The Writer and Director

The writer and director Specific learning outcomes Students will: • understand the process of developing this script. • examine how a scene in the play has been developed by the director. • understand the writer’s purpose in developing this play • understand and be able to describe the features of Stoppard’s writing • identify key ideas in the play. [These learning outcomes relate to the Communication and Interpreting in Drama (CI) and Understanding Drama in Context (UC) strands in The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum.] Tom Stoppard “If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play.” Tom Stoppard Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler on 3 July 1937 in Zlín, Czech Republic. Stoppard’s father, Eugene Straussler, was a company physician whose Czech company sent the family to a branch factory in Singapore in 1938/39. After the Japanese invasion, his father stayed on and was killed in a prisoner of war camp, but Mrs Straussler and her two sons escaped to India, where she married a British officer, Kenneth Stoppard, in 1946. At the age of nine, Tom and his family went to live in England. Tom Stoppard (he assumed his stepfather’s surname) quit school at the age of 17 and started his career as a journalist in Bristol. He began to write plays in 1960 after moving to London. Travesties: The writer and director, page 1 Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Stoppard’s bibliography of plays, radio dramas and film scripts is extensive. He has also worked as a script doctor and re-written (uncredited) on various Hollywood films, including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Sleepy Hollow (1999), and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). Stoppard’s life and personal relationships have been a matter of public record. They have included two marriages, one to a well-known English celebrity doctor Miriam Stoppard, and a very public affair with actress Felicity Kendal. Stoppard was awarded the CBE in 1978 and was knighted in 1997. Travesties is the third Stoppard play that Auckland Theatre Company has staged in the past five years, after Arcadia in 1997 and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 2001. Travesties: The writer and director, page 2 Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Trademarks of Stoppard’s plays Stoppardian as a theatrical term has been defined as “an innovatively structured theatrical extravaganza filled with a plethora of jokes and puns, conflicting arguments, intellectual inquiry, elaborate allusions, and cerebral wit”. A Stoppard play tends to overflow with ideas – philosophical, scientific and literary. Tom Stoppard is noted for his idiosyncratic style, artful and complex construction, deft parody, wide-ranging knowledge, and ability to find significance in wordplay and bizarre juxtapositions of language and character. The plots tend to be difficult to pin down in terms of “beginning-middle-end” summations. He possesses a playful attitude towards time and space. Most of his plays are episodic and rarely follow a linear direction. In Travesties it is quite impossible to follow and put the events into correct order. In fact, Stoppard has admitted that he has problems thinking of stories: “Every one of my plays is flawed by this. I have to exert myself enormously to construct a story and then tell it properly.” With plot or without, all his plays contain a great deal of humour. Puns, allusion, word play of all kinds keep audiences alert and amused. As Stoppard himself once said about his love for words, “I really dig words more than I can speak them. There are no words to say how much I love [words].” Stoppard’s dramatic work is considered to be post-absurdist in the sense that “he appropriates the spirit of absurdity rather than the technique”. He introduces on the stage either a seemingly straightforward story or an absurd situation, each arousing different expectations in the spectator. In Travesties, Joyce, Lenin and Dadaist Tristan Tzara, each with their particular modes of literary or political discourse, are incongruously packed together within the Wildean medium of high comedy. By a theatrically contrived juxtaposition of realistic and absurdist elements within the framework of the same play, Stoppard shakes our firm stand as to what is to be considered “realistic” or “absurd”. (See definitions in the box below.) Stoppard also utilises Bertolt Brecht’s epic techniques (verfremsdungeffekt or “alienation effects”). By interrupting our involvement in the plot of the play (by use of song, dance, time structure or even limericks!) he allows the audience to maintain a distance that serves to hinder emotional involvement and invites intellectual response. Brecht maintained that, in order to avoid the spectator’s automatic perception, the playwright had to show him familiar things in an unfamiliar way. (Brecht used the term “making strange”.) The aim is for the spectator to perceive it as if for the first time. Stoppard’s plays challenge the way we see things. Stoppard has been labelled jokingly as a master plagiarist due to the fact that a good number of his plays have intertextual ties with master works. In intertextualising his texts (inserting lines from other plays), Stoppard certainly owes most to Shakespeare. Two of his plays which use Shakespearian works as a base are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Dogg’s Hamlet. These can be enjoyed without a thorough knowledge of the text of Hamlet, but it would be a pity to miss the links between Shakespeare’s tragedy and Stoppard’s plays. Travesties has intertextual ties with Shakespeare as well as Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Travesties: The writer and director, page 3 Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties Overall, Stoppard aims at involving his audience in an intellectual activity while also producing an entertaining show. Absurdism Works of dramatists who share a similar view of the futility of the human existence. They believe that this condition can be shown only in plays that are absurd. The ideas behind the plays are allowed to dictate the dramatic structure. Despite their dislocated language, illogical plots and intellectual seriousness, the plays are often comic. Well-known absurdist drama includes the Monty Python films. Realism A theatrical movement of the late 19th Century, in which artificiality of style was replaced by a naturalistic depiction of real life situations and characters. This idea revolutionised contemporary theatre. Travesties: The writer and director, page 4 Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties So, what’s it all about? Understanding all the nuances placed in the work undoubtedly enhances the enjoyment of a Stoppard play. Travesties is mainly concerned with artists and their relationship with the world in which they live. It is one of Stoppard’s basic assumptions that the artist creates a world of his own, and, to an extent, lives in it as an alternative to the real world. In Travesties we have two artists, Tzara and Joyce, with very different approaches to their life and art. For Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist, art is a revolutionary act in itself, breaking down our usual assumptions about the world, and art: TZARA (TO JOYCE) You’ve turned literature into a religion and it’s as dead as all the rest. It’s an overripe corpse and you’re cutting fancy figures at the wake. It’s too late for geniuses: Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist! For James Joyce, art is justifiable for its own sake, operating on a level above political or social revolution: JOYCE As an artist, naturally I attach no importance to the swings and roundabouts of political history. Lenin is a third voice in the argument, asserting that art is only valid as an aid to political revolution. Each character’s attitude is reflected in the way in which he uses language: LENIN Today, literature must become party literature. Down with non- partisan literature. Down with literary supermen. Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, a cog in the Social Democratic mechanism. TZARA Dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada. JOYCE Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. The arguments about the relationship between art and society are one level on which the play functions. More importantly, we are given an overview of the whole problem, and here Stoppard uses the stage to dramatise a concept – by the fact that we are seeing the events of the play through the distorting medium of Henry Carr’s memory. Henry Carr, a genuine historical figure, is somewhat overshadowed by the notoriety of the men around him and his opinions are often overlooked. Yet the debate occurs within Carr’s memory, and the play makes it clear that the events presented are highly coloured by Carr’s remembering them. Indeed, Carr’s introductions of each of the other three participants in the debate emphasise their status as products of his memory – “James Joyce As I Knew Him”, “Lenin As I Knew Him”, “Memories of Dada by a Consular Friend of the Famous in Old Zurich: A Sketch”. Travesties: The writer and director, page 5 Accessed from The Arts/Ngā Toi materials, www.tki.org.nz/r/arts/drama/travesties We are reminded that Carr is the narrator by the repeated “time slips”, in which a scene is played two or three times, but slightly differently each time as Carr’s memory plays tricks on him.

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