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
I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience.
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.
The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.
I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.
The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.
Once rehearsals are done the writer really doesn't have a function on the set. If the script is stabilized, then the writer becomes a celebrity tourist visiting the set, trying not to get in the way. It's very good for the ego, to go visit a film set if you are the writer, because they give you a special chair, and tell you where you can sit to watch the monitor. They make you feel special, but at the same time, they make it perfectly plain that you are irrelevant!
The sense of suppression, ... or self-suppression, and pressure generally which came off even this photograph of the page of this diary was so strong and so moving. There was a love story here.
The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together.
Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came across a textual problem.
Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'
Other people's lives come at us without a backstory most of the time. The present is like that.
People think I'm very nice, you know. And I'm not as nice as they think.
The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.
I wanted to be in the theater. It is simply the way I felt.