Tom Stoppard’s early Lord Malquist and Mr Moon leaves critics in an awkward situation. It is sufficiently substantial that no one tracing Stoppard’s career can afford to ignore it. But since it is the only novel by a man universally classified and acclaimed as a “playwright,”it is difficult to know precisely what to do with it. As a result, critics usually treat it as a dry run for the plays to come.

Before discussing how they do so, let me provide a summary, since the novel is not widely known. Moon is a hapless historian aspiring to write a history of the world, one that articulates the “patterns” governing “all the things which have made things turn out the way they have today” (p. 128). But in part because he has a phobia about the infinite (especially the infinite regress brought on by the search for first causes), he is unable to get down even the first sentence. As a stopgap, he takes a job as the Boswell to Lord Malquist – an aristocratic (and, we eventually learn, bankrupt) aesthete. These two provide the central contrast of the book. Moon, terrified by his inability to take a clear stand or draw clear boundaries, wanders around with a bomb in his pocket, in the hopes that he can explode reality into some kind of sense; Malquist, committed to style over substance, blithely buffers himself from reality, including the fact that his horse-drawn carriage has run down a Mrs. Cuttle who (we later learn) had apparently mistaken it for a similar-looking vehicle being used in a promotional campaign for toilet paper.

During the 1990s Dublin's Gate Theatre, under the artistic direction of Michael Colgan, staged festivals celebrating the achievement of two of the century's greatest playwrights, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Both involved productions of individual plays performed by Irish practitioners or by foreign artists long associated with the playwright, backed up by seminars and debates. But there were differences. One playwright, Beckett, was recently dead when the Festival was first staged in 1991; the other, Pinter, was alive and present throughout, directing on two occasions, acting on one. It is possible to stage all of Beckett's plays on the one occasion; whereas even with a Pinter Festival in 1994 and another in 1997 there still remain key works unperformed and an element of choice colours each occasion. But a third factor relates to Ireland and the decision to stage a festival of a dramatist's work. The staging of all of Beckett’s plays in Dublin by a predominantly Irish theatrical group was a key step in the establishment of Beckett as an Irish (as opposed to an English, French, international or non-specific) playwright; the adoption of Irish accents by Ben Kingsley and Alan Howard in Peter Hall’s revisiting of Waiting for Godot in 1997 may be taken as confirmation of the extent to which Beckett’s Irishness is now universally conceded. But Pinter is English and cannot even claim the Irish ancestors that might have got his plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. Michael Colgan rightly argued that he regarded Pinter as one of the greatest living playwrights and one he wished to honour, by mounting productions of plays of classic status that had rarely received professional Irish productions. But there also has always been, as Colgan would have known, an Irish strand to Pinter’s career to which the Pinter Festivals at the Gate would contribute. There are two aspects to this relationship I wish to consider in this chapter: first, Pinter’s career as an actor in Ireland in the early 1950s with the troupe of Anew McMaster; and second, the impact on his theatrical practice of such Irish playwrights as Beckett and Yeats, and the early Abbey Theatre.

In the millennium year, Harold Pinter reached his seventieth birthday. Looking back over his achievements (as actor, pacifist, playwright, poet, critic, director, creator-adaptor of scripts that have sensitively translated the artistry of novelists into the medium of film, campaigner for civil liberties and freedom of speech), one is astonished at the sheer range and variety of endeavour to which he has brought a focused and profound commitment. Yeats, whom Pinter has long admired and studied, comes to mind as possessing a similar protean sensibility, which held to the belief that all creativity is both deeply personal and assuredly political. Fittingly there comes to mind the imperative that occurs in one of the many poems, 'An Acre of Grass', in which Yeats addresses himself as an old man: 'Myself must I remake'. There was to be no quiet putting-out to grass, no cosy retirement for him; rather Yeats envisaged questing after ‘frenzy’, the energetic, satirical rage and insight of Timon, Lear and the elderly William Blake or Michelangelo. It would be a new manifestation of himself and yet one wholly true to old forms; there would be no loss of integrity in this transforming process. To view the four volumes of Pinter’s Plays is to see manifold changes of subject matter, focus, linguistic register, conversational idiom, style, structure; yet the inspiring vision is always and uniquely recognisable as Pinter’s.

