Many years ago, Clive James called Tom Stoppard “a dream interviewee” because he speaks “in eerily quotable sentences”. But Stoppard's reputation for eloquence has since been matched by one for evasiveness. “I feel a bit overinterviewed about myself,” he intones, within moments of saying hello. He'd prefer to talk about his 1988 play Hapgood, revived next week with Josie Lawrence at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. “It's them who have twisted my arm [to do the interview]. So we'll give them a fair crack of the whip,” he says, with the expression of a man submitting himself to electro-shock therapy, “then see where it goes.”
Hapgood had its premiere 20 years ago, with Stoppard's sometime partner Felicity Kendal in the title role. In its mind-bending combination of quantum physics and international espionage, the play was - and remains - the acme of early-career Stoppard: the wunderkind behind Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967), the grown-up writer renowned for his dizzying intellect and theatrical chutzpah. But Hapgood's fortunes represent a blip on his upward career curve of 40 years. In London, it received mixed reviews. “The play is both enjoyable and tedious,” wrote one critic, while even Stoppard is said to have concluded: “I don't know how to write plays any more.”
Recalling Hapgood now, Stoppard remembers his own gut feeling “that it was too complicated” - which will come as news to those of us who doubted that anything was too complicated for Tom Stoppard. “It's the sheer amount of information I put in,” he says. “I was explaining things to do with physics because I enjoyed them and I wanted the audience to understand them. Only when I trimmed those speeches and stopped trying to make every member of the audience follow every detail did I realise that comprehension can take several forms. In theatre,” he concludes, “an impression of the whole sense is sufficient for the purpose. What I need to do is persuade the audience that I understand something, and therefore they understand something.”
Stoppard's critics, of whom there are plenty, complain of precisely this: that his plays flatter West End audiences with a feeling of intelligence-by-proxy; that they're all erudition and no emotion. But Hapgood marked a turning point. For the play's Broadway debut in 1994 (directed by Jack O'Brien, whose production of Stoppard's Coast of Utopia won a record seven Tony Awards in 2007), Stoppard simplified his script.
His subsequent plays, beginning with what many consider his masterpiece, Arcadia, in 1993, were seldom as flashy, or as overburdened with information, again. No one could accuse late-career Stoppard, whose The Invention of Love (1998) depicted the poet A.E. Housman's unrequited passions, or who co-wrote the Oscar-winning Elizabethan rom-com Shakespeare in Love, of lacking heart.
It is the American version of Hapgood that receives its British premiere in Birmingham, “so I'm especially curious and attentive about the production,” Stoppard says. He's as enthusiastic talking about the play now as I'd guess he was 20 years ago. This is a man whose eclectic obsessions drive his drama. “I get turned on by something,” he says, “and then I sleep, eat and do that thing until it's over.”
In this case, Stoppard's obsession was particle physics, which his son Oliver was studying at PhD level while the play was being written. (Stoppard has four sons, two by his first marriage to Josie Ingle, two - including the actor Ed - by his second, to Dr Miriam Stoppard, née Moore-Robinson). Stoppard saw in physics a metaphor for human nature. Does light operate like a bullet or a wave? The answer is, both - depending on whether it's being observed or not. So too people, who have different selves sharing the one body, which appear or disappear depending on who's looking.
Stoppard alighted on “the world of John le Carré” as the form to accommodate these ideas, he says, “because both quantum physics and espionage relate to the ultimate impossibility of observing the truth of a situation; of ever knowing what's truly happening.” The result was a play that constantly confounds the viewer's expectations, and whose mix of physics and spying achieves what Michael Frayn later took two separate plays (Copenhagen and Democracy) to cover adequately.
But times have changed since Hapgood was written. The play is infused with a Cold War sensibility - as is Stoppard's earlier Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a musical collaboration with André Previn set in a Soviet mental institution, which the National Theatre will revive in August. Stoppard is confident the plays will still resonate, not least because Hapgood “doesn't really belong in any realistic period at all,” he says. It paints a “sweetly domestic” picture of espionage, in which the eponymous female spymaster “seems to be working for MI5. She's not quite 5 and she's not quite 6.” This imprecision much embarrassed Stoppard when he eventually met le Carré. “He was sweet about Hapgood, but I knew perfectly well that to him it was complete codswallop.”
