Tom Stoppard interview (1995)

Tom Stoppard is here he is a smart and clever dramatist the Czechoslovakian born British playwright is at 57 years old at the very top of his game last season two of his plays were performed by England's most prestigious theatre companies the Royal Shakespeare Company in the National Theatre Indian ink his latest work opened in London in February here in New York the Lincoln Center production of Arcadia opens this week of the Vivian Beaumont and Hapgood just closed on Sunday after two extensions at the mitzi gaynor theatre all of that work from a former journalist and drama critic who captured our attention with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead in 1967 followed by travesties jumpers real inspector hound the real thing and many others he has won three Tony Awards and we're very pleased to have him here on the eve of the beginning of Arcadia at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center welcome thank you great to have you here we've done this a couple of times and it's always a pleasure for me tell me what Arcadia is about well for one thing it chuckles between the 20th century in the early 19th century it all takes place in a castle no not a consonant but it takes place in one room room in one room in what we call in England the stately home almost the castle and it's about what happens inside this room and also what happens outside the room in the garden and I could go on for too long about that but it's about romance and mathematics and landscape gardening and Byron has that all right how did it begin for you this idea for this play I'm fascinated about the process of how what comes out of your head and makes it way into the mouths of actors well a theatre is a double event it's a it's a text and it's an event it's a happening and quite often the orange origins of a play they come from two different places accordingly I like the idea of of a play in which the action switched periods perhaps by a hundred years two hundred years but but the rooms stayed exactly the same that's so that if you like is a sort of mechanistic idea it's a theatrical happening idea the subject matter the play really derives from an interest in the way we use terms like classical and romantic we can't divide even people and temperaments in the classical type romantic type and as you know in the in the history of our culture in poetry in gardening styles in painting in all kinds of areas there's something deemed to be classical and something deemed to be romantic I think of architecture right these don't divide so neatly I think the one party to the other and that's all I had to start with abstract as it sounds that's what I kicked off with and so you sit down and do what that's a very good question Theater is a storytelling art form and it really really is years and years ago I was in Iran it was so long ago it was called Persia I wondered of the hotel and so crowd of people in the corner of the garden and it turned out that they were all listening to one man telling a story and this was theater it was this tiny theater happening a monologue I think that I think this much more this year than 25 years ago much more this year than the last time we met which wasn't that long ago I think that the the narrative interest of this strange event is not is paramount that's what I feel now when I was a young man and full of confidence and didn't have all my present insecurities I I was confident enough to believe that if I if I just juggled things around and put spangles on them the whole thing would be really interesting and entertaining for two two and a half hours and sometimes I got away with it you could matter with language and get away with pastiche parody jokes music song dance intellectual ping-pong that's already enough it wasn't a calculation charlie it was just what I liked you have to write what you like in the year in which you write it and now I won't want to find good stories to tell which is which is why I'm not very prolific but I hope to be more prolific yeah but I mean so then you're saying Arcadia because of his narrative because of its storytelling is a take off for you it's a different place for you as a playwright it's not a complete break but I think that the reason Arcadia has worked so well touchwood elsewhere which I and we significantly I would include in foreign languages I mean this actually gets us to the nub of it my stuff was quite hard to translate Arcadia has now been done in in more countries more quickly than any other play I wrote and I think it's because it works on a detective story level quite apart from all these grand things you and I have been talking about it but the note why did you you decided that you felt like it was necessary to to take off with the narrative form to explore these ideas because everybody when they were talked about you always says Stafford is writing about ideas and they will look at all the things that you have done most of them and say this was an exploration of this idea whether it's Hapgood and people talk about dual personalities and perceptions with spies as a metaphor of whatever it is no that's still true I do get stimulated turned on as we say here are ideas but you can't begin until you've got some kind of structure situation dramatic narrative story one plus word is best and what I mean is that in the past I I just made do I think sometimes with a story if I if I was lucky I found one which works reasonably well without Arcadia I found I sort of fell into him stumbled into one and fumbled my way through one which when I looked back really did work much better than I realize it was going to and it alerted me to this perfectly obvious fact that if if the story works on on a very simple narrative level you know what happened next and what's going to happen then you are in a much stronger position to indulge yourself