Master playwrite Tom Stoppard has had a lifelong commitment to human rights. Photograph: Karen Robinson
When the Declaration of Human Rights was made, Tom Stoppard was 11 years old and living in Nottingham. In his short life he already had good reason to be sharply aware of its ideals. Having escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1939 - many of his Jewish relatives did not get out - the day the Nazis invaded, his family had lived as refugees for three years in Singapore. When the Japanese invasion forced them to move on again his mother took her two boys - Tom and his elder brother, Peter - to India; their father remained behind as a volunteer in the British army and died in a Japanese prison camp.
Sitting opposite Stoppard in his flat in Chelsea Harbour, looking upriver, all these years on, it is hard to imagine him as that fatherless five-year-old asylum-seeker, Thomas Straussler, in Darjeeling. Stoppard, with several lifetimes worth of brilliance behind him, is the epitome of English raffishness, warm-hearted and courteous, offering sandwiches and tea, dragging on a cigarette as he thinks. He struggles a bit with the idea of the memory of his boyish self, too.
'From my perspective, looking back, it was life going on. I wouldn't have known the word "refugee" when I was one, however I would have known that we had been bombed out of Singapore, and bombed on the ship, and we had lost our father. But that kind of uncertain situation went back further than my memory went back at the time. It was just my childhood.'
That Stoppard was 'saved' in some respects from that uncertainty by the arrival in his life of a very British stepfather, an army major, has indelibly shaped his view of his adoptive country. By the time he arrived in Nottingham, with his new English name, he was already a champion of Britain's finer virtues. 'I was only eight. But when I came here America was the glamorous country and England was, in my mind, the country to do with the creation and spread of civilisation. In India we had not been Raj people until my mother remarried but after that I think I was turned into a proper little snob about the English.'
Can he recall the previous sense of insecurity? Of always escaping things?
'If I was trying to analsye myself as though I was someone else at that age,' he says, 'I would see someone who had completely pulled down the shutters.'
Stoppard's writing, you could claim, has been a process of casting light on that formative shuttered-up experience in surprising ways. His plays from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead onwards have been preoccupied among many other things with individuals who, comically and tragically, have extremely limited control of their fate. Some more recent work has dwelt directly on the immigrant experience, particularly that of writers cast adrift. The genesis of the nine-hour trilogy The Coast of Utopia , for example, came from his wanting to examine the philosophies of two radical emigrés from 19th-century Russia. He traces the history of that play now to a fascination with two quotations.
The first, from Alexander Herzen, Russia's 'first socialist', was about a notion of Englishness that Stoppard himself had good reason to cherish and which he fears is now waning. Having come to Britain from Russia in 1852, Herzen had suggested that 'the English don't give asylum out of respect for us the asylum seekers, they give it out of respect for themselves, because they invented the idea of personal liberty'.
The second quotation was from a celebrated critic, Vissarion Belinsky, who had been allowed out of Moscow at about the same time. In Paris, where he lived for a while in the 1850s, there was no censorship, but Belinsky was determined to go home. His friends tried to dissuade him. If he went back he would undoubtedly be arrested for his words, whereas in Paris he could publish anything. 'Belinsky's response was what made me want to write the play,' Stoppard says. 'He said something like "At home everything I write had to be written so carefully - and when I had a piece coming out in the magazine Contemporary, students would buy a copy and eight of them would share it and stay up all night reading between its lines and get a sense that someone was talking to them about things that mattered. Whereas here in Paris you can write anything and none of it really means a bugger and nobody takes any notice of it. At home you understand what it means to be a writer." I was,' Stoppard says, 'tremendously struck by this paradox that under repression he could be himself...'
Understanding what it means to be a writer, that paradox of being sometimes best able to fulfil that role in the harshest circumstances, has been at the heart of much of Stoppard's intellectual engagement. He has been a great champion of free expression, not only in his efforts to publicise and argue against the censorship and oppression of writers in the former Czechoslovakia and Russia and elsewhere, but also in his work. No living playwright delivers all the possibilities of 'play' in the way Stoppard consistently does. He is the natural playwright in conversation too, always looking for the other man's point of view, turning everything on its head.
