In praise of Stoppard
Friday, April 4th, 2008Lunch at the National on Thursday this week to raise a glass to Sir Tom Stoppard – receiving an outstanding contribution to the arts award from the Critics Circle, that august outfit that represents, in a rather retiring way, the interests of the ‘critical community’. Sir Tom, sometimes referred to as God by Indy motormouth Johann Hari I note, was on fine, graciously eloquent form, relaying anecdotes about the time he mistook Nureyev for a French translator of one of his plays and expressing puzzlement that the table arrangements were more cruciform than circular.
Being any kind of critic but particularly a second-string critic in the presence of the man who wrote The Real Inspector Hound, the 1968 pastiche-whodunnit that thrusts a disgruntled second-stringer (Moon) centre-stage, carries a particular frisson. A onetime critic himself, few playwrights have quite the same measure of journalism and its fretful preoccupation with status as he.
As the Telegraph’s lead critic Charles Spencer rose to make a speech in Sir Tom’s honour I wondered whether I should be taking involuntary note of Stoppard’s homage to our profession by shooting daggers in his direction – but believe it or not, it’s entirely possible for two critic-colleagues to coexist entirely amiably, regardless of their differing profiles. Charlie’s speech was greeted with wry modesty by its subject, who confessed to finding watching the Donmar’s current revival of Arthur Miller’s The Man Who Had All the Luck ‘a bit close to the bone’. And that luck pertained not just to his success as a dramatist but his early career as a fledgling reporter and critic, he felt.
To my mind Charlie’s speech was an absolute model of heartfelt appreciation – and by way of proof that critics don’t need to seethe with envy when one of their kind excels themselves, I’ve secured permission from its author to reprint it, almost in its entirety, here. Is there a bone of contention in it worth blogging over? Perhaps only the old chestnut about Stoppard’s right-wing virtues but I can’t say I disagree either with CS’s interpretation of the playwright’s latent ideology or its essential value. Stoppard was recently quoted in an interview with the Independent as despairing of modern Britain thus:
“People’s freedom to use their own common sense has been taken away from them,” he says. “I think that since September 11, this aspect of our society began to accelerate very quickly. We went a long way into the future, much more quickly than we would have done and the future is a place where, because people took over a plane using box-cutters, you mustn’t have a fruit knife. There’s nobody there to say, ‘Well, obviously you can’t take this bloody carving knife on board, but yes, this ridiculous 19th-century penknife for sharpening quills, of course you can have that.’ The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now.”
As someone whose Polish grandfather would take him aside to express his fervent admiration for a culture that placed such self-restraining value on this concept of ‘common sense’ – so much derided these days - I can only find myself thanking Stoppard there’s someone left to advocate its banal essence of moderation.Anyway, here’s that speech: “Kenneth Tynan once said that fifty years from now everyone would know precisely what was meant when someone was described as a very Noel Coward sort of person. I think the same might be said of Tom Stoppard.Indeed in A Piece of My Mind, an unfairly neglected play, first staged in 1987, and liked I think by no one except myself and the author, the dramatist Peter Nichols had a game attempt at depicting a Tom Stoppard sort of person.The play concerns the distress of a struggling, ageing dramatist and his agony at meeting a younger writer who has a far more precocious and effervescent talent than his own. The Wunderkind has the splendid name of Miles Whittier and his latest play, Starboard Home, concerns the meeting of Mahatma Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, Anton Chekhov and Nellie Melba on a P&O liner bounds from Bombay to London. To the fury of the Nichols-like playwright it receives rave reviews, of the embarrassingly fulsome kind I know I have sometimes written in which “sparkling dialogue” is compared to “vintage champagne.”
Tom Stoppard, of course, is miles wittier than that, and would never come out with such shop-soiled similes, but in an earlier life during his youthful days in Bristol, he was a drama critic himself so that his portrait of a couple of shabby old reviewers in The Real Inspector Hound has an uncomfortable ring of truth of truth about it. Indeed I can hardly get out of the house to review a show without the voice of Mrs Spencer shouting “you can’t go to the theatre dressed like that” ringing in my ears. Stoppard seems to have been briefly serious about a career in journalism, and even went up for a reporters’ job at the London Evening Standard, where he was interviewed by the terrifyingly chilly editor Charles Wintour, a fate I was to endure myself some 20 years later.“It says in your CV that you are interested in politics Mr Stoppard,” Wintour said. “Perhaps you could give me the name of the Home Secretary.”“I said I was interested, not obsessed,” replied Stoppard. He didn’t get the job, but he deserved a medal for such a nifty reply in the face of the terrifying Wintour.
