| “It's Wanting to Know That Makes Us Matter” |
In Memory |
| Tom Stoppard , Theatre of Seven Decades , December 1, 2025 |
An appreciation of fifteen of the plays will follow. “Front Row” discussed Tom Stoppard on BBC Radio 4 for the whole of its 42 minutes on 1st December. Michael Billington: “We had a book at home called “Ideas Have Legs.” All Stoppard's plays have legs. He gives ideas bounce and versatility. Just a few examples. He writes about chaos theory, he writes about moral philosophy, he writes about the nature of consciousness, he writes about the role of the artist in his plays. “But he does this at the same time including puns, parodies, jokes, song and dance, lots of showbiz vitality. That was his specific genius as a writer, to acknowledge high ideas, but also to acknowledge low culture, if you like, at the same time.” Hermione Lee: “It is that extraordinary sense of comedy and knowledge run together. It's a mixture of an extraordinary care and precision with language, a responsibility for language, and making us think all over again about the meaning of words. “Combined with very deep feeling, particularly for people who are lost, or vulnerable, or in exile. Along with a vast appetite for knowledge. Hannah in “Arcadia” says “It's wanting to know that makes us matter.” Michael Billington: “Dealing with ideas, but with exuberance, gaiety and joie de vivre. Those are the words that come to mind. A spiritedness. A lightness of touch.” Hermione Lee: “Henry in “the Real Thing” says “Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.” There's a moral compass, there a moral terra firma, there's an appeal to conscience and kindness in his plays. I know these aren't the obvious things that come up but they are deeply important in all of them." Patrick Marber: “A soft sadness that runs through all his work...There is something underneath that is dark, that is so painful and sad. Stoppardian is for me to penetrate that darkness with a very light touch.” Michael Billington: “The Real Thing” is a pivotal play. You see his ability to write about pain...it's about the ecstasy of love and the pain of jealousy. And he does those two quite brilliantly, love fulfilled and love unfulfilled.” Abridged, with thanks and acknowledgement, from the full discussion which can be heard at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002n06t * * * * The obituarist for the Economist Ann Wroe: “On a warm summer day in 2003, Tom Stoppard found himself strolling round the mostly ruined estate of Premukhino, north of Moscow. The graffiti-scrawled walls had once been home to the family of Mikhail Bakunin, a 19th-century Russian anarchist. This was his setting for the first act of “The Coast of Utopia”, a trilogy about Russian thinkers, with its hero in Alexander Herzen. “The play began with a family gathering: the women talking about Pushkin (then still alive) and affairs of the heart, the young men arguing about German philosophy and Russian literature. As he wandered he recognised a pond, where a visitor had caught a carp, and the site of a family bonfire party. Yet he had never been there before, except in his mind’s eye. Visiting a place while writing about it was no more necessary than travelling to Denmark while writing “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, the play which, in 1967, made him famous. What he needed were his London Library books, not the places, to imagine his characters. “He had gone to Premukhino not to learn, but to feel. “The Coast of Utopia” was no more about the history of Russia’s socialist movement than “The Invention of Love”, his favourite play, was about Latin semantics—or, for that matter, Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” was about capitalism. “What interested him, like Chekhov (whom he translated), was not abstract ideas but how non-abstract lives were determined by the challenges of their time. Characters were not vehicles for ideas; they were driven and sometimes run over by them. “Normally he did not particularly care where his plays were staged. But with “The Coast of Utopia”, he indulged a dream of bringing his characters, speaking Russian, to the Moscow stage. He was fascinated to see them interact with the country that had rejected their ideas of freedom and social justice. “How free will and chance fitted in with history, which Herzen declared “had no purpose”, was a leitmotif of both his work and his life. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” opens with the two minor characters from “Hamlet” playing Chance: tossing a coin that always lands on the same side. Their fate is already known, even from the title page. Yet in the face of what seems inevitable, they jest with each other, as if they can escape. As his Herzen said, it took wit and courage “to make our way while our way is making us”. “...His play “Arcadia”, a melange of ideas on mathematics, Byron, sex and gardening, was set in a perfect English idyll, the fine Georgian house he lived in himself. The English language was already his, and he soon passed on its wit to his characters, including Jan in “Rock ’n’ Roll”: the play that reminded him what could have been his life in Czechoslovakia. Jan jokes that “to be English would be my luck...moderately enthusiastic, moderately philistine and a good sport.” “...But the text required labour. Both parts of the word “playwright” had equal weight for him. Constructing plays was a craft. He wrote them in longhand and fountain pen on unlined A4 sheets, then spoke them, with punctuation and stage directions, into a dictaphone. The job of the actors was to ski freely, playfully, down the piste he had made for them. Style he didn’t mind about, as long as they skied. What he dreaded was to think of them trudging through the snow with one ski on their shoulder. “Fame did not blind him, and his modesty was not false. He was knighted, and won an Oscar for his screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love”; that was all very nice, but didn’t help with his main preoccupation, writing the next play. Nor did any previous techniques. Ideas were not a problem; it was how to get into them. That was like trying to pick a lock without thinking about the lock. Writing plays, in the end, was not a public service but a private neurosis. “And he clung to that privacy. He