Tom Stoppard was the epitome of cool. British theatre will be poorer without him

Tom Stoppard was cool and clever. His coolness was bound up with his cleverness, but he also had his own photogenic rock ‘n’ roll allure, the tousled hair augmenting his charm, erudition and way with a bon mot.

His success was such that he made British theatre cool and clever too. To have done this when he was young, in the Sixties – as he did when he vaulted from the Edinburgh Fringe to the Old Vic with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1967 – was the stuff of fairytales. To have then sustained that achievement and penned a raft of hits, galvanising and lending glamour to the theatre culture without yielding to passing fashion, makes him a playwriting titan; the stuff of legend.

Ahead of his penultimate play The Hard Problem (2014), which explored the science of consciousness, I hailed him as theatre’s internationally feted “philosopher king”. When it came to broaching scientific and philosophical questions – about the nature of freedom, the self, love, existence – the playwright, who has died aged 88, was unequalled in his curiosity, wit and dramatic daring. He had a supreme faith in theatre as a crucible for ideas – and converted the sceptics; he pushed, and pushed again, at the limits of what was possible.

The apotheosis of that “Stoppardian” capacity to dazzle us was Arcadia (1993). Shuttling between the early 19th century and late 20th century, its English country house action explored shifting aesthetic tastes and evolving scientific inquiry; the love story at its heart was defined by ardent intellectualism and a wistful, prescient grasp of chaos theory and entropy. It contained multitudes: landscape gardening, Byron, biography, iterated algorithms, immaculate phrasing. It attracted acting top brass, including Rufus Sewell and Emma Fielding; and played at the National, the West End and then Broadway. It was the final riposte to the lurking fallacy that his work was all mind over heartfelt matter.

So deep in understanding, so broad in ambition, so light of touch, it was rightly hailed as a masterpiece, one of the great plays of the 20^th century, though it has not often been revived (joyfully, the Old Vic recently announced a new production, which will run from January to March next year). In our present age of the soundbite pensée it might bamboozle more than before, but if it requires us to ‘keep up’, the intimidating nature of Stoppard’s oeuvre is often overstated.

Stoppard also earned great acclaim for his work in Hollywood, helping to craft and fine-tune scripts for directors including Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton and Kathryn Bigelow. It was his position as Spielberg’s secret weapon that was perhaps most lucrative: he pocketed $2m for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). But it was Shakespeare in Love (1998) that truly made his name in the film-world, winning him his first Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Sometimes his ambitions overreached themselves, as with the densely involved play Hapgood (1988), combining an espionage plot with a stack of material on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. But the attempt was so valiant that even an off-night ranked higher than most. And the wider point prevailed – that Stoppard was stimulating a discourse; far from recoiling at the idea of a chattering class, he celebrated the self-made intelligentsia.

From ‘bounced Czech’ to devoted Anglophile

In this I see him, for all his establishment trappings, wealth and dandified status, as a rare refusenik figure, almost like one of the dissidents that abound in his work (not least 2006’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, which visits the country of his birth from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution). This ‘bounced Czech’ who found refuge in England after the war, and remained a devoted Anglophile, resisted our ingrained philistinism and flew the flag for thought-experiment and civilisation. He wrote about what he wanted to know about; and he told us who we could be.

A ‘small c’ conservative maverick, he disdained the stipulations of the artistic Left for social ‘commitment’ and the Right’s inclination for mere entertainment. Betraying his own Continental roots, he showed a fondness for abstraction and a feel for the slippery nature of identity – his characters often ideas-driven not fully fleshed, his plots tied to themes.

Stoppard made the case for the individual over the collective, and believed words themselves a crucial tool here. Revived at the Old Vic last year, The Real Thing (1982) – about infidelity and authenticity – struck a timely note in its fictional playwright’s defence of exacting language: “I don’t think writers are sacred but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”

Though he disliked catch-all descriptions of his work and roved various subject-areas, his penchant was to look at periods of intellectual and ideological upheaval – the deficiencies of 20^th century moral relativism in Jumpers (1972), or the complacent assimilationist tendency in Jewish society in early 20^th century Vienna in his final play Leopoldstadt (2020). That swansong represented something profoundly personal: a reckoning with a Jewish identity long kept at arm’s length. Tom Straussler, the boy who fled Czechoslovakia in 1939, had spent a lifetime as Tom Stoppard; Leopoldstadtindirectly confronted the erasure of his family in the Holocaust.

Of his other finest pieces, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a vision of the confined human condition, looks set to be around for a good while, even if it may do so by hanging on to the coat-tails of the immortal Hamlet. You could argue that its additional debt to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot repays itself by pushing through the seeming cul-de-sac of post-war absurdism and finding fresh pastures. Stoppard was a magpie with a Midas touch – his teasing and trenchant pastiche of The Importance of Being Earnest in Travesties (1974), his gem of a play about James Joyce, Lenin and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara in Zurich during the Great War, is borderline genius.

His imagining of Oscar Wilde himself – in Hades, talking to the poet and classicist AE Housman – in The Invention of Love (1997), warrants the highest praise again. Here is a play that combines illuminating scholarship and searing emotion, as Housman counts the cost of his sublimated homosexual desire. “I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age,” Wilde famously declared.

Although he was no revolutionary, the same could be said of Stoppard; he upheld and embodied the very idea of art and culture at a time of corrosive dumbing-down and commercial flim-flam. He raised our game, and changed it too.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]