Gürbüz-Blaich Real and Imaginary Spaces in Tom Stoppard’s Plays

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-11-157328-1
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 18, 230 Seiten

Reihe: SpatioTemporality / RaumZeitlichkeit

This study benefits from the terminology of geocriticism – a literary criticism that suggests an interdisciplinary approach to the exploration of literature in relation to space and place, and refers to the spatial theories of Lefebvre, Foucault, Bakhtin, Augé, and Certeau as well as to Issacharoff’s study of ‘dramatic space’. Proposing a multidisciplinary perspective, the book analyzes the mimetic and diegetic spaces in four of Tom Stoppard’s plays; (1966), (1974), 1993 and 1995 Stoppard’s plays from the 1960s to the 2000s portray different spaces including urban spaces, cities, landscapes, rooms, and fictional sites, thus serving as exceptional textual sources in spatial literary studies.

Zielgruppe

Scholars in the field of English literature, theater and cultural

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gürbüz-Blaich, Nevin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Dramen und Dramatiker
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Leseproben

Introduction

Tom Stoppard/Tomáš Straussler was born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937 to a Jewish family that had to flee to Singapore to escape the German invasion. He lost his father and was also forced to evacuate to India due to the Japanese attack. Stoppard’s fate took another form in India, which led him to settle in England with his mother and stepfather, Kenneth Stoppard, in 1946. His arrival in England at the early age of nine gave him a new identity as he was raised as an “Englishman”. He attended an American boarding school in Darjeeling, India, and then proceeded with his education at a school in Yorkshire, England. Stoppard’s theatrical career began in the late 1950s while serving as a drama critic and reporter for several newspapers (Western Daily Press and Evening World). After reviewing many intellectual plays, Stoppard intended to write a play himself. His first work, A Walk on the Water, revised later as Enter a Free Man, was staged in 1968, transforming him from a journalist into a young dramatist. This period when Stoppard commenced his venture of writing drama was “a time when thousands of young journalists were thinking they should write a play”, as he described it in an interview.1

It was the time when John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) changed the direction of British drama, and British social life was in a different type of interaction with the theatre. With the breakthrough of Osborne’s monumental work, British theatre radicalised further, and young audiences became more interested in theatre with the Poetic Drama revival. The theatre had once again played an essential role in bringing people back to life after the war and giving them hope, with the plays tending to reflect the feelings and thoughts of the current generation of young people. Defining this period, Dan Rebellato stated that “British theatre was flimsy and artificial, serious-minded people yearn for something new, Look Back in Anger ushered in a renaissance of British theatre, and the people were grateful”.2 Osborne, along with many other new playwrights, including John Arden, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker and Stoppard, brought the young back into the theatre by breaking away from the comfortable and complacent middle-class drawing-room drama that dominated British stages from the 1930s to the 1950s. In this regard, Stoppard followed the mainstream trend and entered a part of the theatre where plays were an alternative to the “comedy of manners”; they were now comedies of intellectual parody. The central focus thus changed from courting routines (in the general “comedy of manners”) to mental rituals, to the art of aphorism, quotation and rhetorical discussion.

Regarded now as one of the greatest living playwrights of the English language, Stoppard first made his mark in 1967 with the classic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The three-time Tony Award winner’s works also include Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1975), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), Indian Ink (1995) and The Invention of Love (1997).

Furthermore, in 1998, he received his first Academy Award for co-writing the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love. On 12 December 1997, Stoppard was knighted at Buckingham Palace as the first playwright honoured since Sir Terence Rattigan in 1971. In this ceremony, he was called by his name “Tom” and expressed his pleasure with the following words: “I have felt English almost from the day I arrived, but the knighthood puts some kind of seal on that emotion”.3 Currently, Stoppard resides in London, where he began his theatrical career. His latest plays consist of Heroes (2005), Rock’n Roll (2006) and The Hard Problem (2015), and very recently, he wrote Leopoldstadt (2020). Adding to his illustrious career as a screenwriter, Stoppard also wrote screenplays for Anna Karenina (2012) and Tulip Fever (2014). His theatrical success was crowned in 2014 with a Special Award as “The Greatest Living Playwright” at the 60th London Evening Standard Theatre Awards.4

