Tom Stoppard 1937-2025

There are not many great writers, really great. Certainly not in our time. Most of them, for about half a century at least, have avoided the arts. Go to the arts for bad writing. Especially in novels. So say I. Read novels and see: and everywhere, ye shall find rice pudding dropped from a first-floor window (as Max Beerbohm said about the prose of H.G. Wells). Good writing, on the other hand, serviceable writing, in the 20th century was mostly found in essays, books, histories: in prose written in sentences. Read any blue Penguin from the middle of the century: Childe, Eysenck, Gellner, those people. But on the artistic side there was not much after Eliot and Lawrence and Waugh. The Shakespearian tradition, even the Shavian tradition, more or less faded out in the middle of the last century.

Shaw, sadly, was a socialist – I should know, since I wrote a PhD dissertation on him and his socialism. Almost every dramatist after 1950, at least almost every admired dramatist, was also a socialist. This may have been the fault, between them, of Kenneth Tynan and George Devine (he of the Royal Court Theatre and English Stage Company), who more or less single-handedly destroyed the T.S. Eliot/Christopher Fry/Ronald Duncan attempt to revive the poetic drama and then, with the other hand, along with almost every critic then around, boosted and buffed up that great liturgy of lapsed Methodists who published their plays with Methuen: first, John Osborne, who, at the time of Look Back in Anger, was on the Left, Robert Bolt, who, at the time of A Man For All Seasons was campaigning with Bertrand Russell and others for the CND, and also Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, Arnold Wesker, Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, John Arden and all the rest. There were some exceptions. Some wrote the occasional good play: e.g. Peter Shaffer, whose Royal Hunt of the Sun is great, and Brian Friel, whose Translations is great. No one dislikes Bennett’s Madness of George III. But the only great exception to the otherwise entire collapse of dramaturgy and playwriting to dust was Tom Stoppard.

In an interview with Kenneth Tynan in the 1980s Stoppard said the unsayable. For a start, he was never a socialist, and never wrote anything that could be mistaken for socialism. He admitted to “an absolute lack of certainty about almost anything”. He quoted Keats on negative capability (“when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”) and commented: “I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.” And also: “Dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”

Now, I am not an expert on Stoppard. But I have read many plays, read a good number of his plays, and seen several of them – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Artist Descending a Staircase, Travesties and Arcadia. Oh, and The Real Inspector Hound. For a time, 20 years ago, I thought about writing a book on historical drama, and went so far as to write a draft essay on Travesties: his play about James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin encountering each other in Zurich, as recalled by an English civil servant, and where Stoppard, brilliantly, since he was the Wilde of our day – the maker of perfect works of art, that did double duty by subverting perfect works of art – superimposed the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest onto his stage Irishman Joyce, his stage obfuscator and provocateur Tzara and his stage socialist Lenin.

Stoppard, we are told, thought Arcadia was his best play, and said that The Invention of Love was his favourite. Well, this was late Stoppard: where he was trying to write with a bit more heart. The cliché about Stoppard was that he was all head and no heart. Well, I have never read The Invention of Love: but Arcadia was impressive but really just an excuse to put on stage the same coup that Milan Kundera put in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Do you know either Arcadia or The Unbearable Lightness? In both of them, the magnificent trick is played of killing off the characters, and then, afterwards, displaying them from earlier on in joy and in love – dancing. This was extremely effective: especially on stage. Take an early scene, in exact chronology, but place it at the end, to suggest the triumph of life over death. But it was a trick, a counterfeit: it only worked because it was not true.

If I consider it with my most serious hat on, it is very sad: far less effective than Tolstoy’s Resurrection, where genuine transcendence is attempted, or even than Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, where the abandoned wife, in the form of a statue, comes back to life, and certainly than Kaj Munk’s The Word, a great play, the only play that has ever made me cry.

The Guardian comments:

For all his personal sociability, as a writer Stoppard was a loner who did not share the Left-leaning political sympathies of his playwriting contemporaries. Describing himself as a “timid libertarian” and “an honorary Englishman”, he was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher.

His best play is probably The Real Inspector Hound. It is a perfect, clever farce. Put Stoppard’s Real Inspector Hound and Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer and maybe also Noises Off by Michael Frayn and you have the two or three greatest farces of all English literature. And Stoppard’s is the cleverest.

The thing about Stoppard is that he was the most playful of all playwrights. The Real Inspector Hound plays with Mousetrap-type scenarios. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead plays with Hamlet by fusing it with Waiting for Godot. Travesties plays with almost everything available. Stoppard understood what a play was about: it was fundamentally about delighting an audience, nor boring them, nor teaching them, nor confirming their own boring teachings. (By the way, I did that deliberately: let’s kill the pedantic ‘neither…nor’ and replace it with the old English ‘nor…nor’.) He did not give us the misery and mud and merde of Bond’s Lear or Brenton’s Romans in Britain or, God help us, anything by David Rudkin or Sarah Kane. He did not try to sketch the seriousness we find in Shakespeare’s Antony or Shaw’s Caesar. He did not try to depict spiritual agitation of the sort felt by Luther in Osborne’s Luther or even Pizarro in Shaffer’s Royal Hunt of the Sun: or, for that matter, in many of the best historical plays written in the 20th century – Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, Williams’s Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, Campbell’s The Jesuit, Whiting’s The Devils, Anouilh’s Becket, Camus’s Caligula, perhaps even Masefield’s Pompey the Great. Stoppard avoided, as far as I know, tragedy. Housman at the Styx was not tragedy. He preferred comedy. So there is probably a flaw in his writings that deal with death: they paint too thinly, in watercolour. I refer to the Coast of Utopia plays, which deal with Herzen, Bakunin et al., and The Invention of Love, which is about A.E. Housman, who was not a hero.

