I have been a long-time fan of the plays of Tom Stoppard. As a schoolboy I took huge delight in the tragicomic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I laughed gleefully at the dazzling metatheatre of The Real Inspector Hound. A budding philosopher, I was bowled over when I saw the 1972 production of Jumpers with Michael Hordern and Diana Rigg. I found myself curiously disappointed, however, by Arcadia in 1993, despite the excellent actors (Rufus Sewell, Felicity Kendal, Bill Nighy). The play alternates between 19th-century and present-day scenes in an English country house, where scholars attempt to reconstruct the life of Thomasina, a precocious young mathematician who anticipated chaos theory and thermodynamics before dying young in a fire. The structure was elegant, and Thomasina herself was movingly written, her early death genuinely tragic. But I was beginning to feel uncomfortable, even somewhat manipulated, by the manufactured scenarios and intellectual pretensions that Stoppard introduced into the drama. Watching Arcadia I felt that the audience was being expected to think ‘look how clever we are – we obviously understand this difficult text or that complex idea, and how it relates to the emotion of the scene’.

Stoppard returned to form with the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love. His clever screenplay with its brilliantly funny lines, sympathetic characters and romantic storyline, made it a favourite film for me, as it remains for myriads of viewers. A decade earlier Stoppard had written the final screenplay for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, some scenes of which immediately strike one as uniquely Stoppardian in their humour. I felt, therefore, all the more dejected when the 2006 Rock ‘n Roll brought home to me that the more intimate one is with the subject-matter with which Stoppard deals, the less one is likely to be seduced or impressed by his scholarly references.

One of the main characters in Rock ‘n Roll is Eleanor, a Cambridge Classics professor who specialises in the poetry of the ancient love poet Sappho, and who is dying of cancer. Early on, the audience is treated to a tutorial discussion between Eleanor and a pupil, Lenka, about a line of Sappho’s erotic verse, Eleanor cites the resonant Greek word amâchanon, ‘unbiddable’, and subsequently they spend some time on Sappho’s famous fragmentary poem ‘He seems to me equal to the gods’ (Sappho’s fragment 31). That fragment was particularly well-known to me, since I had only recently worked on reconstructing the original Greek text; and the vigorously superficial interpretation of the poem, which represents the surviving lyrics of a love song (though no mention is made of that crucial aspect of ancient lyric verse) made me shake my head with embarrassment.

While the pseudo-scholarly discussions in Rock ‘n Roll seemed to me misguided, I tried to remind myself that the play was not meant to be a work of academic rigour or instruction. However, the character of Eleanor thereafter seemed so contrived in my eyes that I couldn’t bring myself to care about the outcome or see the play through to the end. I eventually sent Stoppard an offprint of my 2006 article on the Sappho poem (mentioning none of my reservations about his play) and was grateful to receive a warm and courteous letter in response. He was known for his love of the classics and his genuine humility, though he could also be a fierce rebutter of unfounded criticism (as demonstrated by his scornful dismissal of critic Daniel Mendelsohn in the the New York Review of Books in 2000).

Earlier this year, I was particularly excited when a new production of Stoppard’s 1997 play The Invention of Love came to the Hampstead Theatre, starring Simon Russell Beale as the great scholar and textual critic A.E. Housman. I had never seen the play, but as a lover of Housman’s poetry and an admirer of his extraordinary scholarship I had read and enjoyed the script, which, among other things, dwells on Housman’s unrequited love for his friend Moses Jackson. To my regret, in performance I experienced again many of the feelings that had beset me many years earlier when watching Arcadia. When I read them on the page, I could appreciate the quotations of Catullus and Virgil, and could happily go along with references to the exigencies of  textual criticism. But in performance I felt that the Latin quotations (often mispronounced with infuriatingly misplaced confidence – to make the second  syllable of vivamus mea Lesbia short ruins the metre), delivered to an audience largely unversed in classics, were little more than sophisticated window-dressing.

There is much abstruse detail in The Invention of Love, including quotations in both Latin and Greek and references to Oxford people and institutions (Jowett, the Newdigate Prize, etc.). While such references are easy enough – even enjoyably so – for someone steeped in Oxford and in classics to understand, they must strike the inexpert audience as little more than learned gobbledygook. I overheard a young viewer sitting behind me saying at the first interval, ‘I didn’t understand most of that’, and the friends with whom I attended the performance agreed that, though they generally enjoyed the play, much of it had gone over their heads. Stoppard was writing for another generation, a world in which classical allusions were the daily fare of the educated adult. Although the audience response was generally positive, it struck me that the datedness of Stoppard’s approach meant that his plays’ dramatic value was bound to be lost to future generations.

Stoppard was a master craftsman of the stage, capable of creating genuinely moving scenes and dialogue that crackles with wit. There is no doubt a place for work that makes audiences think about textual criticism or thermodynamics or Sapphic fragments, even if these remain only evocative names for things one might investigate in greater depth. But by making scholarship into a clever backdrop or emotional metaphor, Stoppard’s plays risked enlarging the gulf between specialist knowledge and general culture. The audience may leave the theatre flattered that they’ve been faced with difficult ideas, when all they have encountered are simulacra of such ideas; a knowing cleverness substituted for true understanding. For those who work in the scholarly fields Stoppard appropriated, watching his plays can – in some cases, at least – be a strangely disappointing experience. We admire the craftsmanship while recognising that what we know and love has been hollowed out for aesthetic purposes, its substance turned into a kind of brilliant, ornamental glitter.