My first gig of 2026 is Feb 21st at the Spice of Life in Soho, London. If you like strange pop music, this is for you. Come say hi! Listen on YouTube
Sir Tom Stoppard died a few days ago. I wanted to write something because, frankly, I’m sad he’s gone.
His passing prompted me to think about why I found him such an inspiration. These words are the result.
But first, context.
My Tom Stoppard fandom is immoderate.
I don’t just think he compares favourably with Shakespeare, I’m happy to argue that case out loud, in public. (The most recent time I did was in a McDonalds, last weekend).
I first encountered him at school, when we read The Real Inspector Hound, a play about two pompous theatre critics.
They are themselves watching a play within a play - a murder mystery - to review it for their newspaper, only for them to get sucked into the murder mystery they’re reviewing. One ends up having his life rearranged by the experience; the other ends up… murdered.
The play gave off a sense of omnidirectional mischief. Towards the murder mystery genre. Towards us, the audience. And towards theatre critics. Which critic, after all, would dare give a bad review to a play which had got its satirical knife in first?
But above all, it was alive. It had energy.
A few years later I saw Jumpers, Stoppard’s play about gymnastics and philosophy. This was probably over twenty years ago. What happens to that tortoise is something I still think about.
From then on, with each new thing I read or saw from Stoppard, I wanted more.
Now, whenever I pass a secondhand bookshop with time to spare, I pop in to see if they have any second hand Stoppard scripts. (I look for the Shakespeares; I don’t want any but it’s the fastest way to find ‘S’).
I started collecting them partly because of their pleasure-to-weight ratio. They’re such compressed nuggets of entertainment. When I have one in my bag for the day, it feels like walking around with a bar of chocolate.
In the last few days, I’ve felt a mixture of sadness at his passing and quiet satisfaction at the confirmation of his immortality.
Craft 🏏
I’ve tried to get to the bottom of why I find Stoppard so inspiring.
Where to start? Here is someone devoted to making words sizzle. In rhythm and sound as much as meaning and depth. Who took the craft of playwriting seriously.
It’s there in the way he described his Hollywood script doctoring work as ‘overpaid;’ other people would have done more of it and described writing plays as ‘underpaid.’
This care over craft gives the lie to the idea of an artist as someone whose only job is to drink the world in, feel deeply, let passion and curiosity lead them to new pastures, marinade all this, then spill the results into their chosen medium, job done.
Sure, all of that matters.
But the Stoppard way, I think, is to see all that as the ingredients, not the meal. To take the results of all that seeing and feeling, then draft, graft, craft, until you have something even more delicious.
Welcome 🤗
Another thing I love about Stoppard is his inclusiveness.
Many of his plays are about subjects that are not particularly accessible or welcoming: war, art, and posterity (Travesties), espionage and quantum physics (Hapgood), classical music and freedom of speech (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour).
It’s often rich material, more often found in academic settings where the impulse to keep standards of intellectual enquiry high can curdle into mindless elitism. Where the jargon comes in and the barriers go up.
Tom Stoppard could probably have become an academic, but he preferred to be an intellectual flaneur, poking his nose deep into whatever idea was preoccupying him, at least for long enough to write a play about it.
But this is the thing: he didn’t just want to make what he found fun for him. He also wanted to make it fun for you.
And he put the tools of his trade – plot, character, twist, farce, fear, a tortoise if need be – at the service of welcoming you towards those ideas.
And this impulse – to take some of these subjects out of the libraries and the labs, put them on the stage, and add jokes – is a generous one.
He wasn’t always successful. But his best plays work like magic glasses: put them on and whatever he’s showing you is suddenly fascinating.
The ball pool ⚾︎
But in the end, the main reason Stoppard means so much to me is that discovering his work as a teenager showed me a new kind of relationship a person could have with ideas.
There are plenty of people who take ideas seriously enough to study them, believe in them, or devote their lives to them.
Stoppard was the first person I encountered who treated some of the most profound ideas in human history roughly like a child treats a ball pool: as something to dive into and splash around in, for no reason other than fun.
His career was built on the instinct that irreverence doesn’t diminish big ideas, it draws new people towards them.
And I think that’s one of the reasons I find him so inspiring.
A caster of brilliant colour over gloomy corners of the library, a choreographer of the heart and mind, an intellect at play; he introduced me to a new way to relate to the world and a new category of what a person could aspire to be.
Thank you, Tom Stoppard.
My next gig is Feb 21st at the Spice of Life in Soho, London.
It’s going to be … unexpectedly moreish.
Doors at 7, my set: 10.30.
6 Moor St, Soho, W1D 5NA.
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