Sir Tom Stoppard

With two dozen scripts to his name, playwright Sir Tom Stoppard is feted around the world—but right now he's a little stuck for inspiration.  Still, as he tells Peter Wilson, he'd rather people didn't try to help

Sir Tom Stoppard long ago achieved the dream of millions of frustrated workers by ditching his day job for a stunningly successful creative career. Now, 45 years after he gave up journalism to take a shot at writing plays full time, he is recognised as one of the greatest living playwrights in the English language. In addition to his award-winning work for the stage, he has also produced dozens of radio and television scripts and screenplays, including 1998's Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love.

Today, Sir Tom's portfolio is so substantial that at any given time, more than a dozen of his plays or translations of them are being performed somewhere in the world. The surprise, then, is that at the age of 71, he is thinking more and more about his old day job, journalism.
The man who worked for the Bristol daily papers from the age of 17, before a brief stint as a theatre critic in London for Scene magazine, says he is still fascinated with his first craft. Surely he must have been bored with journalism, given that he left it at 25 to become a "real writer"?

"No, it never bored me," he insists over coffee in a Covent Garden hotel. "I never got to be the kind of journalist I wanted to be, because I started writing plays. I never lost my fascination for journalism, which is why a ton of newsprint is still arriving at my door every day, newsprint that I daren't not read." He even takes the trade paper Press Gazette.

In fact, says the author of Night and Day, a 1978 play about two correspondents in Africa, "I keep having this feeling that I have another journalism play in me somewhere." Thirty years is a long time on Fleet Street and the profession has changed so much that Sir Tom knows he could write something new about it, but he hasn't found a way into this particular project just yet.

He rolls his eyes at the thought of this becoming public knowledge: "As soon as you print that, there will be plenty of people telling me how to do it."

Only once before has he been able to do something useful with an idea for a play suggested by somebody else. "My friend and agent was driving me back from some meeting at the BBC around about 1964," he remembers. "The National Theatre had just opened a production of Hamlet and we were talking about that. He said, 'You should write a play about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,' and I thought, 'Yes!'"

Sir Tom's comic take on the two minor Shakespeare characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, was produced at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1966 and picked up by the National Theatre before hitting Broadway, where it scooped a Tony Award. The show became as close to an instant classic as one can get.

Later plays, from Jumpers, Travesties and The Real Thing in the 1970s and 1980s through to Arcadia and The Invention of Love in the 1990s, won him critical acclaim and a string of Evening Standard awards. He was knighted in 1997. But other people's ideas would never again kickstart his creative process, however desperate he was for inspiration.

"In all the years since then, I have often had people tell me that they have a great idea for my next play," he says, "but it is absolutely hopeless because they are coming off what you have already done, which is the last place you want to be next." Instead, the search for his next topic is a process he still finds puzzling and stressful, even after going through it two dozen times.

"I finished writing Rock 'n' Roll two years ago now and I tend to come up with what I call a proper play every four years, so yes, I am afraid I am somewhat behind schedule," he says. "Now I am thinking, 'Oh God, I wish I could find a play to write, why can't I just start the way I started with the last one?' But I can't remember how I did it." He claims to start from empty every time. "I finish a play, hand it in and then I have zilch again. I have nothing in the bottom drawer, no trousseau of things I am saving. At first I am really happy, I'm out of jail and think 'Great, I can do anything.' That mood lasts about 10 days. Then the neurosis starts up, the beetle in here," he says, knocking his forehead with a knuckle.

When a play is bedded down, Sir Tom, who has been divorced twice and now lives alone in Chelsea, reads voraciously and waits for inspiration. "In the last 10 years I have probably spent only a year or maybe 18 months actually writing what gets performed. The rest of the time is either looking for stuff or having a great time reading it up," he says, adding that a play is only about 100 pages long. "Getting the ideas and getting to the top of page one probably takes 90 per cent of the time."

