T S Eliot assured us that the world ends not with a bang but with a whimper, but in the last few months I have started to feel that my cultural world (or, at least, the cultural world that I inhabited and loved before making aliya in 1986, which is the cultural world that I will always regard as home) is ending not with a bang, nor with a single whimper, but, rather, with an inexorable series of whimpers, as, one by one, the cultural icons of my youth and my first decade or so of adulthood turn up on the obituary pages.

This week, it was the turn of Tom Stoppard, whose unique gifts I want to celebrate today. Before I dive deeper into his work, a couple of observations, if I may.

Many of the comments below Stoppard’s obituary on Sunday spoke about what a tremendous loss his death was. While I am sure that it is felt as a profound loss by his family and friends, this seems to me a strange description for the world as a whole. Stoppard was 88 years old at his death. He completed what he declared would be his last play – Leopoldstadt – in 2019. Over a period of 56 years, he wrote 26 plays for the theatre, and adapted or translated 10 others. He also wrote the libretto for an opera, 10 plays for radio, 5 original plays and 2 loose adaptations for television, in addition to 17 film and television screenplays adapted from books and his own and others’ plays. As well as covering a range of genres, these 70 works span a wide range of subject matter. I must confess that I feel no profound sense of loss. I am, indeed, so overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of work that Stoppard has left us that I do not feel anything is lacking.

My second observation concerns the distinction that Stoppard shares with Shaw, Pinter, Chekhov, Brecht, Shakespeare (obviously) and a few other playwrights. He has been adjectivized. This coining of a term to describe the style of plays written by X strikes me as paradoxical. Such an adjective is useful only when describing another playwright’s work – ‘I feel X’s recent work is increasingly Pinteresque’. However, such an adjective is only coined for a playwright whose style is so idiosyncratic that any work by another playwright that puts one in mind of it feels like pastiche, and not really warranting serious discussion. So, the adjectives are, in practical terms, of very limited use.

Which is a neat way into addressing the question of what makes a play ‘Stoppardian’. One obituary suggested that Stoppardian is ‘shorthand for wit, linguistic cleverness and dazzling eloquence’.

This seems to me a very incomplete definition, that fails to recognise the extreme seriousness of Stoppard’s concerns in almost all of his work. He himself once wrote: “I want to demonstrate that I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours.” This, I feel, is an interesting comment for two reasons. The first is that, in dismissing his ‘wit, linguistic cleverness and dazzling eloquence’ as ‘flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours’, either Stoppard was being rather archly self-deprecating, or he was so naturally and effortlessly brilliant a master of words and realiser of absurd situations that he failed to see just how dazzling his wit was.

The second thing I want to note about Stoppard’s self-assessment is that he did not write: “I can make serious points while flinging a custard pie around the stage”, but, rather, “I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage”. The clever, eloquent wit is not an incidental entertainment that makes the serious content palatable to a theatre audience; it is, at its best (and a frighteningly high percentage of it is at its very best), the medium through which the message is conveyed. 

And that message is sometimes very serious indeed. If all you know of Stoppard is that he wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love, then you may be surprised that university professors of social and political theory write essays with titles like Freedom and Morality in the Plays of Tom Stoppard and doctoral candidates submit theses on such subjects as Epistemology and Ethics in Tom Stoppard’s ‘Professional Foul’

This may surprise you, even if you are familiar with the work with which Stoppard strode into the public eye in 1966, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The conceit of this play is so brilliant and so rich that I have to spell it out, even though most if not all of you will already be aware of it. What, Stoppard wonders, do minor characters in a play do, between the time they exit the stage in one scene and enter it again some time later. From this one question, Stoppard weaves a play parallel to Hamlet, following the offstage exploits of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and exploring the logic of a world that exists suspended in limbo between their brief appearances onstage in Hamlet. When a probably befuddled theatregoer asked Stoppard “What is it all about?” he replied, with characteristic lack of pomposity, “It is about to make me a lot of money.”

Before I write about a particular television play I am very fond of, I want to give a taste of Stoppard’s intellectual range. He left the school he hated at 16, and, like many other auto-didacts, his interests were wide-ranging. The themes of his play Arcadia, for example, include the philosophical implications of the second law of thermodynamics, Romantic literature, and the English picturesque style of garden design. I cannot pretend to be educated enough to know whether he was right when he said: “The thing you have to understand is that, as a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas.” Even if that is true, he certainly succeeded in making the arguments around a huge range of political, ethical and aesthetic questions appear accessible to a general audience.