What did the actor David Baron prefer to read when he came off the stage at the Palace Court Theatre, Bournemouth, in 1956 after an evening playing Mr Rochester in an adaptation of Jane Eyre? Where did he turn for intellectual stimulus during that long season at the Pavilion Theatre, Torquay, in the same year when he played, among some thirteen roles in all, minor characters in Coward and Colette? What confirmed, what disturbed, his view of the state of English drama when, two years later, at the Intimate Theatre, Palmers Green, he coupled routine detective roles with Cliff in Look Back in Anger?

Allowing that nothing could be as pressing as the cricket scores, we do know that he turned to Kafka, Yeats and Beckett because their presence is palpable in the subsequent plays of his alter ego, Harold Pinter. We might assume that, as a professional, Pinter/Baron would have turned to the trade journals, probably to The Stage, and it is a reasonable guess that, as an intellectual, he would have read Encore, founded in 1954, the foremost radical theatre journal of the time. Even if he had already determined to go his own way, showing the lack of interest, sometimes active distaste, for theatre criticism that has characterised his later career, the contributors to Encore themselves certainly studied his plays as soon as they arrived on the scene and, through a series of developing aesthetic assumptions, made powerful sense of them.

Since the mid-1980s, the appearance of the full-length plays One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), Party Time (1991) and Ashes to Ashes (1996), as well as the sketches Precisely (1983) and The New World Order (1991), has led critics of Pinter's work to speculate as to whether they embody a fresh departure by which the playwright's oeuvre has become openly, ostensibly political as opposed to his earlier, more metaphorical explorations of power games, or whether, on the contrary, it has been political through and through from the very start. Each position is grounded on a different conception of the 'political', a discrepancy that may be clarified in the light of the ongoing controversy regarding the vexed question of postmodernism's political import.

Stoppard’s two major science-based plays, Hapgood (1988) and Arcadia (1993) have met quite different receptions from audiences and critics. Hapgood, which uses some of the baffling aspects of quantum physics as a parallel to the bluff and double-bluff found in the plots of Cold War spy thrillers, simply confused and irritated much of its audience, while Arcadia, which uses the hardly less confusing mathematical theories of “Chaos”to structure its account of the passage of time in the “timeless” surroundings of an English country house and parkland, is regarded by many as Stoppard’s greatest play. Stoppard is not a playwright who wants to engage only with an élite audience appreciative of an avant-garde aesthetic, so any account of these two plays, even one that makes high claims for Hapgood, must go some way to explain its relative failure. On the other hand, in 1992 Stoppard himself declared that he was interested in it “insofar as it succeeded.”For him, its technical successes were to be the foundation for the critical success of Arcadia.

Clearly, part of the appeal of incorporating scientific theory into theatre is the sheer technical challenge. Quantum mechanics describes the interaction of particles at a subatomic level, where the “common sense” rules of classical mechanics no longer apply. The challenge for the playwright is to find analogies in the larger-scale, human world for the behavior of particles in the subatomic world where our human intuitions completely mislead us. Humans do not, on the face of it, behave like electrons.

A distinguished dramatist once surprised me by lamenting the plight of Harold Pinter. 'All other dramatists', he announced, 'can go off and write any type of play they please - farce or history, polemic or romance. But Harold Pinter has to write a Harold Pinter play. It must be hell for him.'

This was an affectionate joke, but a joke which expressed a truth. Pinter's plays are instantly recognisable and particular. 'Pinteresque' is a word that has entered the language. His voice - whether it be combative cockney, or expressing the unexpected associations and leaps of memory - is very much his own. His content - the unknown threat, the confrontation in the con- fined space, whether it be territorial, or the personal tensions of the subconscious - has hardly changed in forty-five years. The threats have always been political, metaphors of power. Pinter is the champion of tolerance and compassion in the brutal jungle of life, the seeker after clarity in the confusions of memory.

