Tom Stoppard: ‘I have lost my optimism’

“At some point in the recent past, I lost my optimism,” says Tom Stoppard. He is speaking of Englishness, a subject which the playwright has, in a 55-year career, captured in its various shades. “I think the new English men and women coming up now are falling into a world of ‘personal truth versus truth truth’ and that does not make a rational society.” He says: “Somehow I have lost my optimism about clear-eyed, level-headed, open-hearted generations following ours.”

Truth, as Stoppard knows full well, is a slippery concept and it has occupied a lot of his plays, particularly when it comes to Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. His scepticism about communism has, of course, been proved right while other playwrights of his generation found their views quickly outdated. Yet it is clear he can see an encroachment in this country of the absurdities of the Eastern bloc that he once dramatised in such plays as Professional Foul (for TV) and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.

“I used to think ‘lucky us and poor benighted bastards over there’. I had a rather condescending view of those unfortunate souls living in totalitarian societies, being conditioned to believe in all manner of irrational false realities.” That lunacy which Stoppard once so cleverly exposed can now be traced to today’s world of knee-jerk intolerance and the eradication of history.

I am speaking to Stoppard over Zoom, and my laptop frames perfectly the sitting room of his Dorset home where he lives with his third wife, the TV producer Sabrina Guinness. It’s a quintessentially English setting, fitting for a man who is famously very grateful towards the country that gave him, his mother and brother – Czech-born Jews – a home after the Second World War.

Yet this gratitude should not be mistaken for contentment. There is an intellectual restlessness to Stoppard which perhaps explains why his celebrated body of work which includes at least three masterpieces – Arcadia, Travesties and The Real Thing – has taken on such an extraordinary range of subjects from Dadaism to quantum physics, determinism to Agatha Christie. Regarding what he is writing next, he tells me: “I have written nothing for three years and that bugs me. All I think I know is that I see something vaguely promising and try and write my way into that. But I am making excuses for my inactivity. “It is beginning to feel as if I have run out of things to say.”

Part of Stoppard’s state of prevarication is actually due to journalism. He reads the papers every day. “I am addicted,” he says, “and it is not good for one’s self esteem because I end the working day thinking I have failed in some way. But then reading is a nutrient and if I don’t do that I feel like a waste of space which is a terrible thing to say, of course, because I have loved ones.” Stoppard has four children, including the actor Ed, and several grandchildren.

This passion for the free press has extended to a close observation of the Rooney-Vardy case. It seems odd to imagine our greatest living playwright picking over the dirt of this sorry affair, but while the rest of us let ourselves down by guffawing snobbishly about the ghastliness of it all, Stoppard makes an obvious but incisive comment that has passed many of us by.

“I know there is a convention that a journalist isn’t really expected to be forced to reveal a source. The whole notion of protecting a source is a pillar of the profession and there have been innumerable cases where this convention is rather valuable. But I imagine millions of people reading about Rooney versus Vardy are saying: ‘I don’t understand this.’ [They] are asking, ‘Who tipped off the guys [at] The Sun?’ And that is not going to happen because a newspaper must not be asked who disclosed a source.”

Of course, before he became a playwright Stoppard was a journalist, working for the Western Daily Press and later writing theatre reviews (for a magazine called Scene) which he tells me he failed to get the hang of. He says that he once got “terribly upset when the [sub-editors] cut out my best paragraph”, which sort of feeds into the notion that the writer is God, that his words are not to be tampered with. He remembers starting out, “seeing friends performing at Bristol Old Vic and [acclaim] seemed so out of reach, so desirable. Then it finally happened and I felt I had joined a special group of people whose work would be revered.”

And yet, talking to Stoppard it is evident that he is decidedly relaxed about what happens to his words. Pragmatic, I suggest. “Pragmatic is me not being precious about my work, but it is all a masquerade really. I am much more precious than I let on.”

