Why Tom Stoppard Was the Real Thing
No, not Tom Stoppard, too! In the verbal slop of modern culture, the loss of his flashing, ambidextrous wit and his playful erudition is a literary blow especially hard to bear. His writing was the enemy of the turgid absolutes that blight our contemporary discourse. He once said: “I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”
I have been obsessed with the great Tom since our first meeting, when I was sixteen. He was then the rising—or, rather, the already blazing—thirty-one-year-old star of British theatre. The blaze had been ignited by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which burst from a humble venue at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and wound up at the National Theatre in 1967. When asked later, in New York, what the play was about, he replied, “It’s about to make me very rich.” And it did.
In 1969, Tom showed up at my childhood home in Buckinghamshire to see my film producer father, George Brown, about the possibility of bringing his most recent play, The Real Inspector Hound, to the screen. He lived only twenty minutes away, and eventually bought a country manor nearby for a new life with his second wife, Miriam, a glamorous TV doctor. They became, in a way, the first media power couple, until Tom blew up his marriage in 1990 for one of his leading ladies, Felicity Kendal. (Cf. Charlotte, the wife in The Real Thing, his play about marital infidelity: “There are no commitments, only bargains.”)
He turned up that day at our home, I recall, wearing black and yellow patent shoes, flared velvet trousers, and a trailing student scarf. He chain-smoked as if sipping through a straw. The whole camp look was set off by that sardonic but measured voice and the exotic way he emphasized his ‘r’s. When Tom uttered words like “meretricious” or “rancorous,” the liquid consonants rolled off his tongue with languorous precision. He probably had one of the three most voluptuous mouths of the mid-20th century; the other two were possessed by his friend Mick Jagger and the late Martin Amis. I was mesmerized (though, as an awed teenager, ignored) by a playwright who was also, to all appearances, a rock star.
Tom later became a treasured friend and, five decades later, I still find The Real Inspector Hound the most screamingly funny work in the entire Stoppard oeuvre. Hound is so simple, yet so ingenious in its cavorting concept of a play within a play, centered on two pretentious theatre critics, the lofty Birdboot and the embittered second string, Moon, who get pulled into the country house murder-mystery they have come to review. The play opens with a dead body onstage that remains there for the entire performance, ignored by all the characters, who seem not to notice that it’s a leading clue. The housekeeper, Mrs. Drudge, answers the phone in such Mousetrappish stage-direction lingo as, “Hallo, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early Spring?”
Here was classic, joyful absurdity, devoid of the political confrontation then in vogue in the work of playwrights such as Howard Brenton and David Edgar. “I get deeply embarrassed by the statements and postures of ‘committed theatre,’” Stoppard told an interviewer in 1973. “I’ve never felt that art is important. That’s been my secret guilt.” It’s extraordinary to think that none of Tom’s plays would be staged at the Royal Court Theatre until Rock ’n’ Roll, in 2006. There was a feeling among advocates of committed theatre that Tom was little more than a “university wit”—pretty rich considering that, by choice, he never went to college. Who needed Oxford or Cambridge when you could satisfy your passion for finding things out by shoe-leather reporting? For a time, he held down the job of motoring correspondent for the Western Daily Press, even though he couldn’t drive. (“I used to review the upholstery,” he explained.) Unburdened by a degree, Stoppard spent the rest of his life in a kind of autodidactic frenzy, risking one deep dive after another into subjects as varied as linguistic philosophy, landscape gardening, and nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries. But not once did he drown in solemnity.
One of Tom’s favorite novels was Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. In the early part of his journalism career, he sometimes wrote under the pseudonym of its main character, William Boot, the hapless rural-life correspondent of Lord Copper’s successful broadsheet, The Daily Beast, who is sent by mistake to cover a war in the fictional African state of Ishmaelia. The comical confusion and misadventures of Boot reflected Tom’s own relish for journalism as a career that you fell into rather than trained for. He once said that his favorite description of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was as two beat reporters trying and failing to make a story stand up. He retained a lifelong faith in the romance and thrill of newspapering; it was the basis of his long friendship with my husband, Harry, who was the swashbuckling editor of the London Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981. The last time I saw Tom, looking tousled and ebullient, was in 2023, when he came with his third wife and last great love Sabrina Guinness to the Truth Tellers Investigative Journalism Summit I founded with Reuters in Harry’s honor. Once a host and showman of London social action, Tom rarely left his country retreat in Dorset after the Covid lockdown, but his enduring journalistic passion couldn’t resist a roomful of scribes and hacks. He emailed me afterwards, “You are the last person who needs to be told that the feeling for Harry was palpable—evangelical really.”
