Tom Stoppard In Context ed. by David Kornhaber and James N. Loehlin (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Tom Stoppard In Context ed. by David Kornhaber and James N. Loehlin
• Katherine Weiss

TOM STOPPARD IN CONTEXT. Edited by David Kornhaber and James N. Loehlin. Literature in Context Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; pp. 269.

Tom Stoppard in Context, a collection of thirty-one short essays, is part of Cambridge University Press’s Literature in Context series aimed to enhance its readers’ appreciation of an author by providing the “literary, political, intellectual, social and cultural” context that has “bearing on his or her work,” as noted on the publisher’s website. To help the reader navigate the “context” provided in this particular volume, editors David Kornhaber and James Loehlin have grouped the essays in six parts: Origins; Influences; Ideas; Aesthetics; Politics; and Page, Stage, and Screen. The volume’s many contributors help to paint a portrait of Stoppard as one of Britain’s eminent playwrights, whose conservatism and extraordinary wit continues to win over audiences.

Stoppard emerges as a deeply intelligent writer and thinker, engaged in big ideas. Parts 3 (“Ideas”) and 5 (“Politics”) examine the ways in which Stop-pard incorporates philosophical, historical, scientific, and mathematical concepts in his plays. Many of the chapters come to a similar conclusion: that Stoppard’s interest in big ideas, despite his lack of a university education, is astonishing. Thankfully, his use of these ideas is not academic. Kornhaber, in chapter 10, sums up Stoppard’s use of analytic philosophy, writing that Stoppard saw “the philosophical potential” of “theatre itself, a potential he often saw as lacking in academic philosophy: the potential to contemplate what it actually means to be human” (87). William W. Demastes takes Stop-pard’s use of ideas a step further, arguing that scientific thought provides the playwright with the very questions of “behavioural consequences” (92), which evolutionary science attempts to answer. For Demastes, Stoppard is content with those questions remaining unanswered.

Part 2, “Influences,” includes chapters on Stop-pard’s debt to Russian literature, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett—the usual suspects and hardly surprising for anyone familiar with Stoppard’s plays. What is surprising, though, is just how often Beckett appears in the book. In addition to Kersti Tarien Powell’s essay, “Samuel Beckett” (chapter 8), the Irish writer appears in all six sections of the book. His presence outdoes Shakespeare’s and Wilde’s. However, in most chapters in which Beckett appears, the discussion amounts to a brief pointing to Stoppard’s debt to Beckett as seen in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. What sets Powell’s chapter apart is that her exploration of Stoppard’s engagement with Beckett goes beyond Stoppard’s 1966 play. She reproduces a poignant section of the London weekly Scene in which Stoppard reviewed the 1962 Royal Court production of Happy Days. Commenting on Stoppard’s assessment of Beckett’s play, Powell writes, “he now found that Happy Days had stripped away too much; that was the danger that Stoppard perceived in experimental drama” (65). In examining both Stoppard’s explicit use of Beckett and his criticism of Beckett, Powell concludes that “[i]n Beckett, Stoppard discovered his dramatic principles and the foundation of his humour” (68).

The volume is also strong in its discussion of Václav Havel’s profound impact on Stoppard’s personal, artistic, and political life. Powell touches on Stoppard’s commitment to Havel, free speech, and human rights, tying it to Beckett’s Catastrophe (1982), a play he dedicated to Havel and which was commissioned by the Association Internationale de Défense des Artistes to protest censorship and Havel’s imprisonment (68). Michael Žantovský’s chapter on Havel (chapter 9) follows Powell’s on Beckett, providing a natural transition to explore the friendship Havel and Stoppard shared and the ways in which Havel moved Stoppard into a more political space. While his work before the mid-1970s avoided politics, Stoppard’s encounter with Havel and his awareness of Havel’s struggles, as well as his embrace of his own origins, led him to become, as Žantovský argues, “fully preoccupied with politics”; although Stoppard continues to address the political in regard to “moral aspects [rather] than with its role as a...