Harold pinter

The playwright Peter Nichols created a character based on Tom Stoppard. Miles Whittier. On a car journey across London, I once asked Peter why he was so irked by Stoppard. Thelma, his wife, answered for him: ‘He uses all the oxygen.’ But Stoppard was miles wittier. Asked by a punter, after the New York first night of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, what his play was about, he replied: ‘It’s about to earn me a great deal of money.’ Think about it: the only person capable of preserving that bon mot was the playwright himself. He knew how funny he was. Later, he was more careful.

The London premiere of Leopoldstadt in 2020 made this decade the seventh in which a new Tom Stoppard play has been delivered unto the world, and since the playwright has suggested it may be his last, some words about his legacy seem to be in order. Stoppard is often regarded as the greatest English playwright of the later twentieth century. Harold Pinter is the other popular choice. Both men picked up where Pirandello, Beckett and the absurdists left off. Their respective approaches form two sides of the same post-existentialist coin. Stoppard made his name with the expanded footnote: plays in which a sidelight takes center stage, often bristling with comedy, like the metatheatrical Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) or The Real Inspector Hound (1968).