A playwright without heirs

This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.

---

“Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?” — Rosencrantz, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1967

I have met Tom Stoppard twice. The first time was as a teenager when he came to address my school drama society. I can’t recall what he talked about, save that he was very funny, and I was surprised to hear him speak in a Czech accent that remained reasonably strong despite the decades he had spent living in Britain.

Queuing for an autograph, I made some anodyne remark about how much I was looking forward to seeing Shakespeare in Love, due for release the following year. I remember that Stoppard grimaced, as if I had reminded him of something unpleasant, and said “God, don’t mention it. I’ve got to do another rewrite by the end of the week.”

For a second, I had left school with all its privations and boredoms and been co-opted into not just the adult realm, but the thrillingly heightened world of the film business. I was speaking to an adult — a successful, household name adult, at that — about something that he was doing. He had, momentarily, hinted at an irritation, something that rendered him all too human, and more interesting.

The next occasion came seven or eight years later, when Stoppard was giving a talk about his 1972 play Jumpers at the National Theatre. I had read an interview with him in which he said that, whenever he was at the National, he always made time to visit its bookshop beforehand. It was therefore no great surprise to see him perusing the play texts, shock of grey hair set off with a tasteful cashmere scarf.

Bashfully, I walked over and introduced myself, said that I was a writer for the student magazine and that I’d love to interview him. Hearing the name of the title, Stoppard smiled and said, “Oh, they spoke to me once before, didn’t they?” They had indeed, I confirmed, the previous decade, when Arcadia was first staged at the National. Stoppard continued to smile, but there was now an element of mischief in his smile, the chance to subvert the encounter. “Goodness, so recently?”

Sir Tom Stoppard is now 88 and has not had a new play staged since his unusually straightforward Leopoldstadt, a haunting meditation on his Czech Jewish roots, in 2020. Although he is rumoured to be working on something dealing with journalism, it was widely assumed that Leopoldstadt, perhaps his most personal and heartfelt play, would be his swansong.

He can hardly be said to have retired — Stoppard was present in the rehearsal room for new productions of 1982’s The Real Thing and 1997’s The Invention of Love when both were staged last year — but a lengthy period of near-frenetic activity that began when he first came to prominence in the late Sixties with his breakthrough play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, has quietened over the last half-decade.

Hermione Lee’s monumental, exhaustive — and often exhausting — biography of Stoppard was published in 2020, and ran to nearly a thousand pages: an extraordinary tribute for a living writer. When it comes to Stoppard’s character, rather than his work, Lee makes the intriguing observation that he could be “completely, icily alone”, able to remove himself from the mundane cares and woes of everyday existence in favour of something altogether greater.

When Rosencrantz was first staged in 1967, Stoppard had been making a living as an unusually glamorous journalist for the Bristol Evening Post; famously, when an editor tried to catch him out by asking him, of a stated interest in current affairs, who the current Home Secretary was, Stoppard replied, “I said I was interested in politics, not obsessed by them.”

The success of his debut full-length play, at the Edinburgh Festival and then at the Old Vic, made him one of the country’s most feted and exciting playwrights virtually overnight. In an apocryphal remark that has acquired traction because it sounds wholly like something Stoppard would say, he was asked by one journalist, “What’s your play about, Tom?”, to which he responded, “It’s about to make me very rich.”

This proved true. For a period in the Seventies, Stoppard was the quintessential intellectual playwright. More accessible than Pinter, funnier and less angry than Osborne, less agit-prop than Hare or Brenton and more alive than Orton, he became the darling of the intelligentsia and National Theatre patrons alike.

His major plays of the period, including Jumpers, Travesties and Night and Day, were commercially successful on a grand scale, and a large part of the writing’s brilliance lay in convincing theatregoers, for a couple of hours, that they were far cleverer and better-read than they actually were.

Concepts such as situationism, Dada, moral philosophy and colonialism were explored with some of the best jokes of the 20th century thrown in to sugar the pill, then ridiculed. (“Can I make an anonymous complaint? No? How about a pseudonymous one instead?”) But the unspoken offer was tempting. You, too, can be briefly as clever as Tom Stoppard: just pay your £10 and soak up the great man’s erudition.