eschewed party politics, ideologies and dogmas; he resented moral exhibitionism. He never publicised exchanging letters with political prisoners in Russia. In sum, he did not take sides; or rather, he took every possible decent side. His plays were the best expression of himself, because, like Walt Whitman, he contained multitudes. Whitman’s lines would come to his mind when he talked to his actors: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.” “...His final days found him trying to unpick yet another lock: a play about philosophy students at Oxford in 1939-40. In his mind it dealt with ethics and morality as objective and real, rather than subjective. As he told his Russian director over Zoom, he had barely scratched the surface of the paper.” Abridged, with thanks and acknowledgement, from the full review which can be read at the Economist by subscription. * * * * Kate Maltby wrote for Prospect: “The child who would become Sir Tom Stoppard, OM CBE FRSL, fled Czechoslovakia when he was not yet two years old. Years later, he would like to say that at the age of eight he had “put on Englishness like a coat”. That was in 1945, when his widowed mother married Major Kenneth Stoppard, who provided the family with an English surname and an English home in Nottingham. “...Stoppard was one of the great British writers: the type of genius who makes us grateful to have lived in his lifetime. That he chose to channel his talents first and foremost into theatre speaks to the central role that theatre can and should play in British intellectual life. Stoppard was also one of the last of a generation of intellectuals born in continental Europe whose talents, snatched from the pyre of the Holocaust, lit up the nation that had given them refuge. “As Tomáš Sträussler, Stoppard was born into the company town of Zlin, which functioned almost entirely as a campus of the Bata shoe factory. As Nazi Germany geared up to invade Czechoslovakia, the Bata CEO had the foresight and care to transfer all his Jewish employees to overseas postings. Amongst them was Tom’s father, a company doctor, who took his family to Singapore only to die during the Japanese invasion. “...For most of his life, however, Stoppard understood himself and embraced a life as not only British but English. For this, he credited his stepfather, despite their difficult relationship. Kenneth Stoppard, Tom would later write, “believed with Cecil Rhodes that to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life, and I doubt that even Rhodes, the Empire builder who lent his name to Rhodesia, believed it as utterly as Ken”. “Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard’s authorised, authoritative and adoring biographer, tells a slightly different tale. Her doorstopper biography, published in 2020, drew new attention to his childhood refuge amongst the English community in Darjeeling, in the death throes of the British Raj. This is where he first learned English, cricket and Latin; where he first observed that to be English was to be set apart. “Stoppard’s passionate patriotism, however, was not merely a psychological reflex for suppressing his roots, or an absorption of imperial chauvinism. It was rooted in a profound moral vision of the world. He understood himself as having escaped not only Nazism, but also the horrors of the Iron Curtain that fell over his homeland in its wake. From the days of his earliest success, he worked to support dissidents in Soviet-occupied territories, but his ideals were galvanised by the arrest in 1977 of Vaclav Havel and other founder members of the democratic Charter 77 movement. “As Stoppard wrote in his diary, he saw Havel as a twin self-trapped in a darker fate: “Vaclav Havel, a playwright whose mother didn’t marry into British democracy has been charged with high treason… Could I contemplate a life where all can be preserved by moral cowardice, lost by moral courage?” From that moment on, as Lee writes, “Soviet Communism and its victims became ‘his’ cause: all his political views and his emotions, and his personal history, pointed him towards it.” “In 1977, he gladly accepted a commission from the New York Review of Books to report from Prague on the fate of the Charter 77 dissidents. The following year, he joined the advisory board of Index on Censorship, after writing for the organisation’s magazine about the ill treatment of the Czech activist Viktor Fainberg. His commitment to victims of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe continued all his life: in 2011, he founded the “Belarus Committee” and dedicated months at a time to campaigning with Index on Censorship, Pen, Amnesty and the Belarus Free Theatre for the release of Belarusian political prisoners. “Stoppard understood British political traditions as the safeguard that guaranteed liberty, allowing him to live his own free life of the mind. He would later cite this as the greatest benefit of arriving as a child in the land “of tolerance, fair play and autonomous liberty, of habeas corpus, of the mother of parliaments, of freedom of speech, worship and assembly, of the English language”. Four years ago, in an interview with Index on Censorship, he admitted to having doubts about the long-term stability of these bulwarks of bourgeois democracy. “On approaching death in an age of online polarisation, he told the journalist Sarah Sands: “A line of Philip Larkin comes into my head: ‘Get out as early as you can and don’t have any kids yourself’.” (In fact, he had four children, whose future worried him deeply.) “He remained, however, a political patriot. Throughout his life, as Lee writes, “the radical left’s attack on British and American societies and politics as repressive or totalitarian seemed contemptible to him”. It was the knowledge that he had so nearly lived his life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic that made him grateful to have lived it as an Englishman. His was a form of migrant politics that is out of fashion.” Abridged, with thanks and acknowledgement, from the full review which can be read at Prospect, by subscription Tom Stoppard (Tomáš Sträussler) 3 July 1937 to 29 November 2025 |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
This review has been read 175 times There are 37 other reviews of productions with this title in our database:
|
