial. A word that, by now, he must be profoundly sick of.

In an interview I did with him in 1975, I asked if it was true to say he had no strong political feelings. “I’m not impressed by art because it’s political,” he replied. “I believe in art being good art or bad art, not relevant art or irrelevant art. The plain truth is that if you are angered or disgusted by a particular injustice or immorality and you want to do something about it, now, at once, then you can hardly do worse than write a play about it. That’s what art is bad at.”

However, in recent years, Stoppard, like Pinter, appears to have developed a Johnny-Come-Lately political awareness and in works such as “Professional Foul,” “Every Good Boy Deserves a Favor” and “Night and Day,” has foisted a new aspect of his literary personality. For my money, most of these fail to convince as “political statements,” but in a romantic comedy such as “The Real Thing,” Stoppard’s talent and subject-matter splendidly coalesce.

Treating subjects like infidelity and the hunger for genuine as opposed to delusional experience, he appears to have found his truest voice. In the fullness of its range, it is the voice of an incisive, skeptical, bemused observer of human foibles (more Marivaux than Moliere) who uses comedy to agitate social and psychological insights.

The wellspring of many of Stoppard’s characters (here too, he resembles Pinter) is boredom. Marowitz is a critic, playwright, director and founder of London’s Opens Space Theater. His new play, “Wild West,” opened Saturday at Houston’s Main St. Theatre.

One feels they are not motivated by conviction so much as the need to amuse or reanimate themselves.

Yet Stoppard, unlike many of his earlier contemporaries, is constantly changing. The retention of his adolescent ebullience along with a denser subject matter may well raise him to a higher ground--far above the scrawnier talents of Alan Ayckbourn and Michael Frayn, with whom he is frequently, though misleadingly, compared.

One looks forward to “Hapgood” to see which way the Stoppardian weathercock is pointing.