At Home He Feels Like A Tourist

A Continuing Dialogue on Drama

The following is an edited exchange between the author and Claude. A note on method and collaboration appears below. This is the first in a series of dialogues on drama and dramatists — each beginning with a specific provocation and opening outward toward larger arguments about what theatre is for. It is largely written for me. The collection of reviews elsewhere on this blog, now stalled, shows I am a bit if a theatre nut. This aids my learning. It may well be bollocks. But it is my bollocks. Make of that what you will.

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Me: Was Tom Stoppard too clever for his own good?

Claude: It’s a question critics circled throughout his career — and since his death in November 2025, have returned to with fresh urgency. The brief answer is: sometimes yes, mostly no, and by the end, emphatically not.

The charge against his early and middle work was consistent — that the plays were pieces of clever showmanship, lacking emotional weight, his fondness for towers of paradox spiralling away from social comment. The critic Kenneth Tynan, otherwise a Stoppard champion, worried that the work was more interested in its own ingenuity than in the human condition it claimed to be exploring. A more pointed version held that audiences might leave the theatre flattered they had encountered difficult ideas, when all they had encountered were simulacra of such ideas — a knowing cleverness substituted for true understanding.

And yet his later plays — Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Real Thing, Leopoldstadt — showed genuine deepening. What he perhaps sacrificed throughout for his particular pleasures was urgency — the feeling that something is at stake for people you’ve surrendered to emotionally.

Me: Let’s start with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The Old Vic 2017. Marvellous conceit. Drawing on the meta-drama of the past. Brilliantly executed. But flat characters.

Claude: The conceit is genuinely brilliant — taking two walk-on characters from Hamlet and making them the protagonists of their own play, in which the great drama they’re peripheral to keeps intruding from offstage. It’s Beckett meeting Shakespeare, Waiting for Godot relocated to Elsinore, and the philosophical payload — about contingency, identity, the arbitrariness of fate — is real rather than merely decorative. Stoppard was twenty-six when he wrote it. The audacity is breathtaking.

But your instinct about the characters is shared by many serious critics and goes to the heart of what the play is actually doing. Ros and Guil aren’t characters in the conventional dramatic sense — they’re philosophical positions, or rather the absence of one. Their inability to remember which of them is which, their incapacity for decisive thought or feeling, their bewilderment in the face of events they can’t control — all of this is the argument, not a failure of characterisation. Stoppard is making Beckett’s point: that human beings are fundamentally lost, unable to construct coherent selfhood, waiting for a meaning that never arrives.

The critical problem is that this makes them interesting as concepts and somewhat tedious as company. You can admire what they represent without being moved by what happens to them. Which is an early signal of what would become the persistent Stoppard tension. The meta-theatrical machinery is so elegantly constructed that it draws attention to itself at the expense of whatever lies beneath. You watch a performance of cleverness about cleverness. Magnificent, but at a remove.

Me: What aboutTravesties. I saw a superb production at the Apollo Theatre via the Menier Chocolate factory in 2017 with Tom Hollander, directed by Patrick Marber. A multiplicity of ideas, structures, games — but even though some of the art and politics was right up my street it was trying too hard and maybe made me try too hard.

Claude: Travesties is the most purely Stoppardian of all his plays, which means simultaneously his most exhilarating and his most exhausting. The conceit — Henry Carr’s unreliable memory of Zurich in 1917, where Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara were all present in the same city at the same moment — is one of the great theatrical ideas of the twentieth century. The collision of revolutionary politics, literary modernism and Dadaist anti-art, filtered through a minor British consular official who misremembers everything, and structured as a pastiche of The Importance of Being Earnest — it shouldn’t work at all and it almost does.

Marber and Hollander is exactly the right pairing for it — Marber precise enough to impose shape on the chaos, Hollander with the comic timing and intellectual horsepower to hold Carr’s unreliability without losing the audience. That production was widely considered the definitive modern revival.

