Tom Stoppard

Speech delivered by Tom Stoppard on the occasion of receiving an honorary doctorate

Let me begin by thanking you for the great honour I am bestowed with today and for the friendship and hospitality you have shown me. I am very moved to be standing here sixty-eight years after me and my older brother Peter, who is here in the audience, had to leave Moravia – I was less than two years old and Peter was almost four.
When children grow up and have children of their own (not to mention grandchildren, of which I have seven), sooner or later there will come a time when one and the same thought returns to life: “What a pity my father and mother can no longer see me!” And this is one of such situations, because my father Evžen Straussler graduated from a university in Brno: seventy-five years ago he studied at the Medical Faculty of Masaryk University. That is why I am so pleasured to receive this honour from another equally excellent university in this city, from the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts, which I heard has a great partnership with Masaryk University. This closes the circle between a young medical graduate and an honoured playwright. And it’s why I’d like to say something about my father first and foremost.
I grew up far from here, but I knew that I came from Moravia and that it was the homeland of both my parents. My father was born in 1908 in Děčín-Podmokly and then lived with his parents in Francouzská Street in Brno. His sister Edita was a year younger. My mother, Marta Becková, the youngest of six children, was born in 1911 in Rosice. Her father was a teacher. He last worked in Zlín, which is where my mother met Evžen, then a student of medicine who worked at Baťa’s hospital during the summer. After graduation, he became one of the doctors there. It was around that time my parents got engaged. Their life together began in 1934. The next five years were beautiful, my mother told me forty years thereafter. But the war changed everything. Baťa’s company relocated its Jewish doctors overseas. Our family left for Singapore, where we were caught by Japan joining the war. The wives and children of the “Baťa family” were evacuated from Singapore. Evžen was aboard the last ship to leave Singapore, and he was among those killed when she was bombed at sea. We did not find out until much later when we were in India.
After many more years – my brother Peter and I already living in England – I asked my mother to write down everything she could remember from her years in Zlín. She wrote a paragraph about Evžen. I would like to read that paragraph now. “Your father may not have been conventionally handsome, he was very intelligent and very charming (I had to chase off the nurses all the time!), he had a first-class mind, but he was very modest. A true character in every way. Everyone at the hospital liked him – colleagues and patients alike. I don’t want to overdo it with the praise, but that’s how I remember him, and when I die, there will be no one to testify about him as a man.”
My mother died when she was eighty-five, and now I am being honoured in the city that sent my father into the world as a young doctor, so you probably understand why I thought it was appropriate to remember him and try to say something about him that could last inside the walls of Brno a little longer, as a memory of a memory perhaps.
But now it is time to admit that I am not here as a doctor’s son, but as a playwright, and I am certainly expected to have something to say about theatre, about a writer’s role in society and beyond. In other words, I should live up to the situation and say something that would be worthy of this environment, worthy of an institution that seeks to improve civilization through culture. In moment like these, I tend to draw a blank. I am always embarrassed when artists start praising art. I feel deep down that us artists are a very lucky bunch and that we should rather remain silent when society says to us similar words to those I put in the mouth of a character from one of my plays:
“What is an artist? Nine hundred out of every thousand are working on it, ninety are doing well, nine are doing rather well, and that one bastard who is lucky, that is the artist.”
But it would not be fair to leave the last word to this character. Said luck is not necessarily about that person being an artist. It is about that he is allowed to make a living by doing what he loves. Some are lucky to be a writer, others to be a doctor, a teacher, a scientist. My brother Peter, he chose accounting as his profession. It was something he was good at, and that is why he also succeeded in such an essential task as finding the harmony between life and work. My eldest son left physics behind to become a country postman. He is very happy and that is why his life is a success. We are not all so lucky, but the young men and young women in this great chamber have a good chance of reaching the vital balance between love and living, and I congratulate them on that, because they are using all their strength to have that luck.
However, even though I have just tried to deny it, music and drama are not exactly the same as medicine or accounting or the post office. Art has a longer history in the development of not only society but human values. There is something mysterious about art. It is the difference between technology and inspiration. Technically, I assume, it is possible to teach how to compose music. But not only musicians would say that such teaching lacks something unteachable, that mysterious element that determines precisely the qualities of music that speak to us. We have an aesthetic instinct that is older than the drawings on the walls of prehistoric caves, older than the figures engraved in the clay of prehistoric pots. A book I am reading deals with physics, and most of the technical stuff is beyond my comprehension, but we all understand that physicist who says about his theory in that book: “It is so beautiful it must be true.” In other words, there is virtue in beauty. Virtue as a word was intelligible thousands of years ago in the cradle of Western civilization, where virtue and truth intertwined in an unwritten equation deeper than physics.