When I had first discussed the idea of talking about human rights with him, in a phone call, he suggested he was better at chatting than being interviewed, 'so would four hours be long enough?' I imagined it might.
It is, in the event, a typical improvised performance, only slightly shorter than advertised. He begins with attempts at definitions and then immediately offers caveats. 'The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it one does not want to worry too much about semantics. It's like that Hemingway story about two boxers. The one says of the other: "Jack is a very intelligent fighter; you are aware when you are fighting him that he is thinking all the time. But then I won the fight because all the time he was thinking I was hitting him." That's it: People are being hit while we are talking, while we are thinking.' He then continues to talk, to think.
Partly because of his background Stoppard was always acutely aware that in taking on some of these issues, he is, first, a writer in a comfortable country. They could never mean as much to him as they did to those who faced them daily. He could always get on British Airways and fly home. If he has sometimes appeared to be laissez faire about British politics, conservative even, it is because his animus has been directed toward other places, to the situation of other writers. The year 1977 was a sharp point in his life and his thinking and it was all about people who lived where he had started out.
His fuel for getting involved with Czech writers and actors, and with his friend Vaclav Havel in particular, came from a deeply felt conviction that none of the freedoms is possible without freedom of human expression; Stoppard's plays had always been working definitions of that fact, in Prague, suddenly, he could see the drama unfolding in reality. That drama began with the publication by Czech dissidents of Charter 77, which was prompted by the arrest of the rock band the Plastic People of the Universe, and involved a charge sheet delivered to the government documenting its failure to adhere to the human-rights covenants it had signed.
Stoppard spent a lot of the Seventies standing outside embassies with placards and writing letters, but going to see Havel for the first time was a watershed. He had learned about Havel's work from Ken Tynan in the mid-Sixties. 'I don't remember it as something that was all about human rights as a foreground fact,' he recalls. 'He was a playwright, he was banned, he was under house arrest. I had, earlier in 1977, also been to Moscow with a guy from Amnesty to talk about Russian Jews seeking exit visas and held in lunatic asylums. And after that I wrote two plays, one was about the Russian dissident situation, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, with André Previn. And I wrote a play about the situation in Czechoslovakia, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth.'
Stoppard, with his inbuilt Czech sense of the absurd, and his inspired understanding of Shakespeare, shared a sense of how theatre - being made fun of - might be the thing an authoritarian regime was most afraid of. Alongside these absurdist dramas, with brilliant pieces of reporting in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere, and the translation of Havel's plays, Stoppard became a standard bearer in the West for the Charter 77 movement that began to undermine the Communist regime in Prague, and across central Europe, and ultimately ended in the Velvet Revolution and the installation of Havel as President.
He is at pains to point out, however, that in all of this real-life drama the abstract notion of human rights was secondary in a way. 'One didn't need a public phrase to tell one that certain kinds of behaviour towards Czech or Russian citizens was morally wrong. For me human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.' Particularly, you might say, a child who had Stoppard's childhood.
Stoppard is above all interested in following arguments, but he never rests at conclusions. Talk of human rights takes him towards more fundamental beliefs about the nature of what it means to be human. The logician in him wants to see human rights either as being necessarily God-given, absolutes, or alternatively simply man-made, civil rules. They cannot be both and he flits between these two possibilities. Despite everything he reads in Amnesty reports, or just 'in the fucking Guardian every morning', he clings to a sense of innate human goodness.
'A friend,' he says, 'a writer, once suggested one of those phrases I had tried to formulate for myself all of my life. It is that our human survival depends on "a contest of generosity". You know yourself that this instinct is undoubtedly true on the microcosmic scale of the family. Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.' Being Stoppard, he is alive to the fact that the language itself wants to make this point: 'kind' comes from 'kin'; kindness insists at root that you behave to others as you would to your family.
We talk a little about the possibilities of kindness, about whether they can be applied as a universal philosophy. The Declaration of Human Rights grew out of the worst abuse of them in history, but, to take current events, should we believe human rights can be imposed by force?
