Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Tom Stoppard0:05

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1985, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

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This week, our castaway is the Distinguished Playwright.

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Tom Stoppard.

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Tom, we are dumping you on this desert island in complete isolation. Could you adjust to loneliness?

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I don't have to adjust in a sense because I I like being on my own sometimes and I'm not somebody who I think would go mad being alone. What about the consolation of music? How strong would that be? Music has never really been in the foreground of my life. It's been in the background now and again, often enough for me to be able to think of music I'd like to have with me. Have you any musical skill? Were you ever put to the piano as a child?

Tom Stoppard1:03

Have you winning

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No. I played the triangle in a percussion band in the main square of Darjeeling in northern India around nineteen forty four.

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You have just eight records to take with you to your tropical island. What's the first?

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The first one is Betty Smith.

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Blues was the first kind of music which was more than background to me. It's the first music I ever felt emotional about. I've chosen Careless Love, but I could have chosen forty others.

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And this is one which has the bonus of Armstrong on Cornet. It was done in 1925.

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And um it used to move me to tears and probably will again.

Speaker 41:51

Oh no, oh

Speaker 42:08

You read the love of a mini ogre And you never

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Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong Careless Love.

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Tom, you're Czech by origin, aren't you? Yes. Your father was a doctor with one of the Czech shoe companies, the seem very big shoe companies in Czechoslovakia.

Presenter2:38

Well, there's one called Barter, which is a worldwide company, but it is a Czech company, and that's quite right. He worked for them as a doctor.

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Well now, you had to get out before the Nazi angels. Yes. We got out and we went to Singapore. Why Singapore?

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I think it was a question of bart sending people in different directions. And indeed, when we had to leave Singapore,

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which we did after Pearl Harbor. Once again it was a question of about us sending people to different directions and our direction turned out to be India. Were you an early child?

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No, I had an elder brother and I subsequently had a half brother and half sister. How much of this do you remember? Do you remember Czechoslovakia? Not at all. My first memories, and they're very slight, are of Singapore. My real memory begins in India. You went to school in Singapore for a bit? Just. But my first proper school was a convent in India and uh

Presenter3:38

I went to various schools in India, ending up at an American Malti national school in Darjeeling. You were being exposed to a lot of cultures very quickly. Czechoslovakia, Singapore, India, the American school.

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A little confusing to a small child.

Presenter3:56

Yes, but perhaps less confusing to the child, since one accepts anything at that age as as being one's normal lot.

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Yes, when I finally came to England, which was in 1946, I was under the impression that I spoke the same English as anybody else spoke. But as soon as I got to my prep school, it was quite clear that I didn't quite speak the same kind of English. But it was my first language. Nevertheless, I'd stopped speaking Czech as a toddler. I don't even remember speaking Czech. Now, your father had stayed behind in Singapore? In Singapore, that's right. And he was killed during the war. And my mother remarried in India after the war. And then we came to England. And it's through your mother's remarriage, through your stepfather, that you developed the English name of Stoppart. That's right, exactly. Right, prep school, Nottinghamshire.

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Did you take to the prep school system? Yes, I mean I'd been boarding since I'd gone to school. I mean I I was boarding when I was six, I think.

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And I took to it well enough. I didn't enjoy either prep school or my subsequent school all that much. There were a lot of things about both schools which I did like very much. But actually I was quite glad to leave school finally. There's no question of university? No, I w I um wanted to join a newspaper very much.

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Mind you, I I say that, though, until shortly before I left school I had no idea what I wanted to do, but as soon as the idea of journalism occurred, I became really passionate about it.

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And um I was very lucky because I managed to get onto the local paper where my parents were living. Where was that? In Bristol. Now you've got a Bristol record, so shall we pause here to play that?

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Right. Well, during this period and I'm now talking about the middle fifties.

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On Friday nights, I think it was, a band called the Avon Cities Jazz Band used to play in a little kind of hut stroke house on a hillside somewhere near Bristol, as far away as possible from the nearest dwelling.

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And it used to be packed with people on these nights, and there was this line up which included Jeff Nichols on trumpet. And I remember sitting underneath Ray Bush's clarinet, quite happy that the spittle should be dropping down onto my head. I was so carried away by the lovely noise they made.

Tom Stoppard6:07

Yeah.

Presenter6:11

They made one or two records back in those days and the one I thought I'd have is called Jump for Joy because after Bessie Smith, which is not the most cheerful sound in the world, wonderful though it is, a record called Jump for Joy sounds like a good idea.

