Tom stoppard, p.64
Tom Stoppard, page 64
The radio play was well received, and caused a buzz of publicity because of the links with Kendal’s Indian childhood and their new relationship. He was pleased with it, and thought that by comparison Indian Ink was just a piece of craft-work, an enlargement of the original idea. It upset him if his radio work was overlooked. He had a sentence (which he later cut) in his introduction to the Faber reissue of his radio plays, saying how galling it was when people described Arcadia as his first play since Hapgood: “poor In the Native State!”
Initially he intended to make a straightforward stage version of the radio play, for a production by Dan Crawford at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington, scheduled for 1992. But he decided he needed to start again from scratch. He wrote apologetically to Crawford.
It won’t do to stage it in its radio-script form. I want to write it again as a stage play without trying to “save” the radio play. I don’t quite know how to do it…I don’t think it can be simply put on stage like Artist Descending…I know this is disappointing but I hope not incomprehensible.
Instead of going straight ahead with the adaptation of the India play in 1992, he was writing the first screenplay version of Shakespeare in Love, alongside other film work, and engrossed in writing his next new play, Arcadia, which he had started the year before and which would be staged in 1993. And he was celebrating his fifty-fifth birthday, in August that year, with a holiday on Richard Branson’s Caribbean island of Necker. They were a big party: Felicity and her two boys, one of his nephews, Barny, Oliver and his partner, Marie, Ed and a friend. (Will, to his lasting annoyance, had to stay home for a music tour he was managing.) They were “all in one place and in one house on one island for ten days,” as he told Bobby. This was one of the longest times he spent uninterruptedly with Felicity, and the only time, too, that his sons got to know her. It was a luxurious, convivial interlude.
After the holiday, Arcadia took over, and it would be a couple of years before he went back to the India play, with a new title, which he said was a combination of “holy inspiration and the work bench.” Indian Ink was staged in 1995. There had been talk of its going to the small theatre at the National, the Cottesloe, but by 1995 Arcadia had had a long run there, and had transferred to the Haymarket. So Michael Codron took Indian Ink for the Aldwych, and it ran there (after a short out-of-town preview at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford) from 27 February 1995, for ten months, overlapping with Arcadia. As it turned out, this production was to be the final collaboration between Stoppard, Michael Codron, Peter Wood, Carl Toms and Felicity Kendal. Peter Wood found it magical, because “it allowed [Stoppard] to be a poet.” It was the last time they worked together.
In Indian Ink, the “present time” was moved back five years to the “mid-1980s,” so, in 1995, it became a history play twice over. In a new beginning, it started with Flora writing to her sister about her arrival in Jummapur, not with her reading her poem while being painted. There were many changes to the switches between the two time zones, which co-existed (like Arcadia) in one, fluid set. Eldon Pike became an onstage character who visits India in the 1980s. The characterisations became more emphatic. In the dialogue between Anish and Mrs. Swan, a more melancholy note was struck. Mrs. Swan was a Communist in 1930 and has become a conservative; Anish’s father was a nationalist in 1930, but reverted to nostalgic Anglophilia. “He must have—altered,” Anish says. Mrs. Swan replies: “Yes. One alters.”
As always he jibbed at having to give explanations, and he and Peter Wood had their usual arguments about this: “I’m always disappointed by the degree of explicitness which is forced out of me…Peter is constantly at me to help [the audience].” There was much discussion about whether it should be made clear that Flora and Nirad sleep together (as there had been in The Real Thing about Annie and Billy). One tiny detail took up a lot of time. When Nirad explains rasa to Flora, he gives “the scent of sandalwood” as an example of what can arouse it. Much later in the play, he lends her his handkerchief. In the radio play, she says: “Your handkerchief smells faintly of something nice. Is it cinnamon?” But Wood wanted Flora to say: “Is it sandalwood?” so as to remind the audience of rasa. Stoppard noted, during the run of the play: “I refused to let the word sandalwood appear in the scene—to everybody’s fury. Two or three nights ago, I relented.” The change—like many of the small production changes—did not get into the published text. Of course different audiences picked up different things. He was delighted that two people in the audience laughed when Flora, being shown the Rajah’s fleet of cars—a Rolls, a Bentley, a Bugatti—recognises one of them as “a Brancusi.” A fax sent to the stage door, three months after the play had opened, for the attention of Margaret Tyzack and Paul Bhattacharjee, showed how closely he was listening. It concerns two lines between their characters after Mrs. Swan’s outburst about how the British made India a “proper country.”
Anish: Oh yes…I am a guest here and I have been…
Mrs. Swan (calming down): No, only provocative.
Wood had asked Tyzack to speak the line as if it were a question. Stoppard wrote to the actors:
Forgive my ungilding this lily but the interrogative “only provocative” is not what I meant and it bugs me, so I have asked Peter if I may withdraw his suggestion of the other week. Paul, if you slightly slow down the feed “and I have been…,” ie use the three dots, his finding his way to the right word (which might have been “careless”) it gives Mrs. S a moment in which to complete/correct the sense of his statement quite simply. I hope this isn’t annoying. Love, T.