But your “trying too hard” diagnosis is precisely located. Travesties asks the audience to track multiple simultaneous games — the Wildean structure, the historical ironies, the debate about art and politics, the unreliable narrator, the Joycean pastiche — while also finding it funny and following a plot. At a certain point the effort tips from pleasurable to effortful. You become a student of the play rather than an audience for it.

The play also raises Stoppard’s politics explicitly for the first time, which leads somewhere interesting.

Me: I saw Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 2023 revival at the Hampstead Theatre. This felt more distilled. More rounded characters. An explicit political message. Stoppard had a strong sense of his own political worldview — but did this tip over into an overly reactionary stance?

Claude: Rock ‘n’ Roll is the play where Stoppard’s politics become impossible to ignore. It spans 1968 to 1990, moving between Cambridge and Prague, using the Czech rock band The Plastic People of the Universe as its moral centre — the argument being that rock music, precisely because it was beyond ideology, represented a form of human freedom that both Western capitalism and Eastern communism failed to accommodate. Jan, the Czech protagonist who returns from Cambridge to live under normalisation, embodies this. Max, his Cambridge Marxist professor, represents the Western intellectual whose ideology blinds him to what’s actually happening behind the Iron Curtain.

The characters are more rounded than anything in the earlier work — Jan in particular has genuine interiority, and the Eleanor/Esme doubling across time carries real emotional weight. Stoppard had found, perhaps for the first time, a way to make the political personal rather than merely adjacent.

But the political argument is sharp enough to make serious critics uncomfortable. Stoppard — born Tomáš Straussler in Czechoslovakia, his Jewish family fleeing the Nazis — had a visceral, biographical anti-communism that inflected everything he wrote. Michael Billington argued the play set up an unequal contest — Max’s Marxism presented as self-deceiving and culpable, Czech dissidence as heroically clear-eyed — without fully acknowledging the contradictions within Western liberalism that a more even-handed treatment might have required.

The reactionary charge is probably too strong. Stoppard is a civil libertarian rather than a conservative in any conventional sense, and his consistent theme is the freedom of individual consciousness against any system that would subordinate it. But his anti-totalitarianism, formed in the crucible of personal history, did produce blind spots. The market doesn’t get the same scrutiny as the Party. Whether that’s a flaw or an honest expression of a coherent worldview probably depends on where you’re standing politically. What’s undeniable is that Rock ‘n’ Roll is the play where Stoppard stopped hiding behind the games long enough to say what he actually believed.

Me: Ok. Let’s move on to what I think many see as his finest play, Arcadia. The current Old Vic production is about to transfer to the Duke of York’s Theatre. Once again showing that Stoppard can pull in an audience beyond us luvvies. It is undeniably elegant but way overstuffed with ideas?

Claude: “Overstuffed” is fair on first encounter — it’s a play that genuinely rewards a second viewing, partly because you spend the first one just catching up with it.

The story operates on two timelines sharing the same stage — 1809 and the present day — both investigating the same country house and its secrets, the past and present eventually occupying the same space simultaneously. In 1809, Thomasina, a precocious thirteen-year-old, is being tutored by Septimus Hodge when she intuits something very close to chaos theory and the second law of thermodynamics — that heat flows one way, that you can stir jam into rice pudding but never unstir it, that the universe tends toward disorder. In the present day, two academics — the rigorous Hannah and the reckless Bernard — are trying to reconstruct what happened in 1809, each getting it magnificently wrong in different ways.

The deepest theme is the tension between classical certainty and romantic disorder — embodied in the garden being redesigned from formal to “picturesque,” civilisation abandoning reason for feeling. But what makes it more than an elegant seminar is entropy as emotional experience. When Thomasina and Septimus waltz in the final scene — she hours from her death in a fire, he about to become the hermit who will spend the rest of his life in the garden folly — you feel thermodynamic irreversibility as grief. Which is a remarkable thing for a play about mathematics to pull off.

Me: Understood. But that leaves a feeling of being stimulated intellectually — and, to be fair, amused — but drama with more clarity of meaning might be more satisfying.