Which brings me to Professional Foul, an 80-minute television play from 1977 (when mainstream British TV still commissioned and broadcast every week serious plays by leading playwrights). The play is set in Prague and follows a Cambridge ethics don, Professor Anderson, as he attends a weekend philosophical colloquium in Prague, as a guest of the Communist Czech government. What should be a fairly uneventful trip, allowing him to attend the Czechoslovakia v England football game that is the real reason for him accepting the invitation, is complicated by a visit from an ex-student who asks the professor to smuggle out his banned doctoral thesis for publication in the West. The intervention of the Communist government leads to an ethical dilemma for Anderson, a situation explored by Stoppard through the opinions of several characters.

The play was written to coincide with Amnesty International’s Prisoners of Conscience Year and is dedicated to Czech playwright Václav Havel, then periodically imprisoned by the Czech Communist authorities, and later president of a free Czechoslovakia. In the year of publication and broadcast, the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia presented the government with a formal protest against its violations of the Helsinki Accords.

Happily, this play is available on YouTube here. I really hope that you will watch it, especially if you didn’t catch it in 1977. I recommend it for many reasons, but I will mention here only two. First, it is an opportunity to watch Peter Barkworth’s flawless performance as the urbane, cultured, decent, professor, whose lifetime of hypothetical academic musings about ethical problems proves, in the end, to have equipped him to deal magnificently, and for the first time in his life, with a genuine moral dilemma. Nobody portrayed the ultimately decent, upper-middle-class Englishman more perfectly or with more natural poise than Barkworth, and here, as always, he shines.

The second joy of the play is the language. One of the play’s major themes is the uses and abuses, the possibilities and limitations, of language, and, everywhere the play turns, it finds new ways to shed light on this theme. It is incomprehension that enables us to share Anderson’s mounting unease as he finds himself apparently trapped in the home of his dissident ex-student while it is being searched by the secret police. It is some time before we and he realise exactly the situation, and one complete scene, with its multiple bit players intervening from neighbouring apartments, and arguments breaking out, is played out entirely in a language, Czech, that neither the professor, nor the audience, understand. The effect moves from confusion to menace very effectively.

In another scene, Anderson, having failed to make it to the stadium for the football match, and having listened, and understood very little of, a partial Czech live commentary on the game, finds, later that day, that the two rooms adjacent to his in the hotel are occupied by two English newspaper sports correspondents, each of whom is phoning in his copy for the next morning’s edition of his paper. Anderson wanders into each room in turn, desperate to hear the key details of the game, but is repeatedly frustrated by the correspondents’ hyperbole, which favours ornate figures of speech over the dry facts of the game. One of the correspondents, for example, describing a defender who was repeatedly swerved around by the same attacking opponent using the same move, says that he displayed “all the qualities of an elephant except memory.” This is, of course, a wonderfully witty line (although nothing drains the wit from a line that sparkles when dropped unexpectedly into the middle of a scene from a play more completely than extracting it with a pair of tweezers and pinning it, scientifically, to the display case of a written argument). However, more significantly, it offers another example of the limitations and obfuscations of language.

Which I really should take as a less than subtle hint to stop here, since I’ve probably been walking alone through this tangled undergrowth for at least a couple of paragraphs.

But, before I do, let me urge those of you still with me to join me not in mourning the loss of Tom Stoppard, but in celebrating the extraordinary wealth of entertaining food for thought, and thought-provoking entertainment, that, over six decades, he laid out for the delight of the world. If you stumble across any of his perhaps less well-known radio plays – The Dog It Was that Died, Albert’s Bridge – treat yourself to 40 minutes of sense disguised as nonsense…and I haven’t even mentioned The Real Inspector Hound…or the screenplay for Brazil…or Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, another play about dissidents, in this case commissioned by Andre Previn and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra, onstage.

I’ll shut up now, and leave that very crowded stage to a master: the late, great, Tom Stoppard. Please enjoy! The performance is only just over an hour long, and is a unique, hilarious, chilling jewel.