It embarrasses me to admit that I'm a skeptic where the plays of Tom Stoppard are concerned. It embarrasses me because I'm aware that many fine critics consider Stoppard a major writer and that several consider at least one of his plays a modern classic. But from the first Stoppard production I saw 30 years ago to the one I'm reviewing in this week's column, I've been disappointed with his work.
It's not that I doubt Stoppard's formidable intellect or his ability to write a page or 90 of literate dialogue. But he seems to me to be lacking a few features essential for a top talent: original ideas, emotional commitment and, not least, a sense of the audience and its rhythms. I've only seen one mostly satisfying Stoppard play: Travesties, in London with a terrific cast. But I remember even then feeling let down that in a play about the different approaches to making art, the author had strangely declined to specify his preference.
Other experiences have been even more negative: I've seen several productions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard's "classic") and each time I felt that I was witnessing ersatz Beckett. A recent play like Arcadia — which many critics treated as a masterpiece — left me so bored and frustrated that I didn't stay for Act Two.
A few weeks ago, a Tampa theater company put on a Stoppard one-act, Artist Descending a Staircase, and I experienced my usual encounter with the writer: excitement (maybe this time I'll understand why he's great) followed by ennui and disillusion. How can a man who's a) so well-informed and b) so verbally brilliant have c) so little to say? I don't understand it. Perhaps I never will.
Anyway, it's happened again: I just saw Stoppard's Rough Crossing in a Banyan Theater production and I found it — "scintillating" dialogue and all — dull and unimportant. The problem wasn't the acting, which in almost every case was first-rate; the problem was a script that seems motivated more by an idea of what's humorous than by the real heartfelt and intuitive spirit of comedy.
So I had to endure the interminable running gags — the steward who always drinks the cognac that someone ordered, the character who can't stop noshing, the characters who keep calling each other by the wrong names — because errors made repeatedly are supposed to be funny (they are, if not overdone). And I had to tolerate the interminable puns and miscues ("Dodo" instead of "Dido," "smokesticks" instead of "smokestacks") because puns and miscues are supposed to be comic (they can be, but they weren't here).
Then there's the simple problem of suspense. Stoppard doesn't seem tuned into the collective psyche of his audience, that marvelous organ that accepts only so much mystery before it begins to demand answers, that will laugh and cry for a good writer, but that also absolutely refuses to receive the same information too many times.
There is a dramatic question in Rough Crossing, a problem whose resolution is hard to foresee, but Stoppard's so busy being witty that he seems to forget it, and by the time he returns to it, we've almost lost interest. Surely a great dramatist should have more feel for his audience.
Some basics: Rough Crossing is Stoppard's liberal adaptation of a play by Ferenc Molnár best known in America as The Play's The Thing. Now, The Play's The Thing (first produced in the U.S. in 1926) is a charming "adult" comedy about a young composer who overhears his fiancé having an erotic encounter with another man. One of the composer's professional colleagues, a playwright, tries to salvage the situation by secretly writing a short scene using the exact words that the composer overheard. With a little more play-acting (the playwright reasons), the composer will think he overheard a rehearsal, will be reconciled with his fiancé and will continue a promising and prosperous collaboration with the dramatist. If this sounds like sophisticated fluff, well, that's what it is — though Molnár knows how to hold an audience and gives us a hilarious third act.
As for Stoppard, he makes quite a few changes in this material. Instead of taking place in an Italian castle, Stoppard's action takes place onboard the S.S. Italian Castle. Instead of Molnár's rather ordinary young musician, Stoppard gives us a musician with what's supposed to be a funny speech impediment (it's not). Instead of a play that's only about musical theater, Stoppard's characters occasionally break into song. And so on and so forth.
But does Stoppard introduce any significant ideas? Not a one, not anywhere. Does he modernize in some way? Does he make the play's issues more relevant to a contemporary audience? No, not a bit. What's the greatest difference between the two authors? Well, Stoppard precedes the "rehearsal" of the pivotal new scene with a lengthy parody of English comedy that's neither funny nor revealing. Molnár's play is insignificant but suspenseful; Stoppard's adaptation is insignificant and tiresome.
At least the actors are first class. V Craig Heidenreich is verbally dazzling as playwright Sandor Turai; Tessie Hogan is splendid as prima donna Natasha Navratilova; and Stephen Johnson plays the steward Dvornichek with real elan. Matt Bradford Sullivan plays actor Ivor Fish as the man whose photo is in the dictionary beside the word "vanity," and Rob Houle is credibly naive as composer Adam Adam. Jerry Finn (also Banyan's producer) has his moments, but isn't always convincing as Turai's co-writer Alex Gal. But Jackson Gay's direction is impressively fluid, and David M. Covach's costumes are colorful and eloquent. The blue and brown set, by Jeffrey Dillon and Karle H. Murdock, clearly puts us aboard ship, but makes it difficult to know exactly where — on deck? In a stateroom?
But I know where I am: still looking for that Stoppard play that explains the writer's stature. Maybe the next one will do it. Or the one after that.
Of one thing I'm sure.
It's not Rough Crossing.
Performance Critic Mark E. Leib can be reached at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 305.
This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2003.