Tom Stoppard This article is more than 10 years oldPinter would be chuffed that Tom Stoppard won the PEN prize
This article is more than 10 years oldTom Stoppard's fierce, unrelenting opposition to the abuse of human rights makes him the ideal recipient of the Pinter/PEN prizeIn Antonia Fraser's book, Must You Go?, detailing her life with Harold Pinter, there is a fascinating account of a dinner party in 1976 with Miriam and Tom Stoppard. At one point Miriam asks Pinter if all the swearing in No Man's Land reflects something inside Harold himself. In reply, Pinter says he doesn't plan his characters lives and, turning to Stoppard asks: "Don't you find they take you over sometimes?" To which Stoppard cryptically replies "No."
I've always treasured that because it says a lot about Pinter's reliance on dramatic intuition and Stoppard's belief, at that time, in the primacy of ideas. Yet, although Stoppard and Pinter were very different dramatists, they also had a lot in common. They were good friends, passionate about cricket, fastidious in their use of language and increasingly vocal in their built-in antagonism to the abuse of human rights. That's why it seems dead right that Stoppard should be the fifth recipient of the annual PEN Pinter prize, awarded to a writer who casts, in the words of Pinter's Nobel lecture, "an unflinching, unswerving gaze upon the world".
What is fascinating is that both Stoppard and Pinter became active in their public opposition to tyranny in the 1970s, and allowed it to permeate their work. While Pinter was always a radical nonconformist, it was events such as the 1973 overthrow of President Allende in Chile and the imprisonment of the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky that encouraged him to give voice to his political opinions: something that was to feed into plays such as One for the Road and Mountain Language, and encourage him to retrieve The Hothouse.
Stoppard was more hesitant than Pinter to broadcast his hatred of injustice but, when he did, the effect was devastating. In interviews Stoppard often talked of his awareness of the "daily horrors" of the world but his feeling that he could do little about them. But, although Stoppard insists there was no overnight Damascene conversion, his biographer, Ira Nadel, says that his "systematic political education began in earnest in 1976 when he became interested in the plight of Soviet dissidents". Over the next few years Stoppard engaged in a flurry of activity. He visited the Soviet Union with the assistant director of Amnesty International, returned to his native Czechoslovakia for the first time since early childhood, met and befriended Václav Havel, wrote influential articles on the newly formed Czech Charter 77 in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. Not least, he wrote plays for theatre and television that vividly dramatised human rights.
That's the key point. Stoppard was aware that the best contribution he could make to public events was to write to the top of his talent; and I'd argue that two of his finest works spring from this period of intense activism. One was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour: "a play for actors and orchestra" first seen at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977 and revived by the National theatre in 2009. Stoppard boldly shows a Soviet dissident sharing a prison cell with a genuine lunatic who hears an orchestra in his head – it's a dizzying, very funny piece that captures the Alice in Wonderland surreality of a system in which political opposition is treated as madness while certifiable insanity is greeted with bone‑headed incomprehension.
That same year saw the TV premiere of the remarkable Professional Foul. It deals with a Cambridge ethics professor who goes to Prague to deliver a scholarly paper and see England play football. He meets a former student, now cleaning lavatories, who asks him to smuggle his thesis back to England and get it translated, something the professor achieves through ethically dubious tactics. It's a piece that still ranks high in the Stoppard canon for its ability to show an academic confronting the real world of political persecution, and being forced to modify his moral relativism to recognise there is an instinctive morality based on right and wrong.
Over the years Stoppard has continued to strike a delicate balance between activism and art: to oppose all forms of persecution while writing plays that, in the words of critic Robert Cushman, show that "gaiety is a moral quality in itself." It was typical of Stoppard that, when he received a letter seeking help from an unknown theatre company, the Belarus Free Theatre, he decided the best thing to do was to visit them. The account of his trip to Minsk that he wrote for this paper in 2005 not only exposed the grim reality of the Lukashenko regime but also opened doors all over the world for this supremely talented company. And it seems fitting that the work that initially made them famous was a dazzling collage based on Pinter's political plays.
But Stoppard also reveals himself through his work; and I suspect we have still to get the measure of his epic trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, originally seen at the National theatre in 2002. Always fascinated by the position of writers in totalitarian societies, Stoppard deals with the ferment of revolutionary ideas in mid-19th century Europe. And he does this by pursuing the messy lives and high ideals of exiled figures such as Alexander Herzen, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx. But it's significant that the figure with whom Stoppard empathises is the archetypal liberal, Turgenev. "I wanted to write about someone," he said, "who was aware of his own moderation and is accused of essentially going neither left nor right. I feel that's rather true of myself." But, however you choose to pigeonhole Stoppard politically, he has been totally consistent in his fierce, unrelenting opposition to the abuse of human rights; which is why I suspect Pinter would be chuffed that his old Czech mate has won the PEN prize.
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