Claude: Yes, and it gets at something real about Stoppard’s particular trade-off. The plays that produce the deepest satisfaction are ones where intellectual and emotional meaning converge on the same point at the same moment. Think of the end of King Lear — you don’t need to decode it, it simply destroys you. Stoppard’s drama tends to work the other way around. The intellectual structure is crystalline but the emotional payload often arrives as a surprise ambush. You think you’ve been watching a seminar and then suddenly you’re bereft. That’s thrilling, but it’s a slightly odd way to be moved.

There’s also a character problem. Thomasina is luminous but functions partly as a vessel for ideas. Septimus is witty but somewhat opaque by design. You admire them more than you inhabit them.

Me: OK so I have seen The Real Thing on a couple of occasions (Old Vic 2024 and Rose Kingston 2017) and studied it. There is undeniably more emotion on top of the rug-pulling “play within a play (within a play)” but even love and honesty still feel like intellectual exercises for Stoppard. And Henry is a bit of an arse.

Claude: Henry is absolutely an arse — and Stoppard clearly knows it and arguably endorses him anyway. The Real Thing— his most emotionally direct play — centres on Henry, a successful playwright, whose marriage to Charlotte is dissolving as he falls in love with Annie, an actress. The play is ostensibly about adultery but is really about authenticity — in art, in feeling, in political commitment. Henry’s famous cricket bat speech, in which he argues that good writing is like a well-made bat, a precision instrument that can actually do what it claims, is essentially Stoppard’s own aesthetic manifesto put in the mouth of someone you’re not entirely sure you should trust. That’s either brilliant self-awareness or vanity by proxy — probably both.

Your point about love feeling like an intellectual exercise even here identifies something constitutional about Stoppard. He seems genuinely unable — or unwilling — to present feeling without immediately subjecting it to analysis. The characters fall in love and then deliver essays about what falling in love means. The emotion is real but always being supervised.

The interesting contrast is Harold Pinter — almost no ideas, all menace and subtext, feeling that cannot be named. Pinter makes you feel things you can’t explain. Stoppard explains things you then feel. Neither is quite complete.

Me: The Pinter problem — not to say it isn’t great — is that the menace becomes an end in itself. We will come back to that another time. For me the most satisfying drama is big fat tragedies: Greeks, Shakespeare, the Renaissance revenge plays, Arthur Miller. And the formal experimentation of Caryl Churchill and every contemporary playwright who learns from her.

Claude: That’s a coherent aesthetic — and the connecting thread is revealing. What those very different writers share is that formal structure and emotional stakes feel generated by the same necessity. In Greek tragedy the form enacts the fate the characters are trapped in. Churchill does something analogous — the overlapping dialogue in Top Girls, the time structure of Far Away, aren’t clever devices laid over the content, they are the content. Form as meaning rather than form as vehicle.

Which is your implicit critique of Stoppard made precise. His formal ingenuity — the two timelines, the language games — feels somewhat separable from the emotional truth. In Churchill you couldn’t have one without the other.

Me: And the revenge tragedies — not just Webster — all have a similar inexorable march. We know where this will end but still delight in the journey. Same with Miller.

Claude: Yes — and that’s one of the oldest and most underrated pleasures in drama. The dramatic question was never really what happens but how, and more importantly what it means that it had to happen this way. The Greeks relied on audiences who already knew the myths — Oedipus’s audience knew exactly where it was going — and the whole experience was about moving through a known inevitability with full consciousness. Which is perhaps why those plays feel ceremonial as much as dramatic.

There’s a particular pleasure in the protagonist’s complicity in their own destruction — Willy Loman, the Duchess of Malfi, Macbeth, Faustus. Watching someone make the choices that seal their fate while you simultaneously understand why they couldn’t have chosen differently. That tension between agency and inevitability is where the real moral seriousness lives. And in the best tragedies the structure itself enacts that inevitability — the play couldn’t end any other way, and you feel that from the architecture, not just the plot.

Me: Which is maybe why drama fails so often on streaming — too much withholding, so no space to explore the moral seriousness.