if that's the phrase I'm looking for with all these interesting ideas which fuel you to fill hundred pages with your writing I have always assumed about you that this is more of a question about writing plays versus other art forms is that you wrote plays because it was the best place for you to express the kinds of ideas to debate in your own head through your own characters ideas that you were curious about yeah right well you know a duel log is a perfect form yeah in which to conduct a dispute a dialogue is a best way to conduct a dispute or conflict of ideas a dialogue is the best way to contradict yourself yeah which I found pretty useful because most the time I didn't know what I think until I've written the dialogue and then somebody can come up and overturn the applecart as well but yes I didn't have to write plays the you know the idea of writing novels might be attractive I did write one many years ago I stuck with theatre and I've never really turned around to to ask myself you know why I made that choice part of it is just the fun of it you know it's a team sport I really have a good time you like the whole business of it I do the staging the sets the and I love I like working with actors this is that there are two stages to this one I'm writing a play I'm very private and very reclusive really and and bad-tempered and absent-minded and all that and I wouldn't dream of discussing it with anybody when it's done and there is on the table and there's all the actors sitting around the table the director then when it's when oh why this is there's a phrase I never heard in my life until we were rehearsing Hapgood and I loved it so much we did we didn't use it in England because we're too polite it's when the meat gets to its feet and so when the meat gets to it's for one day the director of half could Jack O'Brien said something about let's get the meat on its feet and I realized meant we have to get up and start acting yeah but there's a point where it's no longer enough to call it a text it's turning into an event and then the my other persona which is somewhat as I say reclusive and and and tight sexy but until it comes out very good that's what it is protective then you have to lose some of that and get in amongst the the dialogue with the actors and even in the latter stages in London I've got to play which open about three weeks ago I was sort of changing things around this is in the ink or in ink just to fit in with the set designer you know when the things flying takes too much time and I like I like I like the way it was practical and pragmatic and it's a concrete problem not just an airy-fairy in fine art form yeah but the reason I asked the question I hear all of that and understand that but if you fall in love with narrative might you then say well maybe I can translate this best in a novel well there's not a lead itself to storytelling better than what they look there's nothing like it is a it's very it's a dangerous sport you can think of it as a novel if you like but all the readers are in in one room at the same time reading and you have to listen to their reaction the advantages you know the safe area is that they all get exactly the same thing whichever night you give them the book you know theater cannot be like that will never be like that and we go through this slightly silly thing right now in these final previews where you know there's on a given night a given critic is out front on you and and there's 10,000 moments which turn into this three-hour play and you become kind of stupid about oh dear what about moments 617 it wasn't quite as good as Tuesday night was it you become slightly crazy but the same text unfortunately unfortunately as you know from the plays of William Shakespeare a given text can give rise to an evening which you'll remember with delights for years and years and an evening which you would like to forget immediately right because it didn't work same text so theater is complicated and that's one reason why I like it when you put it together and and and you'll go through this process do you care do you do you care well how much do you do - you've said before that that art is recreation right you believe that you believe that your responsibility is to provide recreation for that those people who pay for those tickets and come and sit there to be entertained yes what I believe firmly is that is that that artist is ten different things it's not nine you can't leave recreation out of it you know and therefore what do you do to make sure you're entertaining what's the demand on you and what well that's a good one isn't it um what can I say there is a match each time between a play and an audience if the match is reasonably a good match then it doesn't you know there is no one answer because in a given space given audience the idea of a completely absorbing recreation might be one of the drier plays of ionesco Arnold Bennett Samuel Beckett it take 43 at the same time you know III love stand-up comics I love circuses I like as well as rather rather dry quiet always talk about you as the intellectual playwright do you want you shirk from that and do you want to say I don't want that label take it somewhere else because it doesn't fit where I think I am or what I think I'm about well I think it's a pretty that theater you know has such a low estimation of itself that a play which just touches upon what you might call intellectual subjects instantly means that the writer is has the intellectual label attached to him let's let's be let's you know let's be realistic here my intellectual players god bless them have made no original contribution to intellectual thought all it means is that that the you know my subject matter includes if you like intellectual preoccupations but even that phrase leaves out the fun doesn't it well but suppose then someone says it includes intellectual