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Jump for Joy the Avon Cities Jazz Band.

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So a journal is Tom in Bristol.

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The Daily Paper? Yes, the Morning Paper to begin with. Later I switched to the afternoon paper. Did they make you start on flower shows and be General Dog's body? Definitely the flower shows, also funerals. But one quickly graduated to more interesting reporting. And I must say I loved all of it, even the flower shows. You homed in on the theatre. Why? Well, there were two or three good theatres in Bristol, notably the Old Vic. And one developed friendships with the people who worked there because Bristol, you know, is not a huge place and one got to know a bit of everything while one was living there. I liked the theatre. I began being sent as a third eleven drama critic to amateur theatre and subsequently

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To the professional theatre.

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And yes, you're you're quite right. Some of it rubbed off onto me and I and I liked the experience. You were also for a while the motoring correspondent.

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You are very well researched, because the while lasted about three or four weeks. Was there any reason for that? Yes, the motoring correspondent was ill. I think he turned over a car somewhere.

Speaker 38:34

Is there any reason

Presenter8:40

And I was the merchant correspondent. I didn't know whether your research has told you that I didn't actually know how to drive at that time. Hardly a central. Well, I would have thought not.

Speaker 38:40

Um

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Let's have your third record.

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Well, I'd written my first play by 1962. It hadn't been done, but I'd written it.

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And I was working as a freelance and I was the theatre critic, in fact, of a magazine called Scene in London. It was quite a short-lived magazine, and I think it was born and died within a year. S-C-E-N-E. S-C-E-N-E. And one day, one of the chaps who was working for Scene came back from a press conference where he'd met four new pop singers, and he came back announcing that he'd, as it were, seen the future and it made a very wonderful noise. And he was flourishing a five by eight glossy print of four young men with pulling bass and haircuts wearing do you remember those suits with no collars? Remember those suits? And they were kind of disported among upended guitars and tastefully arranged double bass. And they were called the Beatles. And their first record was called Love Me Do. I've always loved The Beatles. And I wanted one Beatle number. And I think that I ought to choose Love Me Do, which I associate with an interesting time of my life. And it was obviously an interesting time of their life too.

Tom Stoppard9:35

Remember this

Speaker 410:07

Love, love we do.

Speaker 410:10

You know I love you.

Speaker 410:13

I'll always be true.

Speaker 410:16

No

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Love Me Do by The Beatles.

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So you were starting to write plays? Yes.

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In fact, I wrote my first play in 1960 and I think I had my first thing performed about three or four years later. Was that The Gamblers? That was never performed except by students. The the first play I wrote was actually called A Walk on the Water, which subsequently became known as Enter a Free Man. And it was done first on television, though it was a stage play. It was televised at the end of 1963. You were doing quite a lot of bits and pieces of radio and television. Well, there was a series on the BBC I think it was called Just Before Midnight, and it was a series of fifteen minute plays, and I wrote two of them. At least I wrote two.

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which were accepted.

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I suppose that was about that period, it's hard to remember, but about sixty three.

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I'd also got a job writing a serial for Bush House. I and somebody else took turns to write The Adventures of an Arab Medical Student in London, and this was a series which was translated by somebody into Arabic and beamed out from Busch House.

Speaker 311:29

Uh

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It never had any existence in in the English tongue. So you had to think yourself into the life of an Arab medical student. Did you know any Arab medical students? I didn't know any Arabs or medical students, actually.

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It was just the adventures of a young man, really. And I used to do five episodes at a time. There were ten minute episodes. And when it was my turn, I used to sit down on a Friday night with the typewriter.

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and just sit there until I've done fifty minutes. Describing your perambulations about London. As far as I remember, it had to have some kind of plot. It was really like the archers, I suppose. An Arabic archers. Yes. I mean it had to have a storyline.

Tom Stoppard12:10

Yeah.

Presenter12:14

How long did you do this? I think about twenty-eight, twenty-nine years. I mean, it seemed an awful long time.

Tom Stoppard12:18

That's what it is.

Tom Stoppard12:21

Yeah.

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Then you had a wonderful idea to flesh out Shakespeare's intriguing and unscrupulous characters in Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This was in'sixty four. In fact, I was in Germany on the Ford Foundation thing where

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The Ford Foundation, as it were, imported promising young writers for a few months into Berlin. What for?