The presence of imminent violence, of a breakdown bound to happen, haunts all his plays. Speech is at cross-purposes and combative; charm is possessive; concern contains a hidden mockery; even love is often a violation.

Stoppard has long demonstrated a certain interest in dramatizing political and cultural differences. Plays such as Professional Foul, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, and Hapgood play off the Cold War politics of Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia and the former Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s), as do shorter plays such as The Dog It Was That Died and Cahoot’s Macbeth. Significantly, the delineation of cultural differences in these plays is mainly subordinated to discussion of the repression and censorship of the artist or writer as individual. These plays emphasize the perspectives of English characters in these exotic settings or mark non-English characters as decidedly “foreign,” sometimes picturing, as in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, repressive situations in ways that ultimately foster a sense of English nationalism. Night and Day (1978) might serve as a good example. Set in a volatile political situation in Kambawe, a “fictitious African country, formerly a British colony” (p. ix), it focuses mainly on the personal and professional dilemmas of veteran journalist Dick Wagner, photographer George Guthrie, idealistic young reporter Jacob Milne, mine owner Geoffrey Carson and his bored wife Ruth, these taking precedence over any psychological development of the African characters. The second act appearance of President Mageeba promises an interesting characterization; in an interview with Wagner, the British-educated Mageeba articulately delivers his perspectives on his country’s postcolonial politics and the role of the press. However, this conversation soon comes to an end. Mageeba reveals the danger barely concealed by this well-spoken exterior as he suddenly strikes Wagner; the interview ends entirely when Guthrie enters bringing news of Milne’s violent death in military crossfire. Mageeba’s presence ultimately serves only to establish the degree of uncertainty suffered by the English and Australian journalists and expatriates.

When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (R&GAD) opened in New York, an interviewer asked Stoppard what it was about. “It’s about to make me very rich,” came the Wildean (Malquistian?) response. The play had already made Stoppard’s name: Harold Hobson, in the Sunday Times, described the 1967 National Theatre production as “the most important event in the British professional theatre” since the opening of Pinter’s The Birthday Party in 1958. One of the springs of the play is probably Oscar Wilde’s observation in his prison letter De Profundis that the two deracinated courtiers are “little cups that can hold so much and no more,” who, in their dealings with the machiavellian Danish court, find themselves “merely out of their sphere”: a state of terminal bewilderment which, Wilde says, means that genuine tragic status “is really not for such as they.” However, the Wildean influence on Stoppard’s early work goes beyond this specific instance, and is demonstrably at work before Travesties. When the young Stoppard - then a journalist on the Bristol Evening World - had declared himself “a confirmed addict and admirer (literary)” of Wilde, he was acknowledging an affinity we can trace in Stoppard’s emerging aesthetic ideas and dramatic practice. Indeed, the way that Stoppard appropriates Wilde is central to our understanding of his characteristic strengths and weaknesses as a dramatist.

TomᚠStraüssler (Tomik to his parents) arrived in India as a four-year-old Czech refugee in 1942; but in early 1946 the eight-year-old who left India as Tommy Straüssler would become Tom Stoppard. By then he had a new father, British Army Major Kenneth Stoppard, whom his mother had married after her husband had died in Singapore following the Japanese invasion. He had a new language, English, which he had learned at Mount Hermon, a Darjeeling school run by American Methodists. He had a new nationality - neither American nor Indian nor Czech but British. He had a new identity in a land where he and his brother would be “starting over as English schoolboys.”And he had a new name. Three weeks after arriving in England, the Straüssler brothers received, from their stepfather, the surname Stoppard.

After Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened to acclaim – and a welter of interpretations – both in London and on Broadway, its 29-year-old author would jokingly refer to himself as “a bounced Czech” and dismiss his biographical background as irrelevant to his play about Elizabethan courtiers. But to describe what it felt like to have his play examined for hidden meanings, the Czech émigré who had arrived from Singapore to attend an American school in India before relocating with a new name to Derbyshire significantly invoked the metaphor of going through customs. When a customs officer ransacks Rosencrantz and “comes up with all manner of exotic contraband like truth and illusion, the nature of identity, what I feel about life and death,” Stoppard confesses, “I have to admit the stuff is there but I can’t for the life of me remember packing it.”

