No one seems to have informed Tom Stoppard that he is shortly to turn 80, and could by rights be slowing down. Last autumn he delivered the script of a film adaptation of A Christmas Carol for director Bennett Miller, then helped rehearse a revival of his comedy Travesties at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, directed by Patrick Marber. After that, he decamped to the US to shepherd his most recent work, The Hard Problem, on stage in San Francisco. This month, just as Travesties transfers to the West End, a starry 50th-anniversary production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opens at the Old Vic, with the playwright, as ever, paying obsessive attention.
It’s a wonder he gets any time to write, I say. He purses his lips. “The proportion of time in which I spend what I think of as the writer’s life is shrinking, and the proportion I spend doing everything else is increasing.” In the mildest of tones, he adds: “It makes me quite grumpy.”
We meet during rehearsals for Rosencrantz – a process he finds as unsettling as it is fascinating, as he reacquaints himself with a script he wrote more than half a century ago.
Back then, Stoppard was a former journalist and part-time critic with just one novel and a few short TV and radio dramas to his name. I wonder whether he still recognises himself. He sits, head cocked, assessing the question. “It certainly feels like the self I used to be. I remember him well. Some of the writing is a little dandy-esque, as he was. At that time, I attached more importance to the joys of receiving the right words in the right order, probably too little importance to the motor that kept the wheels turning.”
He adds that with the current revival he hasn’t been able to resist giving the motor a little more oomph, as he did with Travesties – a few small changes, enough to make it feel fresh. “I don’t see the point of being present at rehearsals without being willing to improve matters. Years have passed, your idea of what’s humorous changes, your taste changes. I think actors also rather like the idea that you’re doing small things that have not been done before, just for them.”
The story of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s debut at the Edinburgh fringe in 1966 has become so mythologised that it’s a relief to find it is indeed true. The company was amateur; by the time the 29-year-old Stoppard got into rehearsals, the director and female lead had walked out. On opening night, the audience was in the low double digits, and the Scottish press were befuddled: “What’s it all about, Tom?” ran one headline. Then, on the train back to London, Stoppard opened the Observer to discover a review by Ronald Bryden praising the production to the skies. By the time the playwright had returned home, a telegram from critic Kenneth Tynan – who had recently joined the National as Laurence Olivier’s first literary manager – was waiting. The next spring, Rosencrantz was at the Old Vic, then the NT’s base, and the Sunday Times was declaring it the “most important event” since the arrival of Pinter. Broadway soon beckoned.
What is frequently overlooked is that the idea for the play wasn’t Stoppard’s. It belonged to his then-agent Kenneth Ewing, who observed his young client’s obsession with Hamlet and suggested the idea of retelling the action from the wings, with the Prince’s duplicitous chums haplessly awaiting instructions and attempting, like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon before them, to fill the time.
Fresh in Stoppard’s mind was Peter O’Toole’s starring performance in Hamlet in 1963, the first play to be produced by the NT. But finding a script that was more than a one-line gag was a convoluted process. The first incarnation was a one-act sketch, now lost (“not intentionally, but I’m quite thankful, really”). Then came a weightier three-act version that languished unproduced at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who couldn’t scrape together the money. Though its diamond-sharp dialogue and metaphysical barrel rolls now appear effortless – prefiguring the dazzling intellectual displays of Jumpers (1972) and Travesties (1974) – they were anything but, the playwright recalls: “I was in the same situation they were in, just trying to keep something going.”
What’s most surprising about re‑encountering Rosencrantz is how moving it is, as the protagonists confront the dismal fact that they are mere bit players in someone else’s story. The script glitters with the witty metatheatrical conceits that Stoppard subsequently made his own: “We’re actors,” one of the Players cries, “we’re the opposite of people!”. But we never forget that the one inevitability awaiting these two men, according to the dictates of fate and Shakespearean tragedy, is death. As Guildenstern grimly puts it: “no one gets up after death – there is no applause … only silence and some secondhand clothes”. It is a sermon aimed as much at us in the auditorium as at the Prince of Denmark.
I wonder if this refutes a charge sometimes laid against Stoppard, that his plays – particularly the earliest ones – contain too much brain, too little heart. “Perhaps. It’s not an unintelligible idea to me that at a certain point my plays warmed up and became less defensive, less self-referential.” He shrugs. “It wasn’t a question I bothered myself with – am I being too cold, too warm, not warm enough, whatever. I just wrote the way that interested me.”
Travesties, too, contains more sadness than is sometimes allowed, particularly in Marber’s revival. It, too, experiments with motifs of chance – in this case the coincidence that James Joyce, Lenin and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara were all living in Zurich in 1917, and that Joyce directed an amateur production of The Importance of Being Earnest while there. From these unlikely factual materials, Stoppard spins an elaborate series of fantasies, filtered through the memories – unreliable and increasingly unhinged – of a diplomat who participated in the production. Just as Rosencrantz explores the existential terror of being a small role in Hamlet, so Travesties suggests that what lies beneath Wilde’s kaleidoscopic riff on mistaken identity lies the terror of forgetting who we really are.
