Tom Stoppard, Rock Star

“He’s a rock star,” noted Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies was overheard saying as he and hundreds of other Tom Stoppard fans searched for seats in the packed Yale University Theater auditorium on Monday afternoon. The line to get in to see Stoppard deliver a lecture extended halfway down the block outside the theater. The theater seats 620; dozens, if not hundreds, were turned away.

While the massive crowd was clogging the entranceways, Stoppard could be seen outside the stage door in the alley behind the building, smoking a cigarette and conversing quietly with just a couple of people.

Stoppard gave the Maynard Mack Lecture at the theater Monday in advance of Yale Rep’s staging of his play Arcadia, which opens Oct. 3.

When Tom Stoppard has spoken at Yale before, he’s actually given speeches, lengthy talks on the value of theater in today’s world. Despite its name, the Maynard Mack Lecture tends to be more of a moderated question-and-answer sort of thing. The series isn’t geared to those who can be trusted to bring prepared speeches; of the two dozen recipients so far, only three have been playwrights.

On the stage of the Yale University Theater, Stoppard was quizzed by Murray Biggs, adjunct associate professor of theater studies. For an event honoring eminent ​“theater practioners,” held at one of the major Yale performance venues, the technical aspects of the presentation left a lot to be desired. A microphone on a mic stand cut out, then so did the clip-mic on Stoppard’s shirt, so the playwright and his interviewer had to deal with hand-held microphones.

Biggs asked pointedly about how actors approach the playwright’s work. Stoppard dismissed ​“the pursuit of psychological motivation” as something he personally doesn’t think about, though actors certainly do.

Likewise, he deflected a question about his ​“writing process” by saying he uses paper and a fountain pen.

When Biggs pressed him about how he might ​“comfort” audiences who’ve seen Arcadia yet still don’t understand chaos theory, Stoppard retorted, ​“Comfort them? I just beat them about the head for a while and move on.” Later, he acknowledged that he doesn’t expect people to come to his plays with any special advance knowledge of their subjects (which can range from topical political issues to art history to, in his next play, evolutionary science). ​“Audiences are not required to know anything about anything,” he stated flatly. ​“Knowledge? No. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Anything they need to know, the play will tell them.”

Many of the questions seemed to deal with whether critics and audiences really ​“got” his work — until Stoppard firmly declared, ​“I think I’m being presented as an inaccessible kind of writer” by critics and scholars, but that he’s never gotten that impression from theater audiences.

Stoppard was a refreshing change from all the playwrights who trash directors, producers, actors and designers or anyone else who’s handy for ​“destroying” their work. For his part, Stoppard doesn’t think of his writing as ​“something to be defended against the thing. … I’m an empirical artist. I work in a physical space with others. I work with them.”

As for theater versus film (he won an Academy Award for co-writing Shakespeare in Love) or TV (he adapted Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End novels in 2012) or radio (last year he did a Pink Floyd pastiche called Darkside on BBC Radio 2 for the 40th anniversary of the Dark Side of the Moon album), Stoppard said his stage plays are ​“the real thing, really. When I started, I wanted to be a writer for the boards.”

With that, Stoppard tapped his foot on the Yale University Theater stage and explained that screenplays and other projects are just things he does in between writing his stage plays.

He may be an acquired taste, but Tom Stoppard is funny and articulate and entertaining, whether in person or in script form. When questions from the audience were too concerned with specific images from specific plays (“Why did you write the Ginger Cat into one scene of The Coast of Utopia and not bring it back?”), the playwright openly worried that he was boring much of the audience. (“Is this a private meeting in some sense?”) He would cleverly deflect some questions with responses that were broader or funnier. When asked about the current Roundabout Theater revival of his Indian Ink, a 1990 radio play which he turned into a stage play in 1995 and which has never been produced in New York until now, he forgot the exact question before deciding that ​“my answer is better than your question” and embarking on an elaborate description of a disastrous, glitch-infested performance of the play last Friday.

Rock & Roll

Stoppard the rock star has in fact written a play called Rock & Roll. It’s about, among other things, the political situation in Czechoslavakia, where he was born and lived for a few years in the 1930s. Stoppard’s plays aren’t always what their titles might suggest. The Real Inspector Hound and The Real Thing are about illusions, not real things. Brazil, the Terry Gilliam black-comedy masterpiece for which Stoppard wrote the screenplay, is not about Brazil. Likewise, Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia aren’t exactly set in those legendary places. Stoppard is known his dazzling wordplay and his keen intelligence, but as he said at his Yale talk, ​“I’ve never written anything that’s designed not to get a laugh at any moment.” His Yale appearance was characteristically erudite, in-the-moment and amusing.

Tom Stoppard is beloved by Yale. There likely isn’t a single one of his scripts that hasn’t been staged by ambitious undergraduates. The biggest undergrad drama group on campus, the Yale Dramat, has done six Stoppard shows since 1997, including such relative rarities as Dogg’s Hamlet and the playwright’s adapatation of Pirandello’s Henry IV. The Yale Repertory Theatre did Stoppard’s translation of his friend Vaclav Havel’s political drama Largo Desolato in 1990, the comedy Rough Crossing in 2008 and will be doing Arcadia, his large-cast play about culture, relationships and chaos theory next month. (The Yale Dramat has already done Arcadia twice.) The Yale School of Drama produced his modern romance The Real Thing in 2005. Elsewhere in New Haven, the Long Wharf Theater has staged Stoppard’s classic riff on Shakespeare, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and his history mix Travesties.

While on campus, Stoppard met with playwriting students at the Yale School of Drama, did a live broadcast from The Study Hotel for Colin McEnroe’s WNPR radio show, and met with the cast and creative team who’ll be doing Arcadia at the Rep.

Stoppard has been a rock-star playwright for most of his career. At the Yale talk you could see why. In his plays, and when talking about his plays, he keeps the discussion in the here-and-now. He’s got a voice that audiences cherish and want to hear more of. And while he pokes pomposity and doesn’t appear to suffer fools gladly, he’s extraordinarily gracious and patient when doing so. (Take that, Edward Albee.) Early on in the Maynard Mack Lecture, he thanked Yale in general for ​“your collective warmth.” Rock on.