‘Stoppard’ tells of a life constantly in motion
Lisa Bunker, of Exeter, N.H., is the author of two novels for young readers - “Zenobia July,” about a trans girl with a troubled past starting over with a new family and school, while tackling a cybermystery; and “Felix Yz,” about a boy fused with an alie
Czech-born Jewish playwright Tom Stoppard arrived in England with his family in 1946, when he was 8. They’d managed to flee Czechoslovakia ahead of the Nazis and had spent years in Singapore and in India. He’d later call himself a “bounced Czech.”
Stoppard took to England, his adopted country. He was impressed with its values, especially free speech. He was as impressed by one of its sports: cricket.
He played in school (Stoppard skipped college) and, once he’d found success in the theater, on Harold Pinter’s team in London, the Gaieties. Their rival was a team from The Guardian newspaper. Pinter was an ogre on the pitch. He presided, Stoppard said, “like a 1930s master from a prep school.” Stoppard was the wicketkeeper, stylish in enormous bright red Slazenger gloves.
Stoppard is not an autobiographical playwright. But his obsession with cricket led to one of the great moments in his work. His play “The Real Thing” (1982) is about theater, relationships and politics — one character is an actress, another tries to help free a Scottish soldier imprisoned for burning a memorial wreath during a protest. The play includes what’s become known as the cricket-bat speech, of which here is an excerpt:
“This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel 200 yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly … (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.)”
The way the cricket bat taps a ball, and makes it sail an improbable distance, becomes, in Stoppard’s hands, a metaphor for writing. No living playwright has so regularly made that beautiful (clucks his tongue to make the noise) sound.
The adjective “Stoppardian” — to employ elegant wit while addressing philosophical concerns — entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978. His plays are trees in which he climbs out, precariously, onto every limb. These trees are swaying. There’s electricity in the air, as before a summer thunderstorm.
Stoppard’s best-known plays include “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “The Real Thing,” “Arcadia” and
“The Coast of Utopia.” (His most recent, “Leopoldstadt,” is closed, for now, because of COVID-19.) He co-wrote the screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love” and has written or worked on dozens of other movie scripts. He’s written a novel and flurries of scripts for radio and television.
Now 83, he’s led an enormous life. In the astute and authoritative new biography “Tom Stoppard: A Life,” Hermione Lee wrestles it all onto the page. At times you sense she is chasing a fox through a forest.
Stoppard is constantly in motion — jetting back and forth across the Atlantic, looking after the many revivals of his plays, keeping the plates spinning, agitating on behalf of dissidents, artists and political prisoners in Eastern Europe, delivering lectures, accepting awards, touching up scripts, giving lavish parties, maintaining friendships with Pinter, Vaclav Havel, Steven Spielberg, Mick Jagger and others.
It’s been a charmed life, lived by a charming man. Tall, dashing, large-eyed, shaggy-haired; to women Stoppard’s been a walking stimulus package.
There’s been one previous biography of Stoppard, by Ira Nadel, published in 2002. Lee says that Stoppard “didn’t read it.” She must be taking his word.
Lee is an important biographer who has written scrupulous lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather and Penelope Fitzgerald. Her Stoppard book is estimable but wincingly long; it sometimes rides low in the water. The sections that detail Stoppard’s research for his plays can seem endless, as if Lee has dragged us into the library with him and given us a stubby pencil. Like a lot of us during the pandemic, “Tom Stoppard: A Life” could stand to lose 15% of its body weight.
Lee owns a sharp spade, but don’t come here for dirt. Stoppard has long been a tabloid fixture in England; the spotlight on his relationships sometimes became a searchlight. But Lee makes the case that people, even his ex-wives, of which there are two, find him a decent sort. He’s remained loyal to old friends. He’s a family man who kept his office door open to his children. He kept the same agent and publisher for decades.
Lee tracks the arc of Stoppard’s politics over time. Most people turn to the right as they age; Stoppard went the other way. One reason this book
entertains is that Stoppard has had an opinion about almost everything, and usually these opinions are witty.
He thinks, for example, that art arises from difficulty and talent. “Skill without imagination,” one of his characters says, “is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” (The character’s name is Donner, and Stoppard has said: “Donner is me.”)
Stoppard is a maniacal reader who collects first editions of writers he admires. Asked on the BBC radio show “Desert Island Discs” in 1984 to choose the one book he’d bring to a desert island, he replied: Dante’s “Inferno” in a dual Italian/English version, so he could learn a language while reading a favorite.
His idea of a good death, he’s said, would be to have a bookshelf fall on him, killing him instantly, while reading.
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STORRS — The first time Javicia and Robert Cole allowed their youngest child away from home, he was about 8 and mom was worried. The destination was UConn.
“I was a little skeptical because he was so young, and it would be the first time away from us,” Javicia said, as her son was scoring up a storm behind her at Gampel Pavilion Saturday. “My husband was confident he’d be okay, because he’d always played against older kids.”
