Context & Continuity

A Romance on Three Legs.

One of my hobbies is Glenn Gould.  Okay, he's an obsession.  Unlike other people's obsessions over transiant celebrities, I feel as if my obsession is well deserver and honorable.  I think I've written here before about a new book by Katie Hafner, A Romance on Three Legs

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There is a wonderful interview with Ms. Hafner here.

Lunch w/ Sir Tom Stoppard

   

Dinner with the FT: Sir Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard cannot meet me for lunch; he is in the first week of rehearsals for the new London production of his 1993 play Arcadia. The following week, he can’t meet me for lunch because he is not in the rehearsals for the new London production of Arcadia. This makes perfect sense: lunch eats into a writer’s day. One does not achieve Stoppard’s prodigious output by breaking the flow, and at 71 the playwright seems not to be thinking of slowing down.

So, in his courteous way, he suggests instead an early evening dinner, at an Italian restaurant two minutes from the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square. When I arrive, early, he is already there, sitting in front of a Campari and soda that he does not drink, casually dressed in muted colours.

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“So that’ll be 12 months of being away from home a huge amount, and” – suddenly very intense now, and yet again anticipating the next question – “it’s got to stop, Jan, because I’ve got to write a play. Thing is, I haven’t got an idea for a play. Part of the problem is that there are all these vast subjects thrusting themselves at anybody who presumes to deal with – I don’t, but perhaps it’s time I did – to deal with big contemporary issues. So you think, ‘right, should I do climate change, or should I do torture, or Afghanistan ... ?’”

This does not sound like the playwright once quoted as saying he wanted his work to be “entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness” – but that was before his involvement in human rights became more intense, with visits to eastern Europe and a growing friendship with Vaclav Havel.

“It’s not really obligation, but I do feel a desire to [tackle this sort of subject] – one of the interesting issues of the last two or three years has been the privacy law, for example. But for that kind of play I amass a lot of reading research, of which I use about five per cent – it’s very inefficient. So there’s an equal but very different attraction, which is to write a play that has nothing to do with anything except itself, it’s just about this family, this woman, something.

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I might have found someone even more obssessed about Tom Stoppard than I am.

The Daily Telegraph, 7.6.9:  Tom Stoppard is the greatest living playwright

A while ago, I blogged effusively about Tom Stoppard. I recalled, in particular, staggering out of a performance of Arcadia 15 years ago, convinced that it was the supreme theatrical work of our era. One or two of you felt I was laying it on a bit thick so, now that the play has reopened, I thought I’d have another go.

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