I have very slightly kept in touch with Harold over these last years, those in which all his work has of course been much discussed. His treatment of one of my own books (The French Lieutenant's Woman) at least gave me an excellent reason to admire him, as I hope I made clear in a little essay about my feelings called The Filming of the French Lieutenant's Woman in 1981. This was published in a collection of such essays that I did recently. Only two summers ago I went near here in Dorset to have lunch with both the director of the film, Karel Reisz, and Harold and their respective wives. It was a pleasant occasion and once again brought very close to me what I regard as a kind of secret gate-key to all his work. That is his very intense and evident love of cricket. It is one fixation I share with him and is what I would like to devote most of this little chapter to. Meeting and re-meeting him somehow burrows deep into a part of me I now in general claim to keep forgotten. I should perhaps mention here that I was a captain of the game at my public school, Bedford, played for my college at Oxford (New College) and indeed was once to reach the heights of a county trial (for Essex). Unfortunately I don't dream at all any more. (Unfortunately, because I always used to find dreaming a very fertile source of imagery.) I don't know if cricket is in any way responsible for the mature playwright Pinter. I rather suspect that, as with me, he prefers to keep the odd ethos and imagery of the game deeply obliterated in the past.

Pinter's plays have fascinated many people over the years for many reasons, not the least of which is their capacity to resist large-scale generalisation. The emphasis in the plays on complex and diverse local detail makes it very difficult to argue that the plays as a group exemplify the large general truths of any existing theory about the nature of society, personality, culture, spirituality, anthropology, history or anything else of similar scope. This is not to say that insights into the plays cannot be derived from all these sources. Indeed they can, as several astute Pinter critics have demonstrated. The trouble is that these various perspectives serve best as ways into the texture of the plays rather than as summations of the implications of that texture, and if excessively relied upon, they begin to obscure what they seek to clarify.

Stoppard uses an illuminating phrase to characterise the baffling experiences of the leading characters in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead when he describes them as constantly being intrigued without ever quite being enlightened. That sense of being fascinated by something we do not fully understand is, as Van Laan has argued, an irreducible aspect of the experience of Pinter’s plays, and we have, I think, over the years come to recognize that the role of the critic is to increase the sense of enlightenment without diminishing the sense of intrigue.

Stoppard’s use of the literary past - naming names, mixing and matching time and place and trope, and manhandling familiar quotations - runs the theatrical gamut from farce to parody to show(off)manship to somber intellectual inquiry. As successful productions of his plays have shown, especially when persuasively performed and articulated on the London stage, such territories are rarely, if ever, exclusive. Yet untangling the rich mixture of discourses, a heady allusive style that embraces quick wit, the surprising turn of phrase, and a bit more than a nodding acquaintance with relativity, quantum physics, and the provability (or lack thereof) of Fermat’s last theorem, has proved to be both a delight to his audiences and a challenge to dramatic criticism. In this chapter I would like to trace the development of Stoppard’s engaging “Brit/lit/crit” as well as consider its implications for the kind of audience that continues to be attracted to his plays.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard’s early and spectacular work, already shows the telltale signs of what would quickly become an idiosyncratic and highly eclectic dramatic voice. Let the world take note: Shakespeare’s Hamlet would never be quite the same again. When the Fringe was still the fringe, two minor characters took center stage and turned the English-speaking theatre’s most famous revenge tragedy upside down and inside out. Actors were suddenly hankering to play Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern (or is it the the other way around?), roles formerly assigned as consolation prizes for not making it big-time. Philosophically, of course, this retooling of Hamlet’s endgame offers its audience no such dumbing-down: death is no longer the “consummation devoutly to be wished,” but rather the price you pay for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, then realizing it too late, just when the curtain’s about to fall. To be is in this unenviable stage situation simply – and fatally – not to be, reckoning closed and story ended.