By former WGGB President David Edgar
Alongside Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill, Tom Stoppard was one of the undisputed giants of post-war British playwriting, as well as an Oscar-winning screenwriter and – notably – writer for radio. He was also a dedicated and committed member of the WGGB. In 2017, I was privileged to present him with an Outstanding Contribution to Writing Award on behalf of the Guild, to which his response was: “For a writer, no award can compare to an award from other writers. The Writers’ Guild is a bright spot in a dark world, and I feel very grateful to it.”
Born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard’s Jewish family fled the Nazis in 1939, arriving in England, via India, in 1946. His father had died after the Japanese take-over of Singapore, and his mother had married a British Army Officer called Kenneth Stoppard. Educated at a public school he loathed, and after a short career in journalism, Tom exploded on to the British drama scene in 1966, with the Edinburgh Fringe and then National Theatre hit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Combining – as does Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – a continental absurdism that sought both to respond to and evade the Holocaust and Hiroshima and British music hall slapabout – Rosencrantz was the first play to mirror Stoppard’s own transplantation from divided, Cold War Europe to liberal, welcoming Britain.
For me, the play contains one of the finest tropes in post-war British theatre. Two young men meet a troupe of actors on a road. To make conversation, one of them asks the lead actor about the company’s repertoire. The actor responds that they are of the blood, love and rhetoric school. Pressed, he reveals that they can do blood and love without the rhetoric, and blood and rhetoric without the love, and all three concurrent or consecutive, but they can’t do love and rhetoric without the blood. “Blood is compulsory”, the actor explains, “they’re all blood, you see”.
To which one of the young men responds, you might think reasonably: “Is that what people want?” To which the actor replies, in my view unanswerably, “It’s what we do”.
It would be convenient if that was the manifesto of Stoppard’s writing career, but that would be only half true. Certainly, he wrote what he wanted to write, in the way he wanted to write it, often in defiance of current opinion, mostly to great popular acclaim, occasionally to critical bafflement.
However, far from being limited in range, the repertoire of his work was extraordinary various. He wrote principally for theatre, but also for a range of electronic media. There’s a famous story that he received a phone call from an American film director of galactic repute, who asked him to drop everything and write the screenplay for one of the most important films of its time. He replied that he couldn’t do it because he was currently working on something for the BBC. The director responded: “You mean, you’re going to give up this once in a lifetime opportunity to write for television?”. No, not for television, came the reply. Radio.
Within these various media, his work has covered a vast range of styles and subjects. The early, absurdist ones include much of the radio, and the short plays After Magritte and The Real Inspector Hound, a spoof whodunnit which begins with the charlady answering the phone with the deathless greeting: “Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring”. Stoppard’s second megahit, Jumpers – about a gently crumbling humanist professor in a crazed university run by an ultra-trendy Vice Chancellor obsessed with gymnastics – is also a sort-of whodunnit, as is Travesties, in which the characters include James Joyce, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and Lenin, all of whom were, as it happens, living in Zurich in 1917, and how some of them get caught up in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. They were complicated, erudite, zany and dazzlingly funny.
However, and despite his insistence that his plays must be “untouched by any suspicion of usefulness”, Stoppard’s work has at its heart a serious, sometimes searing critique of the prevailing isms of the 20th century, from the point of view of what he called “timid libertarianism” which set him against the ascendant left of the 60s and 70s. Every lecturer at a new university was convinced Jumpers was a direct portrait of their institution. In the late 70s, when political drama generally was entering a dip, Tom’s work became more specifically political, taking on the newspaper unions, literary correctness, and above all, the Soviet empire and its western apologists, putting his wit and wordplay to service. His teleplay Professional Foul punned on football and political ethics; Every Good Boy Deserves Favour combined a full symphony orchestra (conducted by Andre Previn) with the story of a Soviet dissident incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital whose fellow inmate imagines the orchestra in his head, and whose aphorisms on the links between music and mathematics include “the trombone is the longest distance between two points” and “everyone is equal to the triangle”.
In the 80s, 90s and 00s his range expanded further to the exploration of history in his double-time-scaled Arcadia, biography in his play about A.E.Housman, The Invention of Love, and a combination of the two in his 19th-century Russian trilogy The Coast of Utopia, his most considerable defence of liberal humanist values, which nonetheless gave the anarchist revolutionary Bakhunin at least some of the best tunes. Again directed by Trevor Nunn, he returned to contemporary Eastern Europe with Rock’n’Roll at the Royal Court and, in 2015, to philosophy at the National in (the underestimated) The Hard Problem.
Meanwhile, he managed to slip in film adaptations of The Empire of the Sun, The Russia House and Enigma. Uncredited – though I hope handsomely paid – he wrote much of the dialogue for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. His screenplay for Shakespeare in Love won him and co-writer Marc Norman an Oscar, to sit on an extremely crowded shelf of honours and awards. Among the wonderful knowing theatre gags, many of them about cabbies, is a difficult actor placated by being assured the title of the romantic tragedy he’s been cast in is “Mercutio”. Or, as another actor tells a friend who asks after the subject of Shakespeare’s new play, “it’s about this nurse”.
In the 80s, Tom’s small-c conservative political stance was a convenience for socialist playwrights like me, challenged on the perceived left-wing bias of British theatre, who were able to point to a major playwright who was highly suspicious of everything we thought and wrote: those of us who were accused of caricaturing the ruling class could point to Stoppard’s equally one-dimensional radical lecturer in Professional Foul, his left-wing playwright in The Real Thing and the union-militant journalist in Night and Day. But as the British liberties which we may have not taken seriously enough came under increasing attack, Stoppard seemed to move – gently but definitely – away from the right. In his eloquent 2003 speech accepting Pen’s Pinter Prize, while affirming there was still no other country he wanted to live in, Stoppard revealed a sadness and an anger about the political abuses in his adopted country, from surveillance and the dodgy dossier to newspaper hacking and bankers’ bonuses. In 2016, he visited the Calais Jungle refugee camp and was asked if asylum seekers were treating Britain as a soft touch. His reply was that this was possible, but, if it were, he was happy on this occasion to be on the wrong side of history (which, of course, he wasn’t).
Stoppard enjoyed commenting that he wrote for a medium which, by definition, involved seeing both sides of an argument. Among the most poignant was a kind of self-portrait towards the end of Leopoldstadt (2020), his picture of the kind of Mitteleuropean Jewish family from which – he was to discover in midlife – he came. A British emigre child of a family which had overwhelmingly perished in the Holocaust is confronted with that fact, and the question of whether his own life and career should be entirely defined by that reality. The earlier Rock’n’Roll can be seen as a kind of thought-experiment in which Stoppard imagines how he would have responded to the political choices he would have faced had his family stayed in Czechoslovakia and he had grown up and lived under communism.
I knew Tom Stoppard well enough to miss him now. He was a gentle and witty companion, and a spectacular party host. As stated, he was a committed and active member of the Writers’ Guild, always willing to give public support to Guild initiatives on behalf of writers, and giving generously to WGGB’s New Play Commission Scheme, set up to encourage new commissions after lockdown.
I doubt if Stoppard felt the world got much better following his Pinter Prize speech, or that there was any less need for his work. In which, while there wasn’t a huge amount of blood, there was much glorious rhetoric, an increasing amount of love, and a great deal more besides.
Tom Stoppard is pictured above (right) at the 2017 Writers’ Guild Awards, presented by former WGGB President David Edgar (left)