When I say that music, drama and art in general have their roots in the very beginnings of all things human, I do not want to give the slightest impression that art is incompatible with our physical, technical, everyday life. I mean the exact opposite. I think life is almost unimaginable without art. I am not talking about works of art as such; these are just signs of something necessarily human. When I meet my audience, I am often asked the following question about the relationship between art and society: “Could you name a play or a book or a song or a picture that truly changed something?” It is a strange approach – talking about art piece by piece. For example, no one would do that with sports; one would not say “Name a sporting event that truly changed a situation” as if this or that event could be a justification for the sport. I could probably mention a work of art that has changed something, but such a question misses the point of art. We must imagine a society from which every manifestation of artistic instinct has been removed by some magic. And then consider the outcome of that magic spell. Then the meaning of art becomes clear. It is everywhere and that is its true meaning. Virtue in its concrete and plastic form does not persist only in a statue, it persists in tables and chairs. There is a virtue in a good chair, because the one who did it put his virtue into his work. There is a virtue in a good play, because the one who created it put virtue into his work.
Virtue, as you might see, is a word I love. It was born somewhere very deep within. I like it, because it combines technology with aesthetics, but that is not the main reason. Virtue has no meaning without the idea of morality, and that is the essential point. Virtue combines aesthetics with ethics.
It’s not just a wordplay. The combination of aesthetics with morality has a strong tradition and history in my adoptive homeland. It is not a very old history and it was most clearly formulated at the end of the 19th century by people like John Ruskin and William Morris. Some decades later, a famous architect of a very modern sentiment defined the house as a machine for living in. In my opinion, people like Ruskin and Morris were wiser than Le Corbusier. The English arts and crafts movement believed that the crafts we wield were the beginning of wisdom, that nothing that was moral was not good, and that a good house was a work of art created for living.
I have deliberately steered us away from topic of theatre as such. I hope I did not disappoint you when I did not utter a credo a playwright’s manifesto, by not telling you about my experience. I must admit that as a playwright, I have no programme. I think theatre is basically a pleasure. Theatre can also be something else, but I do not believe it has to. Some (not all) of my plays intend to do more than please, but this is purely between me and them: I write them because they stimulate me, not because I want to stimulate the audience. Alas, allow me to share at least one personal experience. Some of you may become authors. Some of you may already be authors. Either way, it is quite likely that you knew that years ago. And if you are anything like I was your age, you may be looking with sacred horror at those who publish books and perform plays. The possibility of achieving something like this seemed almost like a utopia to me in my youth. In fact, I hope you are not much like me, because I can see it in my memory that I was a bit too amazed. The idea that my play would be performed by real actors who made a living working in a real theatre seemed to me like a dream that would only come true for people who lead a completely different life, as life somewhere I have never been. Then – by some miracle, it seemed to me – they staged my play in a famous London theatre, which I had looked up to until then as a humble pilgrim.
I remember all too well the moment when, as a spectator watching my own play, I realised something that I did not expect and it disappointed me a bit. Until that very moment, I thought that experiencing the staging of my play in this theatre is something that only happens in the enviable society of living and dead authors, who are undoubtedly the most extraordinary kind of exceptional people. But as I understood then and there, it turned out that something like this also happens to people like me after all. In other words, to people like you.
My mother was still alive at the time, and she was also alive when the university in the city where I spent the first few years of my working life awarded me with my first honorary doctorate. She was very proud of that. She and my father would be very proud today as well. I think about them a lot. A few years ago, I met an old lady who lived in Zlín as a child. When she was five, she cut herself badly in the hand, and Dr. Straussler apparently sutured her wound. She told me that he was the nicest doctor, the one the children asked for when they got measles or other illnesses of the childhood. The old lady reached out and showed me the scar. I somehow return to that small trace of my father’s short life today. If my father were proud of me, I am no less proud of the young doctor the children asked for when they fell ill.
Translated by Antonín Přidal