games in which in the end there's no resolution do you care if they make that criticism yes I do because that's not my intention theater has a form it has a form a player has a form as inescapably and as necessarily as architecture has a form you simply can't just you know build just we just build for two hours and forty minutes and then stop halfway through this turret I mean theater also has an architectural form and and the writer is attempting to make it into this form if you walk out of it at the end saying well that was quite intriguing part recreation or whatever god it didn't seem to get anywhere or say anything then then I've got it wrong yeah but that's not my point though is not where it could get somewhere but it didn't necessarily resolve itself I mean you you engaged in this sort of intellectual dialogue with with ideas clashing with each other but you didn't come away in a sense with a resolution to the conflict I'd mind that - I think but life doesn't have resolution to conflicts about ideas does it I mean there is not necessarily one answer to a lot of these debates that you seemed interested in and if you explore the sort of the relationship between science and aren't a lot of other things yeah I'm not sure that there's an answer at the end of the day well theater aims towards the new more very often and as you say life very often doesn't provide the other hand mill theater supposed to because that's the nature of the beast it's the nature of the beast I think that that's why we have 3x that's why we have rising action falling action de Namur and all of that but isn't that true of music and painting an artist doesn't you know paint a canvas and then you don't go in and say I think I'd like a yard and a half please that's not that's that that would say the form doesn't matter um life doesn't have form in the new mall but then on the other hand you know we're not asking to pay $42 to go and sit and look at live speaking of that you're at the bit Kenner at Lincoln Center yes would you want to be on Broadway would you want to take that risk say with Arcadia with Arcadia well three or four producers did ask me to take that risk I say take that risk they were assuring me there was no risk at all because they could sell it out for six months or a year because there was orders no because they were producers they say mitigate distill playwrights on the idea and and I'll tell you I think that that's I got to the point where I wanted to have a four or five month success rather than a ten eleven month failure I I just like the idea of being in a theater where the commercial pressures didn't exist in in the same form Lincoln Center is a it's a unique place in in New York City in the American theater indeed I have friends who've worked there I I knew of it and I knew it first and second hand as being a very sympathetic no place for a writer to be and I like I like being there it there's a good side and there's always a downside to everything and I personally like theaters with proscenium arches what's the downside there well it's not a downside but but there's more money or what what's the downside of what well good happened what you say there's an upside in a downside I'm telling you okay I'm the I this is the it's not it's not a downside just a fact of life I tend to write for the proscenium arch which is a picture frame theater it's because everything I write turns out to have to work one way or another on some comic level or another when you write comedy it's very tough if if not everybody in the audience has got exactly the same view so it's a challenge and a problem which Trevor Nunn and the company have in fact solved very successfully in the case of Arcadia shown on being your director he's the director of Arcadia and I wouldn't have chosen to be on in an amphitheater with a wraparound audience and an apron stage now that it's happening I've seen it I'm pleased but I was nervous I must admit because I subconsciously always see this picture frame when I'm writing and these little figures are moving around and there's only one view of the show and that's not true in that many modern theaters as you find yourself growing older you're 57 now how do you do you find yourself more more more oriented to risk more oriented to new directions as this is as you said in terms of his narrative form or less so or less willing to take answers and more Fred of failure less Fred of failure fearful from from inside here nothing changes when I when I look at my plays over the last 25 years and war or when somebody else might look at them you could say oh you know more risk less risk the change of this change of that but that's not a subjective view in any way you plays all the people who write them and I've always written plays for the only reason that it's possible to write anything that suddenly yes you know god I can do this one oh thank Christ I've got one more to do because I've got nothing in the bottom two I don't have a bottom drawer I have no cupboard when I write a play that's it I'm finished out I have nothing left to do so and how does it feel when you finish well when I finish it feels wonderful for about three days and then I think we're not working I don't mind to do what am I going to do I don't have a play to write and so forth so if not if if the subject matter looms into view like some kind of strange fish in an aquarium and you think oh my goodness yes I could do a play about that you certainly then turn around and say where I don't know is this what is this how would this look in the context of my my track record over there or where should I be going you don't think anything like that you just think I'll do it yes thank goodness thank goodness I have many of those ideas do you have swirling around now in other words okay one one I have had it for a year and a half I tried to write it for about three months this