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Well, the idea was that um Berlin being cut off from the civilized world had to be kept culturally alive and various institutions would pay well known artists to live there for a year and and paint in Berlin rather than in New York.

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And they also had the scheme where young writers were brought in in small groups. In my year it was young playwrights. The playwright James Saunders came as our tutor. Derek Marlowe and Piers Paul Reed were among our number. And we lived in a big house on the Vansee Lake, just outside Berlin.

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And we didn't learn German, at least in my case.

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We did some work.

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And one of the things I did was to start

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what turned out then to be a short burlesque about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

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In fact, as far as I remember, it was a play about what happened to them in England after they'd been sent to England. And in my version, the King of England at that time was King Lear. I don't have a copy of this piece anymore. Was it written in Shakespearean verse? Some of it was pastiche verse, as far as I remember. But then some of it turned into that kind of modern Beketian joke dialogue, which I found interested me more.

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And when I came back to England I started the whole thing again and wrote a rather different play.

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which was Rosencrantz and Guttenstein are not dead, and that must have been in'sixty five,'sixty six.

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Let's have some more music. Record number four. This is a record which encompasses mixed feelings about America, mostly positive.

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It also encompasses my great liking for the American musical, and it also encompasses my liking for deft wit, and finally my friendship with Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyric for this, and it's the America number from Westside Story.

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I like to be in America. Okay, by me in America. Everything free in America. For a small be in America.

Speaker 414:55

I like the city of San Juan. I know of both you can get on. Hundreds of flowers in full bloom. Hundreds of people in each room. Automobile is a merry.

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America from West Side Story, sung by some of the original New York cast.

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Tom, you had a long battle to sell Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

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Were you rewriting it a lot?

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Well, what happened was that I sent it to the Royal Shakespeare Company and they did like they were very encouraging about it. They did take an option at one time. They did, yes.

Tom Stoppard15:30

They did

Tom Stoppard15:31

They did, yeah.

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And as far as I remember, I sent them two acts and they were encouraging and I wrote the third act.

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But of course they plan a long time ahead, and they have to fit things that fit together.

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And after a while they quite nicely said that it didn't look as if they were going to do it in the foreseeable future, and if I wanted to send it to somebody else, I ought to.

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And my agent Kenneth Ewing sent it to Frank Hoser at Oxford, and through him it reached a group of students who each year performed a new play at the Edinburgh Festival.

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And in 1966 they performed my play, You Were On the Fryn.

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Yes, it opened in a church hall on Cranston Street one night, and it had its problems, as these things do.

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But it got a good notice from The Observer, from Ronald Bryden, and because of that Kenneth Tynan, who was at the National Theatre, asked to read it.

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And as I say, that was august sixty six, and it was actually on stage at the Old Vic the following April. It did have an enormous impact, and it's still being done all over the world.

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Yes, that's true. In fact, I believe it's a set book, which seems a rather daunting thing to happen to any work of art. Yes, it is an odd feeling. Two or three of my plays have been set books since then, so I've got slightly used to the idea. But at the time, it seemed very odd to me, because I'd only left school ten or twelve years earlier. And I don't recall having any set books by any people who, you know, had been alive that century.

Presenter17:09

About that time, while you were waiting for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be staged, you wrote your one and only novel? Yes, that's exactly when I did it, yes. And in fact, it was published in the same week as Rosencrantz was performed on the fringe at Edinburgh. So that was a good week.

Presenter17:26

Yes, it was an interesting week. I thought the novel would do rather better than the play, but in fact the novel disappeared almost without trace. I shouldn't say that it's not really fair to Faber and Faber, who gallantly keep it in print, but

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It's not a very well known novel. Rosencrantz and Guilderson were followed by a couple of short plays, one about the murder of a drama critic. That was The Real Inspector Hound. Yes. And I wrote to go with it a play called After Marguerite.

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And then 1972 Jumpers, a play about a professor of philosophy.

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Torrent of language, a a marvellous performance by Michael Horden, you had an enormous success.

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And it's a fairly abstract sort of play, and not an easy play. Well, in one sense perhaps not an easy play. It's a play about a moral philosopher struggling with the idea of God and absolutes of good and evil.

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But it was written as a madcap comedy, really, and it relied quite a lot on its jokes. So, therefore.

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In another sense, it's actually an easy play, it's an entertainment as much as a philosophical discourse.