Claude: The withholding model replaces moral seriousness with information management. You’re kept watching not because you’re being deepened but because you’ve been deliberately left incomplete. And because the form demands constant momentum toward the next disclosure, there’s no space for characters to sit in their situation and meansomething.

Greek tragedy understood that release was as important as pressure. Streaming drama has figured out how to apply pressure indefinitely while making catharsis structurally impossible. Which is why it produces a strange emotional flatness paradoxically — constant tension without resolution. And the camera compounds this: it’s an argument, telling you what to look at and when to feel it. Theatre gives you a field and you navigate it yourself. Your eye going to a minor character in the corner during a big scene is an interpretation the director didn’t make for you.

Me: Let go back to Sir Tom. Specifically Stoppard’s method — he wrote sequentially, line by line, scene by scene, with a game plan, but from beginning to end. Which means if his biases and his own experience colour the plays it isn’t surprising. Not too clever for his own good. But too curious for his own good. Biting off more than he can chew when material gets too remote from himself?

Claude: Your recollection is confirmed — he said explicitly that “the best way to find out what the structure is, is by writing the play out laterally. You just have to be brave enough to start without knowing where you are going, making what you’ve just written suggest what you should write now, literally line by line and scene by scene.” Though crucially, for research-heavy plays like The Invention of Love he spent two or three years reading before writing a word. Sequential in execution, extensively prepared in advance.

The curiosity framing is sharper than the cleverness framing. Cleverness implies showing off — a performance directed at an audience. Curiosity is prior to that, more innocent and more dangerous. A curious mind follows the material wherever it leads regardless of whether the dramatic structure can bear the weight. Indian Ink bit off the cultural complexity of the colonial encounter because the subject genuinely fascinated him — and then discovered mid-play that fascination isn’t the same as understanding from the inside.

Stoppard’s native territory is the world of ideas, specifically European intellectual history and the philosophy of language and knowledge. When he works in that territory the curiosity and the dramatic form pull in the same direction. When he ventures further from himself — into colonial India, into female interiority — the curiosity is real but the inhabitation is thinner. Which makes the late turn inward, toward his own buried history, all the more significant.

Me: Oh yes. Indian Ink. A 2025 Hampstead Theatre production. More forced as a play. Pastiche characters. Some laboured passages. Not a failure — far too much sparkle and wit — but effortful not effortless.

Claude: The effortful/effortless distinction locates the problem precisely. The double timeline structure — Flora Crewe’s time in India in 1930 and her sister Eleanor’s investigation of that period in the 1980s — is characteristic Stoppard architecture. But where in Arcadia the two timelines generate genuine dramatic irony, in Indian Ink the mechanism feels more dutiful than necessary. You’re aware of the machinery rather than transported by it.

Flora herself — the bohemian English poetess in colonial India — sits in a long tradition of similar figures, and Stoppard never quite makes her feel irreducibly real rather than assembled from recognisable parts. The colonial setting creates difficulties he only partially resolves. When the argument about art and empire surfaces directly it crackles. When it retreats into the romantic plot the laboured passages follow.

Michael Coveney felt it was Stoppard writing a kind of play he’d observed others writing rather than one that emerged from his own deepest preoccupations. The India of Indian Ink is, in this reading, somewhat touristic — vivid, affectionately rendered, but observed from outside rather than inhabited from within. The significant thing in the context of his development is what it was reaching toward. The attempt to write about history, cultural encounter and loss with genuine emotional stakes points directly toward the late masterpieces. A necessary failure, if failure is even quite the right word.

Me: Next up .The Invention of Love. Hampstead Theatre 2025 with Simon Russell Beale (in this case perfectly cast) and directed by Blanche McIntyre. I think Stoppard said it was his own favourite. I agree. The intellectual positions, the historical insight, the formal experimentation. But most of all the relationships and the genuine emotion. Stoppard was a very straight man. Yet his portrayal of gay love is so moving. Or am I being manipulated into thinking this?