It was Jim Calhoun’s summer camp, 2007 or 08, and R.J. figured things out, came away with a trophy and a dream.
“I talked to him every night,” Javicia said, “and the last day I came up to watch the game and when he got the award, they said it was the first time ever there was an award for someone that young. I was proud. And this
STORRS — Since James Bouknight returned to UConn’s lineup on Feb. 16, head coach Dan Hurley has preached patience when it comes to the offense. It’s difficult to drop a player of Bouknight’s caliber back into a lineup after an eight-game absence and assume things will immediately click.
Hurley has referenced the time crunch the Huskies are under. As the regular season comes closer to an end, fewer and fewer opportunities for UConn to rebuild chemistry and cohesion present themselves. UConn’s runway, as Hurley put it, is short.
That runway gets shorter with each passing game, but against Marquette on Saturday at Gampel Pavillion, UConn’s offense lifted off. Led by the sophomore Bouknight, senior guard RJ Cole and a 38-point first half, the Huskies overcame an early deficit, second-half foul troubles anddowned Marquette 80-62 for the Big East Conference victory.
It was a huge win for the Huskies (12-6,
9-6) and their NCAA tournament hopes, and it was Bouknight (24 points) and Cole (21) leading the way. The victory lifted UConn into third place in the conference standings and the Huskies jumped from 34th to 28th in Kenpom. com’s ratings.
“A pretty clean performance,” Hurley said. “When your backcourt gives you that, and you guard, you’re hard to beat.”
Marred by five turnovers in the game’s first five minutes, UConn trailed Marquette 11-6 early in the first half, but took the lead on a Bouknight jumper with 12:34 to go and never gave it up. Bouknight’s shot began a 32-10 run that resulted in a 38-21 halftime lead. The Huskies found a balance of inside and outside scoring in the first, with 20 points coming in the paint and the rest from the foul line or jump shots.
The Huskies scored 20 points in the final 7:30 of the first, as a barrage of 3-pointers from Cole and Tyler Polley opened up the offense. Cole scored eight points in the final 5:13 of the first, and Polley — who lit the Golden Eagles up for 23 points on 5-of-8 shooting from three in January — drained two threes to pad UConn’s doubledigit lead. Sophomore Jalen Gaffney pitched in four points during the Huskies’ hot stretch as well.
“The strength of the group is the depth,” Hurley said. “Tyler is capable of having a big night. Isaiah [Whaley] is capable of having a big night. Adama [Sanogo] can get us close to double-figure points. Gaffney, I thought, when we were leaking in the first half, he was pretty good . ... If we have our point guard and James play to that level, depth, rebounding and defense can take you to a pretty good season.”
UConn’s big-man rotation fell into foul trouble early in the second half. Sanogo picked up his third foul of the game 15 seconds in. He finished with four fouls. Whaley picked up his third at the 18:11 mark of the half. Tyrese Martin came into the half with two fouls, and picked up three more as the period progressed. Josh Carlton, a senior center, left the game at the 16:56 mark with a rolled ankle.
The trio of Carlton, Sanogo and Whaley played just 16 minutes. Sophomore Akok Akok, who is still working his way back from a torn Achilles suffered last February, played four minutes.
The fouls allowed Marquette to get closer, though the Golden Eagles never got closer than 11. Freshman Andre Jackson played 15 minutes in the second half, and finished with eight points, eight rebounds and a game-high plus 18 plus/minus. Polley (nine points)
played 12 minutes in the second half.
Dawson Garcia led the Golden Eagles (11-13, 6-11) with 18 points. Justin Lewis scored 14.
“We have a pretty deep team, that’s one of our strong points,” Cole said.
Even with the likes of Jackson and Polley stepping up, Hurley needed his best players to play their best basketball with the lineup in flux.
“That was a brutal time,” Hurley said. “That was not a good time. We had to score at that point [to retain the lead] ... RJ and James were going to have to make some plays.” RJ and James did just that.
The two scored all 17 of UConn’s points in the first 10 minutes of the second half. Cole made five of his six shot attempts and scored 11 points as the Huskies held on. Bouknight scored 16 points after halftime. UConn led by double digits for the entire second half, and at one point extended its lead to 20.
UConn is now 8-2 in games which Bouknight plays.
“Kill or be killed,” Bouknight, who’s averaging 20.7 points since his return from injury, said. He said the same after UConn’s win over Georgetown on Tuesday. “I feel like we’re ready for every game. We’ve got the right game plan ... we just came out today, and we just gave it all we’ve got.”
The Huskies will next travel to New Jersey on Wednesday to play Seton Hall in its final road game of the year. Like the Huskies, Seton Hall is a NCAA tournament hopeful. For both squad’s, Wednesday’s game could be the last best chance to pad resumes prior to the Big East tournament.
“They’re gonna be desperate, we’re gonna be desperate,” Hurley said of Seton Hall.