time last year it's something which interests me a lot I'm not going to tell you what it is because I can wear what you know what's the point I may never do it but I couldn't find this is where we came in I couldn't find a narrative structure for to convey and conduct and contain the idea and when I go back to England which I'll be doing at the weekend that's going to be you know but almost the first thing I'll do is to go back to that to find storytelling it's what we were talking about a few minutes ago a way to tell the story no to find a story to tell but what do you have it's really hard to talk about whether that going with all right but what I have is clear this is no I read once somewhere that there are I that you know you were fascinated by the idea of the tabloid ization it's not that of our society no but no it's not that okay but that is something that interest you maybe down the road to another play about newspapers yeah yeah okay but go ahead anyway you can't tell me what it is you want to give it away but you I mean it's such a good idea somebody else might steal it what I just embarrassing because it's like bad man - to announce plays which aren't started and they'd never be finished it's a play I'm interested in in the Roman poets of the Augustine age Julius Caesar time you know and I don't know how to write for people in togas and they not ever do it well why not why would you not know how to write about people and I told them I don't know how to make them talk and how would you find that out how will you well you get to learn a trick perhaps you know I once wrote a play which had among its characters James Joyce not to mention Lenin not to mention the dagger is tristan tzara and you found out they're in the same city at the same time in 1918 exactly so but I didn't know how to write for any of those three voices um so you you kind of sit there and hold your head and after a while you end up writing a play about an old man who was there as well and is telling you the story but he's a senile amnesiac so the playwright is off the hook in st. a was that true also about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern residence timbers was a different sort of problem I wrote I wrote a play about two characters in Hamlet who spoke what I wrote for them to speak and occasionally entered into conversation written by William Shakespeare um I was so blithe and you know blissfully unaware of how dangerously arrogant this policy of mine might be it never occurred to me that my dialogue would be judged against Shakespeare's when the if the play were ever performed and if that thought had crossed my mind I would never have thought of writing such a play but luckily what happened was that um it turned out not to look remotely considered it turned out to be a sort of expression of something which when you think back about it is true for all of us that we have a public mode of address and a private mode of address and you know we're not now speaking we're speaking slightly more syntactically and sustaining formalism in this conversation right now I'm not actually that's their that notion but go ahead then we were in the green room right three minutes before we came at this table the language structure was quite different how is it different I mean what we're saying because I've thought about this before and you have more insight to it than I do it is that this conversation is how different then if you and I would leave here and have dinner give me one example when we walked in we sat down I said to you what do you think of the OJ Simpson business are you interested in it and you said of course but there's so much stuff there it's hard to keep your eye yeah there's so much information around yes that was a natural conversation this is a kind of elevated conversation because of television half performance half conversation have yes the thing is that I'm always think about other things organization I'm think about structure I'm thinking about a lot of other things in addition to letting myself go into the conversation well the main thing you're thinking about yeah there's not just the two of us yeah it's and when it is just the two of us you and I can rely on talking in code we can finish each other's thoughts right we've met before we share currency of reference and so on so we can actually maintain quite a quite a sustained conversation without without really completing a sentence and having a new subject-verb-object sentence at all as soon as we become aware that we're really speaking for the benefit of a third party you know that's something these arcs are intersecting out there in the blackness we realize that we can no longer rely on other people being sympathetic to our rather informal way of not completing thoughts not looking for the word and so on we can even pause it's your turn see actually that you can use that to I mean that the notional you can I sometimes will pause to say it's your turn in order to generate what I think may be a more natural reaction yes from you well I I think that that there is an internal contradiction in the writer interviewed I think that writers and talkers are two different kinds of animal and I never I never feel that talking about the work is a natural extension of the work it's it's quite an interesting hobby author or courtesy perhaps but it's it's certainly not necessary to it and possibly slightly corrupting there's something healthy about protecting yourself from any sort of self-awareness let alone self analysis I don't believe in automatic writing at all which automatic write automatic writing is is it's a fad which has passed but there's a certain there's a certain possibility of subconscious creative writing where you're really not trying to think you are writing in a trance for example or the you know as just as IRA would draw words out of her hat and writing by