Tom Stoppard’s breakthrough play opened on a bare stage, with two characters in the middle of nowhere tossing a coin. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, notoriously mix-uppable minor characters from the lower reaches of the Hamlet cast list, meet actors on the road to Elsinore, face the haughty Danish court, board the ship that takes them to their unwitting deaths – but they don’t really go anywhere, except in their puzzled, playful minds. They are always on the road to nowhere, a long way from home. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and they’re the only ones who don’t know it.
Some writers create a dramatic territory so identifiable you could type it into a satnav. Harold Pinter’s grubby suburbia, David Hare’s deceitful establishment, Caryl Churchill’s unmoored dystopia. Home in Stoppard is a fitful notion: often historically and geographically exact, but rarely found in the same place twice. He is hardly an autobiographical writer, but the biography gives a clue. Born Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia in 1937, he wasn’t even two years old when, as the Nazis invaded, his family left the country. Then came Singapore and Darjeeling and, after his mother’s second marriage, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Bristol. Later came tours behind the iron curtain in support of dissident artists with Amnesty and PEN. Stoppard was the image of the cosmopolitan intellectual, a restless, rootless imagination. But where do his plays feel at home?
The play that might reflect his day-to-day life most accurately – The Real Thing (1982), which centres on a celebrated London playwright, agonising over his music selection for Desert Island Discs – is, to my mind, one of his least interesting. Far more engaging are works that roam over time and space – prerevolutionary Russia, colonial India, Georgian Britain and various points of Mitteleuropa.
The Real Thing is often thought to mark a shift in Stoppard’s work – where the clever-clogs brain decides to share the stage with the aching heart. That isn’t quite fair – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s lost-puppy bewilderment, the hilarious frustrations of the heroes in Jumpers (1972) and Travesties (1974), all land with a stab of distress.
Yet you can chart the development of Stoppard’s work by looking at his closest collaborators. The director of choice early in his career was Peter Wood, a mandarin of period comedy. “It is my fascination with verbal language that leads me towards comedy,” Stoppard declared. In Jumpers, Travesties and On the Razzle (1981), Wood made epigrams sparkle and also bite. Trevor Nunn’s symphonic embrace took in Stoppard’s later plays, framing the lush historicism and wry romance of Arcadia (1993) and The Coast of Utopia (2002).
Stoppard quipped that he had wanted Morecambe and Wise to play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in his 1966 play, but you can get a sense of his priorities by looking at the actors he actually wrote for: Diana Rigg’s sardonic quipster (Jumpers, Night and Day) was followed by Felicity Kendal, gruff yet gamine in The Real Thing, Arcadia and Hapgood (1988). Stoppard’s favourite male voice remained constant – quizzical, rueful players such as John Wood (Travesties, The Invention of Love), Bill Nighy (Arcadia) and Stephen Dillane (The Coast of Utopia). Collaborations can make temporary homes in an impermanent theatre; such changing relationships suggest what kind of family made Stoppard’s plays feel comfortable over the course of his career.
Stoppard’s adaptations are rarely revived or remarked upon, but they seem crucial hinge works that amplified his sensibility. He may have left central Europe behind as an infant, but its culture stole into his writing. Stoppard’s choices as an adapter are revealing – no Ibsen, Strindberg or Brecht (except for an unproduced screenplay based on Life of Galileo). Laughing-through-tears Chekhov was much more his thing; there were bright-eyed versions of The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard and Ivanov. The distinctive style of these plays – in which characters wrangle over domesticity and speculate about the future, even as the present collapses under them – surely left its mark, above all in The Coast of Utopia.
More revealing still are piercingly crafted versions of less familiar plays from Europe’s strudel belt. Vienna is the setting for three works premiered by the National Theatre between 1979 and 1986. These are some of the most purely pleasurable of Stoppard’s scripts, especially the deliriously pun-popping On the Razzle, after Johann Nestroy, where two apprentices escape to the city for a day of high jinks and giddy humour, replete with comical waiters, ersatz Scotsmen and one delicious zinger after another. (“Refined? The ploughman’s lunch is six oysters and a crème de menthe frappé.”) As Stoppard applied the brakes to word-spinning in his original plays, Nestroy’s giddy farce gave wordplay full rein.