But Stoppard has changed since Hapgood too, having moved on from its brand of theatrical rug-pulling. “I'd got impatient with the whole idea of denouement,” he says, “with keeping things up your sleeve, then going: ‘Aha! Look!' When you write a scientific paper, you start off by saying: ‘Here's what we're going to find out,' then show how to get there. Which is an interesting journey. Having a little triumph over the reader or audience by having a reversal in the last paragraph is merely a kind of author-fascism.”
Did his work change after Hapgood? Stoppard stonewalls: “I'm not a self-analytical person.” He is loath to acknowledge any trends, or even identity, in his plays, save that “I'm writing all of them, so presumably they have something in common”.
Didn't the lessons learnt from Hapgood affect his later work? “While I can't deny that things were operating on me on some level,” he says, vaguely, “I don't take lessons home with me in a very conscious way.”
Kenneth Tynan famously said of the younger Stoppard that “you might mistake him for an older brother of Mick Jagger”. The playwright has aged better than the rock star, but Stoppard's gentle thoughtfulness, not to mention his slight speech impediment (the R's are wonky), present an altogether less macho image than Tynan described. So too does his visible discomfort with self-disclosure. “I tend to go along with anything anybody wants to say about me,” he says, squirming. “That's one of the unfortunate consequences of not actually having any self to project” - or at least, pace Hapgood, of knowing that there is no singular self. “I don't have a sense of myself, and I tend to shrug or nod when people make their own judgments.”
Maybe it's an English inhibition thing. Of course, Stoppard isn't officially English. He was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, and his family fled when the Nazis arrived. His father died in Singapore under Japanese bombs and Tom became son to his mother's new husband, Major Kenneth Stoppard. But he took to Englishness with the zeal of the cricket-loving convert. In a paradox that would merit a place in one of his plays, Stoppard's very English refusal (or inability) to take himself seriously, to “mean” anything, is a subversive act in our literal culture, which harvests art for its statements and artists for their intentions.
There will certainly be few clues to the “real Stoppard” (whatever that is) in his upcoming projects - adaptations of Chekhov's Ivanov (with Kenneth Branagh for the Donmar Warehouse) and The Cherry Orchard, in a world-touring production for Sam Mendes. But that's fine by the writer, who prefers that art, and artists, should incarnate, not demonstrate, what they stand for. “I stand aloof,” says the hero of his only novel, Lord Malquist and the Moon (1966), “contributing nothing but my example.” Forty years later, in his 2006 play Rock'n'Roll, he likewise argued (with characteristic disregard for left-wing pieties) that the apolitical libertinism of the Czech prog-rock band Plastic People of the Universe did more to topple communism than any amount of militant activism.
If you wish the world were carefree, be at least a little carefree yourself. “When I make a real attempt to ask myself what I actually think about what I do,” Stoppard struggles to say, “well, I think that theatre is a recreation. That's an awkward word because it overlaps with escapism and entertainment. But it's not that. When I got absorbed in popular science, that was recreation. It wasn't work, nor was it play.”
For Stoppard, theatre mustn't be overanalysed, because it's 50 per cent play - the beauty of which is self-evident and transcends meaning. “The reason that I go to the theatre and sit down for two and a half hours is not for something that separates us from each other, but for something which unites us,” he says. But this is beginning to sound too meaningful. And so he finishes. “What unites these experiences,” Stoppard says, terminating selfdisclosure, “is that they are all my recreation.”
Hapgood is at Birmingham Repertory Theatre, April 11-26 (0121-236 4455; www.birmingham-rep.co.uk) and at West Yorkshire Playhouse, May 1-24 (0113 2137700; www.wyplayhouse.com)
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