Celebrated for his verbal acrobatics and madcap intellectual conceits, playwright Tom Stoppard first made his name in 1967 with the playful, breathlessly inventive "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", a play loosely related to "Hamlet" but with its feet firmly in the absurdist tradition of Beckett and Pinter. He consolidated his reputation with the philosophical whodunit "Jumpers" (1972) and the Wildean historical farce "Travesties" (1974). His first feature work was co-writing (with Thomas Wiseman) Joseph Losey's "The Romantic Englishwoman" (1975), adapted from Wiseman's novel. Though he has professed a desire to write a film of his own, Stoppard utilizes his story ideas for stage plays; this initial collaboration with Wiseman set the precedent for a busy screenwriting career adapting other people's books. Stoppard's next two scripts transposed Nabokov for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Despair" (1978) and Graham Greene for Otto Preminger's "The Human Factor" (1979), though his contributions to an original screenplay, Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" (1985), earned him his only Oscar nomination to date.
Stoppard continued to enhance his reputation as England's preeminent playwright (alongside Pinter) with such award-winning works as the contemporary love story "The Real Thing" (1982) and the time-bending "Arcadia" (1993), silencing some of his early critics who upbraided him for his "shallowness" and "empty wizardry" and the fact that his women were underdeveloped foils. He has not renounced his love for paradox and the good joke, but his more mature work has reflected a seriousness incompatible with the young wag who once told an interviewer asking him what "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" was about: "It's about to make me very rich." His "The Invention of Love" (1997), based on the life of English poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman, is full of the trademark Stoppard wit but also raises questions about the effect a rigid, overly righteous society has upon individuals who dare to be different. Ironically, that play is a link of sorts to his screenwriting as two of its characters (Frank Harris and Jerome K Jerome) provided the source material for Stoppard movies scripts (Jerome, "Three Men in a Boat" 1975; Harris, "Enigma" lensed 1998).
Spielberg's choice of Stoppard to adapt J G Ballard's "Empire on the Sun" (1987) seemed savvy since his own experience as a child in World War II Singapore would provide some sense memory to draw from in painting the picture of a young British lad separated from his parents in Shanghai at the start of the war. But except for its basic intelligence, there was no recognizing the stamp of the brilliant dramatist in the screenplay. Of course, one should not have expected it either because the genius of Stoppard in the theater is his engagement of the live audience, trusting them to do some of the work that propels the play. Clearly at his creative best as a playwright, he still provided tight serviceable screenplays from the novels of John le Carre ("The Russia House" 1990). E L Doctorow ("Billy Bathgate" 1991) and Robert Parker ("Poodle Springs" HBO, 1998). Stoppard, who first directed a staged revival of "Born Yesterday" in 1973, made a critically-acclaimed feature debut at the helm of his own adaptation of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" in 1990.
Copyright © Baseline 2006.