Claude: Your recollection is confirmed — he called it the play he enjoyed writing more than any other, which is a carefully different thing from calling it his best. The distinction matters. Arcadia is probably the more perfectly achieved mechanism. The Invention of Love is the one where he felt most fully himself — which is precisely what you’re responding to.

The play begins with A.E. Housman — the great Latin scholar and poet of A Shropshire Lad — arriving dead at seventy-seven on the banks of the Styx, where he encounters his young self, the figures of his Oxford years, and eventually, in the play’s most extraordinary passage, Oscar Wilde. The subject is Housman’s lifelong suppressed love for his friend Moses Jackson — a love never expressed, never consummated, sublimated into classical scholarship and into poetry of piercing bleakness. The play’s devastating suggestion is that Housman gained immortality without really having lived at all.

The manipulation question deserves a direct answer: partly, but not in a way that should diminish the response. All drama manipulates — that’s the contract. The question is whether the emotion has been earned by the material or merely engineered by technique. Here it’s genuinely earned. The formal structure means we experience Housman’s love retrospectively, through the filter of an entire wasted lifetime. The emotion arrives not from the love itself — which we never see expressed — but from its negative space. What wasn’t said, what wasn’t done, what the scholarship was sublimating.

The Wilde confrontation is where it becomes most acute. Wilde tells Housman that we would never love anybody if we could see past our invention — that Bosie is his creation, his poem. It’s a speech of devastating beauty and serves as a direct rebuke to Housman’s life of renunciation — Wilde chose the invention and was destroyed by it; Housman refused it and was preserved in amber. Neither is simply right. That moral equipoise lifts it above sentiment.

On the straight man writing gay love — Stoppard doesn’t write from inside gay experience. He writes from inside the experience of love that cannot be spoken, which is broader and in some ways more ancient. Catullus, Horace, the classical tradition Housman devoted his life to — these are full of desire in tension with social prohibition. Stoppard understood that subject from the outside but understood it deeply, possibly because his own emotional reticence made Housman’s predicament peculiarly resonant. The emotion is genuine because structural intelligence and feeling are — for once — pointing in exactly the same direction. Which is why he loved writing it more than anything else. He had finally found a subject where curiosity and feeling were the same thing.

Me: The final curtain. Wyndham’s Theatre 2020 before the closure. Leopoldstadt felt very different. The historical sweep and family drama made it far less intellectual despite the family being intellectual. There was necessary exposition and who’s-who reminding, and the staging couldn’t help but be static. But the characters felt real. Maybe I admired it more than enjoyed it.

Claude: The admired/enjoyed distinction is worth sitting with rather than resolving too quickly. They’re not the same thing and the gap between them tells you something true about the play — and about what Stoppard was asking of his audience.

Leopoldstadt covers fifty years of a Viennese Jewish family from 1899 to 1955, the final scene arriving in the rubble of what the Holocaust has made of what we spent the previous two hours coming to know and love. The biographical stakes couldn’t be higher. Stoppard’s own family fled the Nazis; his Jewish identity was effectively buried by anglicisation. The play is, among other things, Stoppard finally confronting what was suppressed — which is why it has a gravity and stillness quite unlike anything else he wrote.

The large cast and historical sweep are structural necessities. The play needs you to know these people, to have accumulated feeling for specific faces and names, so that the final scene’s enumeration of the dead lands as personal loss rather than historical abstraction. The exposition is the play building its emotional architecture brick by brick, because the last scene requires the audience to feel the weight of each brick individually. That’s why it can feel static. The mechanism is slower and more patient than anything in his earlier work. He earned that patience.

One critic called it Stoppard finally realising the vital importance of being earnest — his first attempt to deal with his own family’s origins, rich in wit and humanity, far closer to De Profundis than to his earlier jeux d’esprit. The restraint — the absence of verbal pyrotechnics, the games, the layered structural conceits — is itself an achievement. He chose plainness. For Stoppard, that’s a radical act.