As a playwright, Stoppard naturally has to lose control of his work, to leave it in the hands of directors the world over. This has led to some hilariously Stoppardian moments. He tells me that he was up at 1am the previous day, talking to a director who wanted to substitute the word “eskimo” for “inuit” in a production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, his break-out hit, premiered in 1966, which gave air-time to the interchangeable courtiers in Hamlet. “I thought, ‘No, you can’t. Inuit is the enlightened term, but Rosencrantz is an Elizabethan. He could not have anticipated such a thing.”

He suggested the line “those eskimos must have a quiet life” become “those polar bears must have a quiet life”. Another incident occurred several years ago, when Stoppard went to a European festival production of The Invention of Love, his play about the poet AE Housman. He noticed that half of the second act was missing, and talking to the director afterwards, he was told that this was because they thought it best to perform the bits they had had time to rehearse.

A travesty? “No, I thought that makes sense.” Stoppard’s humility and humour are striking. He is not some grand old man of letters, holding forth. He is generous with his time, quizzes me about my life and asks after our former theatre critic Charles Spencer, whom he once knew well.

I wonder if his lack of ego extends to reviews. While he has enjoyed many raves over the years, some of his plays have been mauled, including 2015’s The Hard Problem. “I actually go out of my way to read them,” he says. “I think one veers between feeling under-esteemed and over-esteemed if somebody hates what you are doing. I am just glad I am not being told that I am too clever by half again.”

This phrase haunted Stoppard’s reputation for many years as critics felt his dazzlingly brainy work favoured ideas over emotion. But to me, that suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of Stoppard the playwright. He clearly loves artifice and the razzle-dazzle of theatre, but his dramatic and linguistic acrobatics are only a way of getting to a deeper truth. Take The Invention of Love and the unbearably poignant moment when Housman, as a gay man in Victorian England, meets himself as a youngster and realises the boy can never reach the romantic fulfilment he craves. Does Stoppard try to move people? “There is a double personality operating in the writing where you are feeling quite objective and technical and at the same time, you try and enjoy that laugh yourself or that tear at the moment of creation. Sometimes I feel as if I am a member of my own audience and I feel quite tearful.”

The reason for our meeting is to discuss Stoppard’s involvement with English PEN, one of the world’s oldest human rights organisations, which “champions the freedom to write and the freedom to read around the world”. As part of a forthcoming auction at Christie’s in June, Stoppard has annotated the first edition of his latest play, Leopoldstadt, which has recently been in the West End and is set to run on Broadway later this year. The most overtly personal of Stoppard’s plays, it deals with two wealthy Viennese Jewish families caught up in the turbulence of the 20th century’s first 50 years, and broaches his own family history. 

A precise mind like Stoppard’s must surely relish the chance to revise, and indeed he tells me in some detail how it gave him the chance to look at the scene in which one of the families celebrate the Seder (which marks the beginning of Passover), making excisions to the religious text in order to add some momentum. “I am not a jealous guardian of the text,” he says.

On occasion, Stoppard writes in other media. He scripted the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love and has worked as a script doctor on films such as Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He adores cinema, though he says, “I am not a natural audience for Marvel films.” As for rewriting the work of others, he says, “It’s different with theatre because it’s all about the writer. In film, you are the director’s handmaiden. It’s fun, but really what I want to do is write another play.”

So the play is still the thing for Stoppard, and he tells me that something about journalism could happen. He has countless files, including the Leveson Report, upstairs in his study. But of course, there is the question of his advancing years. He seems younger than 84, still gives the impression of being the closest thing the literary world has to a rock star, with fashionably cut flowing grey hair, and a packet of American Spirit cigarettes to hand (“My American friend told me they had no chemicals in them but I really can’t tell the difference”). Does he think about death?

“Actually, as I get older, I think about death less and less. I have less time in front of me so I am less inclined to look backwards. I feel like a clock that needs to be wound up at the start of each day.” He smiles. “But if I don’t get distracted I can be quite useful between noon and five.”

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