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Stoppardian: (adj.) writing marked by “elegant wit while addressing philosophical concerns.” ~ OED, 1978
The death at the end of last month of Sir Tom Stoppard (born Tomáš Straüssler), the modern theatre’s larger-than-life playwright whose plays managed to juggle profundity with introspection, jokes, riddles and philosophical puzzles, prompts me to recall his 1979 visit to Australia.
The scene is WAIT§, February 1979, Tom—the innovative and original wordplay maven, the mental acrobatics guru—is on an arts panel of the annual Festival of Perth. Stoppard as one of the most prominent Festival guests gets asked a series of not very imaginative questions by eager little college drama students, some of which are dragged out to labyrinthine lengths and tortuously, impossibly convoluted. One question-poser, stumbling over his meandering, increasingly incomprehensible question, suddenly spurts out “you’re a modern writer, writing today and it was so so long ago…in terms of do you dig Shakespeare???” Tom’s response, no doubt with a wry smile, once he recomposes himself at such a facile question, is something along the lines of “Sure…but let’s face it, not every writer in the world whose dead is good!”
Moving on, Stoppard fields another, slightly more germane if obvious question. A question the author of Rosencrantz and Guilderstern had without a doubt heard a 1,000 times before…”But what does your play really mean?”, he is earnestly asked. Being Stoppard, his response is razor-sharp original and clearly one that had been devised, fit for purpose, as a retort for every new iteration of this old hobby-horse question. Unfazed, Stoppard answers with a metaphor: “It’s a bit like going through customs. You put your luggage on the table, the customs official asks if you have anything to declare. You say, no, not really, it’s just a play about two insignificant, dim couriers, who hang around Elsinore doing nothing much and they die. Then the official opens the bag and starts ransacking the contents, intentional fallacies to the right, objective correlatives to the left and all manner of exotic contraband in-between, the nature of God and identity, etc. etc. The official asks you to explain all of these undeclared items and while you can't deny that they're there, you can't for the life of you remember packing them!” Boom-boom!
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| Tom readies himself for the next genius question at the FoP while his fellow panel members smoke furiously (which shouldn’t surprise anyone as Peter Stuyvesant was one of the Festival’s sponsors and they probably handed out free ciggies to the guests) |
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§ West Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University)
