- guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 1 1998 04.04 GMT
- The Observer, Sunday November 1 1998
In the Elizabethan Arcadia of Philip Sidney, the shepherds speak Greek and amuse themselves by improvising poems in recondite stanza forms. In Tom Stoppard 's Arcadia, the patrician inhabitants of an English country house pass the time in a dazzling discussion of thermodynamics, computer technology and the cosmic errands of radio waves. 'Nothing changes,' as Stoppard said to me the other day he is an unregenerate Arcadian, the proudly solitary inhabitant of a game park where, as if on some privileged rural estate, ideas and words disport themselves.
Sidney wrote his Arcadia so that this sister, the Countess of Pembroke, could wander through its imaginary arcades during her 'idle times'. Stoppard's plays also set out to fill up a void. They compensate for our moral confusion and spiritual uncertainty by constructing beautiful, flimsy, verbal skyscrapers, which like the human pyramid in Jumpers teeter and topple as we watch. 'My plays have a reputation for dealing with grand philosophical or mathematical notions,' Stoppard said. 'In fact, I am making sandcastles.' His Arcadia, performed at the National Theatre in 1993, cheerily predicts the entropic death of the earth The Invention of Love, which originally opened at the National last year and transfers to the Haymarket this week, begins in Hades, with the poet AE Housman being ferried across the Styx. But while they wait to die, or even after they have done so, his characters go on thinking, talking and laughing. Stoppard, like a pagan sage, exudes a cheerful despair.
It does not matter if his Arcady is refuted by actuality. The Invention of Love commutes between hell and nineteenth-century Oxford. Nowadays, I pointed out to Stoppard, the two places are much the same. With its anoraked academics, unwashed undergraduates and toxic traffic, Oxford today bears little resemblance to the golden dream his play depicts, lulled by the lapping of oars in the river, the thwack of cricket bats, and the poncy epigrammatising of epicene wits. 'Don't disillusion me,' he pleaded. 'Surely the dons are erudite people who speak in formal sentences?' 'No,' I told him, 'you're the one who does that. Mostly they're geeks.' Yet in Stoppard's plays from the dotty logical positivist in Jumpers or the ethical disputants in Professional Foul up to Housman, who makes the textual quibbles and editorial rivalries of classical scholarship so entertaining in The Invention of Love such arcane twitterers resemble wizards, conjuring with ideas and words.
'So,' he conceded, 'I have a romantic idea about the university I never attended.' Then he took up his own nimble wand and bemused me with science. 'It's just how Richard Dawkins conceives of what's going on in our skulls or Francis Crick, who discovered DNA and made the double helix visible. They transcend mere fact, they elevate it to something which leapfrogs over the reality.' The leapfrogging metaphor says it all at the age of 61, Stoppard remains a champion mental gymnast.
He has preserved his vision of Oxford by backdating it to the 1880s. 'I'm rather attracted by the past. I went to Australia in 1980 and I loved Perth. I was calmed by being there the sense of proportion between people and cars, or the heights of people and of buildings, was just as I remembered England in the Fifties. I'm deeply resistant to change. I can't bear what happened to English sentence structure after the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. I love that antiquated Book of English Prose edited by Quiller-Couch.' Then Stoppard was detained by a quizzical word, which he savoured by puckering his ripe, lisping lips. 'By the way, is he pronounced Couch as in sofa or Cooch as in hoochy-cooch? I know he's old-fashioned, but I'm such a fuddy-duddy.'
He then told a story to illustrate his quaint obsolescence. 'The other day I was buying some food.' His hand executed a vague twiddle in the air, to indicate that the kind of food was, as Lady Bracknell says about the Brighton line, immaterial: the mind can't be expected to bother about the body's lowly appetites. He caused the place where he bought the food to dematerialise with another verbal flourish.
'I was in, let's say, a well-known West End provisioner's and I asked for half a pound of something or other. I could see the girl who served me frown as she turned away. She came back with completely the wrong amount, so I asked if she knew how many ounces there were in a pound. 'Oh no,' she said, 'it's my first day!' Then I realised that the calculator in my head needed adjusting. But how is someone like me expected to know that we've all of a sudden gone metric? I used to have a wonderful memory. I now can't remember when I lost it.' In the Sixties, Stoppard idolised and imitated Mick Jagger Jack Flash, it should be remembered, was a jumper too and he is still a rocker. When we were discussing the lilting musicality of the Russian language, Stoppard said: 'That's why I don't want to learn German. In fact, I don't even want to hear it.' But what about Schubert, Schumann and Wolf, whose songs saved the language from guttural spluttering? 'Well,' shrugged Stoppard, 'until their lieder are rerecorded by the Rolling Stones, I don't need to know or care about them!'
