The Innermost Doll: On the Jewishness of Stoppard and the uselessness of Art
“I’m losing my health and making enemies all over the shop,” exclaims the struggling literary critic Belinsky in part one of The coast of Utopia “as I believe literature alone can, even now, redeem our honor, even now, in words alone, that have ducked and dodged their way past the censor, literature can be…become…can.” At wich point he runs out of breath and self-confidence for a moment before resuming: “Art has the right to be useless,an end in itself,for its own sake…It only has to be true.” Invoking the image of wooden matryoshkas, he clarifies: “Not true to the facts, not true to appearances, but true to the innermost doll, where genius and nature are the same stuff. That’s what makes an artist moral.”
I find that such an extraordinary statement. In a culture in which art is increasingly instrumental and theater is expected to make a point or stake a claim, Tom Stoppard’s work has always been the wild and irreverent outlier, always true to its “innermost doll.” With each new play,he conjured a world we’d never been to,colliding people together who would never actually have met,detonating ideas that bounced off each other with the delightful music of his vast creativity.
Being in the rehearsal room with Tom was like a mashup of a sports event and a colloquium: You got smarter and you got faster as time went along. The reason we who had the privilege of working with him loved it so much is that his plays demand the highest level of collaboration from everyone involved. Although, like Henry in The Real Thing Stoppard believed that “words are sacred. Thay demand respect,” he also understood that a playscript is the springboard by which other artists can dive into the pool. That’s why he was never prescriptive, either ideologically or theatrically. In contrast, he was most delighted when you arrived at a solution he hadn’t considered himself. Which meant that I always had to up my game when I worked on one of his plays.
I first met Tom in a bar at the National Theatre in 1993 when I was trying to get the rights to Arcadia for American Conservatory Theater. Hoping he’d take me seriously,I had dressed up in a suit to meet him (that made him laugh-he later told me I looked like a banker). I needn’t have worried.It wasn’t just the slight hint of an Eastern European accent I immediately sensed; he also had a warmth, a sexuality, an eccentricity, a shyness (that “outsider” status), a verbal panache, and an intellectual curiosity that felt familiar to me. Under the British veneer, he was at heart a Central European Jewish refugee, like my beloved mother, whom he came to know and admire later in life. I could tell that somewhere underneath, there was sorrow-a sorrow that reminded me of my stunning Viennese grandmother, on whose face there was always the trace of a memory of what she had lost. As soon as I met Tom,I began to understand Arcadia in a different way: Thomasina’s anguished exclamations about the lost plays of Euripides,while hilarious,were also Tom’s way of reckoning with the grief of losing art destroyed by war,ideology,and indifference.
I proceeded to spend much of my career as artistic director of ACT directing Stoppard plays, and almost every time I did, he was with u
Remembering Tom Stoppard: A Director’s Tribute
This piece is a personal tribute by theatre director Carey Perloff to the late playwright tom stoppard, reflecting on his life, work, and impact on her own.
Perloff describes Stoppard as a man of duality – “a man with two names, two histories, two selves,” a characteristic she believes fueled his dramatic genius. Despite lacking a university education, he penned the acclaimed play The Invention of love, set at Oxford, demonstrating a lifelong dedication to learning, echoing the sentiment expressed by hannah in Arcadia: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.”
Stoppard’s life became intertwined with Perloff’s family over many years. Her son, Nick, composed the score for The Hard Problem, while her mother, Marjorie’s, memoir served as inspiration for Leopoldstadt. A poignant connection also existed through their shared experiences with physician fathers specializing in cardiology. Perloff recalls a especially moving moment during rehearsals for Indian Ink in New York, shortly after learning of her father’s death. As the character Das explained the “rasa” – the moods and colors of emotion – she received a comforting gesture from Stoppard. When Flora asked if there was a color for grey, Das, prompted by Stoppard’s touch, replied, “Grey is for sorrow.”
Perloff deeply valued Stoppard’s friendship and mentorship. He gifted her a set of Indian prints with handwritten captions when Indian Ink was revived in 2014, one depicting a woman with a scimitar, captioned: “Carey-how I see you! With love from Tom.” She describes his influence as transformative, stating he “cracked open my world.” She expresses her hope to continue directing his plays, believing his spirit will remain present in future productions, particularly in the upcoming Chicago run of Leopoldstadt [https://www.writerstheatre.org/events/leopoldstadt].
Stoppard himself viewed playwriting not as work, but as a fundamental part of life, stating, “When I’m writing a play, that’s not a job. Writing a play is life.”
Carey Perloff is a renowned American theatre director, playwright, author, and educator. She served as the artistic director of American Conservatory Theater in san Francisco from 1992 to June 2018.