23:17
Stopping for Stoppard
Saturday 4th April 2026
Listening to Tom Stoppard (1937-2025) on R4, the programme is Archive on 4, Tom Stoppard: Verbatim.This weekend there is and has been a celebration of his life and work. I’ve listened to some of the programmes and this, so far, is the moment that has reached out and taken me by the heart and by the mind and moved me to a seat, with a computer in front of me where my fingers are tap dancing in chaos and beauty and tears.
Leopoldstadt – A play by Tom Stoppard
“Vienna, Austria, at the end of the 19th century. A large Jewish family assimilated and intermarried, prosperous and successful: a doctor, a composer, a businessman, happy wives and children. It’s a scene that opens Leopoldstadt, the epic new play from arguably Britain’s greatest living playwright, Sir Tom Stoppard. The story is told over more than four generations, and five and a half decades ending in the post-war period of loss and grief, as one of the younger members of the family tries to make sense of the Holocaust.”
Stoppard, on Antisemitism in his play and in the body of human culture.
Archive on 4, Tom Stoppard: Verbatim.
“Yes, it’s the sort of thing we need to be reminded about and it probably strikes us each time as a surprising turn of events. That aspect of this play and life in general will continue. I think there’s more to worry about as the century rolls on. Towards the end of the play, there’s a young character who has become an Englishman. And he says to the Viennese Jew who has been through the camps, it can’t happen again, in his inexperienced way. And you can feel, of course, the sense in the audience of knowing better.” – Tom Stoppard.
A line from the play, Leopoldstadt.
“Austria is officially innocent. The ecstatic multitudes that welcomed Hitler, innocent victims. Half the camp guards were Austrian; innocent victims.”
Stoppard on his experience of connecting with the play he wrote and the impact of what it communicates.
“It stole up on me. I didn’t think: Oh, I must figure out a way of finishing this off and make people sob, but in the end, I was sobbing myself, so I feel a bit foolish, you know. And pretty much every night I kind of have to stop making a public spectacle of myself, crying at my own play, I mean I wrote it, I ought to have some kind of writer’s objectivity, but I don’t.”
A line from the play, Leopoldstadt.
“Anti-Semitism is a political fact. It’s a bit soon for it to be a party platform, but when it is, there’ll be Austrians to vote for it.”
“Stoppard: One has to wonder whether there’s been this permafrost covering up a quite fermenting kind of anti-semitism, which other circumstances have brought into view. It may be that it’s always been there in a suppressed way and it’s now relieved of its suppression. It’s as though the Internet has enabled and brought into being a whole new layer of public and private discourse. Where people, because of their anonymity, if they wish to preserve it… say anything and everything without fear of penalty. Fifty years ago, it seemed to me the freedom to say what you like, within the constraints of the law of the land, was the freedom on which all other freedoms depended.
I believe in truth and falsehood. I don’t understand how any society can operate without that, anymore than science can. But little by little, the ladybird book of democracy, which is what you would want to tell a child, no longer fits the facts.”
I don’t quite know where you go when you’re writing. One goes somewhere, and when one comes back, there’s something on paper.
My feelings about the importance of free expression, you won’t be surprised to know, haven’t changed at all, and in fact it becomes more and more important. I don’t believe in the relativity of truths. I think a truth is a truth in a rather absolute sense. I suppose the important thing is to allow and listen to counter-argument and understand that it’s part of the necessary fabric of a society in good health.There have been many societies in very bad health, and that reveals itself in the very lack of having this argumentative world available to you. It reveals itself in having to watch your step, sometimes with appalling consequences for transgression. These are the kinds of societies we end up going to war with. It may be that’s where the conception of a just war makes the most sense, that it preserves what I, in my quite trad way, think of as the values of civilisation.
When I got to the end of Leopoldstadt, I thought, well, I don’t think I could go through that again, and the other thought is, what on earth can you write about after that?
I tend to have four years go by between plays, so I’ll be 86 or 87 by the time I write another proper play. I wondered whether people who are 87 have plays on. It doesn’t seem plausible.
One mustn’t try to follow it, but just do the next thing which sparks you. If you don’t have the juice for it, you can’t write anything anyway. I don’t have plans to stop thinking, and while I’m thinking, I’m potentially writing.
There’s that Philip Larkin line, isn’t there? “Get out as early as you can.” There’s a rather bad feeling in me now. I’ve got some very good reasons for staying in, but there’s this little voice of Larkin saying “Get out as early as you can.”
Take it how you will, but I’m quite keen on posterity. I think I just have to say that, because writing, you know, it may be working for a living, but it’s actually quite hard, and it takes a lot of discipline, and you don’t do it without wanting to be good at it. If you want to be good at it, what does that mean exactly then? It’s got to still mean it after you’re dead, and suddenly you’re into posterity. No, I don’t really find it enough if a certain number of people on a Wednesday night have a good time. It’s very nice, and it’s terrific, and I’m very pleased, but I don’t write for that Wednesday night,
At the root of things, the people who get all the way to thinking of a play, starting it, finishing it, redoing it, and ultimately having actors perform it, the people who make that journey, what they’ve got is the pursuit, the persistence, the desire. My hot flushes for this subject or that subject have tended to be just that I’ve become, for short periods of two or three or four years, fascinated, passionately interested by philosophy, perhaps for this play, or basic physics for that play. None of the education that I gave myself in areas like that was at any time a chore or a duty. It was always done with relish and enjoyment, but it didn’t last.
I gained, of course, as well, by not going to university, or rather by entering journalism, because I had the experience of sitting in law courts and coroners’ courts and county councils and city councils, and going to amateur drama and flower shows. That whole stratum of life, as it’s actually lived outside universities, was made accessible to me, and I did enjoy that life. I was very thrilled to have words in print.
When I started writing, I wasn’t looking to engage myself with matters of the moment. As a matter of fact, I always felt that journalism, and particularly television journalism, was a much more effective and immediate tool for changing society, the way artists are supposed to want to change society. I think that if you imagine a culture, a society, and mentally extract art from it, then one understands that art doesn’t require me or anybody else to defend it. It is an absolute essential; society becomes almost meaningless (without it). Art is a template, a matrix of some kind, for our morality; it’s always there as politic’s conscience.”