‘I have very little curiosity about the how and why of it. I don’t analyse what I write, and I certainly don’t analyse myself.’ Playwright Tom Stoppard reveals a complex man who thrives on paradox
ON THE telephone playwright Tom Stoppard plays the quintessential English gentleman. His low orotund voice delights in long vowels and his rich roticity. His accent is the epitome of authentic King’s English; English as it was meant to be spoken. He goes to such lengths not to inconvenience me as we try to arrange a face-to-face meeting that the interview looks set to become an absurd dramaticule; the kind he might have written himself in his early years a playwright: a surrealist take on the Victorian comedy of manners, or even a farce.
In fact, he is so polite, so gracious, that his civility seems almost subversive: a way of avoiding our meeting perhaps. I spend the day in London in a state of mild anxiety, convinced that he is going to stand me up.
It is late in the afternoon when we finally meet, and he has just come from the funeral of writer John Mortimer, so I’m unsurprised that he seems less than pleased to meet me. However, as my recorder comes out, he seems to relax a little, charming me with a curiosity that I suspect might be more courtesy than genuine interest, especially when I realise that he is deflecting each question back to me without giving an answer. I begin to worry that I may end up with an interview with myself instead of Tom Stoppard. Yet it seems that he is just warming up and as an intense conversation begins to unfold, the logic behind this game of gentility is slowly revealed, providing a fascinating glimpse of a complex man who lives and thrives off paradox.
“I always wanted to be the sort of person who just doesn’t do this kind of [interview] thing,” he says, by way of explanation. “I always wanted to be the sort of hard-hearted writer who says, ‘Sorry to inconvenience you, but I’m afraid that I just do the writing’. But I feel a responsibility to the people who are doing my play – to [Michael] Colgan at the Gate, to the actors – and if I can do my bit to help, to promote their work, well I’ll talk to The Irish Times. But then I go along to the interview, and I’m feeling all out of sorts, and then invariably I have a nice time, meeting new people, having a cup of tea, and I always leave in a much better humour than when I entered.
“Of course there’s a sort of a paradox in that,” he continues. “I know I’m antisocial – I say ‘no’ to almost every social occasion – and yet people who know me think I’m a real social butterfly, because when I’m with them I’m performing sociability. But all the time I’m aware of this contradiction. You know that way, when you’re in a public space, being vivacious and responding, and for some reason you have to go upstairs and the lift closes and everything just falls off your face in that moment when you are alone and you realise that the person who was out there having fun was actually working at it.
“I don’t know why I should be so self-analytical here,” he interrupts himself, “because usually I’m not. People constantly ask me about my work on the assumption that I’ve thought about it and have figured out why characters do this or that, but I’ve realised that I bypass that bit when I’m working and certainly I have very little curiosity about the how and why of it. I don’t analyse what I write, and I certainly don’t analyse myself. There’s a line in one of my plays from Pushkin. (It’s not my line so I feel that I can quote it). He’s sitting at a table and as the pen moves across the page [he says that] something has changed. I have this idea that that’s how artists and writers do what they do, and I don’t think that lends itself to self-analysis.”
Stoppard describes himself as “deliberately resistant” to such inward contemplation and this attitude has surely been conditioned by his peripatetic upbringing during the second World War. While this is a line of questioning that he is uninterested in pursuing with me, it certainly provides a deeper glimpse into the paradox of the public and private self that he recognises, as well as the exaggerated rituals of civility that have governed our meeting.
Born Tomáš Straussler in 1937 in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, his family were forced to flee to Singapore as anti-Semitism began to endanger the lives of Jews in Europe. He was evacuated to Darjeeling along with his mother and brother when Japan was invaded, while his father remained behind as a British army volunteer but was eventually killed in a Japanese prison camp.
