“Appearance is never the full story”: Tom Stoppard in his own words
Learn more about one of the Lantern’s favorite (and most frequently produced) playwrights
“People don’t realize that the part of the playwright is finding something for people to talk about,” playwright Tom Stoppard told The New Yorker. In his madcap comedy Travesties — onstage at Lantern Theater Company September 8 through October 9, 2022 — his characters and the audience watching them face no shortage of conversation topics. Art and revolution, Dada and Wilde, pacifism, socialism, aestheticism — Stoppard’s James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Lenin, and Henry Carr discuss them all.
Tom Stoppard was born Tomáš Straussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, just before World War II. The family was Jewish, and the war sent them on a global search for safety and stability. They fled first to Singapore, then to India and Australia. When Stoppard was eight, his widowed mother married Kenneth Stoppard, an Englishman, and they moved to the UK shortly after the war, giving the young boy a new home, a new country, and a new name. It took decades for Stoppard to start exploring his own past, as he does in Leopoldstadt, his most recent play. “My mother essentially drew a line and didn’t look back. My name was changed, I was British, and I really began to love England in every sense — the landscape, the literature,” Stoppard told the The New York Times. “I don’t recall ever consciously resisting finding out about myself. It’s worse than that. I wasn’t actually interested. I was never curious enough. I just looked in one direction: forward.”
In his early career, Stoppard worked as a reporter and a theater critic before turning to writing plays for both the stage and the radio. He was astonishingly prolific; in the 10 years between his first play and 1976’s Travesties, he wrote six pieces for the radio and 13 for the stage, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his breakout hit. Since Travesties, he has remained active, writing more than 20 original plays and adaptations for the stage, including Leopoldstadt, in performance on Broadway this fall.
Stoppard’s plays are characterized by dazzling language, but they are also highly varied in both form and topic. In his director’s program note for the Lantern’s production of Travesties, Lantern Artistic Director Charles McMahon writes: “All of his works are radically different from one another in style, tone, and genre, but core themes emerge that tie them all together as the life’s work of a mind on a mission to tease some pattern out of a chaotic world.” Stoppard’s plays take inspiration from British spy novels and quantum physics, chaos theory and Romanticism, Soviet-era politics, Shakespeare, and much more.
Stoppard has long been a favorite of the Lantern and its audiences, and Travesties is the sixth of his plays to be produced on our stage. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a riff on Hamlet told from the perspective of the titular minor characters, appeared in the theater’s third season in 1997. Rough Crossing, produced in 1998, is Stoppard’s free translation of a Hungarian comedy set on board a luxury ocean liner. In 2013, the theater company produced Heroes, Stoppard’s adaptation of a French comedy set among restless occupants of a retired soldiers’ home. 2014 brought Arcadia; among Stoppard’s most beloved plays, it uses chaos theory, Romanticism, and math to tell a story across two centuries. And in 2018, the Lantern produced Hapgood, an ingenious take on British spy novels and science.
“Obviously, the plays are more unlike each other than like each other, but people who take pleasure in finding connections will have no trouble finding them,” Stoppard told The New Yorker. Indeed, his plays very often play with perspective in one way or the other, as though he is turning about an issue in his hands and writing from every angle he finds. The topics and the manner in which they are explored may be different, but they have that rigorous and joyful exploration in common. According to McMahon, “There is no clear lesson except that your assumptions will always be overturned and that the appearance is never the full story.”
Travesties is no exception to this sense of shifting perspectives; time slips in and out of linearity, scenes are repeated through different contexts, and influences like The Importance of Being Earnest are gleefully layered and repurposed. That glee is another commonality in Stoppard’s work: the feeling that he truly loves the topic he has chosen to delve into, and that he wants you to as well, all while continuing to probe the depths and limits of the play and its themes. According to McMahon, “To work on a play by Tom Stoppard is to enter into his obsessions and share them for months at a time.” One gets the sense throughout Travesties and Stoppard’s full body of work that sharing those obsessions is — to borrow words from both this play and Earnest — the thing that brings him the most “pleasure, pleasure, what else?”
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Travesties by Tom Stoppard is onstage September 8 through October 9, 2022, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