Michael Codron, who thought the play “suffused with the spell that India clearly had for Stoppard,” was anxious about it in its pre-London run, and he too gave Peter Wood a great number of notes. But Codron came to love the production, with its “haunting Indian reed music…and Carl Tom’s gauzy, gliding sets.” There were eloquent performances by Felicity Kendal (who was replaced later in the run by Niamh Cusack), Margaret Tyzack, and Art Malik as Nirad. Stoppard maintained that he didn’t know Malik had starred in The Jewel in the Crown—though he did know “he was the villain in Schwarzenegger’s True Lies.” On the opening night, he was seen edging his way into a middle-row seat, apologising to his neighbours for disturbing them, and then saying amiably: “After all, you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me.”
But it got mixed reviews. One critic complained that throwing a mango at the Resident’s car was a pretty soft-edged critique of empire. And because of the huge response to Arcadia, still running at the Haymarket Theatre, he became somewhat the victim of his own success. Indian Ink was described as a weak follow-up, even though it was, originally, written earlier. “You don’t have to think Arcadia a masterpiece to be stupefied by Indian Ink,” one critic wrote, calling it “a clunky and obvious reworking” of the radio play. Another lamented that it “had neither the emotional impact nor the intellectual razzle-dazzle of Arcadia.” It did not transfer to Broadway, and it would not often be revived. All the same, the India play kept a place in his heart, and for those who worked on it with him, it was “one of the happiest experiences of all the Stoppards.”
24
Arcadia
Thomasina: Yes, we must hurry if we are going to dance.
Valentine: And everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly…
Septimus: Oh, we have time, I think.
Valentine: …till there’s no time left. That’s what time means.
Begun in 1991, worked on through 1992 and staged in 1993, Arcadia is a mid-life play. It is written at a time of looking back and looking forward, just as the play looks back and forward. The parallel lines spoken by Septimus and Valentine in the last act hold in one mental space the moment in which we still have time to act, and the prospect that time will in the end run out, for us individually as well as for the universe: “we have time”/“there’s no time left.” The play is full of anxiety and sadness about time. But it is also a comedy of time, and timings, and plays with time in enchantingly light and suspenseful ways.
Arcadia is a truly original play, and seduced its audiences and readers by being so new and ingenious. The thrill of discovering revolutionary ideas, for the scientists, poets, historians, landscape gardeners and geniuses who inhabit the play, mirrors the ebullient inventiveness of the thing itself.
Time had always been on his mind. It goes right back to his experiments of the 1960s, under the influence of Eliot, with the inexorable ticking taxi meter that measures out Dominic Boot’s day, or Gladys the speaking clock made dizzy by the infinity of time (“Silence is the sound of time passing”), or the early version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Court of King Lear, ending with Hamlet’s soliloquy: “I have time…it will be night soon…I have a lot of time.” Out of that came their play, which they spend killing time, stuck in limbo, not knowing their fate, while scenes from Hamlet, in another time zone, keep rushing in on them at fast-forward speed. Time bumping backwards in curious jolts, in Artist Descending a Staircase; the sadness of lost time cutting across the present in Where Are They Now?; Henry Carr in Travesties talking us back into past time through his fallible rememberings; Hapgood’s particle-like twins operating in two times at once; the see-saw of In the Native State (and then Indian Ink) from the present to the past: all these plays make us think about time. Now, in Arcadia, time is the subject: what is happening to it; how we live in it, not knowing our fates; whether those things which have become “lost to view will have their time again.” Though we must inevitably be lost in time, perhaps time can be conquered, and the past conjured up.
As usual, this was not his only idea. Arcadia is about knowledge, sex and love, death and pastoral, Englishness and poetry, biography and history. Not to mention chaos mathematics, iterated algorithms, Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is a play with one set, set in two time zones. It is a comedy with a tragedy inside it. And it is a quest story, which he kept reminding himself, in his notes, to keep in focus: “Simple narrative must be prime. The poet—the critic—the duel—the Suitor—the Garden—the Waltz. The searcher—the quest—the discovery—(and being wrong)—.”
Set at the start of the nineteenth century and in the late twentieth century, it brings together two kinds of revolutions. One is the shift between Enlightenment and Romantic culture. The other is the recent shift between classical science and new ways of thinking in maths, physics and biology. Neither of these happened all at once. Nobody wakes up one morning to find they are suddenly a Romantic poet as opposed to an Enlightenment satirist (Byron was both), and Newton’s laws weren’t instantly replaced by quantum physics. But the play suggests turning points.
Its two time zones, which run in parallel, converge at the end of the play. So do the two strands of the arts and science, which are not opposites, as some people say, but have a great deal in common, and can be equally creative. The cunning beauty and delight of Arcadia is how its ingredients—human, romantic, intellectual, scientific—are meshed together to make a perfect whole.