Obviously, things changed. Stoppard never became less popular, but the rise of Thatcherism shifted perceptions of what a playwright could, and should, be. His 1982 play The Real Thing appeared, on paper, to be the first major work of Thatcherite conservatism, in which left-wing agitators and their views are roundly ridiculed and the good-chap playwright Henry (based, transparently, on Stoppard himself) comes out triumphant at the end.

Yet what Max Webster’s production at the Old Vic — complete with the great James McArdle as Henry — last year skilfully explored was that the protagonist’s apparent ability to rise above such petty matters as fidelity and jealousy was wholly illusory and that his own deep repression tipped over into depression.

As Stoppard became increasingly interested in Eastern European politics, befriending Václav Havel and supporting Soviet dissidents, his work shifted a gear. But he was capable of genius when writing in other media, too.

Forty years ago, Stoppard was co-writer on Terry Gilliam’s black-comic film Brazil, which, not so coincidentally, deals with a failing totalitarian state.

Gilliam remains an ardent admirer, as he told me earlier this year: “Tom needs a lot of credit. I wrote this thing, and I had 94 pages of story and it was confusion, and then I teamed up with Tom, and he just cleaned it up. And the dialogue is so funny, and yet it’s serious at the same time.

“I thought, ‘Okay, I’m great with visuals. And who is much better than me with dialogue?’ And [producer Arnon] Milchan brought in Tom and he just made the thing so tight and neat. He doesn’t get as much credit as he deserves, frankly, and he deserves it.”

Yet Stoppard’s major play of the second half of the decade, Hapgood, was a convoluted spy caper that attracted his first proper critical drubbing, and momentarily shook his previously ineffable confidence. (He was seen after the first night weeping, saying, “I’ve forgotten how to write plays.”)

Arcadia showed Stoppard could combine intellectual fireworks with a deep emotional impact

He rebounded spectacularly with 1993’s Arcadia, often cited as his masterpiece. In its skilful and elegant marriage of everything from Byron and chaos theory to landscape gardening and literary theft, Stoppard showed he could combine the intellectual fireworks of his early plays with a deep-rooted emotional impact that could make the audience cry. It is hard to watch the long final scene — in which past and present dovetail, and the child genius Thomasina dances with her tutor Septimus shortly before the fire that will kill her — and not feel a painful sense of loss.

The actor Neil Pearson, who played the pompous but charismatic academic Bernard Nightingale in a 2008 revival, told me it was a privilege to be able to discuss the play with Stoppard. “Dan Stevens, who played Septimus, nudged me in rehearsal and said: ‘This is the closest we will ever get to hearing from Chekhov.’” He was not wrong.

I believed The Invention of Love, which takes as its premise the emotional repression of the poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman, was even better, but having watched the relatively recent Hampstead Theatre revival, I found its flaws as clear as its strengths. Stoppard’s plays are at their weakest when the wit and erudition overtake their dramatic qualities, and there were various points where characters simply address the audience, rather than each other, which leads to a certain stagnancy.

Yet in the final moments, when Housman is confronted by a calm but furious Wilde, the drama achieves lift-off and Stoppard, surely the heir to Oscar, beautifully combines peerless one-liners with painful catharsis of the human heart.

Since then, there have been many plays, some successful, some not. (2015’s The Hard Problem at the National may have been the nadir, an incomprehensible study of consciousness that even a typically elegant Nicholas Hytner production could do little to rescue.) Stoppard deservedly won an Oscar for his wonderfully witty script for Shakespeare in Love and has enjoyed a hugely lucrative career as a public intellectual who can meet kings, presidents and Hollywood moguls on more or less equal terms.

And he has never been anyone’s fool. There is a telling story in director Edward Zwick’s memoir about developing Shakespeare in Love in the early 1990s. The two met for lunch, spent a happy afternoon going round London’s second-hand bookshops, then Stoppard unblushingly asked for a million dollars for the first draft of the screenplay. He received it, too.

Yet for all the savvy, the awards, the gongs — which include his status as a Companion of Honour — and the high-profile relationships that have occasionally made him tabloid catnip, Stoppard approaches his tenth decade with his relationship to posterity curiously uncertain. That he will be remembered as one of the greatest British playwrights is unarguable. I would be astonished and disappointed if a theatre were not named after him after his death — perhaps the Lyttelton at the National, where so many of his plays were first staged — and the outpouring of grief will be great and sincere. But what happens next?

