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
Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much.
You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there's always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation.
I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cassette to dictate a letter, and I find my voice coming back at me with the lines of plays three years old.
With plays that require any kind of reading program, I'm reading for a couple of years before using the material.
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.
You can't go around chasing your own plays and showing up every time somebody does one somewhere. You just cross your fingers and hope that they're OK.
Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.
Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.
I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.
I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.
I'm so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play. It doesn't happen very often. I don't have unwritten plays waiting for their turn.
In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.