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And the National Theatre did it very well. It's a play which requires a few acrobats as well as a few actors.

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And we had quite an impressive sort of production. So it was a sort of, you know, a good time.

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Let us have record number five.

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Well, after Jumpers, there was a play called Travesties, and one of the nice things about my sort of rather vestigial musical life is that

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Music gets put into my plays sometimes, notably by Peter Wood, who directed Jumpers and Travesties. In the case of Travesties, he had the thought that ragtime music would work very well with a play.

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And there was quite a lot of that in the play. One of the pieces we used was a piece called Graceful Ghost, played by William Balcombe, who I think also is the composer of it.

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In Travesties, as indeed in one or two other plays, there are moments which are great favourites of mine, which I absolutely adore, something which I can say without conceit, because I'm talking about the musical effect, or the way that music affects what I've written or what what is being performed.

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And there were lovely things in Travesties which were very much to do with Peter's choice of music and the way that he introduced and implemented the idea. So this is one of my musical memories.

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William Walker playing Graceful Ghost part of the music which was used in Travesties.

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You wrote a play which was almost a musical. Well, I don't know about the almost actually. About ten years ago, I met Andrei Previn, and he said to me one day, should you ever write a play which requires a symphony orchestra? I have one. And it took about two years to work out how to use this opportunity. And the result was a play called Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, which is a play with music rather than a musical, because mostly the play happens, and then there's a music passage, and then there's a dialogue passage, and so on. And I've chosen some of Andrei's music. It's the part which I liked most in Every Good Boy.

Presenter21:10

And this is it. Tell me about Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. What is the title? Well, people who have had to learn music at school and so on probably have used Every Good Boy Deserves Favour as a mnemonic for E G B D F. In America they say Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit, I believe. But anyway, I remember when I was the famous triangularist of the Darjeeling percussion band that it was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.

Tom Stoppard21:30

And

Speaker 321:30

Uh

Tom Stoppard21:30

Yeah.

Presenter21:38

The subject matter of the play is in fact much more serious than that. It's about a political prisoner in Russia who is consigned to a mental institution for his opinions.

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And among the people in the play is one patient or prisoner whose delusion is that he has an orchestra and which he hears.

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And this is the sound that they make.

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Some of Andrei Prebin's music from Every Good Boy deserves favour, and he's conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

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One of your plays, Tom, doesn't match the rest. A realistic drama about journalism, night and day. Yes. I'm not a writer who has masses of good ideas to write about, and I have to write about things I know occasionally, and one of the things I do know is journalism.

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I've always been fascinated by journalism, not merely as somebody in it, but as somebody outside it.

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And I thought for years of somehow using that knowledge, and in the end I wrote a play about a war correspondent at least what Fleet Street calls a fireman sent out to cover a war in Africa.

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And you're right, it was the most, as it were, realistic play I'd written up to then, I think because it was about a world which I knew better than other worlds I'd written about.

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And your current play, which is playing very successfully in London and New York, it's been running in London, what, two years, The Real Thing. And I'm delighted that it features a short excerpt from a Desert Island Disc programme. One of the characters in the plays is being interviewed.

Presenter23:44

Yes, it's quite right. The play it's really we're entering into a world of infinite regress as mirrors face each other, but it's about a playwright who does desert island discs and is vaguely ashamed of his taste.

Tom Stoppard23:56

And it's vaguely

Presenter24:01

Now it's a little puzzling. You are a brilliantly original playwright, but you spend a lot of time adapting old plays by other people Lorke, Schnetzler, currently Molnar.

Presenter24:14

I'm not very prolific as an original playwright. I mean, I'm doing quite well if I write a full length stage play every three or four years, and they don't take that long to write, and um I'm always very pleased to have some good idea offered to me in between.

Presenter24:30

Of course I also occasionally write a radio play and very occasionally a television play and people ask me to try and write a film script. But as regards stage work, I'm very happy about adaptation because I'm very happy to be given plot and characters and to be left to work on the dialogue. They are free adaptations. Well actually the first one I did was was not freed, it was Lorca for the House of Bernard Alba.

Presenter24:56

But at the National Theatre I've done three. The Schnitzler das Wieterland, which we called Undiscovered Country, was pretty faithful. I was in awe of it, quite rightly so. Then I did a Nestro in sort of nineteenth century Viennese knockabout. And then, more recently, what is called a boulevard comedy from the twenties by Ferenz Molnar, the Hungarian playwright. In the latter two cases, yes, free adaptation. And in the case of the Molnar, very free, because a play which began as a play set in a castle in Italy is now set on an ocean liner called the Italian Castle.

