Stoppard as Critic

Abstract

‘There is,’ Tom Stoppard claims, ‘a sort of second-rate journalism that presents the journalist more than the subject.’ He adds, without embarrassment, ‘I did that.’¹ From September 1962 to April 1963 Stoppard reviewed the London theatre for the magazine Scene. He had completed two plays: A Walk on the Water and The Gamblers. Neither had been produced professionally on the stage. Many of the reviews he wrote during his time on Scene are of no interest, telling us little of the journalist and less of the subject. ‘I wasn’t much of a critic,’ he has told me, pointing out that the pieces suffered all the usual drawbacks of magazine work, being written in haste and cut for space.² However, a number of the longer articles have been shamefully neglected by his critics (only Joan Dean’s portentously titled Tom Stoppard: Comedy as a Moral Matrix makes any significant reference to these early reviews); they shed light on his own work and reveal a developing critical outlook which awaits the consistency and vigour it will attain in his dramatic writings, in which criticism becomes an integral aspect of the creative enterprise, Stoppard’s theatre emerging as a battle of the books, a clamorous argument of form with form. Despite his self-deprecation, the best work on Scene shows Stoppard’s critical powers at full stretch; it illuminates not just the journalist but Stoppard the playwright as well — particularly when his subject is Beckett.