Sir Tom says he is not inspired by any great sociopolitical drive. "What does not happen is that you think to yourself: 'I have got certain rather interesting ideas I really would like to communicate to people and I think I will do it through the medium of the stage play. You just don't do that. "It's much more to do with being part of this wonderful form of recreation. And I really do believe theatre is a recreation. That is what unites the different sorts of theatre, otherwise why are they called 'plays'?"

And this, he says, is what motivates him. "I happen to be the sort of person who gets turned on by ideas. So, when it comes to finding a play, I am looking for a story and the characters to embody some abstract thing I happen to have got obsessed with."

In Rock 'n' Roll, for example, there is communist oppression in Czechoslovakia; a character teaching a classics tutorial on the Greek poet, Sappho; an academic whose interest is in consciousness; Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd (who retired young with mental illness) and a Czech rock band called Plastic People of the Universe.

"It all comes together naturally for me, but you can think of it as some weird parlour game where you draw bits of paper out of a hat and at the end of the round you think: 'Christ, I have got Sappho and the Soviet invasion of Prague. Help! What can I come up with here?'"

But for all his claims to start with an empty drawer, Sir Tom admits to being something of an ideas magpie. "Over the years, you collect ideas, you save up little false alarms. A guy I know was a big Syd Barrett fan. More to the point, he loathed Pink Floyd after Barrett left and I loved Pink Floyd. So we used to have these conversations and he used to tell me about Syd and I thought, 'Actually, that's a play: this reclusive rock star living in the most suburban environment you could possibly imagine, a semi-detached home in a housing estate, while pilgrims try to find him.'"

But that was not a play he could write, as he didn't know what else to do with the material. In his younger days he believed that he needed to know a lot about the script he was constructing in order to write it, but over the years he has developed a different sense of his craft.

"It is almost a case of just pulling around something and trying to find out where it is going to—not where you take it, but where it takes you."
Sir Tom admits that the closest thing to a trigger for the final version of Rock 'n' Roll was a book about Barrett. "There was a photograph of him as a rock god, and a photograph of him not very long before he died, where he was just a lone bloke on a bike with a plastic shopping bag and you could read the brand of toilet paper and toothpaste."

The contrast was dramatic. "It was impossible to think it was the same person-it was like people living on different planets," recalls Sir Tom. "I found the photograph of the older man very moving. I saw that photo and that got pulled into what I wanted to do. But there is a certain point where you don't know what you are doing, so I don't actually have a memory of the premise that I then carefully and laboriously worked through."

He linked Barrett's story to the role that rock music played during the communist oppression of Czechoslovakia, the country where the playwright himself was born in 1937, as Tomas Straussler. His parents were non-practising Jews who fled the Nazis to Singapore. His father was killed in the Japanese invasion and his mother took Tomas and his older brother to India where she married an English army officer, Kenneth Stoppard.

The newly renamed Thomas reached England at the age of nine and after boarding school took up his reporting career. Within a few years, he was reviewing local theatre productions and in 1960 he began writing his own plays. "I burn with no causes," he wrote in the Sunday Times in the 1960s. "I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really."

In fact Sir Tom has written vehemently since the 1970s about communist oppression in eastern Europe and he admits that his early claims that he had no political motives should be treated with deep scepticism.

"First of all, almost nothing I said and possibly say is entirely sincere. It is the sincerity of the moment, it's a kind of ephemeral sincerity. In any case, it is very hard to name any work of art that is incapable of being spun in a political way."

He cites the example of the author of Waiting for Godot. "Samuel Beckett was not a political writer in most senses and yet writing about human existence at that level is some kind of statement beyond literature and beyond mere observation of human behaviour."

Sir Tom likes to think that drama has a long-term impact, laying down a template of moral values that has an influence on audiences. "But in terms of trying to change something out on the streets, or change it by next Tuesday, print and television journalism are far more powerful."

Perhaps a new play about journalism would allow him to combine the best of both.