Laudatio delivered by prof. PhDr. Josef Kovalčuk

Five praises for Tom Stoppard

Magnificence, Spectabiles, Honorabiles,
Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Guests!
When I started writing this laudatio to be delivered on the occasion of the award of an honorary doctorate by the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts to the world-famous English playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, I simply had to mention his Moravian origin and Central European roots at the very outset. However, it turned out that the author himself will talk about these things much more intimately and with personal interest.
Thus, I can focus mainly on his dramatic work, which has been performed on many of the world’s leading stages, in the London’s National Theatre, on the stages of the Broadway, in Comédie-Française and the Prague’s National Theatre. After all, this body of work is also the main reason why our school has decided to award the title Doctor Honoris Causa to Tom Stoppard.
Laudatio is to be a praise, a panegyric, a praising testament and an expression of thanks and recognition. So I am expected to sing praises. When conceiving the laudatio, I therefore decided that I would sing five praises for the work of Tom Stoppard.
So here they are:

Praise one: on the linguistic, stylistic and stylish sophistication of Stoppard’s work
We admire how Tom Stoppard’s plays are stylistically and stylishly polished as a brilliant diamond. In several ways, the author successfully continues the tradition of the island conversation play, which leads all the way from Richard Brinsley Sheridan to Oscar Wilde, but at the same time he develops and enriches it with the means and procedures of modern theatre. The language of his plays is playful and extraordinarily cultured, full of charm, funny pranks and one-liners. However, even more importantly, Stoppard’s relationship with and care for language seems to restore the theatre’s sense for capacity of and commitment to the word and faith in its validity. Words can be “innocent, neutral, accurate, denoting this or that, and so if you take care of them, you can use them to build bridges over misunderstandings and chaos. When you have the right words in the right order, you can move the world…”, says one of the characters in the play the Real Thing, undoubtedly expressing Stoppard’s conviction here. Such confidence in the binding nature and possibility of active action of the right word or phrase is not unlike the belief in the validity of the word expressed in the essay A Word about the Word by another playwright, another honorary doctor of our school, Václav Havel.

Praise two: on the diversity and layered nature of Stoppard’s work, through which the author speaks to the urgent questions of our present
Stoppard’s dramatic work is diverse in its topics, themes, subjects and genres. In addition to plays, it also contains film scripts, such as Shakespeare in Love, Empire of the Sun, Enigma, and the just about to be finished Bourne Ultimatum. It also includes a long list of television and radio plays, which are unfortunately practically unknown in our country and which should be translated and produced not only because the author uses them to deal with the same issues that come to the fore in his plays. Similar diversity is to be find in terms of genre and style. Stoppard is not afraid to delve into genres that are not usually thought of as high literature, such as detective stories, thrillers, travesties, or a new libretto to an operetta, but he always knows how to elevate them to become a more demanding piece with real impact. If we were to agree that most of Stoppard’s plays can categorised as comedy, we must say that they are thought-intensive, deep and multi-layered comedies, although their author fully respects the “mere” entertaining function of theatre.
Tom Stoppard is quite exceptional in that the writing of his plays is preceded by an extraordinarily thorough study of issues at hand, as well as of its time and environment. Thematically and topically, he draws from a number of different areas, he always knows how to surprise the audience again and again, and he cannot be restricted or locked into a box. He also does not shy away from political and contemporary topics. He of relies on scientific knowledge and theories, fascinated by mathematics, as well as quantum physics, population biology, political and literary history or landscape architecture. For the problem of human identity, for example, he finds “a metaphor in quantum theory, in the dual nature of light existing as a wave and a particle at the same time.”
One of the author’s first plays, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (1966), was accepted with extraordinary praise. The characters of Hamlet’s classmates, which King Claudius tries to abuse for his purposes, Stoppard turned into the central heroes of his play, toyed with their destinies in a special way, and illuminated their story from a different angle. After the success on the Edinburgh Theatre Festival in 1966, the play was staged the following year at the National Theatre in London, on Broadway in New York and as soon as in 1969 – which is remarkable – also in the Czechoslovakia at the Theatre in Martin under the direction of the leading Slovak director Miloš Pietor. The Czech premiere followed in 1971 at the F. X. Šalda Theatre. However, this exhausted the number of Czech premieres until 1989, with one notable exception, when playwright Miloslav Klíma managed to stage the premiere of the play Enter a Free Man in 1978 in Cheb, when Stoppard was still a banned author in Czechoslovakia. Other important Stoppard’s plays, such as The Real Inspector Hound, Travesties or The Real Thing had to wait for their Czech premieres until after November 1989. Others, such as Jumpers, Night and Day, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love or The Coast of Utopia, are still waiting to be staged in Czech theatres.

