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 doesSo, 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.
...
“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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