'Well,' he says, 'you read the accounts of people being tortured in Guantánamo Bay. It is quite a hard thing to say without appearing to reach for Gandhi's dhoti, but I am convinced that if we, the great western liberal axis, simply refused to torture under any circumstances - even when we knew it might produce some information that would save thousands of lives - and by doing so we declared ourselves to be certain kinds of people, I am absolutely convinced that we would be making real headway in the war against terror.'
I wonder if he feels that the right of free expression should extend in all cases to the right to offend? Where would he have stood on the publication of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet, for example?
He pauses. 'If I had been a national newspaper editor no doubt I would have been scared to publish them, too. The ideal response would have been for the cartoons to have been republished in every newspaper in the western world along with reasoned rejoinders to why they should not be published. But when push comes to shove, I couldn't possibly castigate someone for not putting his staff in danger, or his family for that matter.'
But don't human rights have to go beyond cultural difference in every case?
He agrees. 'But that question is a leftover from an arena that no longer exists. The common ground of reason, that words have an integrity and they don't kill, has been replaced by a more surreal arena. When you think of honour killings, or clitoridectomy, how do we begin to engage with that at all?'
One of the ways, perhaps, is through theatre, the example of Prague is perhaps the greatest expression of this. But does he believe dictatorships are always bound to fall, without foreign intervention?
'One's gut feeling is yes. Let's say, given its history and geography, Czechosolvakia's history would always have evolved in some way. As it turned out it was like a fairytale. We never contemplated charging in to free the poor Poles and Estonians from their absence of free expression, because however dimly we had a sense that worse would follow...'
Stoppard has lived long enough to know that fairytale endings seldom last. In his recent dramatisation of the home-made cultural forces that caused Czech communism to crumble, Rock'n'Roll - in part a homage to the Plastic People of the Universe - he ended in 1990, when everything was still to play for. He had, he says, originally planned it to end up in 1997 with a scene that showed how the freedom that everybody had dreamed about, the western way of life, wasn't entirely good news. But then his romanticism took over. He says he is happy to be thought of as a romantic, as sentimental even. That admission reminds me of the poignant theme in Jumpers in which Dotty, the former nightclub singer, goes mad with the thought that with man having landed on the moon all the mystery has gone from the universe. It always felt to me that that was Stoppard talking directly. Was it?
He smiles. 'I think I have got over it. But at the time it seemed an immense change. It was as though up to that point the moon and the stars existed as an adornment for us. So it was a pretty sharp reminder of our true status alone in the universe...'
As we have been talking he has spoken a little about human rights, or the basis of what being human is, as something that goes beyond the material. Does he have that faith? He pauses again. 'There is a level at which one can only give voice to some form of unreasoned conviction - and mine in that regard is that unless there is, for want of a better term, a spiritual universe, I don't see what is so important about anything including human rights. What I really think is that everybody who believes in human rights is unspokenly, possibly unconsciously, accepting some form of immaterial reality. I don't see the value in endurance or survival if we are no more than the sum of our molecules.'
If he takes the implications of that phrase of Hamlet's, 'What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties... and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?' which side does he come down on?
'I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology, it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon. About 40 years ago I said I just didn't find it credible that some green slime grew up to write Shakespeare's sonnets. And I don't,' he suggests, taking the longest drag on his cigarette and stubbing it out, 'find that idea any more plausible today.'
Tom Stoppard's version of Chekhov's Ivanov is reviewed on page 19
The life of Stoppard
1937 Tomás Straussler is born on 3 July in Zlin, Czechoslovakia.
1949 Having fled to Singapore in 1939 to escape the Nazis, Japanese invasion compels his family to move to India and then England.
1954 Leaves school at 17 to work as a journalist in Bristol. Begins career as a playwright six years later.
1977 Visits Soviet Union and other eastern European countries with an Amnesty representative. Befriends the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel, who later becomes the first President of the Czech Republic.
1977 Completes Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, written at the request of pianist and composer André Previn.
1979 His play, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, implicitly, attacks eastern Europe's old, oppressive regimes.
1983 The Tom Stoppard Prize is created to honour writers of Czech origin.
1997 Receives a knighthood.
Hermione Hoby
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