In fact, I wonder why Stoppard avoided kings. Perhaps he did not want Charles III to ever say, “I am, er, Moon.” (Cf. Elizabeth I, who knew her Shakespeare, said, “I am Richard II.”)

The skill of Travesties was that it defied the history it depicted. Stoppard insisted that it was not a historical play. Whereas other playwrights imagined the great and good coming together, even when in history they had not – as Bolt imagined Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots coming together in Vivat, Vivat Regina, and Shaw imagined Isaac Newton, Charles II, Geoffrey Kneller and George Foxcoming together in In Great Good Charles’s Golden Days – Stoppard did something different. He did not pretend that these figures had come together, and then depicted it as if they did, but instead showed that the coming together of Lenin, Tzara and Joyce was in fact the confection of the pompous English civil servant Carr, who more or less made up his stories as he went along:

CARR. A prudish, prudent man, Joyce, in no way profligate or vulgar, and yet convivial, without being spend-thrift, and yet still without primness towards hard currency in all its transferable and transmutable forms and denominations [and so on]… in short, a liar and a hypocrite, a tight-fisted, sponging, fornicating drunk not worth the paper, that’s that bit done.

I usually have no patience for unreliable narrators, but somehow, by putting an unreliable narrator into a play for perhaps the first time, Stoppard made unreliable narration palatable: since the spectators could accept everything on an ‘as if’ basis. Stoppard’s play was itself a play within a play. Clever, eh?

Who has sent up the English more effectively than this? Tzara explains to Carr how his Dadaism is an artistic representation of contingency. The conversation is a caricature of that between an aesthete and a philistine and Carr disagrees as a plain Englishman might:

CARR. You are simply asking me to accept that the word Art means whatever you wish it to mean but I do not accept it.

TZARA. Why not? You do the same with words like patriotism, duty, love, freedom, king and country, brave little Belgium…

Stoppard could not write poetry, and he could not write tragedy. But the problem with everyone else’s modern drama is that it turned political weight into scatology, rape and meaningless violence before venturing into Bond-Brenton-Barker aggrieved NHSishness and ASBOishness. Stoppard had to avoid all that. And there was space for something else: a sceptical, sharp, wry, witty, playful sort of sensibility, of the sort we used to have in Wilde and Shaw. So he wrote comedy, and carved out for himself an amusing life on the edge of English literature and as part of the establishment of the English drama. He was even on Pinter’s cricket team.

I don’t want to sound satirical. Everyone has limits. And the point about Stoppard is that he, almost uniquely nowadays, had a real ear for the English language. Perhaps others forced it to do more, for better or worse; but he did his bit to keep sharp, conscious use of English alive to the present day. He worked at his plots, and in this he was a good scrivener, a good craftsman. He needed the plots, as frames on which to hang the great shields and trophies of his power. These shields and trophies were his words: that flow or flux which is writer’s real power. The real thing, indeed. Yet he knew that words alone were not enough. So he worked at situation, and, of course, had a side gig as a Hollywood chafing-dish, adding a bit of pepper, vinegar, oil and nutmeg to other people’s drab drafts.

The meaning of ‘travesty’ is something like ‘a cross-dressed thing’. The obvious implication is that something is worse if it is a travesty. But Stoppard always knew that a play is a travesty, and so the best thing to do with plays is admit the travesty.

One part of English, despite what everyone thinks about the dull, leaden, pragmatic English, is an excess of intellect, even an irrelevance of intellect. I have it: indeed, my entire adult life since university has involved a grotesque attempt to discipline that youthful, careless exuberance and folly. This excess of intellect is not clever in German or French manner: it is not Kantian or Cartesian. It is Shakespearian, and Beatlesque, a Chaucerian, Alice-in-Wonderland, Wodehousian, perhaps sometimes grotesque and Swiftian, sort of thing: whimsical, ironic, cheerful, frivolous, darkly self-knowing, self-jeering, even a bit self-contemptuous, and somewhat disgraceful. This aspect of our nature, and art, is as much a national characteristic as anything else we have ever had. It expresses itself continuously in jingles and japes and jeer and jar. For some reason this was muted in the drama of dreary Davids (Edgar, Storey, Hare) and boring Brentons, Barkers and Bonds. But it shone out clear in the writing of Tom Stoppard. Czech, he was, by origin; and Jew he was, by blood: and that is good – our country is all about immigrants, isn’t it – but he wrote in English, good English, and it is the language that made him the almost exemplary Englishman of our time. Understated, not a sound-of-his-own-voice man, but humble, and interested in the written word.

I hear that the King and Queen lament his death. Graham Linehan confides to Triggernometry that the producer of, I assume, Leopoldstadt said that Stoppard did not want colour-blind casting for the ghetto, while adding, with moral vengefulness, that he got it anyway. Daniel Johnson has written a nice piece. So has Patrick Marber. Michael Billington, the last remaining old critic, also writes a nice piece. In fact, ain’t it remarkable, that everyone has been so nice about the departed. One would expect nothing less from the Telegraph and Spectator. Buteven the miserable old Guardian had nothing bad to say about Mr Negative Capability and Dr Mock. Though Billington did reprove Stoppard for saying that The Importance of Being Earnest is about nothing, saying: “I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce.” Sillington Billington.

He was silent on everything the Daily Sceptic wants to make a noise about. But I suppose his is the sort of sensibility we are ultimately concerned to defend: the genuine old free spirit of the second half of the 20th century, when a good writer could command the heights of his art.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.