Stoppard’s other plays produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), Professional Foul (1977), Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979) and Squaring the Circle (1984) are usually referred to as “political plays’ just like The Coast of Utopia (2002). This is because these plays, in a similar vein, include the Soviets, Eastern European Communist countries and their repression as the subject matter of criticism. In some of his plays, he also criticises his birthplace Czechoslovakia. He essentially advocates and praises the political system and freedom in England. He focuses on human rights violations in Eastern Europe, repudiating Marxist ideology. The Soviet Union’s occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 increased Stoppard’s anger at Communist Russia, with the main reasons for speaking against the Soviet regime were the futility of expressing oneself and the restrictions on different and independent ideas and thoughts in Russia. On 20 to 21 August 1968, the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia with the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact allies to halt Alexander Dubcek’s political liberalisation reforms known as the “Prague Spring”. Many Czechoslovak civilians were killed during the attack and more than half a million civilians were injured.

Throughout his career, Tom Stoppard has always emphasised individual freedom. He argues that it is impossible to reach a truth on which everyone can agree; therefore, local realities should be respected alongside human rights. Thus, every person should be released to find their existence. According to Stoppard, “individuals should be able to negotiate with the authorities or legislators even though a possible agreement is not expected”.5 Stoppard’s interest in politics and his writing of political plays basically derive from his humanistic worldview and show his reaction against the abuse of politics for tyrannical purposes.6 Consequently, he did not refrain from expressing his support for human rights and reflecting the social conditions and politics through his plays.

Born just seven years after Pinter, Stoppard belongs to the “After Beckett” generation that incorporates existentialist philosophy and The Theatre of the Absurd into late twentieth-century, post-war British drama. Like Pinter, Stoppard pursued the dramatic techniques of Samuel Beckett and, to a large extent, was influenced by the absurdist theatre that predominated at the beginning of the century.

Stoppard’s first significant work, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, achieved immense attention after being put on stage at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966 and the National Theatre in 1967. This play revealed his philosophical interest, which received a great deal of attention. His themes generally revolve around metaphysics, philosophy, literature and arts. Specifically, he addresses the human condition and unreality through verbal and visual humour, incorporated into physical farces that clarify specific topics, such as free will, fate, freedom and existential themes.

Stoppard’s theatre embodies an appropriate means to express contemporary issues such as space, place, “placelessness”, uncertainty, travel and landscapes in the new age. His fascination with the assumptions of existentialist philosophy challenges us to identify the spaces and locality in a more meaningful and expressive reflective of contemporary culture. On the one hand, his deep desire to write plots about real people like James Joyce, Lord Byron and Vladimir Lenin; on the other hand, revealing details about fictional characters like Ros and Guil demonstrates his ability to combine the real and imaginary worlds in his work. Thus, he forms inner and outer settings phenomenally in various worlds in England, across Europe, and even outer space. Stoppard claims that “a theatre is essentially an event connecting actors and audience in a theatrical space”.7 Therefore, the significance of space is indicated in the drama that locates the interaction between characters and other elements. His writing converges around England and Europe, intermingling real and imaginary spaces to illustrate the representation of uncertain places in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, offering city portraits and cityscapes in Travesties, and employing landscape in Arcadia and postcolonial spaces in Indian Ink. His construction of urban concepts reveals a dynamic social representation and provides a depiction of contemporary political transformations.

Regarding the spatial concern in Stoppard’s radio plays, Albert’s Bridge, one of his earliest and most acclaimed radio plays, was presented in 1967 by the BBC. Previously, Stoppard had written two radio dramas, including If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank, which developed a significant theme that appears in Albert’s Bridge. Katherine E. Kelly describes this as “the conflict between a desire to withdraw from the world in the form of fantasy, contemplation, or complete immersion in mechanical tasks and a desire to participate in the world outside the self”.8 It is a play which Jim Hunter identifies as designed “to take us into unlikely places, and many of them, very...

Über Autor(innen)

Nevin Gürbüz-Blaich, Heidelberg University.

Nevin Gürbüz-Blaich, Heidelberg University.