Mrs Straussler then married a Major Kenneth Stoppard, who was commissioned in India. The family moved to England in 1946 when the war was over, and a full embrace of England and Englishness was encouraged. In an autobiographical essay, Another Country, Stoppard remembers how his mother wrote a memoir without once mentioning the fact that she was Jewish, while his new father exclaimed to a curious nine-year-old Tom: ‘Don’t you realise that I made you British!”
THE TORTURED complexity these formative identity-shaping years has undeniably influenced the theme and content of Stoppard's work too, which draws its vast frame of reference from a range of literary, philosophical and historical influences. In the early period of his career these are deeply embedded in classical British education, evidenced in the Shakespearean origins of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Dogg's Hamletand Cahoots Macbeth.
Later, however, they draw on political and philosophical developments in the Soviet Block region where his heritage lies, like in his monumental nine-hour mediation on pre-revolutionary Russia, The Coast of Utopia.
While these plays are renowned for the intellectual challenge that they set for the audience, they are always underpinned by an accessible human drama which, significantly, revolves around dissembling identities and role-playing: from the infamous eponymous characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,who struggle to understand themselves beyond their function in Stoppard's play, to the confused loyalties of the artists and muses in The Real Thing, which opens in a new production at the Gate Theatre next week.
If Stoppard prefers not to contemplate the relationship between himself and his plays – by the time other people are interested, he says, “I’ve moved on to something else” – he takes a real pleasure in the knowledge that that his large body of work – some 25 plays, and numerous scripts for television and film – continues to be produced. “What some people fail to understand,” he explains, “is that a printed play is only a shadow of the theatre. So, yes, I feel is that it is very satisfying to know that my work is still living, still being produced.
“I grew up with an attitude towards the theatre in which posterity was everything”, he explains. “All the plays that I knew were 50 years, 100 years, 300 years old, so the idea of a play proving itself by surviving, by lasting, was built into my attitude towards the theatre.That’s not always the case, because of course there are writers for whom it’s vitally important that their play will be seen at the right moment, when the subject is still current. That’s its function, and that’s another way of being a playwright. But I was already conditioned before I even thought about that.
“For me,” he continues with qualification, “ – in this privileged Western liberal society – I don’t see the point of theatre if it doesn’t operate on the level of a good night out.” In fact, Stoppard will even admit to enjoying watching his own work: “Sometimes I’m really looking forward to the first night. I’m sick of working on it and I just want to sit there like any member of the audience, when it’s too late to do anything about it. Of course, there are times when you’re watching and thinking, ‘Oh God! I should have done something about that bit!’ Or ‘Oh, that’s so very naive’. Or ‘how did I think that was funny?’ Or ‘why doesn’t that person just shut up?’
“I don’t tend to worry about whether the audience will like my play,” he continues. “They will or they won’t and I am usually more worried about the scenery falling down.” The same nonchalance applies to reviews and commentaries on his work. “I find all that sort of stuff is unreadable!” he exclaims. “It’s not that I mind it, but I find it incredibly uninteresting [like self-analysis]. Mostly the propositions are neither true nor untrue. In fact, they seem fine, but if you experiment and put a ‘not’ in into the sentence, it also seems fine.
“What I really want to do is just write the plays. I suppose that’s what I’ve always liked about the theatre,” he says, bringing the point to a philosophical close. “The combination of that insularity, when it’s just you and a pen and a piece of paper, and the team sport of production. I enjoy the rehearsals, the first night, but then I want to get back to my desk.
“I’m terribly sorry, but I’m going to have to go,” he says all of a sudden, as if that revelation has reminded him that he must return to his study. “That was 60 minutes,” he reassures me, “so I’m sure you’ve got enough.” “It was lovely to meet you,” he adds, shaking my hand with polite formality. And Tom Stoppard: Public Playwright transforms into Tom Stoppard: Reclusive Writer again, as the sociable, confessional, shadow of the man follows the fleeing figure out the door.
The Real Thingopens at the Gate Theatre on Feb 10th. Previews from Feb 5th
