Many years ago, and well retired, I was working in my study when the phone rang and a voice said: ‘This is Tom Stoppard. David West put me on to you.’ West was professor of Latin at Newcastle University and Tom called him when he had queries about Latin. But he had a question about the ancient Greeks which David could not answer, so he suggested Tom try me. I have no memory of what the question was, but my answer must at least have satisfied him because he continued to throw the odd leg-break my way. To give some idea of his range of interests, on one occasion he became interested in the Greek perfect tense. He had done Latin and some Greek at his school in Yorkshire.
In his Rock’n’Roll, the passion and energy of the lesbian poetess Sappho are used by the classicist Eleanor as a parallel to the emotions aroused by rock music. Stoppard and I chatted around ancient and modern attitudes: Greek views of love as bittersweet, violent and unmanageable, which could be controlled only by turning the experience into a dramatised, witty fantasy, often free of emotions, as against Catullus who put the pain back into the frame, exploring for the first time what love meant in sexual and non-sexual terms.
Infuriatingly, I missed a trick: a wonderful image in a fragment of Sophocles likened love to the ‘thrill of boys playing with fresh snow until their hands freeze, and they cannot wipe it off’. Stoppard said he would have loved to use it, but I had remembered it too late. But I did persuade him that the Sappho poem in question in the play was not about love but about envy. However, on the opening night it turned out to be about love after all. Repressing the desire to stand up and give the audience a lecture on the subject, I asked him what had gone wrong. ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘The actors thought you were wrong and the actors are always right.’
At one of his summer parties, he told me rather gloomily of André Previn’s wish for him to produce a prose-poem for Renée Fleming to sing to orchestral accompaniment, but admitted he had doubts because he’d never written a prose-poem before, let alone one backed by a full orchestra. Anyway, he had taken it on and would make its subject Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus left at home for 20 years and besieged by suitors while he was returning after fighting at Troy. Apart from Homer’s Odyssey, what should he read? Three or four hundred deeply probing academic articles, most in German (obviously), flashed through my mind but I said all he needed to do was to read Ovid’s brilliant take on the subject in his Heroides (‘Heroic Women’), in which women from the grave reflect on their fate.
The result was, of course, a scintillating miniature, though we agreed that there was perhaps a little too much about Penelope’s family (his desire for knowledge was omn-ivorous). I felt that all I could offer was to try it out privately on family and friends, without telling them who had written it. I hardly need to describe the reception. Tom still had his doubts about the whole idea as Previn had conceived it, but it went ahead at Tangle-wood in 2019.
About a year had passed when I bumped into him at a literary festival. I asked him how Penelope had gone down and he made a face which suggested ‘Not very well.’ So I suggested it would make a wonderful one-woman show – minus the music – and since Jimmy Mulville (Hat Trick Productions) was about to become chairman of the charity Classics for All (of which Tom had been a patron), we might be able to persuade him to film it and premiere it in the UK, doing some good for the charity at the same time.
The deal was done and in November 2021 at Cazenove Capital in the City it went ahead before a selected audience, with Hattie Morahan playing Penelope. The care and attention that Stoppard showed during the preparations were admirable – he spent a long time with Hattie, who had been drafted in at short notice – and the show was prefaced with a discussion about Penelope between him, the BBC’s Martha Kearney (a classicist), and the academic Dr Emma Greensmith. The classical scholar John Godwin’s review of the performance said: ‘Stoppard has managed something which may look easy but which is in fact almost impossible to achieve: he has recreated the inner emotions of Homer’s Penelope in such a way as to be credible both in ancient and in modern terms, using language which manages to avoid the Scylla of archaism and the Charybdis of pastiche.’
Penelope is a masterpiece of Stoppardian cunning. He makes her quite the match of her husband in a language whose invention and precision surely drew a nod of approval from western literature’s First Father.
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