Le Journal

Découvrez Lou-Adriane Cassidy, la chanteuse québécoise qui conquiert le Canada avec ses albums primés, sa voix unique et ses récompenses prestigieuses comme le Prix Félix-Leclerc et les ADISQ 2025.

Why didn’t Tom Stoppard win the Nobel prize? Every autumn, when conversation turned to the question, he was my go-to pick. An unanswerable nomination. Each year, of course, with ritualistic inevitability the Swedish Academy would identify another post-colonial blank-verse poet or Icelandic memoirist never before translated beyond his own village dialect and thrust the prize towards them instead. Stoppard, though, was multiply disqualified from the Nobel. First, there were the scores of plays, film treatments and bon mots, all too obviously designed for the enjoyment of others. Popular without being populist, Stoppard’s career consisted in exercising an astonishing capacity for giving pleasure to millions of people. His plays were precision-made exhibitions of his own striking capacity for a kind of high-intellectual screwball: hard to devise, but not hard — not really, despite what people say — to appreciate. That that is not a glib trick, but an unusual gift, is suggested by how few writers show much inclination to follow his literary or commercial example. Part of Stoppard’s trademark effect was to flatter his audience in the presumption that they were in on the joke, however esoteric. That alone — Stoppard’s talent to amuse — would have registered as a big no-no to the Swedish Academy. It can’t have helped, either, when it came to judging his literary accomplishment, that Stoppard was so obviously at ease with his own talent and success, seeming to find it neither a burden nor a distraction. He was a global star, would commute if need be by Concorde, and each summer hosted legendary fête champêtres to which he would invite Harrison Ford, Alfred Brendel, Mick Jagger, the Duchess of Devonshire, and no more than 500 or so other close friends. “There is a god,” Stoppard once reflected, “and he looks after English playwrights.” Suggested readingThe hidden desire of Tennessee WilliamsBy David Mamet Perhaps the Swedish Academy, party to a widespread but pretentious prejudice, felt that true artists are not supposed to be so glamorous and palpably well-adjusted, nor so candidly attuned to the possibility of commercial reward. When asked by the press to explain what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, his first major theatrical hit, was “about”, Stoppard is said to have replied: “It’s about to make me very rich.” At the height of his fame he became the well-rewarded script “doctor” of Hollywood producers — not just for Shakespeare in Love, for which he asked, and received, a $1 million repair-job fee — but also blockbusters such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. That the last in that franchise is arguably the best is in no small part due to Stoppard’s expert doctoring. Not every job had so much room for remedy. While he was working on Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, he was less a script doctor than a battlefield surgeon. But even here, his trademark humour remained. Teased about whether Shakespeare would have written screenplays, Stoppard replied unembarrassedly. “No, he’d have rewritten them.” And then, to pile discredit upon discredit in the eyes of the Swedes, there was Stoppard’s first career as a journalist, and worse still the damaging fact that he seems to have enjoyed it. According to an early interview, young Stoppard conceived of himself, in the late Sixties, as having “no higher ambition than to make a gaudy mark in Fleet Street”. Reporting on a regional paper, he felt delighted by the decidedly parochial glamour of “flashing his press card at flower shows”. He was, briefly, the only motoring correspondent in the land unable to drive (“I used to review the upholstery”). And even then, too, there were early symptoms of the incipient dilettantish condition that critics would later claim to detect in his plays. Applying for a job at the Evening Standard, Stoppard found himself put on the spot by then-editor Charles Wintour who, perhaps doubtful of the true extent of Stoppard’s declared interest in current affairs,…

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