‘Tom Stoppard is dead.’ For anyone who cares for the theatre, the English language, and especially for those of us who knew him, these words are as unthinkable as they are hard to bear. How can such a force of nature, such a generosity of spirit, such a voice of sanity, have fallen silent?
And yet he has gone. To the end, his body emaciated by cancer, he was still the old Tom: self-deprecating but full of ideas and plans. He might have one more play inside him, he told me, but his fingers could no longer physically write and dictation somehow stopped the words from flowing. He was cared for by his magnificent wife Sabrina, who entertained us tirelessly.
A few months ago he rang out of the blue, as he sometimes did, to talk about my father, Paul Johnson, who was his dear friend over many decades and to whom he dedicated Night and Day, his play about journalism. Tom had learned his trade as a local journalist and freedom of expression was his lifelong cause. And he mercilessly mocked those who took liberties with such freedom. As one character in that play remarks: ‘I don’t mind the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.’
This was the master of comedy who never let us forget that no life is without tragedy, yet that we are redeemed by love. He made the world laugh in our darkest days: from the existentialism of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to the anarchism of Jumpers and Travesties, from the epic grandeur of The Coast of Utopia to the intimate agonies of The Real Thing, the poetry of Arcadia, the physics of The Hard Problem and the dialectics of Rock n’ Roll.
Tom’s last and most autobiographical play was Leopoldstadt, which depicts the fate of a Jewish family in Vienna from 1899 to 1955. Older fans had expected more laughs, but this was a subtler, less uproarious kind of humour. By the end, Stoppard had become the ironic Englishman.
Ideas and mathematics, art and music pepper the conversation in Leopoldstadt, his last play and his only tragedy, as they do throughout his oeuvre. The adjective ‘Stoppardian’ embraces everything from bittersweet nostalgia to verbal pyrotechnics, but there is nothing frivolous about his achievement. Stoppard’s legacy bears comparison with the greatest luminaries of the theatrical tradition that stretches from Shakespeare and Marlowe to Beckett and Pinter. Tom Stoppard knew that tyrants who long to be feared quake at the sound of laughter.
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