Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE FRSLis a British playwright and screenwriter, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love, and has received one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth3 July 1937
CityZlin, Czech Republic
It's better to be quotable than to be honest.
It's wholly deserved and I am completely thrilled. As a writer he has been unswerving for 50 years, ... a most fitting award.
the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics and audience.
I want to be part of the Royal Court's history before I pack it in. Some of my best nights of the last 40 years have been spent in the Royal Court's auditorium. I don't want to fall under a bus before having a play on its stage.
Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based.
The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now.
I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.
When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example.
What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?
I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells.
That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a 'basic human right' possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour.
Time is short, life is short, there's a lot to know. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper now. I just haven't got time.