Mark Fiddes

The way I met Tom Stoppard was unforgettable – over twenty years ago: a producer wanted to make a movie of one of my earlier books, Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar and he said he wanted me to meet the script writer. I was already wildly overexcited because the producer was Mick Jagger but when I arrived at dinner, imagine my almost dizzy bedazzlement when I found out the screenwriter was… none other than Tom -who himself looked like a rockstar, handsome with rocknroll hair that he never lost and who approached the Stalin idea with what I gradually learned was his usual manner which was both brilliant urbane worldweary and erudite but also self deprecating and playful, incredibly warm and generous – all delivered in a beautiful velvety voice with that Mitteleuropean accent. Those slightly rolling-rrr always reminded you that behind his cricket-loving English glamour was a cerebral Bohemian intellect in exile that treasured the English language and a very unEnglish realm of lightly-deployed ideas in a way no English writer ever would. That was part of his genius. Of course we immediately plunged into his special land of Travesties discussing the Stoppardian vision of Stalin in Vienna with Hitler, Freud and Trotsky. Needless to say, that film never happened but imagine Stalin written by Stoppard. From then on we sometimes met - once on a long trip between Delhi and Galle in Sri Lanka when faced with chaotic airports and endless traffic he was astonishingly modest travelling with a tiny leather satchel and just enjoying talking about books & freedom that he defined without fashionable ideology; the last time I saw him he was discussing Belarus’s dictatorship - and especially when he married the great Sabrina Guinness to whom I send love and condolences. Sometimes his philosophies appeared in his plays: “Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it” and yet: “We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.” We have lost our greatest playwright but the plays are very much immortal.