The Play’s the Thing
In the newly released Hamnet—a favorite at film festivals, and much buzzed about—Shakespeare is, I am told, depicted as a person of overwhelming melancholy, felled by grief. If so, that’s about as far as you can get from the Stoppard view of the Bard. Think of Shakespeare in Love, which won Tom an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1999. His Shakespeare was a driven, overworked man of the theatre, hustling for new ideas, less of a brooding savant and more like a showrunner working against the clock in the writers’ room of a Netflix hit. Hard not to see clear traces of a self-portrait in the character. Tom, too, thrived on a pileup of assignments and deadlines; it was part of his expertise not to let them distract him from the more substantial business of writing for the stage. Screenplays, radio plays, TV plays: All were cranked out, yet they rarely seemed like rote work. Despite the cranking, they bore the Stoppard stamp. Think of the moment in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, on which he was a script doctor, when Indy realizes that he and his father have both slept with the same woman. Sean Connery, proudly: “I’m as human as the next man.” Harrison Ford, indignantly: “I was the next man.” Sounds like Tom to me, doesn’t it?
In short, Stoppard, though the owner of a radiant mind, was averse to the high-minded. He was a practical craftsman, with an ever-keen eye on the folks in the audience, and on how they were best approached: Bedazzle them but don’t bewilder them, and God help you if you bore them. What he worshiped was words: “If you look after them, you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos,” as Henry, the playwright character, says in The Real Thing. “I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are.”
Tom was famously generous with his time and support for his friends and young actors and writers. (One of his four sons, Ed Stoppard, is a distinguished actor today.) In 1998, he gave me the best possible gift an editor could ask for. For the launch issue of my new magazine, Talk, he agreed to do something he had hitherto avoided: He would write a personal essay about his early life. (As a rule, he seldom wrote articles unless it was to champion human rights.) He could have dashed off something elegant and evasive, but what he wrote turned out to be pivotal self-revelation. Until the Talk piece, his standard autobiography had painted his childhood as a series of escapes. He was born in Czechoslovakia; his family fled to Singapore to escape Hitler. When Japan attacked Singapore, his mother took young Tom and his brother to India. His father, a physician, stayed behind and was killed. At the end of the war, when his mother remarried, this time to a British soldier, the family moved to England, where Stoppard was raised to believe, like Cecil Rhodes, that to be born an Englishman was to “have drawn first prize in the lottery of life.”
In Tom’s telling, however, his mother, Martha, like so many of her traumatized generation, had “held back whole histories.” She had “no sense of racial identity and no religious beliefs,” Stoppard wrote. “There were Jews in Zlín”—his hometown—“but they were proper Jews who wore black hats and went to the synagogue and the rest of it. Jews who were Jewish.” It fostered in him an “almost willful purblindness” and a “rarely disturbed absence of curiosity,” he confessed, about his mysterious distant kinsmen.
Darkness Visible
It was not until the Communists fell from power, in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, that, according to Tom, “the blind went up.” As an admirer of Václav Havel, his fellow playwright and later the last president of Czechoslovakia, Tom became preoccupied with the question of fate: how, but for the luck of being spirited to the West (think of the toss of a coin that opens Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), he, too, could have been deprived of his existence and his freedom, instead of enjoying what he described as his “charmed life” in Britain. When Tom visited Prague, an elderly relative turned up at his hotel bearing a photograph album, which brought alive for the first time his family’s exterminated world. It rounded out information that he had learned the year before: All four of his grandparents and three of his mother’s sisters were among the 263,000 Czechoslovakian Jews who had died at Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and other Nazi concentration camps. Such were the memories, and the forgotten stories, into which Tom delved for the article in Talk.
It took more than twenty years for those discoveries to grow and bloom into Leopoldstadt, his last great play and, in some respects, his simplest. It was the hard-won simplicity that only artists of the highest rank, painters and poets as well as playwrights, arrive at in their final years. The magician laid aside his box of tricks in favor of truths that were almost too hard to bear. Thus was the arc of his life brought close to its end. Last week, at the age of 88, he died as we would all wish to, surrounded by loved ones, amid beautiful countryside, in peace. Tom Stoppard had all the luck, and he knew it. But he repaid his private blessings, many times over, on the public stage, for our astonishment and our delight. If we want to honor him, now he is gone, one wise line from The Real Thing gives us our cue: “Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late.”
Tina, you too are a magical writer — you always manage to hit the right note and gather those emotions in us that say yes yes yes exactly. Thank you for this wonderful tribute to Tom Stoppard both as the revered writer and also to him as your dear friend.
Masterful. The obit to die for.