Stoppard insists he has no favourites among his oeuvre, but it is revealing, perhaps, that the work he most relished tackling was 1997’s The Invention of Love. Within an apparently desiccated subject – the irreproachably English life and frustrated loves of the scholar-poet AE Housman – Stoppard found a seam of raw, turbulent emotion, moving from Sophocles’s definition of love as like “a piece of ice held fast in the fist” to Housman’s own words to his beloved male friend: “I would have died for you but I never had the luck!” It is far from accidental that Wilde makes an appearance here, too.
“I think I liked writing that play more than any other, really,” Stoppard reflects. “I felt I understood Housman, which is possibly a presumption, but I knew the man.”
The plays are a faithful expression of his own makeup, he says; and that makeup is more emotionally volatile than he is sometimes given credit for. “I actually would much rather write a play that makes people cry; whether with horror or happiness is the secondary issue.”
He stops, frustrated that this answer isn’t polished enough, and switches tack. “I’m willing to say that essentially I write plays of ideas, and I hope there’s enough human tissue in them to make them more than that. I don’t know whether I’ve always succeeded in that, but that’s the hope.”
The question surfaced again with 2015’s The Hard Problem, his first theatre script for nine years and still his most recent. Focusing on the nature of consciousness (the “hard problem” of the title), the plotline harked back to Jumpers, with a dash of Dawkins: a young psychology researcher struggles to reconcile her private faith with the chilly rationalism of colleagues in the brain institute where she works. Yet there was a sense that the finished work didn’t altogether add up. Michael Billington thought it occasionally suffered “information overload”, while the Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish dubbed it a “major disappointment”.
Did the reviews get to him? “Not the way they would have done years ago, not at all. I got up in the morning, read them, thought, ‘Oh, that’s a shame’. But then other reviews began coming and some of them were fine. I ended up thinking, ‘Well, we didn’t quite bring that off, I’d better think about that.’”
Some suggested that the real, behind-the-scenes problem was he’d been suffering from writer’s block. Was that how it felt? He looks briefly irked. Not at all: part of the reason The Hard Problem took so long was that he’d simultaneously been tackling a multi-part BBC/HBO adaptation of Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford. Does he have any regrets about devoting time to his TV and movie work? “None,” he replies briskly. “Parade’s End gave me a lot of pleasure. What can you say: the cast was wonderful and 2 million people probably watched it – cheerio, I was glad I did that. But, yes, it was the main reason I didn’t write a play three years earlier.”
He has often spoken of his struggles with pinning down subject matter, quite apart from the exhaustive research he feels compelled to do (he spent three years on The Invention of Love before he wrote a word). When I ask if it’s got any easier, he chuckles ruefully. “No, but of course the whole conversation is self-serving and misleading because I create my own conditions; no one is forcing me to spend half my morning reading the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books and the Spectator and the New Statesman and Prospect. It’s a wonder I’ve written anything for years.”
But is he on the lookout for material? “Oh yes. I like to think that something is marinating. I read out of a combination of normal interest and the hope that there will be a play in there, or the half-notion of a play.”
The question, of course, is what. There were rumours of a project about journalism, a sort of post-Leveson inquiry follow-up to his 1978 play Night and Day. I wonder, too, what he might make of Brexit. He has considered both subjects, he replies; both might be possible – perhaps neither. He sighs. “The big stories at the moment are so big and affect so many people that it’s hard to think which artform could encompass them. Take Brexit: there are so many things begging to be thought about and written about, and I’m not even sure that’s a healthy way to approach the whole matter. If I were a maker of TV documentaries or long-form journalism, maybe I’d be better placed. I feel a bit puny, really.”
I wonder what he really feels about Brexit, as someone born in Czechoslovakia who spent his first years in Singapore and India before arriving in Britain as a child. Slightly to my surprise, he hedges his bets. “I have a temperamental attitude which is to be a Remainer, but I don’t pretend to have the knowledge of economics and statistics and whatever is going on in learned journals. I don’t feel equipped to make a Whitehall judgment.” He is less interested by the overall question of whether it’ll be good or bad for British interests than what it means for our character as a nation. “I feel temperamentally that fraternity and sorority is good for us.”
Politics interests him as a subject, he adds, but he doesn’t always know where to place himself in terms of left and right. “I feel a bit sheepish about it, but I’m not politically engaged enough to have a political position.”
In the meantime there is yet another deadline: that 80th birthday in July. When I say he doesn’t look his age, he’s gratified. “For me to be 80 feels like some sort of contradiction of what I think I am. Apart from my knees, I’m OK. I’m not too 80.”
He’s still smoking? He grins. “Yes, but I’ve got nothing intelligent to say that justifies my position. I don’t have one. I just smoke.”
Worries about work rate aside – one suspects they have been there as long as he’s been working – Stoppard seems somehow at peace. In 2014 he married the heiress Sabrina Guinness, his third wife, and now lives in Dorset, far from the London theatre scrum – “at least when I’m there,” he laughs, “which hasn’t been much lately”.
He drifts back to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the play’s obsession with chance, certainties and uncertainties. A line has been haunting him recently, a stray remark by one of the Players that “life is a gamble, at terrible odds – if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it”.
It’s a smart observation, but flawed in one regard, he says: occasionally you do win. “I’m sitting in a room talking about rehearsing a play which was first on 50 years ago. Who would have taken a gamble on that?”
• Travesties is at the Apollo, London W1, 15 Februaryto 29 April. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is at the Old Vic, London SE1, 25 February to 29 April.
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