Praise three: Arcadia
Arcadia (1993) is another remarkable dramatic text of Tom Stoppard, perhaps even his masterpiece. In dramatic literature, we can hardly find a play in which its author would introduce so many diverse themes and circles of thought. One of the stimuli for writing the play, as the author himself says, was the book by James Gleich, Chaos: Making a New Science; another stimulus was Quennell’s monograph on Lord Byron. The theory of chaos provided Stoppard with “an interesting and supportive metaphor for human behaviour. Chaos theory shows a world in which there is chaos in order, but also order in chaos.”
The story of the play takes us to England at the brink of the 19th century, a moment of the transformation of two cultural styles – classicist and romantic. The second level of the play takes place in the present, bringing with it noetic issues and asking questions about our ability to get discover both nature and history. The drama teaches us about integration algorithms, fractals, nonlinear dynamics, landscape architecture and population biology of black grouse. In addition, we are witnessing the deepening relationship of the mathematically gifted Thomasina with her teacher Septimus, a friend of the poet Lord Byron. We also follow various ways of learning about historical facts by scientist Bernard Nightingale and writer Hannah Jarvis. It could have been too much for one play if it were not all connected by Stoppard’s extraordinary talent to organically connect the world of thought with the characters, creating situations that can bear the connection. That is why Arcadia is undoubtedly a play deserving of our attention and praise. Therefore, it was already staged thrice in Czech theatres: in the Komedie Theatre in Prague, in the Estates Theatre and in the Brno City Theatre.

Praise four: Rock’n’Roll
Stoppard’s latest play, Rock’n’Roll, was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2006. Its Czech premiere took place this February at the National Theatre in Prague. Both premieres have become important events in the world of music and arts.

Rock’n‘Roll is one of Stoppard’s plays that draw on social and political themes and topics. It makes it all the more interesting for us that one of the storylines takes its theme from the Czech environment. Specifically, these are events connected with the ban and persecution of members of The Plastic People of the Universe, in defence of which and their right to artistic expression representatives of Czech dissent spoke out. Subsequently, this attitude led to the creation of Charter 77. Another line of the play is the story of an English professor – a Marxist, who has long been unable to confront his ideas with reality. The third line contrasts with the translation of the poetry of the ancient poet Sapfó, to which the professor’s wife is deeply devoted. These lines are connected by the character of Jan, in whose story we can find both certain autobiographical moments, as well as responses to the refinement of opinion from the environment of Czech dissent. As is characteristic of Stoppard, the birth of the play was preceded by an extraordinarily thorough study of the relevant background, as evidenced by the author’s Preface to Rock’n’Roll, entitled Havel, Kundera, Vaculík, Jirous, Plastic People… Drama, which was written about the main character’s relationship to one musical style – rock’n’roll, and it also became an important theatrical reflection of the normalisation conditions in Czechoslovakia.

Praise five, the final one: support for the Czech dissent and independent production
Rock’n‘Roll is not the only Stoppard play that draws in its themes from the Czech environment, specifically from the environment of Czech dissent. The first was the television play Professional Foul, the other was Cahoot’s Macbeth, which was based on the Vlasta Chramostová residential theatre. In Professional Foul, we meet for the first time the archetype of the English professor from Rock’n‘Roll, who visits Prague in 1977 for a scientific congress as well as a football match. In that year, Tom Stoppard visited Prague and Bohemia himself. He met with Václav Havel, a playwright he had read and admired in the 1960s, under relatively dramatic circumstances. Based on Stoppard’s testimony, it was the Havel’s plays that aroused his increased interest in the country of his birthplace: “Sometime in 1967 I came upon Václav Havel’s plays… when I read the Garden Party and later the Memorandum, I knew that Havel as a playwright was my man… If you want to know, I felt that in terms of writing, he was a bit like me. I just liked his writing, and from this sympathy for Havel the author was born my interest in Havel the Czech. So it wasn’t a case of me being interested in Havel because he was Czech, it was a case of me getting interested in my original homeland because I liked Havel’s plays.”
It should be noted that Stoppard not only remained interested in the Czech dissent, but also consistently supported it, not only by signing numerous petitions, but also financially by subsidising the awarding of supporting independent creators who published under the samizdat.
Creative destinies sometimes intertwine wonderfully with human destinies, so that in the end they close a certain circle. Tom Stoppard’s life journey began in 1937 in Zlín. After many intricate and complicated plots and twist of his life and after numerous social changes, we have the opportunity to meet the author and his work again. We are not familiar with the work of Tom Stoppard in its entirety, so our task remains to translate and stage a number of his plays. A small payment towards this debt could perhaps be the staging of the play The Real Inspector Hound, the premiere of which is being prepared by students of the Faculty of Theatre at Studio Marta for this year.
It is an extraordinary honour for us to be able to welcome Sir Tom Stoppard in the place of his roots, almost seventy years after this genius was born in this Moravian town, and we welcome him as a world-famous playwright, to award him an honorary doctorate from our academy.

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