Two bittersweet dramas by Arthur Schnitzler signalled the path to Arcadia. Tart little tragedies of pointless duels and the wasted lives they leave in their wake, they opened a door on Stoppard’s heart. Undiscovered Country (1979) has a novelistic breadth, keeping more than a dozen significant characters in play, as it traces the discreet infidelities of the bourgeoisie through Alpine hotel and Viennese villa. Even more direct is Dalliance (1986), where an officer’s bit on the side occupies our attention, a loose end forgotten after his death. “I worshipped him,” she says bitterly. “He was God and salvation – and I was his day off.”
All of these qualities feed into Stoppard’s sumptuous maturity – panorama and plangency, iron and irony. It’s no surprise that Arcadia is set in a library – or at least, in a room used mostly for reading – because it is, in part, a play about the way books can become home, even if lost or misunderstood. There are still brilliant jokes; history’s a brilliant joke, destined to be misread by posterity, which will not get it or will laugh in all the wrong places. Byron is credited with verses and amours not his own; Thomasina, a Georgian maths genius, isn’t credited at all. History is loss, so we must carry loss with us. Here is Thomasina’s tutor consoling her for the destruction of the ancient library of Alexandria:
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language … You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
It is easy to think of Stoppard as a wordsmith, because his words are so scintillating, but he’s an image-smith, too. Canary-clad acrobats in Jumpers, Charon the boatman sculling a poet to the underworld in The Invention of Love (1997). And the final waltz in Arcadia – two waltzes, one past, one present, swooping heartbreakingly and unrequitedly around each other.
In the trilogy The Coast of Utopia, the fizziest minds of a generation have home swept from under them. Set in mid-19th-century Russia, the work shows revolutionaries, liberals, free lovers and freeloaders leaving Tsarist repression but struggling to build a new home in Paris, London or Berlin. They take Russia with them, even as it spurns them. Stoppard’s hero isn’t Karl Marx (reduced to an intemperate minor character), or the swashbuckling anarchist Mikhail Bakunin; surprisingly, perhaps, it isn’t even the worldly novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev. Instead it’s Alexander Herzen, a socialist pulled between nurturing his family and cradling a revolution, pouring his heart and money into quixotic ventures that seem urgent in the moment but bafflingly vaporous to us, watching from the sceptical future.
At the heart of the trilogy, in the aching play Shipwreck, Herzen is about to head into another exile, with another grievous loss of refuge, wife and young child. In the flurry of the great event, it is a painful moment. “Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up,” he reflects. “But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment … The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.”
Stoppard’s late play, Leopoldstadt, arrived in 2020 with an unexpected immersion in Jewish identity. It isn’t directly autobiographical, but traces an affluent Jewish-Austrian family’s half-century of anguish from 1899. The title refers to Vienna’s un-smart Jewish quarter – not where this swank family lives, but where they will have come from. Not-quite-acceptance shadows their lives – as, perhaps, Stoppard acknowledges, it quietly shadowed his. He even unsparingly portrays himself in Leo, the anglicised young writer who revisits Vienna in a sobering coda. The almost giddying throng of characters and clutter in the opening scenes becomes a near-empty stage, a mere trio of survivors. Again, it’s only what we carry in our hearts and heads that steps into the future.
What will the future need from Stoppard? Which plays will last, which fade away? I think the plays that look back at an implausible arcadia or on to an impossible utopia should linger. Stoppard doesn’t address our migrant century, exactly, but his work forms an emblem of the mind on the move: ready to pack up and press on, with only intellectual capital sewn like diamonds into the jacket lining. Principles, paradoxes, a lifetime’s reading and a few good jokes – travelling light, he’s always good to go.
