In a piece for the Guardian in 1971, Tom Stoppard elaborates at length about working with the community arts pioneer Ed Berman, an American born in Maine who later became a British citizen. Stoppard obviously found a fellow jokey libertarian spirit in Berman that sometimes disguised an intense seriousness of purpose. Stoppard’s early play After Magritte was in a season of plays in Berman’s Ambiance theatre in London. Later he wrote other plays for Inter-Action, the hugely ambitious community arts company created by Berman and a team of talented collaborators in arts and education.
Among these plays was Dirty Linen, a satire on the sexual indiscretions of politicians. Embedded in the play is a diversion called New-Found-Land, based around Berman’s bid for UK citizenship. The American and the Czech shared a vision of Britain where liberty, creativity and a sense of the ridiculous were thought to be entrenched. The play’s subsequent four‑year run at the Arts Theatre allowed a stream of supportive royalties to go to Inter-Action, which in its turn became one of the most significant social and communitarian organisations of the later decades of the 20th century, pioneering everything from city farms to IT training for young people, to basing their operations on a minesweeper opposite the South Bank.
That Stoppard was aware of the significance of this artistic and outsider connection is summarised in his own words: “Inter-Action is an astounding monument to a man who a year ago was described in a Council of Europe report as the most dynamic phenomenon in the British community arts scene.”
Tony Coult
London
• The many obituaries and tributes to Tom Stoppard omit the little-known fact that, in the 1950s when Tom was a journalist in Bristol, he attended evening classes in philosophy that were taught by my father, the Czech refugee and philosopher Stephan Körner. The two became fast friends and Tom’s brother Peter, who remained in Bristol, became my parents’ accountant and an executor of their wills.
As John Sheperdson wrote in my father’s obituary for the British Academy: “He was delighted by Tom Stoppard’s portrait of a philosopher in Jumpers and he and the playwright enjoyed a friendship cemented by a mutual love of the intellectual life of old Vienna.”
In the 1990s, my parents accompanied Peter on an “ancestry tour” to Zlín, where my mother, also a Czech refugee, acted as interpreter and, when my parents’ died, Peter brought a condolence note from Tom to their funeral.
It does seem highly unlikely that, during a long friendship that started in the 1950s, Tom and my parents never acknowledged or discussed their common background as Czech Jews.
Ann M Altman (née Körner)
Hamden, Connecticut, US
• In his tribute piece (Tom Stoppard: a brilliant dramatist who always raised the temperature of the room, 29 November), Michael Billington draws out the multiple facets of Tom Stoppard’s writing and his brilliant use of words. Surprising then, that in his summary of the Stoppard canon Billington makes no mention of The Invention of Love. Asked which of his plays was his favourite, Stoppard told his biographer Hermione Lee that he personally loved The Invention of Love because he so enjoyed writing it.
The play explores the complex character of AE Housman, who fascinated Stoppard because he was “the man who was two men” – the leading classical scholar of his day and the popular poet who wrote the 63 poems in A Shropshire Lad.
Billington recalls that Stoppard undertook meticulous research for each play he wrote. But no stack of books could have been higher than the 85 volumes about Housman and Roman poets that he told Richard Eyre were on his work table. The gestation period for The Invention of Love was a full three years. Finally, under Eyre’s direction, it premiered at the National in September 1997.
This fascination with the character of Housman never left Stoppard. He was a vice-president of the Housman Society and recently he contributed an article to our annual journal that intriguingly brought together Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and some Housman diary entries about his lifelong and unrequited love for Moses Jackson. We have lost a monumental literary figure.
Max Hunt
Chairman, The Housman Society
• I would like to mention two of Tom Stoppard’s early, seemingly minor works, that, within their comedic framework address serious issues, and I think are practically perfect in every way. First, the BBC radio play Albert’s Bridge (1967), which on the surface is about the painting of a huge railway bridge but deals with philosophical questions about life, with a wonderful central performance by John Hurt.
Second, the one-act play The Real Inspector Hound (1968), where we watch two critics watching a pastiche of an Agatha Christie-type murder mystery, but deals with questions about identity and life and death, and had outstanding performances from Richard Briers and Ronnie Barker.
David Freedman
London
• As a very grateful boomer, I, like Michael Billington, remain lost in admiration at the artistry of Tom Stoppard and feel his loss. I do not remember how this young man from a family that had no history of dramatic theatre got to the Old Vic to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but I do remember what an impact it had on me. It spoke to me about the dilemmas and confusion of my life, and gave me an uncanny feeling that I was not alone. He was a genius.
John Beer
Farnham, Surrey
• The best Tom Stoppard joke wasn’t by him, it was about him and occurred in an episode of the 1970s ITV sitcom George and Mildred. Mildred, played with brilliant comic timing by the great Yootha Joyce, goes to babysit for the young middle-class couple next door who are off to the theatre. “What are you going to see?” she asks. “Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers.” A very slight pause as a worried look crosses Mildred’s face before she replies: “I hope you enjoy them.”
Ralph Lloyd-Jones
Nottingham
• When our daughter was studying A-level English she took some inspiration from Tom Stoppard, and also set up a future opportunity to make a dramatic announcement, when she named her goldfish Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Dr Charles Smith
Bridgend
• In 1946, millions of refugees were washing round the postwar world, looking for a safe place. What a good thing that Britain found room for nine-year old Tomáš Sträussler (Tom Stoppard).
Jenny Tillyard
Seaford, East Sussex
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