- guardian.co.uk, Sunday July 6 1997 04.04 BST
- The Observer, Sunday July 6 1997
On Thursday, Tom Stoppard turned 60. It seems improbable: 60 is too sedate for him. Nor will it do to describe Sir Tom the first playwright to be knighted since Terence Rattigan as a pillar of the theatrical establishment. He is not stolid enough more of a flying buttress. As a dramatist, Stoppard has always been an intellectual tease. He likes to create fantastical situations such as a man in pyjamas, covered in shaving foam, carrying a peacock (in After Magritte). The man, the peacock, the foam can be explained but not easily, and not to a casual observer.
In life, Stoppard does not need a peacock to rouse curiosity. Mia Farrow will serve instead. Last week, he was spotted with Farrow in County Wicklow, where she is working on a film. The Daily Mail implied that walking must be the same as walking out, encouraged in their view by reports that 'the couple' had been seen buying groceries together. The Mail's attempt to quiz Felicity Kendal on whether her affair with Stoppard was now over, earned the response: 'Have a nice day.' Tom Stoppard 's office claim categorically there is no truth to the story, adding that Farrow and Stoppard are 'old friends' who have known each other for 25 years. Stoppard first met Farrow when her ex-husband, Andre Previn, wrote the music for Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Stoppard's theatrical concert about free speech in a totalitarian society.
If Stoppard is nettled or worse by such gossip about himself, he might care to recite a few lines from an AE Housman poem: 'The hopes of others were light and fleeting/ Of lovers meeting and luck and fame/ Mine were of trouble and mine were steady/ So I was ready when trouble came.' He ought to have these lines to hand, for his new play, The Invention of Love, is devoted to Housman and to his withheld, yet in its way passionate, life.
The Invention of Love opens in October at the National, and will be Richard Eyre's last production there as director. Two actors will play Housman John Wood and Paul Rhys. Housman was, as Christopher Ricks has pointed out, a 'divided man'. Stoppard has described himself as divided too. In his interviews, he wonders whether his seriousness is 'compromised by my frivolity, or . . . frivolity redeemed by my seriousness.' In every other way, it is hard to imagine any character less like Stoppard. In his writing, Housman perfected the art of the glum. He was an academic, and a nostalgic, self-pitying homosexual. Stoppard never went to university and is anything but nostalgic let alone homosexual.
Stoppard likes vanishing tricks, the quicksand of self-definition. His favourite line in modern drama is from Christopher Hampton's The Philanthropist: 'I am a man of absolutely no convictions, or at least I think I am.' Hampton's own view is that Stoppard is far from being a man without conviction: 'He has worked out an excellent position as a dramatist, of disagreeing with himself.' He believes that Stoppard is uneasy about settling down with answers. 'It is much more important for a dramatist to ask the questions than to try and answer them.'
Looking back at his stint as a theatre critic in Bristol, Stoppard said: 'I never had the moral courage to pan a friend.' He then added: 'I had the moral courage never to pan a friend.' His friends return the compliment. But the question for Stoppard admirers must be: how good is he? The most common criticism of his work is that, intellectually diverting though his plays are, they lack emotional charge. Stoppard loves language more than emotion. His language is like a telescoping umbrella: it seems to offer shelter, but may suddenly be turned inside out by a surprise wind.
John Mortimer, who has known Stoppard for years, points out that the plays make audiences feel clever. (He will not comment on whether they please him.) And there is no question that Arcadia (1993) was a hit at least partly because it flattered audiences. On the other hand, flattery by itself is no good at all. Hapgood (1987) which took on quantum physics as its subject, flopped on the lab table.
Stoppard has always disliked earnest poses as a writer. He is politically contradictory he has described himself as conservative (he supported Thatcher in her early days), but he is also liberal in his leanings and a staunch campaigner for human rights. It is not surprising that he has not as yet found a biographer strong enough to take on his life he is adept at making his character into a slipknot. Stoppard was born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937 as Thomas Straussler. He had a Jewish grandparent, and in 1939 the Bata Shoe company for whom his father worked felt that this was reason enough to remove the family from the Nazi threat. They went to Singapore and then, three years later, when Japan threatened to invade, the family (minus Stoppard's father, who had died) moved to Darjeeling.
In 1946, Stoppard's mother married Major Kenneth Stoppard and the family came to England. Tom must have seemed a singular figure, with his funny accent and rootlessness. He remembers being bullied, not by other schoolboys but by a frightening teacher. He went on to board at Pocklington School outside York, where he did not prosper. He left without taking any A-levels. It is too simple to say that it was because he did not go to university that he is so fascinated with academics in his plays. But if he had attended university, it might have put him off.
After leaving school, Stoppard joined the Western Daily Press in Bristol and worked as a cub reporter for pounds 2.10 a week. As a journalist, he felt fraudulent: 'I couldn't believe in my own right to ask people personal questions. I always expected them to throw the teapot at me or call the police.' At the time, he was living on the top floor of the house of Dr John Wilders an English lecturer at Bristol who later became an Oxford don. Wilders remembers the young Stoppard as 'very sweet', but 'disorganised'. 'Big Tom', as he was known, was a great help painting their stairs (he sounds grateful to this day), but not as an intellectual. 'There was no sign of the brilliant epigrammatic wit then. It's not spontaneous, of course. Stoppard is like Oscar Wilde, he works on it.'
Stoppard started writing plays in 1960. His first play was for television A Walk on the Water. But it was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that made his name. It was originally put on by the Oxford Theatre Group at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966. The Observer raved about it: 'This is erudite comedy, punning, far-fetched, leaping from depth to dizziness . . . the most brilliant debut since John Arden's' Stoppard received a telegram from Kenneth Tynan saying that the National Theatre wanted to read it. Stoppard became the youngest playwright they had ever taken on.
Stoppard was surprised. He had hoped that his novel Lord Malquist and Mr Moon would have earned him applause. Of the plays he has written since, Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974) and The Real Thing (1982) about adultery are probably the best known. They have one thing in common: they have all been written with a devoted attention to actors. His editor at Faber, Frank Pike, sees Stoppard as exceptionally 'fastidious' in this respect. He can remember wistfully asking why a scene he particularly admired had been cut. Stoppard said briskly it didn't work on stage. Although Stoppard has been married twice and neither marriage has lasted, he is by his own account and by the account of others an innately domestic person and devoted to his children. His first wife Jose, with whom he had two sons, was a nurse they divorced in 1972 when his second wife, Dr Miriam Stoppard, was pregnant with the first of their two sons. After 18 years, Stoppard became involved with Felicity Kendal. Although they were seldom out of the public eye, making a resplendent couple at opening nights, they never bought a house together, but continued to live at separate Chelsea addresses. It is said that their affair has been over for more than a year. But they have managed against the odds to keep their private lives almost private.
But even when he hits old age, Stoppard will never turn into a recluse. He is too good at talking and too quotable. The critic John Lahr remembers discussing a play they had both seen. Lahr said: 'It has elan, but it lacks eclat' a line from Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound spoken by an untalented theatre critic.
Stoppard, Lahr recalls, was 'very startled'. It was some time before he recognised the quotation. Even though he has both elan and eclat.