But thank heavens Tom Stoppard didn’t end up on the Evening Standard, covering first night parties for Londoners’ Diary perhaps, or working as Milton Shulman’s deputy. Instead he began to write plays rather than reviewing them and like Byron woke up famous, some 40 years ago after the first night of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the National Theatre. “What’s it about?” someone asked him after that famous first night, a question his witty, unashamedly cerebral plays have continued to provoke ever since. “It’s about to make me very rich,” Stoppard replied with characteristic elan, or should that be éclat.
It is Stoppard’s gift for combining serious ideas with brilliant jokes that is perhaps his distinguishing gift as a dramatist. This has led some to the mistaken view that his work is all verbal fireworks and a frighteningly high IQ and little else. That is emphatically not the case. As the recent revival of Jumpers starring Simon Russell Beale revealed, even this early play full of wit, bravura and tumbling acrobats is also a profoundly painful study of a failed marriage. Arcadia, which when push comes to shove is I think the Stoppard play I love most, may combine a witty country house thriller with searching meditations on mathematics, chaos theory and landscape gardening, but it is also a beautifully moving study of human transience and loss.And in his most recent play Rock ‘n’ Roll, Stoppard combined his great love of pop music with a biography of the kind of man he might have been himself had he remained in Czechoslovakia, and survived the Second World, rather than following the circuitous route via Singapore and India that brought him to England as a boy. Incidentally the limited edition soundtrack of the play, known to aficionados as the Best Tom Stoppard Album in the World Ever, and containing tracks by the Stones, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead and the legendary lost leader of British psychedelia, Syd Barrett, the latter a potent but fugitive presence in the play, is one of the most treasured items in my record collection.It is not the kind of stuff one imagines Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia grooving to of an evening at home. In fact one of my most treasured memories of Pinter is of him storming out of a play by Neil LaBute before it had even started, Lady Antonia as so often in his flustered wake, because the music of the Smashing Pumpkins was playing too loudly. I like to imagine however that Stoppard and Ayckbourn swap tips about hot rock albums when they meet up and turn the volume up to eleven just like the old rockers in Spinal Tap.
As well as all the plays, Stoppard won an Oscar for his delightful screenplay for Shakespeare in Love and is also renowned in Hollywood as a brilliant script doctor. One of his most recent contributions in this capacity, though his name, as so often, wasn’t on the credits, was to the thrilling Bourne Ultimatum, and the story of Jason Bourne, whose past is a blank, must have struck a chord with a writer who didn’t know all the precise circumstances of his own background until late in life.
Stoppard has described his favourite line in modern drama as being Christopher Hampton’s “I am a man of no convictions, or at least I think I am,” in The Philanthropist. But actually I think it is pretty clear what Stoppard does believe in. He stands for order and civilisation, for tolerance and freedom, all qualities that his work doesn’t so much promulgate as exemplify, though his condemnation of totalitarianism, in his drama and in his public utterance, has at times been explicit.
There is a passage in Rock ‘n’ Roll that seems to me to be particularly poignant and perceptive, coming as it does from a writer who has long acknowledged his love of – and debt to - England. It is delivered by a Czech character, Lenka, long resident in the UK to the hero Jan, a fellow Czech who has also always loved England.
“Don’t come back, Jan,” she says “This place has lost its nerve. They put something in the water since you were here. It’s a democracy of obedience. They’re frightened to use their minds in case their minds tell them heresy. They apologise for history. They apologise for good manners. They apologise for difference. It’s a contest of apology. You’ve got your country back. Why would you change it for one that’s f**ked for fifty years at least.”
That scene is actually set in 1990 shortly before Mrs Thatcher’s defenestration. But my hunch – and he can correct me if I’m wrong - is that Stoppard couldn’t resist smuggling in a speech reflecting his own feelings about the grim PC Britain we inhabit today under a bossy Government that cannot spot a human freedom without planning to regulate or ban it.
So, for all the great evenings in the theatre, Tom, for all the elegance, intelligence, great jokes and generosity of spirit, it gives me huge pleasure to present you with the highest prize in our gift, the Critics’ Circle Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts.”
April 4th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
That was an excellent speech. It’s interesting you’d note Stoppard’s aversion to being PC, when one of the major criticisms of his plays has been that they are, in the words of John Osborne, “intellectual laxatives.” I don’t agree with that viewpoint at all, and consider Stoppard the most accomplished living dramatist in the English language. His massive success here in the States speaks to his universality (Coast of Utopia actually was more successful in New York), even if his work is more intellectually than politically challenging.