chance and fate and coincidence and so on I think that that writing art and a very conservative person when it comes to my views on art I think art is essentially a formal attempt to bring some order out of the universe into another medium so I do feel that that the subconscious has to be the slave of the conscious of one's consciousness but at the same time when I say I am slightly fearful of analyzing my own work analyzing my own instincts my my principles if I have any that kind of self-awareness when I say I'm nervous of it it's because I think that all artists are in some sense the beneficiary of their subconscious and you have to you know you have to not know too much about what's going on doesn't that sound pretentious no I think I hear you I just hope that not many people but I want you to still only be a passing notion with you only because of what my curiosity and what I do is which is I want you to feel not that I mean I don't think it's it's either pretentious to say look what I have is my subconscious which drives what I do if I hear you my subconscious drives what I do in part and I best protect it at best that nurture and protect it because it is in the end if work is central to my life yeah is the essence of what I am planning interview too much right then but I don't I don't know you know but I mean it's the same it's the same expression you you can't um precalculate premeditate too far to in too much detail because then the moment there's no given it you see the moment you go off it it just breaks like a breadstick no no I don't think that's true demote if you offer you plant it then oh no I agree with you if you're if you are you know if you're rigid adherence to a structure and if it goes away from structured then you lose yourself and you have nowhere to go you don't know how to scramble back I think it therefore also loses spontaneity and loses any real sense of I think that's the best way to come out of a piece of work is the the times you a number where you look back and you think I don't know how I did that that's that's that's better than I know how to do you can actually that you know this is a great story which you everybody in London's heard a hundred times it is a little bit about Olivier when Roddy McDowall or somebody went back to him and they just seen him and they said my god Larry as I guess he was called that was it was incredible you know and they thought he would be up and thrilled and knowing how magnificent his performance was here and he said he was almost despondent and he said I know but I don't know why I don't know how I know how it was that I made it that it came out that's part of what you're saying and it is yes yes you don't yes that is that's right I didn't know that story but but it's it's it's how actors are yeah but how about writers I mean you you now look at your work and know that you grabbed something and ran with it and it started a life of its own and you all of a sudden once you were in the process once you were right you were reaching for conversations they're part notes I mean that story is about you that you'll just go buy books and there'll be an ideal laying at one book or another book or a book and that somehow once you get going your characters say things and do things and feel things that are part of a curiosity that you had that yes and you don't quite know why they reach for that or reach for that it just happens am i putting too much into it no you're not I mean when I suddenly became nervous of sounding pretentious about about the subconscious yeah part of writing um I shouldn't apologize with it whether it's pretentious or not it just happens to be true and that's that when when one is in the middle of doing it when one is not talking about right here gone rehearsing or thinking that all starts at six o'clock when one is doing nothing but sitting there with a pen in the hand and a pen paper on the table and doing it take my word for it there's something going on which is not possible to explain rationally completely because you you don't know what the play is you're going to write and time and time and time again as you as you work your way forward you encounter pieces of such extraordinary luck happy coincidence oh my goodness that's just alright yeah I see that all that thing yeah um and and and if they have if your luck holds I did have luck is the right word but if your luck holds when you get to the end you think you've got something and another person would say but you couldn't possibly have written that unless you'd planned it all because it just how would you wouldn't write this if you didn't know about that but the simple truth is you didn't write this without knowing about that and when it comes to it all goes click now here's my last I'm not saying that means every time yeah but my last question is do you know that it will always come no you do not and and it puts a great strain on on one's relationship with one's nearest and dearest because you're so terrified of losing it I mean I go to bed worrying about it wake up with it and I I don't like really to say good morning much because I don't have time I haven't got space for that when I'm too tired to work then I can join the human race again but the answer is you're frightened of losing it all the time stop it in the act of creating as a pain in the butt I'm not the most most congenial company no I'm not it's great to have you here I'm out of time thank you for coming or Katie opens on Thursday night and here in Manhattan yeah then you're often wonderful the weekend to struggle with a new idea yes thank you thank you for joining us we look forward to seeing you tomorrow night see you then

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

Views: 21,671

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Id: EEmK_Tumgr4

Length: 35min 8sec (2108 seconds)

Published: Sat May 28 2016