In Hapgood, quantum physics and Cold War spying were effortfully brought together. In Arcadia, his eclectic reading led to a more rewarding outcome. He told Bobby in 1991 that he had been reading for a play “about the Romantic/Classical temperament, I mean the change between.” He had been browsing in books on Byron and Romanticism in Paul Johnson’s library, and reading about the history of landscape gardening. And he continually followed new developments in science. He said later: “Arcadia came out of the subjects that had been my enthusiasms over years and years.” He started with two thoughts, how to put “chaos” in a play, and how to have a play with one set, moving through time.
His own self-education was itself an example of what fascinated him: how the mind works things out, how knowledge is acquired and put to use. He enjoys writing plays in which thinkers make sense of the world, or apply logic and reason to what seems impenetrable. He loves to set up complications that require acrobatic feats of ingenuity to solve. He likes to show characters wondering if there is any order inside apparent randomness, like Mr. Moon in Malquist, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tossing coins. He is interested in people who are obsessed with proving the unprovable, like George in Jumpers, or who are gambling on a completely new way of thinking, like the ridiculous Tristan Tzara, or Joyce the modernist genius, or the stubborn Galileo. How do new systems of thought come into the world, and what kinds of people might think them?
Although he is famously a playwright of ideas, who often says that he starts from the idea rather than from the plot or the characters—or his own life—there are always people mixed up with the ideas. Part of what attracted him to quantum physics was the compelling personal voice of Richard Feynman. When he heard that Feynman had died, in 1988, just after Hapgood was launched, he said: “I don’t think I’ve ever read [an obituary] which caused me such a stab of grief as I felt on reading of the death of an American physicist whom I had never met and whose work was way out of the reach of my understanding.” He knew that it was, fundamentally, “grief for myself”: he had wanted to send him Hapgood as “an object of tribute.” But, more than that, he had wanted Feynman to know that he had tried to cross the “great divide in our culture” between science and art. Reading Feynman had confirmed his view that “science and art are more like each other than unlike…[they] are not just like each other, they sometimes seem to be each other.” He called him “an aristocrat in science and a democrat in almost everything else.”
He responded as strongly to James Gleick’s popular 1987 book on chaos theory, which he read soon after Hapgood was done. He was gripped by its account of the new science challenging orthodoxies in maths and physics, and of the solitary, embattled, creative, sometimes unrecognised scientists who brought it to light. “Genius” in science and in art seemed similar to him, and the idea of “genius” is vital to Arcadia.
Quantum physics had appealed to him because it involved doubling and uncertainty, a drastic change from the fixed certainties of classical physics to the realm of unpredictability. Chaos theory, too, involves the relationship between order and randomness, something that had interested him for a long time. He liked the idea of putting something so unlikely and new into a play.
Chaos theory “attempts to systemize that which appears to function outside of any system. It describes a world in which there is chaos in order, but also order in chaos.” Stoppard calls it “a reconciliation between the idea of things not being random on the one hand and yet unpredictable on the other hand.” It appealed to him because it had to do “with the unpredictability of determinism.” In fact, “chaos theory” is a distorting term, because it makes it sound as if it is all about randomness. And for non-scientists, confusingly, it is the same word that we use in everyday speech when we are talking loosely about a state of hopeless disorder. Some scientists prefer to use the term “deterministic chaos,” so as to get in both sides of its meaning, order and unpredictability.
Nor is it just one science. Chaos theory is a hybrid. It mixes together maths, physics, biology, economics, astronomy. It can apply to fluctuating population growth or weather forecasting, turbulence or earthquakes, eclipses or heartbeat patterns, the formation of snowflakes: to any dynamical system where apparent randomness is found to contain order. Grandly put, it is “a science of the global nature of systems.”
“Chaos” got going in the 1970s, so when Stoppard was reading about it, it was still an excitingly new, radical change of direction. In Gleick’s words: “Where chaos begins, classical science stops.” Newtonian, classical science argued for an entirely determined universe. It maintained that given enough information, we can predict future events. The nineteenth-century scientist Pierre Laplace proposed that one could infer from the deterministic laws of the universe a vast entity, or intellect, which could “embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom.” Or as Thomasina Coverly puts it in Arcadia in 1809, several years before Laplace: “If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future.” But classical science ignored, or dismissed as monstrosities, what Gleick calls “the irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side.” Galileo (whose distant shadow haunts Arcadia), Newton and their scientific descendants searched for regularity. But that meant “disregarding bits of messiness that interfere with a neat picture.” The new science wanted to ask big questions: “How does life begin? What is turbulence?…In a universe ruled by entropy, drawing inexorably toward greater and greater disorder, how does order arise?”
Chaos theory took the messiness and disorder on board. Gleick tells the story: “The modern study of chaos began with the creeping realization…that quite simple mathematical equations could model systems every bit as violent as a waterfall. Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.” Chaos theory paid attention to aperiodic systems—systems which “almost repeated themselves but never quite succeeded,” like weather, or animal populations. It dealt in non-linear equations, “which express relationships that are not strictly proportional, and generally cannot be solved,” unlike solvable linear equations. Before that, “almost no one in the classical era suspected the chaos that could lurk in dynamical systems if non-linearity was given its due.”