Nevertheless, the years have slyly morphed Stoppard's face, and he now, with his floppy hair and epicurean mouth, looks and sounds more like another of his idols, Oscar Wilde. His view of Wilde has changed accordingly. In Travesties, which includes a deliriously brilliant adaptation of The Importance, Wilde is said to be 'a little overdressed but he made up for it by being immensely uncommitted'. By contrast with committed, radicalised contemporaries such as Bond or Brenton, the youthful Stoppard admired Wilde because he believed in nothing. 'I had an argument with Ken Tynan about Wilde in the Seventies. He tried to present Wilde as a socialist before his time. I didn't buy that. My route to Wilde left out the politics what I valued was style raised to genius.' In his 1966 novel Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, Malquist is a Wildean dandy 'the Stylist, the man of inaction who would not dare roll up his sleeves for fear of creasing the cuffs' while Moon impersonates Bosie, Wilde's catamite.
Stoppard today sees Wilde (who almost upstages the arid Housman in The Invention of Love) as a tragic figure, not a foppish narcissist. 'He sacrifices himself to self-fulfilment, if that's an intelligible statement. There's a Housman-Wilde axis in the play it's an axle rather than a wheel. When Housman died, he got the memorial service at Trinity and a leading editorial in the Times, yet he was the one who failed in life emotionally, if not intellectually. Though Wilde crashed in flames, and ended as a disgraced, pathetic, maladjusted, poverty-stricken wreck, he had the successful life.' Wilde succeeded because he dared to love perhaps even to invent a new kind of love and (since for Stoppard emotions comprise a lexicon) to give it a name. A young man in the play is delighted when he learns that he can call himself a homosexual the neologism pleases him because one half is Greek, the other Latin. 'While I was doing research,' said Stoppard, 'I hoped I'd find that Housman had a cruel mistress, like Propertius whom he credited with having invented love in the elegies he wrote a century before Christ's birth. Instead, he turned out to be so self-repressed that he never acted on his own infatuation. My chorus of old Oxford wrinklies, who bang on about 'beastliness' in the play, consists of Pater who wanted to have sex but never dated, Jowett who didn't want to, and Ruskin who couldn't 200 combined years of celibacy and impotence!'
The lover is a mythomane: Stoppard's Wilde, though betrayed by Bosie, heroically insists on seeing him as a god. 'I don't know,' Stoppard admitted, 'how I feel about that. We create someone we have a human need for we find it necessary.' Yet his phrasing, I suggested, seemed to harbour a grudge, as if he regretted the way that the body cravenly anchors the aerodynamic head. 'Is love ever the real thing?' he asked, and at once put defensive quote marks around the adjective. In his play The Real Thing, some actors fall in and out of love while performing a Jacobean tragedy, unsure whether what they feel is simulated or not. 'Love,' he said, 'is an abstraction, it's never real in the way a coffee cup is. I'm not a romantic.' Though Stoppard admires the confessional ardour of Propertius, Catullus and Wilde, he does not share it: discussion of his defunct romance with Felicity Kendal is discreetly embargoed, and he is happiest when translating emotions into the words which represent (and perhaps, as in the case of love, beget) them. He pondered the untranslatability of the Latin word for virtue. 'It's a concept which joins the good and the beautiful, linking courage, honour and la bella figura and we've reduced it to meaning that which a woman is not supposed to lose!' Nevertheless, as a cautious conservative, he respects our limited, imperfect nature, and therefore does not complain about the inadequacies of our vocabulary. 'It's totalitarian societies that try to engineer human nature through words, so the labels redefine what they're supposed to be standing for. In a healthy society, language struggles to do justice to the deepest human instincts. The dictator's job is to subvert that to make the instincts conform.' Stoppard's first play was called Enter a Free Man. The free man, though nowadays more of a mental than a physical acrobat, is not yet ready for his exit.
The playwright's progress: Tom Stoppard
1937 Born Thomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia
1939 Family leave for Singapore to avoid German invasion later evacuated to India
1946 Settles in Britain
1954 Joins Western Daily Press: 'I got a bigger thrill from seeing my first byline than from having my first play on at the National'
1966 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead marks him out as name to watch when it is staged at Edinburgh Festival. Later put on by National Theatre
1968 The Real Inspector Hound - one-act spoof on detective thrillers
1972 Jumpers (philosophy and trampolining)
1974 Travesties (Lenin and James Joyce in Zurich)
1977 Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (music by Andre Previn and human rights)
1978 Night and Day (journalism and morality)
1982 The Real Thing (literature and love)
1988 Hapgood (espionage and quantum physics)
1990 Directs film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth
1993 Arcadia staged at National Theatre
1997 First British playwright knighted since Terence Rattigan