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It's time we had some more music and we've got to record number seven. On this tropical island, I imagine it is being tropical. I suppose it's it's it is tropical. Yes, yes, exactly as on the posters.

Speaker 325:42

Oh, it is drop in.

Speaker 325:44

As on the

Presenter25:45

Mm-hmm.

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I try to think of the most English sound one can possibly have, and um

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quite quickly got to Vaughan Williams.

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I should say that although as we've mentioned I didn't get here until I was eight years old, I have an intense empathy for England, landscape, architecture, language. I feel

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Very English. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, and I love England.

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And I suppose on this island I would solace or torture myself by having the most English noise I could think of musically. And I've settled on the Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Talis. And the recording I'd like is the Neville Mariner one with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.

Speaker 326:48

Uh

Presenter27:34

An excerpt from the Vaughan Williams Fantasier on a theme of Thomas Talis, The Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Mariner.

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We've talked about the theatre and and radio. When did you last write a television play? In nineteen seventy seven, I'm sorry to say it's not since then.

Speaker 327:50

Yeah.

Presenter27:54

That was a play called Professional Fowl. Which won an award? Yes, it won the BAFTA Award. And it had Peter Barkworth and other people in it.

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That was actually a very happy experience, rehearsing and working on that play.

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For one thing it came quite easily, unusually for me.

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I remember that although it took ages to get to page one, which it always does, having settled on what it was about, I did it in about two or three weeks. The other thing of interest is that I wrote it for a fairly elderly leading character.

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And when I'd finished it, I was watching Peter Barkworth in a television play, and I thought to myself, God, he's wonderful, I really ought to try and write a play for him one day and then I thought to myself, Well, why does he have to be that old? And we ended up with Peter Barkworth doing professional foul, and it couldn't have been done better.

Presenter28:41

Well, let's get back to the island. How are you going to be able to look after yourself practically? Are you a handyman? Can you build huts? Yes, I could do that. They'd fall down after a while. I was in the scouts, come to think of it. Well, splendid, then you could light a fire. Yes. Done any fishing? I'm very keen on fishing. Are you? What sort of fishing? Fly fishing.

Tom Stoppard28:53

Yeah.

Presenter28:59

Well, I fish actually near Newbury. I what is called share a rod with Michael Horden. Yes, Michael's very keen on the road. Oh, yes. Acting is his sideline. Well, you have all sorts of qualifications we we never knew about. Would you try to escape? No. I think death by water is worse than death by sand and sun. Right.

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Your last record.

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My last record it's not a climax actually, it's last because I came across it most recently.

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Again actually I owe it to Peter Wood, who was finding music for the real thing.

Presenter29:34

And um it's a it's jazz piano. I'm not actually keen on modern jazz, and I have to say that I've never heard of this chap until his music was provided for my play. He's called Keith Jarrett, and this is a piece of his Cologne concert.

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And the moment I heard it, I loved it.

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And it's one of the very few pieces that I continue to play for myself occasionally at home.

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Keith Jarrett, in an excerpt from his Cologne Concert If you could take only one disc of your eight Tom, which would it be?

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I think I take the Bessie Smith, actually.

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Because it's first love, last love, you know. It stood the test of time. Yes.

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And one book you already have the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

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I'd want something which would somehow occupy me stretch me intellectually in some way. I'd thought of a book of chess problems so I could make my own chess set.

Presenter30:57

I thought of a history of mathematics which would genuinely interest me. But in the end I decided I'd like one of those books which has the English text on one page and the translation on another page, or vice versa, as it were, because what I thought I'd do is I'd I'd have something

Presenter31:12

like Dante's Inferno in English and the original, and that way I'd go some way to learn a language. Right. And one luxury, one object of no practical use that would give you pleasure to have about on the island.

Presenter31:28

Well, when I'm stuck and I have the delusion that um a change of activity and scene would unblock me.

Presenter31:36

I tend to go into the garden and kick a plastic football around, not at random. The idea is to kick it up and down without the ball ever touching the ground. And I think my record is about 22, you know, from one foot to the other. And I'd like a plastic football, and probably I'd get into the hundreds by the time I'd left the island. Right. And thank you, Tom Stoppart, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Tom Stoppard32:09

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.