The admiration without full enjoyment is perhaps the inevitable response to a play that wants witness rather than delight. You leave feeling something important happened rather than that you had a wonderful time. For a playwright who spent fifty years being brilliant and entertaining, that may be precisely the point.

Me: I note that the major revivals of Stoppard’s plays in recent years have appeared at the Old Vic and Hampstead Theatre. Maybe a sign that those houses and their creatives’ admiration spills over into a genuine belief they can pull in an audience. Reputation ten out of ten. Economics of staging that reputation — less clear.

Claude: It’s a telling observation and worth unpacking. The Old Vic and Hampstead are both houses with the programming ambition and the subscriber base to take the risk — but Stoppard is a genuine risk, and the choice to stage him says something about institutional identity as much as commercial calculation. Both theatres are implicitly arguing, by producing him, that their audiences are up to the demand. That’s a form of flattery directed at the audience as much as at the playwright.

The economics are genuinely complicated. Stoppard requires large, often technically complex productions — Arcadia‘s two timelines, Travesties‘ elaborate theatrical machinery — and the casts need to be strong enough across the board to carry the intellectual weight without losing the comedy. That’s expensive. Star casting helps sell tickets but as your second Creditors experience demonstrated, it doesn’t guarantee the right kind of performance. The plays need actors who will go to uncomfortable places rather than ones who will be comfortable in them.

There’s also the question of audience attrition during a run. A Stoppard revival typically opens to strong critical response and devoted early audiences — the people who’ve been waiting for it — and then faces the harder task of sustaining houses through the middle weeks with theatregoers who haven’t already decided they want to be there. The word of mouth is usually good but rarely simple. “Brilliant but demanding” is not a phrase that fills seats effortlessly.

What both the Old Vic and Hampstead seem to have concluded is that Stoppard’s reputation is a cultural asset worth investing in regardless — that producing him says something about what kind of theatre they are that has value beyond the specific run. Whether the balance sheet agrees is another matter. The artistic director’s admiration and the finance director’s spreadsheet are not always in productive dialogue.

Me: So in conclusion I think we have moved quite a bit. From too clever for his own good to actually, at best, a more searching examination of the human condition through genuinely expressed emotion. More Enlightenment polymath than post-Modern structuralist. We leave the conclusion open.

Claude: Yes — and the open conclusion is more honest than a verdict would be. The arc from provocation to qualified reassessment is itself the argument. Stoppard remained, to the end, someone whose curiosity consistently outran his emotional reach — except in the moments when the two finally converged. The Invention of Love and Leopoldstadt are those moments. They don’t cancel the earlier diagnosis so much as complicate it irreversibly.

Perhaps the most useful reframe is this: the question “was Stoppard too clever for his own good?” is the wrong question, because it locates the problem in the cleverness. The cleverness was never the problem. The distance from his own deepest material was — and the late work is the story of that distance slowly, sometimes painfully, closing.

What drama at its best requires is that form and feeling be generated by the same necessity. Stoppard spent most of his career with those forces pulling in slightly different directions. In his last two major plays they finally pulled together. That’s not failure redeemed. That’s a life’s work arriving, late but unmistakably, at its destination.

This dialogue continues. Future instalments may cover Pinter, Churchill, Miller, Ibsen, Strindberg, some Russians and the contemporary African-American writers. Arden of Faversham, revenge tragedy. Maybe a bloke called Will. Missing mothers, family trauma, greed, the state. nationhood. That’s just for starters. Each time beginning with a provocation and ending, we hope, somewhere neither of us expected.

A note on method

Some posts on this blog take the form of a dialogue between the author and Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. The method is described more fully elsewhere. Briefly: the instincts, provocations, corrections and editorial judgements are mine. Claude provides synthesis, scaffolding and connective tissue — and occasionally something worth disagreeing with. The exchange is lightly edited for flow but otherwise presented as it happened, including the mistakes and the pushback. This feels more honest than laundering the process into a false monologue.

Oh and don’t bug me about Claude’s style. You can no more roughen his prose edges and de-program his sycophancy than you can stop my intellectual pretension. Features not bugs in both of us.