Below is the text of a letter I’ve written to Stoppard and am mailing via the publisher of The Coast of Utopia – fingers crossed, maybe I’ll even get an answer!
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Dear Mr. Stoppard:
I am an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where I recently spent a semester conducting a study of your plays. I have loved your work since I first encountered it in high school, and after reading so much of your writing in the last few months, I wanted to write to you and tell you how much I respect and enjoy your plays.
Many of my favorite moments in dramatic literature come from your plays. The final waltz in Arcadia is for me one of the most beautiful scenes in the realm of theatre. I love Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead because it is so universal – for weeks after I first performed it, everything people said or that I heard or saw related back to the play somehow, and I caught myself quoting it continuously. I can’t see a coin flipped anymore without instinctively calling ‘heads’. To me, that is part of the greatness of your plays, that they seem relevant to everything. I find myself constantly relating my own experiences back to your plays.
Of all the immense variety of subject matter you’ve written on, I am most intrigued by your depiction of theatre and plays within the plays. Works such as The Real Inspector Hound, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead have given me an entirely new perspective on the old conceit of the world as a stage. And yet, whenever I feel I’ve drawn a conclusion about your writing, something else emerges to make me rethink all my assumptions, and I find that to be one of the most enthralling things about your writing – that it’s nearly impossible to pin things down and say definitively, “this is this, and that is that.” To me, the ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning which appears in your dialogue and stagecraft makes reading or viewing your plays almost like a game, a challenge to work out all the possible meanings contained in one exchange or stage direction. In months of reading I’ve made very little progress in meeting that challenge, but the process has been terrific fun anyways.
I would love to discuss your plays at length, but I recognize of course that you must be an exceedingly busy man. I hope, though, that you might find time to reply, however briefly, to this letter – if for no other reason than that it would be a thrilling end to my study to hear from the author himself. Regardless, though, you have my utmost respect and admiration, and I look forward to many future encounters with your writing.
Sincerely,
Erin M. Shannahan
College of William and Mary, Class of 2009
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