There are few, if any, playwrights attempting to follow in Stoppard’s footsteps. Part of this reflects how the industry has changed since he first broke through. A languid, camp but decidedly heterosexual figure — one (male) writer friend of mine sighed, “There are very few men who look as if they could discuss chaos theory whilst fucking you senseless” — with conservative leanings and a perpetual smoking habit, he was no favourite of the Royal Court set (when he made a late debut there with his 2006 play Rock and Roll, there were old Trots glowering and making a fuss).

But everyone from Kenneth Tynan to Laurence Olivier saw his innate brilliance and adored him, helping to establish a career that has gone on to define contemporary British drama. Yet if he attempted to begin that same career today, doors would be slammed in his face. The Stoppard of 2025 is more likely to be a well-paid newspaper columnist — witty, provocative and ephemeral — than he ever would be a dramatist.

There are younger writers who are excellent, just as there are tiresomely overpraised and modish ones, but I struggle to think of any who could legitimately be described as heirs to Stoppard. Laura Wade, James Graham and Jack Thorne all have Stoppardian aspects to their work, but none has written anything as incendiary as Rosencrantz, so emotionally devastating as The Real Thing or as complete a masterpiece as Arcadia.

In fact, the closest link they have with Stoppard is his unashamed penchant for puns and cringeworthy (but still funny) jokes, such as when a minor character in Invention, when asked about his moustache, replies, “I’m still not sure about it, but it’s growing on me.”

Stoppard once reflected, of his own success: “What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.” What he did not say was that his luck was extraordinary in an era that is suspicious of intellectuals and regards the playfully clever with contempt.

Whilst Rupert Goold’s Old Vic might embrace a play that attempts to marry Joyce and Dadaism, or recreate 19th century Oxford with a wooden boat, with delighted amusement, I am unsure that Indhu Rubasingham’s National Theatre would welcome such flamboyant drama.

There may be something in this disdain. Stoppard has often been damned as “pseudo-intellectual” whose plays are as much a product of research in the London Library as genuine inspiration. This might be harsh, but anyone who has heard West End audiences laugh appreciatively at jokes they don’t understand may have some sympathy with this view. Yet he’d be the first to argue that his work is the highest-quality entertainment, rather than something imbued with Meaning; a delicious theatrical gin and tonic, crisp and refreshing, rather than a worthy dramatic barium enema.

This is hard to replicate. The only writer I can see who has been deeply, rather than superficially, influenced by Stoppard is Tony McNamara, creator of The Great and The Favourite, who left the theatre for the lucrative pastures of the screen, and script doctoring. In this, he may have lived up to Stoppard’s much-repeated quip, when asked if Shakespeare would have written screenplays, “No, he’d have rewritten them.”

McNamara aside, Stoppard would undoubtedly pooh-pooh any idea that he should be seen as any kind of inspiration on another generation. He remains sui generis — one of the few writers whose name can justifiably be said to be an adjective — but also someone whose work is, proudly, greater than the sum of its parts and influences.

If you’re a fan of Beckett, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, Gilbert and Sullivan, abstruse 19th century philosophy, post-war collectivism, doo-wop, Romantic poetry, Hamlet, Wilde, Pink Floyd and brutalism, there will be something for you, somewhere, in the Stoppard canon. But if you also want brilliantly written drama that makes you laugh, cry and, crucially, think, you are never going to be disappointed by his extraordinary work.

I write this as a tribute, not as an obituary. One hears rumours about the various aches and indignities we are all heir to being no respecter of talent and genius, and one can only hope that Stoppard continues to delight the world for years to come. A new play, even a new screenplay, would be something of wonder, if it ever came to pass. But if it does not, no matter. We have the work, and that will count for much as long as serious-minded (but never po-faced) drama is still valued.

As the great man wrote himself in Arcadia, “We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.”

Better this, anyway, than a pitiless, boring eternity, where the humanity and wit of Stoppard has become so much sellable content rather than the vivacious and appropriately dramatic expression of a once-in-a-lifetime intellect.

Stoppardian, adj: to be the lucky bastard who’s the artist.